Steven Buchsbaum

Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head and still managed to keep the country together. Franklin Roosevelt ran the entire Second World War from a wheelchair. Eisenhower defeated Hitler and then, just to stay busy, built 48,000 miles of motorway. Kennedy looked at the moon, said “we’ll have that,” and inside a decade they did. Reagan stared down the Soviet Union until it simply gave up and went home. Two hundred and fifty years. Forty-six men. Men who stormed beaches, split atoms, faced down nuclear annihilation over breakfast and then filed sensible paperwork about it afterward. And then, after all of that, the entire accumulated weight of American history, the most consequential democratic experiment the world has ever seen, produced this. A television review. No Mars landing. No cure for cancer. No Soviet empire dissolved before lunch. Just a man in the White House, in the year 2026, informing the internet that a CBS chat show host had no talent. That is what 250 years of American greatness built. America should be deeply, permanently ashamed of itself. If you like what you read, follow Gandalv on Substack: open.substack.com/pub/gandal…