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Somewhere between evidence-based medicine and cable news, testosterone stopped being a hormone and became a political identity. On today’s right, “low-T” has replaced “snowflake” as the insult of choice, while influencers hawk miracle supplements promising everything from bigger muscles to bigger egos. Soon, the president will start bragging about his hormone panel alongside his cognitive test results.

This is the latest symptom of a political movement that has confused governing with macho cosplay. The modern right has become convinced that masculinity isn’t something you demonstrate through courage, discipline or responsibility. It’s something measured in nanograms per deciliter and puffed-up expressions of bravado.

The funniest part is that many of the loudest self-appointed “alphas” spend an astonishing amount of time worrying about other men’s hormone levels. They discuss testosterone with the enthusiasm wine enthusiasts reserve for French vintages. “I’m getting 900 nanograms with subtle notes of dominance and a lingering finish of owning the libs.” At this point, the right has become less of a political movement than a men’s health podcast with occasional elections.

The administration seems determined to prove that every national challenge can be solved by dialing masculinity up to eleven. Next up: mandatory pushups before Cabinet meetings, creatine in MREs, and replacing the Pentagon’s annual fitness test with a deadlift competition.

Real doctors, meanwhile, keep ruining the fantasy by pointing out that testosterone replacement is an actual medical treatment for an actual medical condition—not a personality transplant. It won’t make a weak leader strong, a foolish strategy wise, or a reckless decision prudent. History has never been kind to nations that mistake swagger for strength. But swagger is much easier to market. It fits neatly on a T-shirt, looks great in a campaign ad, and, unlike competence, requires almost no maintenance.

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Pat Bagley - cagle.com/bagley

Chris Britt - Creators

KAL - Substack and Andrews McMeel

Michael Ramirez - Creators

Taylor Jones - cagle.com/jones

Bill Day - cagle.com/day

Matt Wuerker - Andrews McMeel

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Meanwhile, smoke from Canadian wildfires once again drifted across much of the country, turning the sky an eerie shade of orange and making it nearly impossible to tell whether that burning sensation in your lungs came from climate change or simply reading the latest headlines. If that wasn’t enough to ruin your week, Taco Bell announced a lettuce recall tied to a parasitic illness outbreak, leaving thousands of Americans wondering whether explosive diarrhea should finally qualify as a pre-existing condition.

With democracy under siege, the Middle East on a hair trigger, the air trying to kill us and fast food finishing the job, it’s comforting to know at least one American institution remains dependable: politicians finding ever more creative ways to make everything worse. Welcome to another week of Counterpoint.

Rick McKee - cagle.com/mckee

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Clay Bennett - Tribune Content Agency

Clay Jones - Substack and Claytoonz

Steve Sack - cagle.com/sack

KAL - Substack and Andrews McMeel

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Dave Granlund - cagle.com/granlund

Drew Sheneman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

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The problem isn’t that Blanche once represented Trump. Every defendant is entitled to vigorous legal representation. The problem is that he never seemed to stop acting like Trump’s lawyer after joining the Justice Department. Whether defending politically charged investigations, advancing Trump’s grievances or insisting the department’s actions were above reproach, Blanche has repeatedly looked less like the nation’s top law enforcement officer than the president’s in-house counsel.

Confirmation hearings are supposed to answer one simple question: Is this nominee capable of putting the interests of the country ahead of the interests of the president who nominated him? Blanche’s testimony mostly answered a different one: How many ways can someone say, “Trust me,” while asking senators to ignore everything they’ve watched him do for the past two years?

The attorney general’s client is supposed to be the Constitution, not the occupant of the Oval Office. Todd Blanche may sincerely believe those two things are one and the same. That’s precisely why so many Americans believe he is the wrong man for the job.

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Pat Bagley - cagle.com/bagley

Matt Davies - Andrews McMeel

Mike Luckovich - Creators

Dennis Goris

Drew Sheneman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Matt Wuerker - Andrews McMeel

Steve Sack - cagle.com/sack

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Washington’s most important committee may no longer be Appropriations. It’s Geriatrics. Every legislative session now comes with a side order of medical speculation as lawmakers disappear from public view, staff insist everything is fine, and the rest of the country wonders whether the next vacancy will be filled by an election or an obituary.

If Congress keeps aging at this pace, C-SPAN may have to add a medical correspondent.

Rick McKee - cagle.com/mckee

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Clay Bennett - Tribune Content Agency

Lalo Alcaraz - Andrews McMeel

Clay Jones - Substack and Claytoonz

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Speaking of goodbyes, the editorial cartooning profession lost a giant Monday with the passing of Pat Oliphant at the age of 90.

There are very few people about whom it can honestly be said they changed an art form. Pat Oliphant was one of them.

"I think he was the best cartoonist of the last 100 years," remarked Edward Sorel, a famous magazine illustrator and friend of Oliphant. "There hasn't been anybody like him."

His drawings weren’t merely clever. They were fearless. His pen had the rare ability to slice through layers of political spin and expose the uncomfortable truth hiding underneath. Presidents feared him. Politicians dreaded opening the morning newspaper. Readers stopped to study his work because every line served a purpose, every caricature revealed character, and every cartoon demanded a reaction.

Oliphant once said the goal of a political cartoon was simple: “Make people write letters to the editor. Get mad.” He succeeded better than anyone of his generation. His cartoons didn’t comfort readers. They challenged them. Whether he was skewering Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Donald Trump, no one escaped his scrutiny. He didn’t pick sides. He picked targets. Usually the powerful.

His influence on editorial cartooning is impossible to overstate. Every cartoonist working today—whether they realize it or not—draws in a profession he helped redefine. His sparse compositions, devastating caricatures and uncompromising independence raised the standard for everyone who followed. He proved that a single drawing, executed with intelligence and courage, could say more than a thousand-word editorial.

Perhaps what we admired most was his refusal to become part of the club. He famously avoided friendships with politicians because he believed cartoonists shouldn’t socialize with the people they were supposed to hold accountable. That independence wasn’t an affectation. It was a philosophy. Satirists don’t exist to make the powerful comfortable. They exist to make them nervous.

Ironically, Oliphant’s eyesight began failing just as Donald Trump emerged onto the political stage. Friends said everything in his remarkable career had prepared him for a figure like Trump, but glaucoma and macular degeneration robbed him of the chance to chronicle that era as fully as he deserved. Even so, his body of work remains one of the great visual records of modern American politics.

Political cartooning is an endangered profession. Newspapers have shrunk. Syndication has withered. Newsrooms have concluded they can do without the one person whose job was to make everyone equally uncomfortable. Through it all, Pat Oliphant remained proof of what the profession could be at its very best: fearless, original, intellectually rigorous and wickedly funny.

There won’t be another Pat Oliphant. His pen is finally still. The rest of us are fortunate we got to watch it move.

The Capitol has become a place where reporters spend as much time chasing medical updates as legislative updates. Every prolonged absence sparks rumors. Every unexplained hospitalization becomes a constitutional guessing game. Every …

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Steve Sack - cagle.com/sack

Mike Luckovich - Creators

Pedro Molina - Tinyview and Tribune Content Agency

Clay Bennett - Tribune Content Agency

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

KAL - Substack and Andrews McMeel

Pat Bagley - cagle.com/bagley

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Ukraine is once again de…

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McConnell, 84, remains hospitalized after a June medical emergency that dispatch audio described as a possible cardiac arrest, though aides have offered only vague assurances that he’s “improving” and working on Senate business. The information vacuum has fueled a cottage industry of rumors about whether he’ll return at all, while Republicans quietly count votes and wonder how to pass their agenda without one of their most reliable senators.

Ironically, after years of criticizing the Biden White House for a lack of transparency about the president’s health, Republicans now find themselves asking the public to simply trust that everything is under control. Apparently, when it comes to elected officials’ medical conditions, bipartisanship is still alive and well.

Drew Sheneman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Mike Luckovich - Creators

Ed Wexler - cagle.com/wexler

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

RJ Matson - cagle.com/matson

Jimmy Margulies - King Features

Matt Davies - Andrews McMeel

Rob Rogers - Tinyview Comics and Andrews McMeel

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Platner now faces a choice. He can spend the next four months insisting everyone else is lying—his accuser, the witnesses, the reporting and a growing list of Democratic leaders abandoning ship—or he can acknowledge the obvious: a Senate campaign is a terrible place to conduct a public credibility contest over a sexual assault allegation.

At some point, staying in the race stops looking courageous and starts looking narcissistic. Candidates love to say elections are “about the people.” Then, when their own political future is on the line, suddenly everything becomes about them. The voters. The party. The issues. The election. All are expected to take a back seat while one politician fights to salvage his own ambitions.

The irony is hard to miss. Platner built his campaign around accountability, integrity and demanding higher standards from public officials. Now he’s asking voters to suspend judgment while he explains why those standards shouldn’t apply to him. Democrats don’t need another news cycle. They need another nominee.

Matt Davies - Andrews McMeel

Chris Britt - Creators

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Chip Bok - Creators

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Joel Pett - Tribune Content Agency

KAL - Substack and Andrews McMeel

Jimmy Margulies - King Features

That’s why President Trump’s public boasting about calling FIFA to seek relief for U.S. striker Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension was so troubling. Whether or not the White House actually influenced FIFA’s decision is almost beside the point. Trump says he made the call. FIFA reversed the suspension. Then Trump took credit. Around the world, millions of soccer fans reached the same conclusion: America got special treatment.

And then Belgium beat the U.S. 4–1 anyway. Apparently, even presidential intervention has its limits. If there was any cosmic soccer justice at work, it arrived not as a subtle rebuke but as a scoreboard.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino insists the organization’s judicial bodies acted independently. Perhaps that’s true. But in sports—as in government—the appearance of impartiality is nearly as important as impartiality itself. Referees aren’t supposed to take calls from team owners during halftime. Judges aren’t supposed to take calls from politicians about pending cases. And the President of the United States shouldn’t be lobbying an international sports body to overturn a disciplinary decision involving his own national team.

The damage extends beyond one World Cup match. Whether you thought Balogun deserved a second chance is beside the point. The world’s biggest sporting event isn’t strengthened when the host nation’s president publicly inserts himself into the officiating process. It breeds resentment, invites accusations of favoritism, and undermines the spirit of fair competition the World Cup is supposed to celebrate. Good sportsmanship begins with accepting that sometimes the referee’s call doesn’t go your way. Great nations should be able to do the same.

Now the U.S. team will have to live with the ignominious distinction of having received special treatment and still losing. That’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the President of the United States.

Matt Davies - Andrews McMeel

Joel Pett - Tribune Content Agency

Pat Bagley - cagle.com/bagley

Graeme MacKay - cagle.com/mackay

Adam Zyglis - cagle.com/zyglis

Michael de Adder - cagle.com/de-adder

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Clay Bennett - Tribune Content Agency

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Members of Patriot Front, faces concealed behind white masks, carried American flags alongside Confederate flags whi…

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This week, the Supreme Court reminded presidents that they can’t simply rewrite the 14th Amendment by executive order—though it continued its recent tradition of expanding presidential power in other areas, proving that constitutional law is nothing if not a rich source of plot twists. Donald Trump continued defending his algae-infested, $14 million “American flag blue” Reflecting Pool while insisting vandals—not physics, biology, or project management—were to blame. Congress spent another week proving that the greatest obstacle to the Republican agenda is frequently Republicans.

Still, America has survived a civil war, a Great Depression, world wars, Watergate, disco, New Coke, and whatever it is we’re calling the last decade. If history teaches us anything, it’s that this country has an extraordinary ability to endure the people temporarily placed in charge of it.

Happy 250th birthday, America. May your next 250 years feature fewer algae blooms, fewer executive orders attempting to amend the Constitution, and at least one week in which reality doesn’t feel like it was written by a committee of exhausted political satirists.

Dennis Goris

Pat Bagley - cagle.com/bagley

Pedro Molina - Tinyview and Tribune Content Agency

Joel Pett - Tribune Content Agency

Sean Delonas - cagle.com/delonas

Adam Zyglis - cagle.com/zyglis

Christopher Weyant - cagle.com/weyant

Jimmy Margulies - King Features

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

His Great American State Fair was intended to showcase the nation’…

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Trump insists there’s nothing to see here because his businesses are run by his sons. Which is reassuring, because everyone knows there can never be a conflict of interest if you simply move the money to the next seat over at the Thanksgiving table.

The Founding Fathers worried that foreign governments might buy influence with American presidents. They probably never imagined they’d be able to do it with meme coins, governance tokens, and a promotional code.

Mike Luckovich - Creators

Chris Britt - Creators

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Matt Davies - Andrews McMeel

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Milt Prigee - cagle.com/priggee

Rick McKee - cagle.com/mckee

Steve Sack - cagle.com/sack

Clay Jones - Substack and Claytoonz

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The event promised a modern-day World’s Fair, complete with state pavilions, concerts, exhibits, a Ferris wheel, and enough saccharin Americana to make Norman Rockwell develop diabetes. What visitors found instead were sparse crowds, canceled performers, power outages, melted ice cream, technical glitches, and enough empty pavement to land the president’s grifted Qatari Air Force One.

Trump, naturally, declared victory.

He insisted opening night drew 45,000 people and described the grounds as “packed to the brim,” despite photographs and video showing large open spaces and reporters describing attendance as relatively sparse.

This has become one of the defining features of Trumpism: if reality disagrees with the press release, reality must be fake news.

Even Fox News accidentally wandered into the comedy by broadcasting live interviews with administration officials while vast stretches of empty fairgrounds filled the background.

The fair’s problems didn’t stop there. Major performers withdrew after concluding the event had become overtly political. Several states declined to participate. A power failure shut down attractions and spoiled food. Even one of the event’s listed restaurants publicly announced it had never agreed to participate in the first place.

But perhaps the most revealing aspect wasn’t the attendance. It was the concept. America’s 250th birthday should be about the country. Instead, it once again became about the president. Some presidents leave behind libraries. Others leave behind monuments. Donald Trump may be remembered as the first president to throw himself a birthday party so unpopular that even the empty chairs looked like they had somewhere else to be.

Rick McKee - cagle.com/mckee

Steve Breen - Creators

Pedro Molina - Tinyview and Tribune Content Agency

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Ed Wexler - cagle.com/wexler

Matt Wuerker - Andrews McMeel

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Michael Ramirez - Creators

Harley Schwadron - cagle.com/schwadron