Carnival of Fools: The Ground Is Shifting Underneath Our Feet

WITH JEFF BLEHAR

March 04 2025

The Ground Is Shifting Underneath Our Feet

Greetings and welcome to this unexpected, 26th performance of the Carnival of Fools. I say "unexpected" because this column was originally intended to be an appreciation of the career of Gene Hackman, one of the greatest and most versatile actors of my lifetime. I even announced as much on Thursday night, writing: "I expect to devote a significant amount of next week's Carnival of Fools to him as a tribute, unless Donald Trump does something crazy in the meantime like attempting to annex North Korea."

You already know where this is going, I presume. In the comments to that brief Hackman piece, I picked up some complaints from readers — "Why must he always bring Trump into this?" I'm sorry, dear readers, but I don't do it out of pettiness; I do it out of prescience. Because I now understand what odds I'm up against as a writer. A mere twelve hours after I wrote that, on Friday morning, Volodymyr Zelensky met with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office, in front of the press, for a conversation that went almost incomprehensibly awry ...