Bob Schwartz

Three weeks ago I published the image above and the post below. It was not meant as a joke.

Joke’s on us. Trump is asking the Treasury to issue a $250 bill with his portrait on it, to celebrate America 250. The law does not allow the portrait of a living person to appear on currency, so Congress is being asked to change the law. (Or alternatively, the Treasury will simply break the law, since the president controls federal law enforcement, so who is going to arrest them?)

The lesson here, one we should have learned, is that Trump is totally predictable. Trump supporters praise Trump’s leadership style, saying it works because he is unpredictable. No. Maybe I got the denomination wrong, but the idea was right. As I said recently about Trump’s war strategies, he is not playing three-dimensional chess, he is playing zero-dimensional chess. You can see his craziness coming from a mile away. The American dilemma is what to do about it.

The U.S. $10,000 bill was discontinued in 1969 and was last printed in 1945.

This may be the year it is printed again. Will Trump order the Treasury to resume printing the $10,000 bill, this time with his portrait instead of Salmon P. Chase? Chase was Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury.

Stranger things have happened and are still happening.

If we have only one lesson about authoritarian government, it’s this: You may believe that you are protected because you are supportive of those in power. Only “wrong thinking” citizens will be subject to exclusion and punishment, which they deserve.

Historically, that is nonsense. A hallmark of authoritarians is that everyone and everything is either useful for their ambition or an obstacle. There is no such thing as loyalty. You may think it is impossible for an authoritarian to turn on you—you, a true believer—but you are deluded. Besides being ambitious and self-interested, authoritarians are whimsical, often to the point of seeming craziness. If they wake up and decide there is something or someone they don’t like, it won’t matter what or who has been on their side before.

This is the heart and soul of democracy. Ideally, though it isn’t always achieved, those in power act without fear or favor. If you think this can be selective, you may not understand. If you think that you are the chosen, while the others who are punished are the justified victims, you are wrong. In an authoritarian regime, the next victim is you.

© 2026 Bob Schwartz

Do we want smarter people or better people? This is in some ways a trick question, because an instant answer is that we want both. But if we can’t have both, at least not at the same time, which do we want first?

Here, smarter people means those who can think things through reasonably. They are knowledgeable and are curious and can find ways to learn what they don’t know and need to know. They are discerning.

Here, better people means those who maintain a balanced view of what is good for themselves and good for others, and are guided by a commitment that however they reach what is good for themselves, out of necessity or desire, the effect on others is at least as important or more important.

When we see people who are not so smart, in positions of power and authority or among our neighbors, we are sure we want smarter people.

When we see people who are not so good, in positions of power and authority or among our neighbors, we are sure we want better people.

Nevertheless, at least until I reach the end of this writing, I am going for better people. We have problems that smart people solve. We have problems that smart people create. But smart, whether from other people or within ourselves, cannot wholly solve the problems of soul, theirs and ours. Good people, better people, can.

The column below is from the Economist in 2023. Joe Biden was president. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was emerging on the national scene, planning to oppose Biden for the Democratic nomination. We are now living in the future, where Kennedy Jr., who appears to have serious problems, is the chief health policy maker of America. He works for the chief executive of America, who also appears to have serious problems.

This column is about the late Robert F. Kennedy. I have included Bobby Kennedy in at least a dozen posts over the years. He deserves as much attention as ever in 2026. Maybe we can and should use every appearance of his namesake son as a reminder to consider the worth of the father.

The point of the Economist column is as valid today as it was three years ago. If Democrats are lost—they are—and willing to admit they need models—they do—the simple suggestion is that they have one. Whether 2026 is a worse time than 1968 doesn’t matter. What matters is that when you are in such times, leaders may come along who are what we need. We will never know whether Bobby Kennedy was fully the one to elevate us above 1968, since he was assassinated in June of that year. Is there a Democrat out there who can elevate us above 2026? One who truly, not just superficially, is like Bobby Kennedy?

What Democrats can learn from Bobby Kennedy
The father—not the son—was the party’s last great populist

The Economist
Sep 7th 2023

Of all the what-ifs of post-war American politics, none is more haunting than the vision in which an assassin did not shoot down Robert Kennedy while he was running for president in 1968. Had Kennedy lived, runs this counterfactual history, he would have become president, and America would have left Vietnam years earlier. There would have been no Nixon administration, no Watergate scandal to sharpen cynicism and no successful Republican “southern strategy” to deepen racial division. The Democrats would have become the party of the multiracial working class, rather than of the multiracial professional elite.

Now, as his father challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination, Robert Kennedy junior is challenging President Joe Biden. You might hear echoes of the father’s politics, as when the son inveighs against “the warfare machine that is bankrupting our country” or against the Democratic Party for “inviting Wall Street to strip-mine the American public”.

But unlike his father, this Kennedy has little chance of the nomination. Rather than falling in love with him, leftish journalists are tearing him apart for his opposition to vaccination and his yen for conspiracy theories, including about the murders of his father and his uncle, John Kennedy. Having supplied the tragedy in 1968, history is offering up the farce.

And yet an unflattering comparison could also be made with most other modern Democratic campaigns, even allowing for mythmaking: they all seem a bit pallid beside Kennedy’s blazing, tragic 82-day race. A mix of idealism and pragmatism led him to try to reassemble the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, fractured by the Vietnam war and the civil-rights movement. He got in late, after the New Hampshire primary. Another Democratic challenger, Eugene McCarthy, a cerebral senator from Minnesota, had claimed the hearts of affluent, educated opponents of the war.

Kennedy set out to build on his support among black voters by showing working-class white Americans they had common interests. His policies were heterodox, aimed at holding families and communities together, to nurture civic pride and a spirit of mutual obligation. For decades liberals had linked the growth of the federal government to the expansion of rights and freedom, but Kennedy sensed Americans felt they were losing control to a distant government with giant, one-size-fits-all programmes. He argued that people wanted the dignity of work rather than welfare, and he favoured local, public-private jobs schemes. “He sensed and managed to articulate that feeling of disempowerment experienced by ordinary Americans, including the white working class, black and Hispanic voters and other groups excluded from the mainstream of American prosperity and respect,” says Michael Sandel, a political philosopher and author of “Democracy’s Discontent”.

As riots tore inner cities apart, Kennedy called for “law and order”, courting the disdain of some liberals who, then as now, heard that as racist code. But he always twinned his call for law enforcement with demands for racial justice, saying white Americans bore responsibility for black violence.

To housewives in Terre Haute, Indiana, he cited Camus, urging empathy with the hopelessness of destitute families. In Indianapolis, on the night Martin Luther King was killed, Kennedy defused the anger in a crowd primed to riot. He quoted Aeschylus on the wisdom that comes with despair and added, “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

He often said what voters did not want to hear. “You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam,” he scolded students at Indiana University, saying he wanted to take their draft deferments away. “He sort of respects our intelligence,” a farmer told a reporter in Nebraska, where Kennedy freely admitted he had no idea how to milk a cow.

The honesty and intensity of Kennedy’s campaign—along with his decision to visit Native American reservations, where presidential candidates seldom bother to go, to draw attention to their wretchedness—may have resulted in part from the sense of doom suffusing it. Like the reporters covering him, the candidate feared he would eventually be shot.

From George Wallace to Donald Trump

Yet Kennedy insisted on so exposing himself that supporters would make off with his jacket and even his shoes. He ended his campaign in Indiana with a nine-hour ride in an open car inching through black and white communities. The reporter Jules Witcover described an “unbroken display of adulation and support” as he rode through neighbourhoods “that ran smack against one another, and you read their racial or ethnic composition in the faces that looked up at him, in the colour of the hands that stretched out to him, in the accents that shouted out at him”. Kennedy did not succeed with well-off white voters. Instead, he won the Indiana primary by carrying 86% of black voters along with working-class white Democrats, including many who had defected to the segregationist George Wallace four years earlier.

Kennedy would go on to lose the primary in Oregon, an affluent white state, but he won Nebraska, South Dakota and California. There, after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel, he broke one of his own rules. Instead of wading through the crowd he left through the kitchen, where his assassin waited.

It is impossible to know what Kennedy might have achieved. Yet it is also hard to believe Donald Trump would have achieved so much had the Democrats modelled themselves less on McCarthy and more on Kennedy. He was, in short, the last great Democratic populist. Kennedy loved to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’” These days both questions seem worth asking.