Welcome to Fighting Words, a new newsletter about the things that got me steamed this week. Plus some culture and sports and trivia and fun. Let’s dive in.

Item one: Trucker protests coming our way

Trucker protests, that very un-worthwhile Canadian initiative, may be headed to the United States Sunday, just in time for the Super Bowl. The Department of Homeland Security said that it has information that truckers may try to tie up traffic around the big game in Los Angeles (although who in L.A. would notice?) and then convoy over to Washington to mess with Joe Biden’s March 1 State of the Union address, although I find it hard to see how they’ll manage that, since by tradition the president makes the 16-block trip to the Capitol down a Pennsylvania Avenue that is cordoned off for many blocks around.

These people are the fringe of the fringe. As you may have read by now, 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaxxed. But this holdout faction is nevertheless being lionized in the U.S. by right-wing media. I doubt they’re especially popular, though, among people trying to cross the Ambassador Bridge or to negotiate that other clogged-up border crossing in Montana. On top of that, Ford and GM have scaled back work at their plants. That’ll make the working class happy.

But the truckers don’t really care how popular they are. They have two goals, whether they’d quite articulate it to themselves this way or not: one, to vent rage; two, to create chaos. These are two great lessons that the American right has learned from Donald Trump: Rage and chaos help the right, particularly when a Democratic president is in power, because if people see rage and chaos on their television screens, they assume that Biden has no control over anything and the country is going to hell and we need a strongman to fix it. Rage and chaos are thus enemies of democracy, as both Trump and these truckers know in their bones.

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Item two: Democrats, wear your masks!

So we saw the beginning, this week, of a divide between national and state Democrats that looks like it’s going to be a political problem for the party for some time—and is just the kind of thing Republicans are expert at exploiting. Governors and mayors are under pressure to lift mask mandates, as many of them are doing. Joe Biden and his CDC don’t want to make changes. I understand the political pressure governors feel, but Biden is right on substance, right? This idea that we can “get back to normal” because we will it so is fantasy.

The galloping media narrative is that people are sick of this and want to return to living life, the virus be damned. But is this another case of the media deciding on a narrative, the facts be damned? Here’s a poll from this week from Ipsos and Axios. Respondents were asked whether we should open up and get back to normal life. Responses:

Yes, with no restrictions: 21 percent

Yes, with some precautions: 29 percent

No, mostly keep requirements in place: 23 percent

No, increase mask mandates and vaccine requirements: 21 percent

As you see, we nanny-staters (yep, I’m one) are on equal footing with the freedom-distortion caucus. So maybe these governors are caving to vocal right-wing pressure that sounds like it represents a majority, but it doesn’t. Still, since Glenn Youngkin’s election, they’re all terrified of angry suburban moms.

It hasn’t helped that Democrats are occasionally being photographed not wearing their masks. Tim Miller highlighted this on The Bulwark the other day, with a headline and subhed that it’s hard to argue with: “Memo to Dems: Stop Taking These Maskless Pictures. It’s simple: don’t make others do shit you don’t do.” The next day, The New York Post, which rarely misses a trick along these lines, put photographs on its cover of Gavin Newsom, Stacey Abrams, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sans masks and thundering that Democrats must lift all bans now, if they’re going to go around like that.

Democrats, after all these years, still don’t really understand virality and how good Republicans are at making some daily dose of outrage go viral (ensuring wider pickup on cable news), especially in the general category of making Democrats/liberals look like snooty hypocrites. They’ve got to be smarter than that.

Item three: Donald Trump’s phone logs

I thought about headlining this item “Donald Trump’s Toilet,” which is definitely more titillating, but I don’t know. I don’t really want to think about Trump’s toilet.

Yet the news that he was flushing memos and documents down the presidential bog is pretty stunning (I wonder how often he clogged the toilet? Back in the Nixon days, the White House “plumbers” were a group of people given that name metaphorically to identify leaders; in the Trump era, we may yet be seeing literal White House plumbers appear as witnesses). Followed, a few hours later Thursday, by The New York Times’ report about “gaps” in Trump’s January 6, 2021, phone logs, the toilet scoop (from Maggie Haberman’s upcoming book) tells us that Trump knew he had something to hide. The gaps mean that there are “few records of calls by President Donald J. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them.”

We’re getting a picture of a man who shredded documents, flushed them down the toilet, made calls from aides’ cell phones so he couldn’t be tracked. The question is whether he’ll get away with it. One thing about destruction of government records, though: It’s clearly illegal.

Little stuff you may not have heard: J.D. Vance’s pollster warns that the GOP Ohio Senate candidate is sliding fast in the polls. This in fact is not good news. He’s slipping among Republicans who are mad because he used to say bad things about Trump. And the guy who’s likely to win the primary, Josh Mandel, is a certifiable Trumper.… Kevin McCarthy generated some quasi-positive headlines for finally agreeing, after Mitch McConnell said so, that January 6 was indeed a “violent insurrection”; but then he zagged back in the safe Trumpist direction of defending the infamous Republican National Committee resolution by saying that the RNC was not referring to January 6 in its resolution. Right.

Thing you should read: Tim Noah’s March TNR cover story explaining why Washington, D.C., is not in fact a swamp or a cesspool or any of those other hoary clichés. Yes, there are people in this city who hanker for an invite to a Bloomberg after-party; but they are vastly outnumbered by the honorable civil servants who moved here because they believe in public service. Yes, it’s true. It’s a smart rebuttal to a stupid and lazy conventional wisdom, and it reminds us that when the government is in the hands of people who give a fuck about what government does, government can do good things, as Noah’s reporting amply shows.

This week’s quiz

Culture question: I’m going to see the IMAX Get Back this weekend. Question: Lennon plays the lead guitar on two songs in the Get Back sessions—unusual, as he only played a couple other solos during the band’s whole career. What were the two songs?

Super Bowl projection: Who knows? I’m for Cincinnati. I typically settle on the blue city if I have no particular stake in the game, but in this case I feel Cincy needs a shot in the arm, and in any case it’s blue now, as virtually all cities are. I think I’ll be making lasagna, broccoli rabe, and garlic bread. I remain of the view that the NFL should move the game to Saturday. With the 6:40 p.m.-ish kickoff time and the extra-long halftime show, Supes tend to last until after 10, which is hard on the kiddies on a school night. There’s also the famous thing about the day after the Super Bowl being the least productive workday of the year in America. Give people a day to nurse hangovers.

Super Bowl trivia: The first Super Bowl, which wasn’t known as the Super Bowl, wasn’t a sellout. Just 62,000 fans filled the 94,000-seat L.A. Coliseum. That turned out to be a luck thing. Why?

Today is the first of my Friday weekly newsletters on what’s getting me steamed up. If you like what you read, sign up for free below. See you next week. Go Cincy!

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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