Trump's dumb move just handed Dems a massive gift — again

Donald Trump is the worst thing to ever happen to global politics, but he didn’t get there by himself. Putin’s occasionally useful puppet also happens to be surrounded by the most inept collection of political non-savants ever assembled.

Case in point: When the COVID-19 pandemic began in February 2020, Trump secretly told writer Bob “My Publishing Date is More Important Than American Lives” Woodward how serious the virus was, but seemed to forget that minor detail every time he spoke to the public. Weird!

If Trump had been any kind of competent person, or at least had surrounded himself with competent people instead of attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci on the daily, he would have recognized the coronavirus as the political gift it was in an election year. Trump needed only to embrace measures to stop the spread and he would have —to quote Bill Murray — saved the lives of millions of registered voters.

Instead, he killed off his own voting base in the Red States. And since the surviving MAGA cultists weren’t inclined to vote by mail after he convinced them it wasn’t safe, Trump lost bigly to Joe Biden.

I don’t have enough internet space to list all the mistakes Trump has made that could have been avoided, so let’s just fast forward to Monday night, when Bari Weiss’s spineless Trumpsimps at CBS wouldn’t allow Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas Democrat James Talarico to air.

We all — including the crack legal staff at CBS, all of whom apparently just graduated from Trump University’s Bondi School of Law — know Trump is very worried about Texas going purple.

Instead of obeying in advance, the smart thing for CBS would have been to invoke the Fairness Doctrine and get a Republican booked too. Of course, Colbert would probably have requested Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the only sensible Republican in the House, but would have had to settle for someone super-Trumpy yet vaguely Talarico-esque, say Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), who’s joined performative, attention-seeking Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in pretending Trump’s name isn’t in the Epstein Files more than a million times.

The best part of this is how beautifully Colbert handled the latest bit of Orwellian FCC-ery from Trumpocrite Brendan Carr, who basically helped Streisand Effect the entire Talarico interview.

Yes, this Brendan Carr. I wonder what’s changed since he tweeted this in 2019?

Anyway, Colbert got to tell his audience the network wouldn’t let him air the Talarico interview, and to drag Trump and his protectors on the same episode they were censoring. Yay, First Amendment still in effect!

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Even better, the interview with Talarico has racked up far more views on Colbert’s YouTube Channel (over 6 million at the time of this writing, so probably at least 2 million more by the time you read this) than it would’ve if guarding Trump’s snowflake feelings wasn’t CBS’s top priority.

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But wait, it gets even better!

Thanks to Trump being a giant baby, Talarico’s campaign raised a whopping $2.5 million after the news broke. I’m encouraged to see that Americans are reacting appropriately to censorship and the deliberate deterioration of our First Amendment rights.

Yes, Bari Weiss of CBS follows me on Twitter. No, I don’t follow her back, and she’s never responded to me. Weird, huh? Especially since Trump blocked me forever ago, in August 2015.

If Weiss had any real sense of how to run a news network, she would offer me a gig, representing the liberal take. But again, anyone connected to Trump is terrible at whatever they do. There’s a part of me that wishes they were trying to take him down from the inside, but none are smart enough to maintain a front like that for too long.

As someone who comes from terrestrial radio, my biggest fear about the second Trump Regime arose from its intention to control the flow of information on our airwaves, as laid out in Project 2025. Now we have Carr’s Federal Communications Commission nestled in Trump’s alimentary canal, more than willing to suppress truths Trump doesn’t like.

But don’t forget Kari Lake, who’s filtering all of the truth out of the Voice of America even more than she filters her face. I’m blocked on Twitter by both her personal account and her “Kari Lake War Room.” You know, because she’s so brave and cares so much about the truth — which I suggest is that whatever she sends out from the Voice of America is translated from the Russian first.

We have the First Amendment for so many reasons. If you don’t want to watch something or listen to it, you don’t have to. Unless you’re this giant snowflake baby, then you block some five-foot-nothing lady on Twitter because you can’t handle the truth she tells about you being a convicted felon accused of doing unspeakable things to women and children.

The irony of this kind of censorship happening in 2026 is that there’s more content available now than at any other time in our history. If you don’t want to see Stephen Colbert and James Talarico chatting about politics and their shared faith, just change the channel. It’s that part that really chaps MAGA’s collective IQ point. Those Trumpocrites think they’re the only ones who get to be churchy. But that’s a whole other kind of opinion column.

• Tara Dublin is a political writer/commentator based in Portland, OR, who has been blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter since August 2015 and can occasionally be heard as a fill-in host on SiriusXM Progress. She is also the author of The Sound of Settling, a rock ‘n’ roll love story available at taradublinrocks.com