When the Impossible Becomes Possible
Democrats can learn from the New York Knicks: Fight hard. Never give up.
There are days when it’s hard not to feel like the New York Knicks early on in Wednesday night’s game: 29 points down, overwhelmed by a powerful opponent on a roll, struggling to envision escaping humiliating defeat.
But that night at Madison Square Garden, a stadium full of fans and over 23 million TV viewers around the country were thrilled to realize that anything is possible when a team refuses to give up and fights back with all it’s got.
Yes, the Knicks’ one-point win in the closing seconds (107-106) was only a game, not the fate of the nation. But it was the greatest comeback in the history of the NBA finals—and the on-court heroics deserve to be seen as a reminder of what’s possible when a group of humans are clear in purpose and care enough to give everything they have.
Let’s contrast that with the team that’s currently running our country, captained by a man who keeps proving how little he cares about his job and how he remains convinced he can win with—as novelist John Kennedy Toole put it—a “confederacy of dunces.”
This week Donald Trump officially nominated Todd Blanche for Attorney General for crying out loud—his personal criminal defense attorney, his second Roy Cohn, who pushed the $1.8 billion slush fund that was intended to reward violent insurrectionists who attacked police officers on Jan. 6; who has helped lead the Epstein files coverup and denied there’s any evidence implicating his boss; who arranged for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to be transferred to a cushy minimum-security prison; and who has pursued vindictive prosecutions against Trump’s perceived enemies like former FBI director James Comey.
Asked in April if he wanted the permanent AG job—after Pam Bondi was fired and he replaced her as the acting head of the Justice Department—Blanche communicated where his priorities reside: “I love working for President Trump…If he chooses to nominate me, that's an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say ‘thank you very much—I love you, sir.’”
So much for an independent DOJ. So much for justice.
Yet Blanche—an actual lawyer—almost looks like a credible appointment when contrasted with blockhead Bill Pulte, who Trump picked as acting Director of National Intelligence, even though Pulte has zero experience in intelligence. That appointment was so bad that even typically obsequious Republicans couldn’t stomach it, leading Trump to name Jay Clayton for the job instead. Clayton currently serves as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and was previously a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
But the Trump players—this band largely comprised of sycophants and miscreants—take their direction from a man who is untethered from reality, deluded into believing he’s winning when he’s losing and doubles-down on his wrong-headed ideas.
“I love the inflation,” Donald Trump said Wednesday, the same day we learned that inflation rose to 4.2 percent, its highest level in three years. This is the same guy who said last month, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” He’s the team captain who has repeatedly insisted that rising prices are really falling prices and affordability issues are just a hoax.
We can believe him when he tells us how little he cares about the economic well-being of most Americans, especially as he’s focused on building himself a billion-dollar ballroom and other vanity projects to console his fragile ego.
Even after the Knicks won Wednesday night, going up 3-1 in the best-of-seven series, its top players said they’ll be watching the game’s film to figure out what they did wrong and how they can do better for Saturday’s game.
But the Republicans’ “top player” can’t be bothered with looking at film. He has no interest in learning from his mistakes or even acknowledging that he ever makes mistakes. He behaves as if he doesn’t know or care when his team’s finals—the Nov. 3 midterms—even take place.
He’s convinced that he can keep running failing plays and get a winning outcome. He believes he can bludgeon us all into accepting his false picture, which is why he could not take it and walked out when Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker asked him for evidence that he won in 2020 and that California’s primaries last week were rigged against Republicans.
He may assume he can ignore the rules and the refs. He and his hostile team may believe they can abuse their opponents without consequence. But that only works if their opponents lack the determination to defeat them.
Yesterday after Trump threatened to bomb Iran “VERY HARD” and seize its oil and gas infrastructure on Kharg Island, he backed down. Once again, he insisted that negotiations have heated up, “brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved.”
This increases CNN’s tally of at least 38 times when he’s publicly claimed that a deal was imminent or that “Iran was desperate to cut one.” Which would be hilarious if it weren’t so dangerous. It is both absurd and painfully real.
But let’s not doubt that the Iranians can see how ridiculous Trump and his team is, indeed that they have the upper hand and can slow down this awful game and ensure victory when Trump finally gives up.
Between now and Nov. 3, we need to demand that the democratic opponents of this careless Tump team recognize that they too can emerge victorious. That means fighting back hard. That means refusing to be discouraged by the ongoing threats of a team of cheaters who reject the rules, abuse the refs and whine that the game is rigged.
(That also may mean believing, as my Six Questions guest George Conway does, that the utterly corrupt Trump must be removed from office—and that making that happen requires conviction and commitment, not accepting business as usual. You can watch the new episode here.)
Democrats should take strength from the New York Knicks who never gave up Wednesday night and now are on the verge of an extraordinary victory in the NBA championships. I urge everyone to look at the celebrations in the streets of New York after the Knicks won that night and imagine what the celebration will look like after the Republicans are soundly defeated in the midterms.
And if that’s not enough, we should all pay attention to the prediction of Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary to the Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton. Trump, Cornyn said yesterday, is “going to have the most miserable two years of his life in the last two years of his term, I think, because I think November is going to be a disaster.”
Let’s go.
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Speaking of doing the impossible: it happens all the time.
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by those doing it.” - James Baldwin
https://albellenchia.substack.com/p/a-concept-and-a-plan?r=7wk5d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I saw the press interview where the player who make that last basket that won the game was asked that trite question about how it felt to have won the game. I was struck by his matter-of-fact reply. For me that shows: 1) He knows that he was part of a team effort; that point would be nothing without the teammates that put him in position to make the basket by getting the score to where it was, and 2) He was focused on the moment when he made that basket, not its implications.
I am reminded, yet again, of Heather Cox Richardson's "Letter" about the events around the ride of Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescottt: a lot of people were involved, but it was each individual doing what he could, whether it was showing the lanterns or spreading the word, that came together to create that moment. I am stitching a piece in honor of the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States that shows key moments. The pattern has the phrase, "A Worthy Patriot," at the top, but I plan to replace it with some other phrase, not sure what yet, because it is never about just one person but about each person doing his or her part.