JD Vance fired back at Abdul El-Sayed over comments about Usha Vance, telling the Michigan Senate candidate to keep his wife's name out of his mouth.
Page B2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 31 August 2026
Political civility, already running on fumes, absorbs two more direct hits in a single news cycle.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: Political Civility, a norm once assumed rather than argued for, age indeterminate, of no fixed address in Washington.
Civility is survived by a handful of columnists who still write the phrase 'across the aisle' without irony, and by whatever remained of the assumption that a president's inner circle wouldn't go on a racist, islamophobic tirade over a weekend and still be taking calls Monday morning. It is preceded in death by decorum, by the loyal opposition, and by the idea that a vice president disagreeing with a public critic required anything more than the phrase 'way out of your league.'…
…(cont) The cause of death, per the record, was not one blow but a pattern. A confidante of the president used a weekend to indulge in bigotry with her name still on the guest list, and the vice president answered a policy criticism with a warning instead of an argument. Neither event alone killed the patient. The patient had been on a ventilator for some time. But taken together, in the same news cycle, they make a fair epitaph.
This whippersnapper habit of treating public disagreement as a personal grudge match is not new, but it used to at least wear a tie. Now it doesn't bother. That's not a scandal anymore, it's Tuesday. There is something almost penny-ante about how routine it has become, a tirade here, a warning there, hardly worth the ink except that the ink is what's left of the record.
Nobody is shocked, and that is perhaps the real obituary. Not that civility died, but that its death stopped being news. It went the way of a lot of institutions in this town, not with a hearing, not with a vote, just a quiet failure to show up one more time, until the seat was empty and nobody moved to fill it. There's no malarkey in saying so; the record speaks for itself, tirade and warning, filed the same week.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you hold your own elected officials, at every level, to the standard the deceased used to at least pretend to enforce.
“This isn't two isolated blowups, it's the operating manual now: bigotry from the inner circle, a threat dressed as a warning from the number two, and nobody at the top asking either of them to cut it out. When cruelty stops being a scandal and starts being Tuesday's news, that's not a gaffe, that's a culture somebody built on purpose.”
“Strong language happens in politics on both sides, always has. Laura Loomer doesn't speak for the administration, she's a private citizen with opinions, who happens to talk to the president regularly, but that's not the same as speaking for him. And the Vice President was simply defending his family, that's not a threat, that's, okay, 'way out of your league' does read a little like a threat. Moving on.”
The receipts
Loomer targeted Florida Senate Democratic nominee Angie Nixon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Zeteo 's Mehdi Hasan, among others.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.