We Sat Down with a U.S. Senator

EPISODE 230: Independence.

American politics is in trouble.

The kind of trouble where your timeline’s drowning in fake sports fans, and crypto scams, and a chief executive that so many powerful people are conspicuously afraid to even slightly criticize.

So we here at PTFO set out to find that rarest of things: an independent politician — and genuine sports fan! — who’d be willing to take us inside no less than the United States Senate. The Hotel California of American democracy. Where so many senators are prisoners there, of their own device.

But luckily… we found a former quarterback named Angus King.

Senator King, age 81, has a C.V. that we’ll discuss. But the most striking aspect of his perspective, I’d argue, is his party affiliation.

Because he doesn’t have any.

He is — authentically — neither a Democrat nor a Republican. He’s been an Independent for four decades, ever since he got elected the governor of Maine.

And while Angus King did vote No on 14 different Trump cabinet appointees — as he did, for instance, with former wrestling promoter and current Secretary of Education Linda McMahon — he did vote Yes on seven of Trump’s picks, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

King isn’t a categorical Never-Trumper.

Which is why I need to highlight another line from his C.V. at the outset here.

A line we found on a physical piece of paper, actually, from a course he taught, as a civics and history lecturer, at Bowdoin College, in the spring of 2005. Exactly 20 years ago. And this line on Professor Angus King’s syllabus simply read:

“Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick.”

YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Nourishingly,

Pablo