If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last few weeks — and many thanks to those readers who checked in to see if I was OK — I’m just back from a trip to the end (or very near it) of the world.
Not only to get as far away from Donald Trump and MAGA world as I could. Although that would have been more than enough incentive.
But also because I couldn’t pass up a chance to go to Antarctica, which is as glorious as I had imagined. When you get to be my age, if you’ve still got a bucket list, you gotta get moving if you’re ever going to fill it.
My trip, though, was a little different from, say, Ernest Shackleton’s, meaning our ship didn’t get stuck, and then crushed, in the ice. I didn’t have to do anything more heroic than get up in time for breakfast. And, let’s just say, at no point was I forced to eat a penguin.
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(Which, by the way, if you even touched one, you’d be sent to the brig or, conceivably, forced to walk the plank. I mean, according to international rules that govern the seventh continent, you’re not allowed to even touch the Antarctic ice, which was piled two miles high even in the Southern Hemisphere’s mid-summer, much less any of its creatures.)
And yet, the voyage was called an expedition and definitely not a cruise. Just an expedition ship with Wi-Fi — sadly, as a news junkie, I checked the news at least twice a day — four restaurants and our semi-personal butler. And an assistant butler.
Before the trip, all I knew about butlers was what I’d learned from watching “Arthur,” “Trading Places” and “Upstairs, Downstairs.” The butler, Joseph, was cool. The most butlerish thing he did for me was to exchange war stories — and to check on when we wanted the stateroom cleaned. The stateroom, by the way, had a veranda.Still, an expedition, not a cruise.
But expedition or cruise, we saw what we came to see. We’d board our zodiac boats — sort of like a large inner tube with a floor and a motor (electric?) — which took us from the ship to the Antarctic peninsula and islands and for 75-minute-long tours of the Southern Ocean. We saw penguins by the thousands, many from just feet away, humpback whales by the scores, giant icebergs calving, and we hiked on the Antarctic peninsula, where I posed with a sign saying I had reached the seventh continent.
So now that I have been to all seven, what could I do next?
Oh, yeah, I would come home to the same old place I was before, the same old struggles, the same old assaults on U.S. democracy, the same nastiness, the same president who deals in “shithole” countries and invites only Republican governors to the White House and demands that even more things, like airports, be named for him, the same war-torn country — Minneapolis still under siege — I left behind.
The great thing about the ship was that the staff was composed of guides and scientific experts and butlers and chefs and captains and sailors from around the world. It was more cosmopolitan than any New York City street. And the expeditioners, too, came from more countries than I could count.
But on my return, I would be immediately reminded of the small-minded, unworldly, racist, misogynist, mean-spirited, cruel people who have taken control of our country.
Not just reminded, but smacked in the face with it.
There’s nothing like going all the way to Antarctica to come back for a lesson in what it actually means to be an American.
Where to begin?
I got home on Friday, in time to see the opening ceremonies at the Winter Olympics and for Trump to trash several American athletes who had expressed ambivalence about representing Trump’s benighted vision of America.
The one that caught Trump’s attention was a comment from U.S. skier Hunter Hess. When asked at a news conference about what it means to represent the United States at this point, Hess replied, “I think it brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now.”
He added: “There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of and I think a lot of people aren’t. Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”
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Meaning Hess doesn’t represent Trump’s jackbooted agents who killed two American citizens in Minneapolis, doesn’t represent Trump’s attacks on the LGBTQ community, doesn’t represent a president who posts on social media about the so-called rigged election of 2020 while somehow adding video of the Obamas on the bodies of African apes. That’s maybe the vilest of vile racist tropes, historically used, per the New York Times, “by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings.”
In other words, exactly what you’d expect from Trump, who began his political career by claiming Barack Obama wasn’t an American.
Trump didn’t apologize, of course, although he did take the video down and blamed it on an unnamed staffer. So, it’s OK for the staffer — who probably doesn’t exist, unless his name is Stephen Miller — to be racist? Was he punished, maybe even fired, for the act? Does this unknown staffer really have full access to Trump’s account? No word from the White House on any of that, except for Trump saying, “I didn’t make a mistake.”
Instead, Trump, because he’s Trump, fired back on social media calling Hess a “real Loser” who “says he doesn’t represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it. Very hard to root for someone like this.”
The clip from Hess went viral, causing MAGA world to erupt. I wonder how many recall the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists from the podium — Smith had won a gold and Carlos a bronze in the 200 meters — as the “Star Spangled Banner” played. They raised their fists in protest of racism back home.
For their actions, they were booed. They were suspended. They were vilified. And they were, to many of us, heroes who bravely stood up for a just cause.
I’d like to see a U.S. athlete or two in Milan raise a fist to protest the violent roundup of migrants in the U.S. — most of them with no criminal record — or a president and vice president who run for office by alleging that Haitians were eating their neighbors’ pets. In Italy, there have been anti-ICE and anti-Trump demonstrations, just as there continue to be in the U.S.
After Trump’s diatribe, Hess would later say that “I love my country.” Of course he does. But maybe he doesn’t love Trump or ICE. Even some Republican lawmakers, timidly standing up halfway against Trump, are now asking for ICE to tone it down.
One day after the Opening Ceremonies, the TV cameras were back home for the Super Bowl and, of course, the Bad Bunny halftime show. Bad Bunny was a controversial choice because the Puerto Rican superstar sings in Spanish — and how un-American, asked the MAGA people, is that?
I’m not a fan of Bad Bunny’s music particularly or his often-misogynistic lyrics — I’m still stuck somewhere in the classic-rock twilight zone — but the modern-day rock critics loved it. And you didn’t have to be Spanish to see that the 14-minute show was not over-the-top provocative — as many had feared from Bad Bunny, who can definitely be a provocateur in defense of the Latino culture — but rather a joyous love letter to his island home.
In protest, Turning Point USA — the organization the late Charlie Kirk founded — had offered a “faith, family, and freedom” alternative halftime show, featuring Trump favorite Kid Rock, whose song lyrics, it turned out, have included over time such lines as these: “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage/ See, some say that’s statutory/ But I say it’s mandatory.”
Trump didn’t attend the Super Bowl because he was afraid he’d be booed, which he certainly would have been. Instead, he settled for a watch party in Florida where he apparently watched the halftime show, even though he had said he wouldn’t. Or, I don’t know, maybe an unnamed staffer watched it for him.
In any case, Trump’s social media review:
“The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. This ‘Show’ is just a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country, which is setting new standards and records every single day.”
It made no sense to Trump because he doesn’t speak Spanish. One Facebook poster asked if Trump didn’t listen to opera because he doesn’t speak Italian. (I’m guessing Donald Trump doesn’t listen to opera because he’s Donald Trump.)
Not sure, though, how it was an affront to America or how it was a slap in the face to our country, since Puerto Ricans, like Bad Bunny, are U.S. citizens, even if their rights, if they live on the island, are limited.
As one of the U.S. Olympians said from Italy, in the United States we are still entitled to speak our opinions.
Or are we?
This best part of the Bad Bunny show, for my taste, was toward the ending, which was partly in English. Even Trump couldn’t miss the meaning.
Near the end of his set, Bad Bunny proclaimed, “God bless America,” in English as he reached the end zone, before naming all the countries and territories in North and South America — from Chile and Argentina to the U.S. and Canada — as dancers waved their respective flags.
Bad Bunny then turned the football he had been holding toward the camera to reveal a message: “Together, we are America.”
The message of inclusion — not a Trumpian message at all — was clear, the place of Latin American migrants in the U.S. was clear, the fact that the Americas, North and South, are more than subplot countries controlled by the “Donald Doctrine” was clear.
And for anyone who couldn’t figure it out, the words on the Jumbotron read: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” — a reference to Bad Bunny’s speech at the 2026 Grammys and also, you’d have to say, to our better angels.
It was a message worth flying home 8,000 miles or so to see.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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