Our long national nightmare is over: Cracker Barrel announced last night they will abandon their woke new logo and go back to the old one after all. For good measure, representatives of the company called Donald Trump and—in the words of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich—“thanked President Trump for weighing in on the issue of their iconic ‘original’ logo. They wanted the President to know that they heard him.”

Normal country! Normal times! Happy Wednesday.

Nietzsche, Take the Wheel

by William Kristol

I remember reading Nietzsche in college: “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks back into you.”

Having the abyss look back into you seemed to me kind of a bad thing, so I’ve tried ever since then to avoid frequent abyss-looking.

And I was cheered yesterday to see some non-abysmal developments.

Taylor and Kelce are engaged! Congratulations and best wishes.

Cracker Barrel is returning to its 1969 logo! That’s fine with me—it seems to my untutored eye to be superior to the antiseptic 2025 corporate update.

And in a special state senate election in the Sioux City area, Iowans elected a Democrat, Catelin Drey. It was a previously Republican seat, with Drey winning by more than a ten-point margin in a district Trump won last year by 11, and ending the GOP’s supermajority in the chamber.

Pretty good.

Yesterday also featured a spectacle that perhaps transcended good and evil, but that was certainly striking: A three-and-a-quarter-hour televised cabinet Politburo meeting, in which the highest-ranking government officials of the world’s oldest and once greatest democracy abased themselves ridiculously before their presidential idol.

Every Trump apparatchik took a turn in the Cabinet Room adulating their leader. They even sought to outdo each other. Steve Witkoff’s fawning may have taken the prize: “There’s only one thing I wish for: That that Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since that Nobel award was ever talked about.” But there was some stiff competition in this contest, about which retired Gen. Ben Hodges noted, “in the Army we called this Butt-snorkeling.”

Anyway, take a look at some of the clips online if you wish. The flattery is so over-the-top as to be—in short doses, at least—entertaining. And watching the other cabinet secretaries being sure to vigorously nod along to their colleagues’ moments of adoration, lest they seem less than fully enthusiastic, is a sight to behold.

But the great leader to whom all in the room bowed, Donald J. Trump, was not a silent idol. He spoke occasionally. At times he of course added to the sense of ridiculousness. But there were also moments that brought one back to reality.

The president forecast troop deployments to more cities, explaining, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.”

He also mocked critics who claim he’s behaving like a dictator, adding that “a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’ But I’m not a dictator.”

So one was reminded: We have a president who rejects any checks on presidential power, and who is trying to normalize the view that dictatorship maybe isn’t so bad.

As for the idea that an opposition to the president and his agenda has some sort of right to exist, the Trump administration rejects that too. On Monday night, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, appeared on Fox News. He called the opposition party “an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

So much for the rule of law. So much for limits on the power of the executive. So much for the legitimacy of opposition to the government.

One can try to look away from the abyss for a while. But when the diversions end, one can’t help but see that we’re heading straight towards it.