NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

The Brutal Truth About Second-Class Service: Customers Are Done Waiting in the ‘Right Now’ Economy. Consumers are accustomed to having virtually everything available at the touch of a button. If you’re not willing to meet their requirements, they’ll find someone else who will.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Jul 7, 2026

We’re nearing the end of the “hurry up and wait” era when customers politely settled for service and timeliness that suited the providers but sucked for the recipients. In many cases, there were few alternatives, and they were grateful to have access at all to certain of these providers. However, in today’s competitive environment, “right now” is barely enough to satisfy the demands of an educated, aggressive and increasingly connected public. No one wants to wait for anything, and if you’re not willing to meet their requirements, they’ll happily find someone else who will. The whole world is a few clicks away.

You can blame a small part of the overall “need for speed” on the impatience of young people—whose cultural impact and purchasing power across the board has never been greater—and on young techies and developers who are always seeking to accelerate whatever processes are central to their products and services. You can also point to the global nature of competition these days, as well as the ever-present availability of advice, instruction and alternatives that mobile devices make possible. Then there’s the fact that Amazon is constantly upping its delivery game and heightening the assumptions and expectations of buyers everywhere, both as to delivery times and the expansiveness of its inventory, wherein virtually everything you can imagine is online and available at the touch of a button.

The simple truth is that there’s no going back and, if your business or industry hasn’t been impacted and changed by these trends, it’s only a matter of time until the wave of change hits. The passage of time is not anyone’s friend except maybe for the Orange Monster who stalls everything and has escaped accountability for his misdeeds for decades. For us mere mortals, time has a nasty way of turning even the best assets into liabilities.

Speed, convenience and access win out over quality in far too many cases, but it’s really our own fault because we settle for “good enough” too often. We’ve also come to believe that almost everything is relatively disposable and quickly replaceable, so we think that we’re not really giving that much up when we accept second class service and mediocre performances and results.

Too many providers still take advantage of our indifference and grudging acceptance to continue to do a lousy job because they can get away with it and no one has yet offered a better alternative. But change is coming. One of the first groups to be targeted will be government office holders and political candidates. Anyone who’s wasted time trying to call or contact any of their city, state or federal representatives knows they’ll never reach anyone of consequence or secure any assistance or relief.

While our political and governmental officers and representatives have always lagged in terms of the demonstrable speed and service advances which we now see in virtually every business, the fact is, once a new technology emerges—and when that technology delivers better, faster results—the race will truly be on to see how quickly the laggards can catch up. Many of them won’t have the capacity to deliver comparable new features and services and will quickly fall by the wayside.

We’re only now starting to see the introduction–obviously aided in many respects by artificial intelligence–of intelligent automated response systems which will enable politicians, candidates, governmental authorities and other regulatory agencies to create authentic and interactive digital twins like Selfie which will enable them to deliver replies and responses in a timely (in fact instantly) and scalable fashion to a virtually unlimited number of callers, constituents, and voters.

These systems can be updated in real time 24 hours a day and provide the most accurate and comprehensive answers available to any inquiries. The time, cost and manpower savings which this kind of interactive and intelligent automation will offer to early adopters will be substantial. Competitors, candidates, and other offices or agencies which lack comparable tools and capabilities will rapidly discover that they are doing a comparatively poor job of providing the services to their constituents, prospective voters, funders, media and the public in general.
These are people who are looking forward to the past. The future doesn’t wait.

 

What J. D. Vance Once Knew

Ten years ago, the vice president wrote that one day, voters would realize the truth about Donald Trump. That day has now arrived.

By Peter Wehner

Scott Olson / Getty

JULY 4, 2026, 6 AM ET

Ten years ago today, in the middle of the presidential campaign, an essay in The Atlantic set out to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. Its author traced that appeal to the social decline and cultural trauma he had known firsthand, in an impoverished childhood.

The author, J. D. Vance, had only days earlier published Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to sell roughly 3 million copies and made him, almost overnight, the country’s designated interpreter of working-class grievances. And he was quite good at it.

In the July 4, 2016, essay, Vance described the places from which the pain came—factories that downsized or ceased to exist, along with the jobs they had provided; the aesthetic decline in once beautiful and vibrant towns; families that were shattering or never forming in the first place; and anger and frustration with a government that had broken the trust with the people it was meant to serve. “During this election season,” Vance wrote, “it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever.” His name was Donald Trump.

In the midst of a social crisis, Vance observed, Trump offered “an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” But, he argued, such promises were a cheap high. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”

“Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

“One day” is today.

The trump presidency, while still quite dangerous, is also collapsing, cracking under the weight of its own choices. The main driver is the economy, which he sold as his strong point. We’re seeing tariff-driven price increases, gas prices that spiked from less than $3 to more than $4 a gallon during a 100-day war against Iran that America lost, wages failing to keep pace with the cost of living, and inflation ticking back up. Manufacturing jobs, which Trump promised to bring roaring back, are still being lost. Health care has gotten much more expensive on his watch, and millions have lost coverage.At the top of the nation’s health agencies sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a single year moved to cut the list of recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half, fired the government’s vaccine advisers and replaced them with skeptics, and presided over the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biomedical science, has seen billions in research cut, clinical trials canceled, and labs closed, resulting in a “brain drain” that rival nations are racing to exploit. And the dismantling of USAID, along with the gutting of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan AIDS-relief program credited with saving more than 25 million lives—has, by credible estimates, already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, most of them children, with projections of as many as 14 million more by 2030 if the cuts hold.

Americans are deeply divided and intensely polarized, with pessimism at or near a multidecade high. Faith in nearly every major institution—government, the press, universities, religious leaders—sits at or near the bottom of the modern record.

It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s approval rating is anemic. (In one recent poll, it’s down to 30 percent.) His remaining support is soft, while the unhappiness with him is intense. Republican members of Congress are beginning to break with him. His MAGA base is fracturing. Former stalwart supporters, such as Tucker Carlson, are openly mocking the president. (“Shut up, bitch! I don’t take you seriously,” Carlson said 10 days ago.) Trump looks weak and lost, a husk of a man still performing the same routine to a crowd that is drifting toward the exits. The country is finally waking to the comedown Vance predicted.

This is the context in which Americans are celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday. It’s not simply that things are going badly; it’s that their view of the United States is darkening. Pride in being an American has hit a new low. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believethe Founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.

Some of that sentiment reflects the fact that the president and those around him subvert the rule of law, decency, and democratic restraints. Many Americans believe the country is, in its current incarnation, betraying its ideals. They feel at odds with the nation they love.

And this is true as well: Among more and more Americans there is a sickening recognition of what the United States, during the Trump era, has become. They see it as a pitiable farce, a verdict that is hard to dispute when a nation has twice elected a carnival barker as its leader. For a historically proud people, that is an indignity and a humiliation. We are in the bread-and-circuses phase of the American story, the point at which a great republic, having lost its sense of purpose, makes do with spectacle.

Which brings me back to J. D. Vance. Ten summers ago he understood, better than most, the threat Trump posed to America. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” thought Trump was an “idiot.” He admitted to a friend at the time that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” But then ambition made its offer, and Vance, who had seen the danger so clearly, discovered he could see his way around it. The first stop was the Senate; the next was the vice presidency.

Along the way, the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy—a teller of hard truths, a morally serious person committed to honesty even when it cost him, beholden to no one—became a cynic, a partner in a cruel enterprise, a peddler of lies he is surely clever enough to recognize as such, a man whose only fixed commitment is to his own rise to power.

In his memoir, Vance wrote, “Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.” It’s a poignant line, referring to a man raised amid the addiction and volatility he feared he might inherit. The monster Vance feared was a private one; the monster he became is a public one. His legacy turns out to be a much more destructive than the one he was afraid of inheriting.

america will outlast trump and vance; the issue is whether they will be seen as a parenthesis the country closes or the opening of a different, dark chapter.

Abraham Lincoln, in his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum on the subject of the perpetuation of our political institutions, warned, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” What Lincoln meant is that the threat America faced was not external conquest; it was internal decay. If destruction is to be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

Lincoln was responding to a wave of mob violence in the 1830s, including lynchings such as the murder of the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The “props” that once supported a “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” were “decayed, and crumbled away.” Out of such decay might rise a demagogue, a future tyrant, feeding on what the Lincoln scholar Diana Schaub called “politically degenerative passions.”

The remedy, according to Lincoln, was a “political religion” based on reverence for the law and fidelity to America’s constitutional process. Lincoln was in turn relying on the wisdom of George Washington, and particularly Washington’s farewell address. America’s two greatest presidents shared an intense conviction: that a republic depends on some measure of virtue in its citizens and some measure of integrity in its leaders. Without them, the temple of liberty will fall.

The past decade in America has been a lost decade. Far too many Americans have cheered on the men tearing at the temple. But Americans can now see, later than they should have, the cost of the damage. It is within our power to make it whole. What remains is to find the will. There is a name for those who do: renewers of ruined cities, repairers of the breach, restorers of streets in which to dwell.

FRANK BRUNI

 

July 6, 2026

Ben Wiseman

If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.

The bling and brutality of American ‘diplomacy’

	By Frank Bruni

How do we want the world to see us? Which of our nation’s traits do we highlight — as a show of our strengths, as an assertion of our values, as an act of self-definition?

In the past we answered that question by helping to rebuild Europe after World War II, by tackling the scourge of AIDS in Africa, by sharing our trailblazing scientific advances and by tapping our extraordinary wealth.

President Trump is answering it with brutes in cages beating each other to pulps.

I don’t mean the desecration of the White House on his 80th birthday last month, when he and members of his cabinet cheered the chokeholds, body slams and bloodshed of Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the South Lawn. Or at least I don’t mean only that. Less widely noted than that national disgrace was an agreement between the U.F.C. and the Trump administration to promote such pummeling abroad.

You read that right: The American government is giving its imprimatur — perhaps I should say lending its muscle — to the international expansion of human cockfighting. An earlier generation had the Marshall Plan. Ours has mixed martial arts.

The administration is calling the arrangement “sports diplomacy,” and there are images of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Dana White, U.F.C.’s chief executive officer, holding up a memorandum of understanding at the State Department on June 11. They’re smiling, as if they accomplished something important. As if there were a global barbarism deficit and the United States is nobly stepping up to fill the void. As if an important emblem of human civilization and expression of human culture will finally get the recognition it deserves. As if the torch of liberty can now shine brighter than ever, because it will be carried by warriors of such vision and valor that one of them, upon winning his South Lawn brawl, used his moment at the mic to crow a cuckoo credo: “Michelle Obama is a man!”

That’s what a White House obsessed with trade imbalances is electing to export.

“It’s something we want to share with the world,” Rubio said during his photo opportunity with White, referring to mixed martial arts. He called it “one of those few things we have left in our country, and I would say in the world, that brings so many people from so many different places, so many different backgrounds and so many different points of view together.” That rationale was a crucial reassurance; otherwise, a skeptic might wonder if Trump was simply setting up U.F.C.’s parent company, in which he’s invested, for ever greater profits. But thanks to Rubio, I now understand that there’s no self-enrichment here. No conflict of interest. Just cage fighting as Kumbaya.

The arrangement with the U.F.C. isn’t novel. Our government has engaged in sports diplomacy before. It has collaborated, for example, with the National Football League to advertise professional football, which itself is plenty violent and hardly the ideal expression and embodiment of American virtues. Maybe I’m kidding myself to see a difference between a quarterback being sacked and a wrestler being punched in the ribs, kicked in the head and subjected to a “guillotine choke.” But I do.

And I cringe at our government’s advancement of such savagery while we’re retreating from the kinds of engagements that lessen hardship and relieve misery. Near the start of his current term in the presidency, Trump quickly and gleefully dissolved the U.S. Agency for International Development. Whatever that organization’s inefficiencies and excesses, it did vital, lifesaving work that proclaimed concern for the welfare of needy people beyond our borders. The president didn’t replace the agency’s programs with better ones, either. He essentially said that America was exhausted with such altruism — tired of being saps and chumps — and he rechanneled our treasure toward new munitions and new monuments, baubles and bling.

Trump’s visions of American might are either gaudy or, in the case of U.F.C. matches, grotesque. Cage fighting fits perfectly into his rejection of anything that codes as elitist. Out with the Kennedy Center, in with the Octagon. So much for symphonies, bring on the gladiators. Who needs discernment when you can flex domination?

That’s Trump’s message to the world. That’s his thinking, the limits of which have been exposed by his ongoing capitulation to a smaller, poorer, less brawny country with control over the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps he should have forgone the war with Iran and simply staged a cage fight in Tehran. Such sports diplomacy would have been a whole lot less expensive. And while it would have been an embarrassing illustration of American passions and priorities under this president, it would also have been an honest one.

For the Love of Sentences

Finn Gomez/Getty Images

In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Cathal Kelly attempted to console the president of South Korea, who took to social media to express his utter bafflement over his country’s elimination from soccer’s World Cup: “I don’t know what to tell you, man. There’s a ball and both teams are allowed to kick it. Occasionally, it ends up in places you hoped it wouldn’t.” (Thanks to Jeremy Wilson of Victoria, British Columbia, for nominating this.)

In The Guardian, Aaron Timms hailed Ecuador’s distinctive presence in the tournament: “On the sidelines and in the press conferences, they have absolutely dominated, and that’s all down to the gaucho Fabio they have leading their team. With his streaks of dirty blond hair, chinstrap of stubble and Boeing 747 nose, Sebastián Beccacece looks like the kind of manager who should do well at the World Cup, regardless of results on the pitch.” (Rob Hisnay, Cleveland Heights, Ohio)

In The New Yorker, Patricia Marx processed the fitful hostilities between the United States and Iran, the cease-fire that wasn’t and other dramas in a discombobulating month: “If June were a book, it would be titled ‘War and Peace and War and Peace and Whatever.’ There’d also be chapters about the N.B.A. Finals and the World Cup because sports are just war with a referee.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)

In a policy analysis on the Brookings Institution’s website, Fiona Hill contrasted two world leaders: “Putin believes that things will go wrong in military and other operations — based on his own experience in the security services — but he also believes he will always find a way to fix them. Trump believes nothing will go wrong, and if it does, someone else is to blame.” (Marion Kelly, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia)

In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel reacted to a photo of cleanup efforts at the cursed Reflecting Pool: “Four men in camo waders are in the pool. Water, the color of fresh Mountain Dew, laps at their thighs as they dredge the bottom with poles like cranberry farmers on a faraway radioactive planet.” (Beth Dillon, Vashon Island, Wash., and Dave Piazza, North Las Vegas, Nev., among others)

Also in The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri sought a final word on those iconically foul waters, which may bear some blame for a fowl fatality: “The Reflecting Pool is a metaphor so perfect, it feels almost valedictory, as though symbolism as a whole gave up and decided to sign off. On its way out, it killed a duck.” (Paula Craft, Bigfork, Mont., and Stuart Antell, Manhattan)

In The Times, Gary Shteyngart visited an American landmark: “Monticello is the key to America and America will break your heart. With every brick, every vegetable plot, every budding tulip, Thomas Jefferson’s estate announces the uniqueness of our civilization, just as it submerges the visitor in the gruesome details of its original sin.” (Shelley A. Saltzman, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.)

Also in The Times, Jamelle Bouie examined the country’s founding document: “As we mark, this year, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is important to see that its meaning is dynamic. And that meaning, as we understand it, flows less from the men who signed it than from those who heard its words and took ownership of them as a standard for their freedom and independence — not from Britain, but from bondage.” (Nancy Montgomery Boise, Idaho)