PHONY COURAGE

On September 4, a mistrial was declared in the prosecution of Lindsay Clancy. 

She is the Massachusetts woman who killed her three children but claimed she was not guilty by reason of insanity.

When such a plea is mounted under Massachusetts law, the prosecution must prove not only guilt beyond a reasonable doubt but also that the defendant was not mentally ill. And the absence of mental illness itself must also be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. 

At trial, Clancy put on evidence that she suffered from post-partum psychosis when she killed her children and was therefore unable “to appreciate the criminality of her conduct or conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.” This evidence came in the form of testimony from expert psychologists, as well as testimony that she had repeatedly but unsuccessfully sought help in the months before the crime  and also tried to kill herself immediately after it. 

In response, the commonwealth attempted to rebut her defense with their own evidence that she still had the “substantial capacity” to appreciate criminality or wrongfulness or “conform her conduct  to the requirements of the law.” Their evidence took the form of competing expert testimony along with her demonstrated capacity to perform routine tasks like driving to her doctors’ appointments. The  prosecution's experts did not dispute she was sick but did claim she was not suffering from post-partum psychosis.

After the parties rested and made their closing arguments, the case went to the jury of nine women and three men. 

They deliberated for seven days but could not reach a unanimous verdict.

The judge then declared a mistrial.

In the week following the mistrial, four jurors reported that eleven of them had agreed to return a not guilty verdict but a single holdout refused. According to one of them, the foreperson, that holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt” but said he was “still not going to say [Clancy was] not guilty by reason of insanity.” Another said the holdout was “arrogant”. A third said the holdout “wouldn’t engage” and was “scrolling on his phone” during deliberations. Yet a fourth said the holdout effectively denied Clancy a fair trial. "It’s not simply because of the fact that he had an opposing view or . . . felt like she was guilty,” she explained, “it was the inability to back that up with any logic.”

The lone holdout has remained silent and anonymous and both the trial judge and a justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Court refused to intervene when his conduct was called to their attention. The general view, and it is a good one, is that a jury is sacrosanct. The jurors who have spoken admit the deliberations throughout were contentious and that others had strong views from which they could not be dissuaded.  Maybe the holdout juror thought any effort he made to persuade others who were adamant would be futile.  Maybe he misspoke when he admitted reasonable doubt.  Maybe if he went public, he'd deny admitting reasonable doubt. 

That's a lot of maybes.

But here is another one.

Maybe not.

There is in our culture as a whole these days a phenomenon that can best be described as phony courage.

It is manifest in the form of a steely but repeated adherence to one's point of view across many subjects, some of which are informed by actual knowledge but some (perhaps most) of which are not.  

It is often perceived, quite accurately, as arrogance, mostly because it is often accompanied by swagger, the first cousin of arrogance.  

Sometimes swagger is understandable. 

Michael Jordan was, and LeBron James is, a great basketball player. 

Most of us, however, can make no credible claim to that type of greatness. 

In fact, as Jordan himself demonstrated when he tried (and spectacularly failed) to become a professional baseball player, even the greats are limited. 

They cannot necessarily extend their swagger beyond the field of their own expertise.

And they look silly . . .

Or arrogant . . .

When they try.

If the Clancy jury holdout actually admitted reasonable doubt, and actually was unable or unwilling to explain himself, and actually was scrolling through his phone during deliberations, his courage was as phony as it gets.

All swagger.

With nothing to back it up.

Unfortunately, however, he was not alone last week.

On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke to the Republican Mini-Convention in Dallas. 

The convention was called by a now historically unpopular President Trump so that the party faithful -- and in particular any GOP candidates who wants a portion of his $400 million political war chest -- could bend the knee and shower him with praise.

Kennedy . . .

Who jettisoned the party of his forebears in 2024 to endorse Trump, basically in exchange for a Cabinet post his medical ignorance (and dangerous advocacy) would have otherwise precluded in a Harris administration . . .

Was one of them.

Although the attending MAGA faithful ate it up, his speech was laced with lies.  

He falsely claimed the Democrats had "closed every church in our country for a year" during Covid. He falsely claimed that President Biden's HHS "somehow lost 360,000 children" in immigration enforcement and thus "turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in history." He falsely claimed Biden had personally "ordered Facebook and Instagram to remove his accounts to prevent public debate" in 2022. He falsely claimed the Democrats in 2024 had "sued every candidate who dared to run against Joe Biden". He falsely claimed the Democrats had "cancelled their own convention" in 2024 and that "no delegate was ever consulted" in nominating Kamala Harris. And he falsely claimed Trump has "ended nine wars" in his second term as President.

None of these assertions were true.

Even worse, he lied about his own family and pretended his prior but now discarded allegiance somehow cloaked him with a courage others, including those in his family who have repudiated his Trumpism and criticized his medical ignorance, lack.

His opening salvo was an example of his phony courage.

"The irony of my presence here is inescapable," he proclaimed, "I grew up in a Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, of my Uncle John Kennedy, of my father Robert Kennedy . . . The Democrats of that era stood with labor and working people and the American middle class . . . They stood firmly against crony capitalism . . . and  . . . for meritocracy . . . and . . . excellence."

"My father and uncles," he continued  "served in World War II, and they understood the difference between forever wars that they opposed and wars to protect our national security, which they believed we should never hesitate to defend."

In closing this portrait, he concluded "My family played critical roles in building NIH and CDC," and "my Uncle Ted Kennedy wrote Title IX because he wanted to make sure women, real women, were able to have a safe and guaranteed spot in college sports."

All this was designed to clothe Trump -- and RFK, Jr. himself -- in the halo of Kennedys past.

And all of it was incredibly phony.

Neither Donald Trump nor Bobby Kennedy Jr. are today standing with America's working people or its middle class.  Inequality is at historic levels, and the Trump administration is as anti-labor as GOP administrations past. It supports Taft-Hartley and right to work laws and wants no part of reform to the National Labor  Relations Act to make it easier to organize or form a union,   This has been true of  Republican administrations since at least Reagan's in 1980 and neither Trump's first or second term changed that.  

As for the middle class, Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, which Kennedy supported, made billionaire tax cuts permanent, gutted the NIH,  and  eliminated the enhanced marketplace subsidies under the Affordable Care Act that made health insurance more affordable. In 2025, roughly 22 million people -- or 90% of Obamacare enrollees -- used those subsidies and this year their insurance premiums on average doubled. Though Kennedy embraced his uncle and father's military service, and lauded their aversion to so-called "forever wars", his boss is famous for a bone-spurs medical deferment during the Vietnam War and this year started an unnecessary and unauthorized war in Iran that he wants to but cannot end and is otherwise losing. 

More recently, according to Bobby in Dallas, his Uncle Ted "wrote Title IX."

But only, again according to Bobby. for "real women" . . .

A comment that, Trump-like, manages to be both insultingly offensive and spectacularly wrong . . .

All at the same time.

Because . . .

Whether Bobby knows it or not, his Uncle Ted also spearheaded the first Senate bill (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act) to protect the transgendered.

 For that work and more, the Human Rights Campaign said there was no greater advocate for LGBT equality.

In truth, nothing about Trump echoes the overall policies, priorities or politics of John, Robert or Ted Kennedy, and no amount of careerist revisionism from their 72-year-old nephew or son can change that. 

The John Kennedy who uttered his famous "Ask not" would never endorse the Trump who offers $5,000 bribes to vote for Republicans in the upcoming elections or the one who called soldiers who died in World War I "suckers" and "losers".

The Robert Kennedy who in his polarized time counseled that "love and wisdom and compassion" were the only real antidotes to  "hatred" and "division" would never endorse the Trump who has turned hate into an art form and ruthlessly inflames divisions to create fear and drive his base to the polls.

And the Ted Kennedy who told us "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die" would never endorse the Trump  whose only dream is to turn the presidency into his personal piggy-bank and whose only cause has always been himself.

In the middle of his speech, RFK, Jr. said that, upon meeting Trump and "during the series of talks that followed, I realized that everything I had heard about President Trump and everything I believed about him from the mainstream media was a lie." Instead, Kennedy said, "I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues".  Toward the end he said, "President Trump has kept every single promise he made to me, without exception."

If the first statement is true then Kennedy, like Trump, is an election denier who thinks Trump won the 2020 election and the J6 insurrectionists were patriots. If the second and third are true, Kennedy is part of an infinitesimally small set.

For after more than a decade with the man . . .

The world as a whole has come nowhere near concluding that Trump is a compassionate, self-effacing, superior intellect.  

Or that he keeps his promises.

None of this makes me happy.

I have known Bobby Kennedy for more than thirty years.  I supported his efforts as an environmental lawyer in New York in the 1990s, praised his yeoman work in cleaning up the Hudson River and founding the international Waterkeeper Alliance, and was grateful for the support he provided when I ran for Congress in 1992. I consider him a friend, and one of his best friends is also one of mine.  I'm also friends with others in his immediate and extended Kennedy family.

For Irish Catholics my age, raised in the Catholic parishes and schools of Brooklyn and Manhattan, something noble died in the 1960s when his uncle and father were assassinated. 

Donald Trump does not recapture that nobility.

And none of us, least of all a namesake, should pretend otherwise.