Let us begin with the four nouns.
Thomas Hawley Tuberville, United States Senator from Alabama, member of the Armed Services Committee, chairman of its Subcommittee on Personnel, and Republican nominee for the governorship of a state he may or may not inhabit, introduced himself to the voters of that state as follows: a football coach, a leader, a builder, and a recruiter. He said it on Fox News. He said it again at a barbecue restaurant in Auburn in front of family and friends wearing hats that said Coach in the colors of both major universities, which is the sort of hedging that tells you everything, and the crowd applauded, and nobody asked a follow-up question about any of the four.
We should take him at his word and go through them in order.
The coach is real. This is the part that holds up and the part that explains the rest. He went 85-40 at Auburn, took five SEC West titles, and finished 13-0 in 2004, and these are genuine accomplishments achieved by a genuine person and they concluded in 2008. Alabama then elected him to the United States Senate on the strength of them, which means a state sent a man to Washington for two decades of work he did to a rival football team, and this is not a joke I am making, it is the actual causal chain.
The branches. Shortly after his election, the senator-elect was asked whether he would work across the aisle and explained that the founders had not designed the system for one group to hold all three branches of government, which he then enumerated as the House, the Senate, and the executive. The judicial branch, employing roughly two thousand federal judges and occupying a large marble building four hundred yards from the office he was about to take, did not come up. He had campaigned on a pledge to help seat more conservative judges on the Supreme Court, which sits at the top of the branch he could not locate, in the building he could see from his window, in the government he had just joined. In the same interview he explained that his father had fought in the Second World War to free Europe from socialism, an operation whose actual target has been documented at some length, and he mentioned that Al Gore had briefly served as president, an event that did not occur in this timeline or any adjacent one.
The house. Every builder requires a structure and the senator has one. It is in Auburn, it is 1,551 square feet, it has one bathroom, and the county appraises it at about $291,780. He also owns a beach house in Walton County, Florida, valued at $5.6 million, which is nineteen of the Auburn house stacked into a tower, and which he describes as a vacation home. In 2017 he appeared in an ESPN commercial in which he mentioned having moved to Santa Rosa Beach and called it a great place to live, a phrase people generally deploy about the place where they live. To satisfy the Alabama Constitution’s seven-year residency requirement he points to a homestead exemption claimed on the Auburn property in 2018 by his wife and his son. His own name reached the deed in 2024. In November of 2018, after that exemption was granted, he and his wife voted in Florida. He registered to vote in Alabama in March of 2019, roughly two weeks before announcing for Senate. He carried a Florida driver’s license until 2023. His Senate travel records show a great many flights home, a striking number of which landed at Destin-Fort Walton Beach, which is a hundred and eighty miles from the bathroom he swears by. In June the state party’s steering committee heard the challenge behind a closed door, ruled for him unanimously, and announced that it was time to lock this chapter, which is a thing you say about a chapter that is still open.
The hold. In February 2023, protesting a Pentagon policy that reimbursed service members who had to travel to obtain reproductive care, Senator Tuberville placed a blanket hold on every general and flag officer nomination in the United States military, and left it there for ten months. By autumn the Pentagon counted more than 450 officers frozen. Three of the armed services were simultaneously operating without Senate-confirmed leaders for the first time in the history of the Department. Officers performed the duties of ranks they had not been confirmed into, which meant the work without the pay and in some cases without the legal authority the work requires, and the officers below them stopped moving because the ladder had stopped moving, and families sat on orders they could not execute, and the nominee to run the Navy testified that readiness would erode if it continued. Asked in October whether he was damaging readiness, the senator said that if he thought that were happening he would not be doing it, and that the people he trusts had told him it was not, a sentence with the epistemological structure of a man declining to look in a bag because someone told him what is in the bag. In December he lifted the holds. The policy he had been protesting was unchanged, in every particular, down to the punctuation. He had obtained nothing. He told reporters it had been a long fight and that they had fought hard, which is what you say in the tunnel after a loss, and then he went to lunch. This is the same man who, asked whether white nationalists should serve in the armed forces, would answer that they call them that and he calls them Americans, and who, defending himself, would offer the observation that there is nobody more military than him.
The portfolio. In his first five months in office he executed roughly 130 stock and stock-option trades worth between $894,000 and $3.56 million and disclosed none of them inside the forty-five days the law requires. Among the positions were healthcare companies regulated by the Senate health committee, on which he sat, and an option in Alibaba, a Chinese firm, traded by a senator who had built a portion of his brand on the danger posed by China. His office explained that he had been unaware the trades occurred, because advisers manage the portfolio without his day-to-day involvement, and then declined to name the advisers. Unaware is not among the exceptions the statute provides. Asked afterward whether members of Congress ought to be barred from trading individual stocks, he called the idea ridiculous and suggested that if it came to that they might as well start sending robots to Washington, apparently unaware that he was making the argument for the robots.
The tyrant. On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Senator Tuberville released a statement calling Putin a tyrant attacking a sovereign nation, condemning the war, urging the free world to cripple Russia with sanctions, and pledging that the United States stood with Ukrainians and would supply what they needed to defend their country. That is the baseline, and it is in writing, on his own letterhead, under his own name. Everything after it is the deviation. Within months he was voting against aid. By 2024 he was on the Senate floor declaring the war unwinnable and demanding that not one dime go to Ukraine, and sitting with Steve Bannon to observe that Putin appeared to be on top of his game while his host explained that the Russian people have always been our friends. He floated the theory that a president might start a war with Russia to help himself get reelected. He complained about money flowing to Ukraine while serving on Armed Services and representing a state whose plants build a meaningful share of the weapons in question, and at one point he mangled American war spending so thoroughly that he appeared to have read Russia’s number off the wrong line of the page. Lindsey Graham, in one of the few sentences of an otherwise weightless career that carried any weight at all, called him an outlier on Putin and said the position belonged to him and to him alone. Nobody in Moscow has ever needed to place a call to Tommy Tuberville. Agents require handling and handling requires effort and no effort was ever necessary here, because a man who has told you that Al Gore was president and that the Allies landed at Normandy to fight socialism does not need to be recruited, he needs only to be pointed, and the pointing is done for free every week by whoever has him booked, and the output is indistinguishable from service rendered.
The names. At a Trump rally in Nevada in October 2022 he told the crowd that Democrats are not soft on crime but pro-crime, that they want crime because they want to take what you have, and that they want reparations because they believe the people who do the crime are owed them, and then he swore for emphasis and the crowd cheered. The NAACP called it racist. Joe Scarborough, a Republican from the South, said it would have made George Wallace and Lester Maddox proud. Tuberville has never apologized and has never explained. In May 2023 he told an Alabama public radio station that Democrats were wrecking recruitment by trying to remove white extremists and white nationalists from the ranks, and when the interviewer asked directly whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve, he said they call them that and he calls them Americans, and his office later clarified that the senator has a sarcastic sense of humor, which is the single funniest document in the entire file. In early 2026 he posted an image pairing the burning towers of September 11 with a photograph of the mayor of New York, a Muslim man elected by three million people, captioned with the observation that the enemy is inside the gates. He pinned it to the top of his page and left it there. He kept posting about Islam. The Council on American-Islamic Relations designated him an anti-Muslim extremist, the first sitting United States senator ever added to that list, and offered to host him at a mosque, and he said he is open to talking to anyone and has Muslim friends in the state and then went back to warning the Senate floor about Sharia. Candidates down the Alabama ballot started copying the cadence, because it works, because it has always worked, because there has never been a week in the history of that state when it did not work.
And then, one week ago, on the twenty-third of July, sitting with Benny Johnson, the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama said of that mayor that sooner or later he will do something stupid enough that we finally say enough is enough, and put the handcuffs on him, and get him the hell out of here, and send him to Gitmo.
He did not name a crime. He did not cite a statute. He did not appear to understand that he was describing the abduction of an elected American official into an offshore prison purpose-built to sit outside the reach of American courts, and that is the part worth holding onto, because it is the whole inventory in one sentence. The ignorance was never the obstacle to any of this. He did not need to know what the judicial branch was to freeze four hundred careers for ten months. He does not need to know what Guantanamo is for in order to point at a man and say put him there. Not knowing has been the engine the entire time, and every teacher and booster and athletic director and donor and primary voter and state party steering committee that looked at him and decided not to say the word no is the reason a man who cannot name the third branch of government is ninety days from commanding the Alabama National Guard.
The record shows a football coach.
The record has never shown anything else.
And here it is again, the reckless rhetoric being shoved down the throats of those Americans" too ignorant, and too lazy to rectify their ignorance. It is singularly abhorrent to hear the dangerous drivel from the likes of Tuberville, and others of his ilk..ie.Rick Scott, Fl., etc. These are the most reprehensible of the species - pretending to be "patriots" as they line their pockets at the expense of their constituents.
"We, the People"need to exert some diligence, examine the facts, and not take these charlatans at face value!
With "patriots" like Dummy Dumberville, China's work is 99% done. Thank you for holding up those senior military promotions, Tommy. Please learn Mandarin...FAST.