I loved Mickey Mantel, even growing up on the West Coast I couldn’t help being in love with the guy who hit the most home runs. I mean who else was being talked about as much in the sports pages? It took me a while to learn that Mikey Mantel never won a World Series. It was the Yankees who won the World Series. Mickey was just their star player. As time went on I learned about colorful managers and brilliant general managers and even shrewd team owners. All of whom were important, but none of them individually won the World Series, or built a stadium. What counted for important things like that was the team they shared.

I can’t help wondering why we haven’t learned that simple lesson about our politics. I’m reading day after day in our liberal newspapers about the same TV star I hear about and see on the conservative stations, the guy with the most important name recognition in the world. The guy who they keep telling us was never as good as his name recognition. The building contractor who kept going bankrupt while stiffing clients as his name kept increasing in notoriety. The one who even now is making more out of his name than his building.

Smart people keep writing finely thought-out condemnations of his terrible policies and his presidential orders. As if he was making the world a worse place by his presidency and his presidential orders and his Supreme Court nominations and his Cabinet nominations, and his Fox-host Secretary of Defense and his inept head of the FBI and his personal lawyer head of his personal Justice Department. Or his tearing down the nondescript East Wing of the White House, that you never heard of before and couldn’t identify if you saw a picture of it, to replace with a Coney Island ballroom with his name on it.

When are we going to figure out that the CEO of Disney can’t draw cartoons, or invent TV shows, or for that matter buy and sell TV networks? It’s the company that does that. And it’s the company that hires the CEO, and the company that will go on when the temporary CEO has moved out of Florida, because the theme park has lost his interest.

This president of the United States can’t do anything without the Republican Party sponsoring him to. No Republican Party support, no DOGE to cut the government waste on your health care or jobs or the education departments that the Republican Party has been trying to eliminate for generations. The president can’t end a government program or international alliance or give billionaires a giant tax cut. Only the Republican Party can do that.

And they have. And they plan on continuing to.

No matter how clever he might be at finding conservative ways to tax imports or cut off poor people’s health care (both at home and all around the world), he can only get done what the Republican Party wants.

So why do we keep talking about him, when it is them who he represents and who are going to be running for election all around the country to elect people to carry out the same projects?

This president can start wars and spend billions and billions of dollars killing people in non-Christian countries only as long as the Republican Party will let him. This president can only grab women by whatever part of their bodies he chooses, as long as Republican women and men will let him. This president can only pardon the thugs he sent to break into the Capitol and interfere with our election, because the Republican Party thinks he might get away with it for them.

Do you think he’d have done it if there were more than three Republican Party members standing up to say they’d stop supporting him if he did? Do you think there would not be some group of Republicans objecting seriously to anything he does, if what he does was not what they want?

The minute he begins to do things the Republican Party does not want, you’ll see the Republican Party object and look for ways to impede him, just like they have every appointment they really didn’t want. Don’t you remember when he was “pro-choice?”

We do not have a do-nothing Congress that is allowing the president to run roughshod over the laws. We have a Republican-Party-ruled-Congress getting what it wants. It may be popular to say “a do-nothing Congress,” but that’s only a Republican PR victory. What we have is a Republican Party-ruled-Congress holding the shiny object up in front, so we won’t notice who is actually in charge.

It isn’t the shiny puppet that is succeeding in implementing the Republican Party’s agenda. It is the Republican Party on whose arm the dummy sits, that we should be naming. It’s the Republicans dummy!

Gary Michael Tartakov lives in Amherst.