IOWA CITY, Iowa — Gophers cornerback John Nestor has been trending toward a return to play against Iowa at Kinnick Stadium on Saturday afternoon, the Pioneer Press has learned.

If Nestor is able to suit up and play, it would boost a Minnesota secondary that has dealt with more injuries than any other position group this season. Nestor was listed as questionable with an unknown issue last Friday versus No. 25 Nebraska and narrowly missed the 24-6 win over the Cornhuskers.

Nestor’s official availability won’t be known until 12:30 p.m., two hours before the Gophers kickoff the Floyd of Rosedale rivalry game with the Hawkeyes.

The rivalry game has extra meaning for Nestor. The junior from Chicago played two years at Iowa before entering the transfer portal last spring. He played 20 total games for the Hawkeyes, making 16 total tackles and winning a Team Hustle Award in 2024 and ’23.

For the Gophers, Nestor has a team-high three interceptions and is sixth with 21 total tackles across the opening six games.

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President Donald Trump’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House reveals him to have the aesthetic taste of a mildly successful professional con artist. The Oval Office already lacks only the requirement that all who enter the sanctum must wear grills and large jewel-encrusted chains around their neck with perhaps a clock hanging from it, or a crucifix.

Never has there been a more important man in the world with less class.

A 90,000-square-foot ballroom will be built in place of the demolished East Wing, a ballroom. Did we need a ballroom? It is certain to be grotesque, out of character, out of place, out of this world. Early betting favors the opening-night performance of either Kid Rock or maybe a full card of greased wrestling.

The Rose Garden is gone, replaced by a concrete slab and a forest of flag poles. The new Air Force One will struggle to get off the ground with the burden of all that extra weight in gold bathroom fixtures.

You can tell a lot about a guy by his place. You often see Trump-like conversions happen in Minnesota’s lake country. Somebody buys a traditional old cabin with a screened porch and those heavy canvas awnings and a winding old moss-grown footpath down to the dock, and the next thing you know, there sits a mansion loaded with framed centaurs done in purple velvet, life-size Elvis statues and probably a pontoon boat out front with a radar dish and three 200-horsepower outboards hanging off the stern. That misses the point of a pontoon boat, not to mention living on a nice piece of lakeshore. There is no accounting for taste and to each his own, but you look stupid, pal, like you got lucky with a hedge fund and you didn’t have a clue what to do with the money.

There’s a difference, though. We don’t own that guy’s lakeshore. But we do own the White House. And everything Trump does to it he does without permission or consultation and without a note of grace. He apparently knew a guy with a bulldozer and here we go.

Well, yes, but FDR built a swimming pool, to which it might be countered that pools make good palliative care for polio sufferers.

OK, but Richard Nixon built a bowling alley. Wouldn’t you rather have had Nixon go down to the basement and roll a few frames and not be seen by the public walking around talking to portraits? Jacqueline Kennedy installed art and artifacts of history, saying that it would be a sacrilege to merely redecorate. She said there must be a purpose served by the White House.

For Donald, the purpose of the White House is him.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump got elected. He was the antidote to the insane ideology of progressives who are systematically ruining cities and universities. Here came a fellow who didn’t buy the DEI nonsense, didn’t believe men should compete against women in sports, wasn’t falling for the ridiculous affectation of multiple pronouns, liked the police and didn’t believe cities should burn at the hands of rioters, and he didn’t hold the military in contempt.

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Trump’s problem is that he takes great liberties with his possession of the antidote. He over-corrects everything. If Trump were to insist, for example, that the Christopher Columbus statue be reinstalled on the Minnesota Capitol grounds, he would also insist that the Capitol should be called the Columbus Building. If he deemed a DEI hire not suitable for a particular job, he would find the same person not suitable for any job. Other presidents have managed to deport illegal immigrants without a display of military strength.

Donald is The Great Over Corrector, even with ballrooms.

They could have knocked down a wall or two in the White House and created a quaint new banquet hall, but The Great Over Corrector doesn’t do quaint. He knew a guy with a bulldozer and there goes the entire East Wing.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

In 2020, Democrats won a convincing election victory. They proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including raising health insurance subsidies to families making up to 400% of the poverty line. They wrote the law so that the subsidies would expire in 2025.

In 2024, the Republicans won a convincing election victory. They proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including letting the Democrats’ insurance subsidies expire as planned.

If the Democrats were a normal party that believed in democratic principles, they would have planned to go to the voters in the next elections and said: These Republican policies are terrible! You should vote for us!

But of course that’s not what the Democrats decided to do. Instead, they shut down the government. Why did they do that? Because we don’t live in a healthy democracy. We live in a country in which the norms, beliefs and practices that hold up a democracy are dying even in the minds of many of the people who profess to oppose Donald Trump.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote an essay called “Defining Deviancy Down.” His core point was that when the amount of deviant behavior rises, people begin to redefine deviant behavior as normal. This is a column about that.

In a functioning democracy, a politician’s first instinct is to go to the voters and let the voters decide. In a diseased democracy a politician’s first instinct is to amass power by any means necessary. In a healthy democracy politicians abide by a series of formal and informal restraints because those restraints are good for the nation as a whole. In a diseased democracy like ours all the decent rules and arrangements are destroyed. Anything goes.

Trump is destroying democratic norms. Democrats have decided to follow him into the basement. When both parties cooperate to degrade public morality, then nobody even notices as it’s happening.

Government shutdowns became a thing during the Carter administration. The first few shutdowns during the Reagan administration lasted a day or two. Leaders in both parties did not want to face the wrath of voters who would be offended by this level of gridlock and incompetence. Now we’re in our 20th shutdown (depending on how you count them) and nobody cares. Neither political party is paying much of a price because the public has been rendered utterly cynical about government. Nothing is shocking anymore because there are no moral norms left standing.

Let me try to illustrate how deeply this cynicism has penetrated the American mind. When Democrats did decide to shut down the government they could have done it to protest Trump’s historically unprecedented assault on democracy. But instead the Democrats decided to organize their messaging around the expiring health insurance subsidies. Why did they do that? Because they calculated that the American public doesn’t care about democracy’s degradation. It’s been going on so long voters are simply inured to it. So better to talk about Obamacare.

And in fact there are good reasons to think that Americans simply don’t care about their democratic rights. For example, several states are redrawing congressional district maps to come as close as possible to eliminating competitive races. If you live in Texas or California, then you probably will not have to vote in November 2026. The district maps will have been redrawn in a way that makes House elections largely predetermined. By then you will probably have been effectively disenfranchised.

You might think that proud Texans and Californians would be outraged, or that the ruling parties in those states would be destroyed for doing this. Didn’t our ancestors at Valley Forge and on the beaches of Normandy die to preserve our democracy? But do you hear an outcry? No. It’s just crickets. People are used to the idea that the game is already rigged. So what is there left to get upset about so long as your party is ruthless enough to do the rigging?

I don’t think I appreciated how much a democracy depends upon regular people standing up to defend their rights and their powers against the elites who try to usurp them. These days people are happy to give up their rights and power if they can find some strongman or strongwoman willing to take it. This is a much larger part of human nature than I thought.

For example, when I first started covering Congress, in the 1990s, backbench members could pass legislation if they had a good idea and some entrepreneurial mojo. Back then, congressional committees and their chairs were still powerful. Power was dispersed, in true democratic fashion.

But for at least 30 years members of Congress have been content to give away their power. First, they gave the power to leadership, so that today four people basically run the legislative branch. Then they gave power to executive branch agencies, letting more and more key decisions get made by the unelected civil service.

Today, if you are a Republican you have basically given away all your power to Trump. You are a duly elected representative of your constituents, yet you’ve turned yourself into a Trump bobblehead figure who gets to go on Fox News from time to time.

The blunt truth is that a lot of Americans don’t find our founding ideals sacred, so they don’t get upset when the Constitution is trampled, so long as it is their side doing the trampling.

Let me try to describe something that may seem trivial but which I believe is at the core of our rot. It is politicians’ tendency to use the word “fight” in their campaign rhetoric. I noticed this trope when Hillary Clinton ran for president. She was continually promising to “fight” for middle-class Americans. It didn’t bother me then. She was a woman running for an office that had been held entirely by men, so she had to prove she was tough.

But now the “fighting” rhetoric is ubiquitous. MAGA Republicans claim that the old Bush-era Republicans were squishes who didn’t really know how to fight. Democrats are upset with their party leaders because they don’t fight hard enough. Political analysts casually use phrases like “he brought a knife to a gunfight.” I hear “fighting” references constantly in political discourse and every time I do alarm bells go off.

This is no longer just a metaphor. It’s a mindset. We now have a lot of people in this country who do not believe that democracy is about trying to persuade people, it’s about fighting, crushing and destroying people. I don’t agree with philosopher Michel Foucault on much, but he had a point when he observed that a lot of life is about trying to repress the little fascist in each one of us. When people start describing politics as a fight, they are unleashing their inner fascist. Fighting is for fascists.

Democracy is about persuasion. Our Constitution is a vast machine that is supposed to increase the amount of deliberation, conversation and persuasion in society. Our elections are supposed to be raw, rollicking persuasion contests.

Trump’s idiotic rhetoric is not about persuasion. The Democrats’ mind-numbingly repetitive talking points are not about persuasion. The people who want their leaders to “fight” harder just want them to shout their side’s orthodoxies at higher and higher volume. They just want their leaders to ramp up the bellicosity of their rhetoric so that the extremists on their side feel good.

What defines extremists these days? It’s not that they hold ideological extreme positions. It is that they treat politics as if it were war. They use the language, mental habits and practices of warfare. They are letting their inner Mussolini out for a romp.

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Let me give you one quick example of how widely this corruption has pervaded our society. Universities were once about persuasion, truth-seeking and the life of the mind. But over the past half century an ideology has spread through them that holds that persuasion is naive. Ideas are about power. Thus many professors decided their job was indoctrination, not truth-seeking. To impose power so that students think just like they do.

Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik recently published a study in the magazine Persuasion looking at college syllabuses. As you’d expect, professors assign a lot of left-wing books like Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” about the criminal justice system and race, that align with the official orthodoxy of academia. But there are a lot of other books that dispute the historical claims of books like “The New Jim Crow.” You might think that some professors would assign books on both sides of the issue so students would learn how to weigh evidence and be persuaded. But the researchers estimated that “less than 10% of professors assigning Alexander’s book actually teach the controversy surrounding it.”

Students are completely aware that they are not being educated; they are simply players in a cynical indoctrination game. At Northwestern and the University of Michigan, 88% of students told researchers that they pretend to be more progressive than they are because they think it will help them succeed academically or socially. I saw exactly this kind of performative dishonesty while covering the Soviet Union years ago.

Yes, Trump is launching an assault on democracy. But what worries me more is what has happened over the last few decades to the rest of us. There has been a slow moral, emotional and intellectual degradation — the loss of the convictions, norms and habits of mind that undergird democracy. What worries me most is the rot creeping into your mind, and into my own.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

While the public has recently been able to visit a new polar bear and two new zebras in residence at the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory, it’s now time to say goodbye to some smaller creatures.

The four Mold-A-Rama machines that have cranked out colorful plastic sea lions, gorillas, lions and polar bears as souvenirs at Como for generations are packing up and moving south due to a change in their Illinois-based company’s strategic plans.

The public is encouraged to come out and make their final creations as soon as possible before the machines, which are situated around the zoo, are removed the first week in November (or while supplies last). Money collected from the molded souvenir vending machines help support Como’s free admission.

Nostalgic icons

Mary Acosta of Maplewood retrieves a sea lion mold from a Mold-A-Rama machine at Como Park Zoo & Conservatory in St. Paul on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The vintage machines, which light up and make noise before churning out the warm molded plastic animals for $5 each, are nostalgic icons dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. However, these so-called “plastic factories,” which are rented, did leave for a generation or two before returning to Como in 2007.

Mold-A-Rama’s decision to move on surprised Katie Hill, the new president of Como Friends, the nonprofit organization that supports Como Park Zoo & Conservatory and oversees both the Mold-A-Rama machines and Como’s gift shops.

“The company reached out on Oct. 9 to let us know that they would like to move the equipment out at month’s end,” Hill said. “They said it was strictly a business decision, to move them somewhere where there’s a longer peak season, that it would be more lucrative on their end.”

A company representative contacted on Friday referred to Como’s statement on the decision, which also mentioned that a new location would offer higher year-round attendance, but the representative declined to disclose where the machines were going, noting that this would be announced later on social media.

Hill hopes maybe this isn’t the final era for Mold-A-Rama’s time at the St. Paul zoo.

“They came back to Como once, maybe they can again,” she says.

‘Good times and good memories’

The four figures, a gorilla, polar bear, sea lion and lion, created by the Mold-A-Rama machines at Como Park Zoo & Conservatory in St. Paul on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

After Como announced the upcoming departure this week, the public has been reacting to the news by sharing memories, thoughts and ideas on social media, with 729 comments on Como’s Facebook page by Friday afternoon:

“Must have been 50 years ago, every time we went to Como I would beg Mom to get me one. I still remember how hot they would be dropping out of the mold. I’d grab them anyway and juggle them around until I could hold them. Good times and good memories.”

“As a kid I was amazed by this machine. I went on to school to be a mold/toolmaker. This might have been my influencer??”

“The smell of a warm wax figure is unforgettable. Ingrained in my brain, as part of my childhood.”

“Is there a petition to keep ’em? I’d sign it! Heck, I’d go to school to figure out how to maintain & repair them!”

“I have a one year old daughter and when we took her to the zoo for the first time, gathering all of the molds was part of our day. I grew up with them and now she will have one of the last sets.”

The announcement on Mold-A-Rama’s Facebook page about the decision had the comments closed, but the Pioneer Press asked the company if they were surprised at the reaction elsewhere to the news.

“Not really surprised,” a representative replied by email. “People across the country all love the Mold-A-Rama machines and want them at their zoos and museums.”

Other current vending machine locations include the Field Museum in Chicago and the San Antonio Zoo in Texas (info at mold-a-rama.com).

“Thank you to Como Park Zoo, zoo attendees and Mold-A-Rama collectors for all the support through the years,” the Mold-A-Rama representative said on Friday.

On Friday at Como Zoo, the machines were still lighting up and the memories were still flowing, including those of Paul Kelley of Andover. He and his wife, Meg, brought their 3-year-old grandson, Nolan, to the zoo, but Kelley was suddenly transported back to his own childhood as he remembered the toys that the machines created, warm as cookies out of the oven and perfectly sized for a child’s hands to hold and play with for hours.

“We moved here from Wisconsin in ’69 and lived in Roseville, so nearby,” he said. “The smell is what I remember. The feel of the plastic brings back great memories. And now we’ve got all four of them for our grandkids.

“It’s sad, it’s very sad.”

There are still the machines at Como that make souvenir pennies, at least …

“Yeah, I guess so,” Kelley said, “but it’s not the same.”

What now?

While Como Friends would love to have the machines stay, not only for nostalgia’s sake but because the revenue is “meaningful,” what is plan B?

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“It’s an opportunity to look forward, to try something new,” Hill says.

What kind of modern and interactive souvenirs could align with Como’s mission? That’s an open question for now.

“Ideally we will work with someone local and find or create something new that is more aligned with our conservation-focus moving forward,” Hill said in an email late Friday. “A fun new challenge that I’m sure the local community will have great ideas about. I’ve already received some calls …”

Stay tuned, St. Paul. And in the meantime, Astra (the polar bear) and Khomas and Keanu (the zebras) are not going anywhere and can be visited from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week within Como Park in St. Paul at 1225 Estabrook Drive.