Alvin Brown, a Democrat member of the National Transportation Safety Board nominated by President Biden, was fired from his post in May 2025. In his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Tuesday, Brown said that political differences couldn’t have been the main reason for his firing from the NTSB. Brown’s lawyers, who work for the Democracy Forward Foundation, also claim that 75 percent of Black officials at independent agencies have been fired under Trump.

“Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB cannot be explained by the fact that Mr. Brown is a Democrat and President Trump might have wanted to exert Republican control over the Board,” the lawsuit states. “At the time of Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB, there were two other Democrats serving on the Board.”

Since Brown’s firing was racially motivated, the lawsuit alleges, it “therefore violated Mr. Brown’s constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment,” the lawsuit states. The lawsuit also points to people of color being dismissed at agencies including the National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Federal Reserve, and Library of Congress.

The lawsuit cited Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the fact that Brown’s replacement, John DeLeeuw, is white.

“President Trump has removed Black Senate-confirmed appointees; he has either nominated a non-Black individual for their replacement or has not formally replaced them at all,” the lawsuit states. “This trend fits with President Trump’s consistent messaging criticizing diversity and inclusion and his clear and demonstrable emphasis.”

Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a resolution that would have stopped Trump from taking further military action in Iran without the express approval of Congress. The vote was 47–52, largely along party lines, with Senator Rand Paul joining the Democrats, and Senator John Fetterman siding with Republicans.

Some Republicans, however, expressed that they were nearing their breaking points. 

“I hope that we are arriving at an exit strategy here to bring this to a close to preserve our security interests and bring down the cost of gasoline. They’re very high. Very, very high,” said Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. 

Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon as crude oil has climbed to more than $100 per barrel, placing a significant strain on Americans’ pocketbooks. Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports will only send prices higher.

It’s been 47 days since Trump first struck Iran. That means he has less than two weeks to acquire support from Congress. The War Powers Act states that the president can legally deploy armed forces in a hostile environment for a period of 60 days without congressional approval.  

South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said that if Trump expects Congress to support the conflict beyond the 60-day window, then the administration should be prepared to “come in and give us a full description of it and sell the point and the plan.”

“We’ve got to start answering questions,” said North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis. “The 60-day target is what I’m looking at.”

Earlier this month, Utah Senator John Curtis had warned Deseret News, “I will not support ongoing military action beyond a 60-day window without congressional approval. I take this position for two reasons—one is historical, and one is constitutional.”

The verdict was reached after four days of deliberations in a closely-watched trial in New York federal court. It comes after years of criticism of Live Nation’s predatory ticketing practices, and will likely completely change the face of the music industry from here on out. It also ends a long antitrust battle against Live Nation that Merrick Garland’s DOJ began in 2019.

The Department of Justice and 40 states sued Live Nation in 2024 for controlling “virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem” along with Ticketmaster. In a move that surprised many of the states, and even the judge overseeing the case, Trump’s Justice Department decided to settle with Live Nation a week into trial for $281 million. Judge Arun Subramanian called the move “totally unacceptable,” given the lack of transparency from the DOJ. To make matters even worse, a whopping 34 of the 40 states involved rejected the settlement and chose to continue the trial without the DOJ’s help.

This story has been updated.

Republican Representatives María Elvira Salazar (Florida), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania), Mike Lawler (New York), Don Bacon (Nebraska), Carlos Giménez (Florida), and Nicole Malliotakis (New York) voted alongside 212 House Democrats and one independent to advance a vote to extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitians for three years.

“I have one of the largest Haitian populations in the country in my district,” Lawler told The Washington Post. “If you end [temporary protections] without addressing work authorization, it will cause a huge crisis in our health care system, especially in an area like mine, where a lot of our Haitian TPS holders are nurses.”

The minority party utilized a discharge petition to bring the issue to the House floor, circumventing the whims of House Speaker Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.

Politicians across the country have argued that ending TPS for Haitians would threaten the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of families, disrupt state economies, and jeopardize the futures of the population’s American-born children.

Haitians have become a favorite target of the MAGA movement in recent years. In 2024, several prominent members of the party—including then–vice presidential candidate JD Vance—hurled racist and baseless accusations against Haitian immigrants in Ohio, claiming that they were causing “constant car crashes” and were capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets.

The Trump administration set an effective end date for TPS for Haiti of September 2, 2025, a decision that was expected to affect more than 348,000 people in the U.S. But the effort has since been held up in the judiciary as lower courts stepped in to prevent the suspension.

The admin has appealed the matter to the Supreme Court, which will hear the government’s argument on April 29. Nineteen attorneys general have jointly filed an amicus brief imploring the nation’s highest court to uphold Haitians’ legal status.

USA Today and Zeteo, both citing anonymous sources, report that the Pentagon is ramping up planning for a military operation in Cuba, should Trump make the call. Zeteo noted that the order came straight from the White House.

Trump has been threatening Cuba for months now, and in January signed an executive order imposing tariffs on countries that attempted to send oil there, essentially imposing a catastrophic oil blockade on the island. On Monday, he said that “we may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” in reference to his war on Iran, which still has no tangible end in sight. And last month, Trump said of Cuba that “it may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter.... They have no energy. They have no money. They’re in deep trouble on a humanitarian basis.”

Trump’s oil and aid blockade of Cuba has caused rampant human suffering on the island, as Cubans have experienced blackouts, food shortages, and inflation. While the Trump administration has framed this economic strangling as a liberatory endeavor, this kind of military escalation in a country that hasn’t been a threat in decades points to plans to impose its own agenda on Cuba and the rest of the Western hemisphere.

In June, Lee introduced a controversial measure to sell off 4.2 million acres of public land as an amendment to Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, after consulting with the Department of the Interior, Public Domain reported Wednesday.

The agency shared technical data about the proposal with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, of which Lee is the chair, according to internal emails obtained by the Wilderness Society. The department also offered feedback on the proposal, which Lee used to craft talking points and respond to concerns.

In one email chain on June 10, Chris Prandoni, the committee’s deputy staff director, asked two Interior Department staffers to approve a quote that would accurately reflect the agency’s research.

“This is the quote I’ve been working up with your guys to accurately reflect your research: ‘The Department of the Interior estimates that the Bureau of Land Management has about 1.2 million acres of land within 1 mile of a population city center and another 800,000 acres within 1-5 miles of a population center. Much of this land may qualify for disposal under this section,’” Prandoni wrote.

Jeremy Arendt, who serves as the Interior’s deputy assistant secretary of natural resources and infrastructure, urged Lee’s staff to “include a % of total acres this represents for [the Bureau of Land Management], which is about 0.7% of the total, or about 30% of lands within 5 miles of population centers.”

“Good to go on the quoted content. Thanks for running it by us!” wrote Greg Wischer, the Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management.

“Thanks, guys. See some of you all tomorrow,” Prandoni replied, implying that staff from the Senate committee would meet with Interior staff in person the next day, when Lee would announce his amendment to Trump’s massive budget reconciliation bill.

But just two weeks later, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tried to distance the Trump administration from Lee’s outrageous proposal.

“It’s not a central topic. I don’t think anybody is really thinking about it up there,” Burgum told Scripps News, later adding: “It doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill, because it’s not something that’s—it wasn’t part of the president’s agenda to be part of this bill in the first place.”

Ultimately, Lee’s massive sell-off wasn’t included in Trump’s behemoth budget bill. But contrary to what Burgum said, the privatization of federal lands is definitely a part of Trump’s agenda, even if it wasn’t for that particular bill.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which represents Catholic leaders across the country, issued a statement Wednesday from its chairman on doctrine, Bishop James Massa, in which he defended the pope’s opposition to the Iran war.

“For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war,” Massa said in his statement. “That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’”

Massa said that the pope wasn’t just “offering opinions on theology” but “preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ. The consistent teaching of the Church is insistent that all people of good will must pray and work toward lasting peace while avoiding the evils and injustices that accompany all wars.”

President Trump called the pope “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy” in a Truth Social post Sunday, and Vance, who converted to Catholicism seven years ago, tried to defend him at Tuesday’s event in Georgia, claiming that God supports just wars—a stark contrast to the pope’s assertion that “anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

“Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?” Vance said to a sparse crowd. “I certainly think the answer is yes.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed the same talking point on Wednesday, saying that “there’s something called the just war doctrine” and it is a “very well settled matter of Christian theology.”

Meanwhile, the U.S.-led war in Iran has killed an estimated 1,700 civilians in the country and damaged at least 17 Iranian health care facilities and 22 schools. Perhaps Vance and his boss in the White House need to take some moral direction from higher authority on what a just war actually is.

Arizona Representative Yassamin Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against the Pentagon chief Wednesday, accusing Hegseth of repeatedly violating his constitutional oath.

“Pete Hegseth broke his oath to the Constitution, put U.S. troops at grave risk through the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, engaged in abuse of office and conduct beneath the dignity of his office, and carried out unlawful military actions despite his obligation to refuse—including strikes on civilians and a girls’ school in Minab, Iran,” Ansari said in a statement.

The text of the articles claims that Hegseth engaged in “high crimes and misdemeanors” when he obeyed Donald Trump’s orders, initiating a war against Iran without congressional approval.

“Only Congress can declare war; his actions demand immediate removal,” Ansari wrote on X.

Ansari also accused Hegseth of demonstrating a “willful disregard” for the Constitution, a willingness to abuse the powers of his office, and reckless endangerment of American servicemembers deployed in the Middle East. She further argued that Hegseth’s relative incompetence fronting the war effort caused thousands of civilian casualties.

But his actions in the Iran war were not the only topic of concern. Ansari also said that Hegseth had inappropriately politicized America’s military, and that he had broken the established rules of engagement by approving illegal “double tap” strikes on noncombatant boats in the Caribbean. She even alluded to the March 2025 Signalgate scandal, claiming that Hegseth had “demonstrated gross negligence” in his handling of classified military information.

A dozen other liberal representatives cosponsored Ansari’s bill: Sarah McBride (Delaware), Lauren Underwood (Illinois), Al Green (Texas), Steve Cohen (Tennessee), Jasmine Crockett (Texas), Nikema Williams (Georgia), Dina Titus (Nevada), Dave Min (California), Shri Thanedar (Michigan), Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico), Mike Quigley (Illinois), and Brittany Pettersen (Colorado).

This story has been updated.

Tillis came up while Bartiromo asked the president if he’d have enough support in the Senate to confirm his preferred replacement for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Board of Governors member Kevin Warsh.

“And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? You think Thom Tillis is gonna give you a vote—”

“Well, we’re gonna have to find out, he might not. But that’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator,” Trump replied. Tillis is very much still a senator, although he’s stated he won’t seek reelection in 2026.

“OK,” Bartiromo said, staring blankly at Trump before trying to change the subject. But he didn’t let her.

“Thom Tillis is no longer a senator right, he quit?”

“Well, he’s on his way out.”

“But he quit.”

This isn’t just some minor slipup. As Bartiromo herself said, Tillis could stand in the way of more than a few of Trump’s goals, from confirming the next Fed chair and attorney general to passing his desired budget. In this same interview, Trump claimed that Ginsburg died after his 2020 election loss, when in fact she died a month before. The whole interview added yet another chapter to Trump’s long record of mental instability.

Trump: Thom Tillis is no longer a senator.

Bartiromo: ...

Trump: Thom Tillis is no longer a senator, right? pic.twitter.com/8TFou0Q8v6

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) April 15, 2026

“A pontiff or any religious leader can say anything they want, but obviously if you wade into political waters, I think you should expect some political response and I think the pope has received some of that,” Johnson said Wednesday.

Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened an ambassador of the Holy See in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. In the days since that report, Donald Trump has fired off several antagonistic comments against the leader of the Catholic Church, repeatedly trying to sour the pope’s reputation by claiming that Leo is “terrible for foreign policy” and “weak on crime.” That is despite the fact that religious leaders are neither responsible for foreign policy nor in charge of lowering crime rates.

“I was taken a little bit aback, just honestly, frankly, by something that he said, I think he said several days back, something about ‘those who engage in war, Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers’ or something,” Johnson continued.

The Republican House leader was referring to the pope’s Palm Sunday Mass, in which the pontiff said that “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Johnson went on to preach against the highest Catholic’s teachings, claiming that it’s a “very well settled matter of Christian theology” that war is sometimes justified, and invoking the “just war” doctrine within military ethics.

The House speaker added that Iran was the “largest sponsor of terrorism” in the world and that the Trump administration’s siege had potentially saved “millions of innocent people” from “being killed by terrorists.”

The war has so far cost the lives of more than 3,000 people in Iran, including dozens of political leaders, reported Reuters. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have also been killed, and nearly 400 have been wounded, according to U.S. Central Command.

Meanwhile, gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon. In five states—California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—gas has risen above an average of $5 a gallon. The soaring price has driven up the cost of practically everything else, as inflated transportation and shipping costs get off-loaded to the customer.

Trump imposed a formal blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil tradeway between Iran and Oman, on Tuesday, and has promised repeatedly that the war is “very close to being over.” In the same breath, however, he added that his administration is “not finished” with Iran.

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo Wednesday.

The Washington Post reports that about 6,000 troops are heading to the region on the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier, and about 4,200 troops from the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group and 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which can conduct limited ground operations, will arrive in the region at the end of the month. There are already an estimated 50,000 U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, and a two-week ceasefire with Iran is set to expire April 22 unless a peace deal is reached.

Negotiations between Iran and the U.S. could resume this week in Pakistan after hitting an impasse over nuclear enrichment. But Trump’s new blockade on Iranian ports, aimed at forcing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by squeezing its economy, may not help the situation. Still, the president told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that he thinks the war with Iran is “close to over, yeah. I view it as very close to being over.”

“You know what? If I pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild that country, and we’re not finished. We’ll see what happens. I think they want to make a deal very badly,” Trump said.

BARTIROMO: You keep saying 'was.' Is this war over?

TRUMP: I think it's close to over, yeah. I view it as very close to over. If I pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild that country. And we're not finished. We'll see what happens. I think they want… pic.twitter.com/X9aNELvyRA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2026

Is Trump planning to escalate the war by sending more troops, or is he trying to intimidate Iran into agreeing to terms more favorable to the U.S.? It’s impossible to say, as Trump is unpredictable and impatient. In fact, it was he who begged for the ceasefire in the first place. The question is whether he’s willing to continue an unpopular war that’s hurting the economy and his poll numbers.

Speaking to CNN Tuesday evening, Marshall was asked if he actually expected his constituents to buy into his earlier claim that national security was “more important than your pocketbook.”

Marshall insisted that Kansans understood the “long game,” and that things could be a lot worse if the United States had not attacked Iran.

“I would argue that if Iran ever had nuclear weapons, and then they controlled the Strait of Hormuz, that gasoline would be $10 a gallon,” Marshall said. “The good news, what gas in America right now is $3.14 a gallon on average, something—oh no, $4.14, forgive me, $4.14 a gallon. In Europe right now it’s $7 a gallon. So, it’s not great. I’m concerned about it.”

Sen. Roger Marshall: "The good news, ah, what gas in America right now is $3.14 a gallon on averag-- no no, $4.14 a gallon, forgive me. $4.14 a gallon. In Europe right now it's $7 a gallon. So it's not great, I'm concerned about it. The good news is we're the largest oil producer… pic.twitter.com/MT4dCZEop1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

Of course, experts say Iran was nowhere near having nuclear weapons. And while the country didn’t control the flow of trade through the Strait of Hormuz before, it certainly does now.

Meanwhile, the “short-term sacrifice” Marshall describes is hurting Americans—and his own party’s chances at reelection. A recent poll from CBS News/YouGov found that 51 percent of Americans found gas prices presented a significant financial hardship. At the beginning of April, Donald Trump’s approval on the economy hit a new low, and gas prices have only continued to climb.

But Marshall claimed there was an upside to paying more at the pump.

“The good news is we’re the largest oil producer in the world right now. That we’re a net exporter,” he said, as if average Americans would ever benefit from oil executives’ war profiteering. That’s sure to be a winning message for the midterm elections in November—hey, we should get this guy a regular spot on Fox News!

“Look at [what] happens to Justice Ginsburg. She was not exactly a young woman. The election was taken. They had a Democrat who could’ve appointed a liberal justice—and the liberals do stick together, that’s one thing about those justices, they stick together like glue, not like the Republicans,” Trump said in an interview that aired on Wednesday morning. “But she decided that she was gonna live forever, and about two minutes after the election, she went out. And I got to appoint somebody.… She really hurt herself within the Democrat Party.”

a very confused Trump: "Look at Justice Ginsburg. She was not exactly a young woman. The election was taken. They had a Democrat who could've appointed a liberal justice. About two minutes after the election, she went out." (Ginsburg died in September 2020, when Trump was… pic.twitter.com/6Hw6bQzlaE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2026

Trump is very wrong here. Ginsburg died in September 2020, well before the general election, and he replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett before his 2020 election loss, which went directly against Ginsburg’s dying wish.

Trump shared the factually incorrect story in response to a question about the possibility of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, 76, stepping down while Republicans still control the Senate—appearing to warn the justice that his time is at an end.

The flub is a cherry on top of what has been an absolutely awful few weeks for Trump’s mental fitness, and it’s only Wednesday. From his weird AI posts depicting himself as or with Jesus Christ, to saying the pope is “weak on crime,” to threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, the president seems to be unraveling at a faster rate than usual.

It’s shocking that Trump could even forget Ginsburg’s death. His raw, cinematic reaction to it on an airport tarmac—with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” playing in the background—was perhaps one of the most iconic moments of his first term.

Gorka, a former Breitbart News editor and conservative radio personality, has served as a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council since January 2025.

The London-born Hungarian has been a fixture in Donald Trump’s inner circle since 2017, though his appointment to Trump’s first administration came as a surprise to many in his field. Gorka had previously been known for his extremist Islamophobic views, which relegated him to the fringes of Washington. Even during Trump’s first term, Gorka’s work was stunted after he failed to obtain the security clearance necessary to actually work on national security issues.

The position at the National Counterterrorism Center has been open since Joe Kent resigned last month over the war in Iran. In his exit letter, Kent argued that Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the U.S., and that there was no available intel suggesting that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Gorka does not agree. Last month, he told the Council on Foreign Relations that he believed Operation Epic Fury would “solve perhaps the most trenchant and strategic terrorist threat the world faces today.”

Four people familiar with Gorka’s potential political ascension told The Washington Post Wednesday that it would give him “broad powers over the country’s vast counterterrorism apparatus.”

His influence could make the country a hostile place for anyone the administration deems a leftist. At the National Security Council, Gorka has advocated to expand the definition of terrorist threats to include far-left groups. His work bore a result: In September, the White House branded antifa—a catchall for self-described antifascists—a terrorist organization. The executive order deemed antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” although the Post reported that no such label exists in federal law.

Speaking to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo in an interview that aired Wednesday morning, Trump dodged a question about his “top priorities for the economy” for the rest of the year, insisting that the economy was already in great shape.

“To be honest, we are doing so well. You look at this. I hit the 50,000 Dow mark, which everyone said couldn’t happen in four years. I did it in one year. I hit the 7,000 S&P mark in less than one year,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Now we have to do a little bit of a turn, a detour, to a place called Iran, and we have to stop them from ever having a nuclear weapon.’”

Unfortunately, Trump’s words were undercut by the Fox Business chyron, which displayed in glaring red and white graphics that the Dow Jones Industrial Average
wasn’t in great shape.

BARTIROMO: Moving to domestic issues, what are your top priorities now for the economy for the rest of the year?

TRUMP: To be honest, we are doing so well. You look at this. I hit the 50,000 Dow mark. pic.twitter.com/V8fkVgQZUx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2026

The Dow topped 50,000 in February, shortly before the launch of the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign in Iran caused it to crater, obliterating nearly all the growth Trump had seen during his first year. In the past several weeks, the Dow has gone back up, but the Fox Business graphic located just inches from Trump’s face revealed that the Dow futures market predicted that that level would drop yet again.

Trump insisted that the stock market was “almost as good as it was two months ago,” and that he was pleasantly surprised that oil was selling for $92 per barrel, saying that many had predicted it would be closer to $200.

But Trump’s assertion that the Dow is somehow the most important economic indicator is nothing short of delusional. Gas prices and inflation are up; employment and consumer sentiment are down. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval on the economy has hit a career low. How does he plan to address this? He doesn’t.

The president posted a screenshot of an image of him with Jesus Christ just days after coming under fire for making a post of himself as Jesus Christ. It’s a screenshot from an “Irish for Trump” X account that shows Trump and Jesus in a tender embrace, eyes closed, standing in front of the American flag with a celestial light shining behind them. 

“I was never a religious man,” the random caption reads. “But doesn’t it seem, with all these satanic, demonic, child sacrificing monsters being exposed … that God might be playing his Trump card!” 

“The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!” Trump captioned the screenshot. “President DJT.” 

These are the posts your senile uncle with deep religious psychosis posts on Facebook, not the president of the United States.

You’d think that Trump would abandon the Jesus posts after being criticized from all sides for his previous one—and for his strange beef with Pope Leo XIV. But he continues to put up these baffling images. And that caption? What satanic and demonic things has Trump “exposed”? His Cabinet has done more work to further obscure the Epstein files, he dropped an f-bomb on Easter Sunday, and is currently engaged in an illegal war with one of the oldest civilizations on earth.  

In an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday morning, Trump complained about a made-up scandal involving renovations to the Federal Reserve headquarters, and said he’d have to fire Powell “if he’s not leaving on time,” as his term ends May 15. But Trump’s replacement, Kevin Warsh, has not been confirmed by the Senate, leaving open the possibility that Powell will stay on as chair “pro tempore,” as regulations state.  

WATCH: 🇺🇸 President Trump says he will fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell if he remains beyond his mandate. pic.twitter.com/4o0NaoK06c

— Global Markets (@globalmarketss) April 15, 2026

Warsh’s confirmation hearing with the Senate Banking Committee is scheduled for April 21, but his nomination faces opposition from Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who has refused to confirm Warsh until Trump ends his investigation into the Fed chair. Powell himself said last month he would stay on until the investigation ends. 

“I have no intention of leaving the Board until the investigation is well and truly over with transparency and finality,” Powell said. 

Trump has complained about Powell for months because he won’t lower interest rates to the president’s liking. In Wednesday’s interview, Trump still tried to bring up his sham investigation into the Fed’s building renovations, even as it holds up his preferred Fed nominee. 

“Does that mean we stop a probe of a building that I would have done for $25 million that’s going to cost maybe $4 billion? Don’t you think we have to find out what happened there?” Trump told Bartiromo, adding that “it is probably corrupt, but what it really is is incompetent, and we have to show the incompetence of that.” 

This story has been updated.

The president posted a strange remark about America’s strongest economic adversary on Truth Social early Wednesday, claiming that Chinese President Xi Jinping will give him a “big, fat hug” when they see each other next month.

“China is very happy that I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz. I am doing it for them, also—And the World,” Trump wrote. “This situation will never happen again. They have agreed not to send weapons to Iran. President Xi will give me a big, fat, hug when I get there in a few weeks.

“We are working together smartly, and very well! Doesn’t that beat fighting??? BUT REMEMBER, we are very good at fighting, if we have to—far better than anyone else!!!” the president added.

Trump is scheduled to meet Xi in Beijing on May 14 and 15 to reopen trade talks, although this time, the United States does not appear to have the upper hand. Last year, the U.S. president aggressively repositioned the two countries’ trade agreements, imposing enormous tariffs in an attempt to strong-arm China into trade deals that he argued would benefit Americans. Yet foreign policy advisers warn that Trump does not have the leverage to continue that position this time, as the U.S. economy wobbles under whopping gas and oil prices and mass layoffs.

The meeting will be further complicated by reports that China has been cooperating with Iran since at least March 10, sharing military intelligence that includes the locations of U.S. troops and equipment and targeting coordinates. It is not clear why China began distributing intel to Iran, or whether the information exchange was the source of harm to U.S. forces. So far, 13 U.S. service members have died in the war.

China has also conducted cyberattacks against the U.S., and has been selling advanced air defense systems to Iran.

Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday morning, Trump explained that his suddenly fuzzy feelings toward Xi were related to a “beautiful letter” that the Chinese president had written him about the reported weapon transfer.

“I wrote him a letter asking him not to do that,” Trump said, “and he wrote me a letter saying that essentially he’s not doing that.”

Speaking at the University of Georgia, Vance was faced with backlash to Donald Trump’s Middle East policies up close and in person. While local activists expected a large crowd at the event, which was heavily promoted by TPUSA, the 8,000-seat arena venue was only a quarter-full. Videos and photographs of the event posted to X showed thousands of empty seats.

Six minutes to go and the scene is the same at the Turning Point event at UGA pic.twitter.com/rhnSrXcVCB

— Matthew Boedy (@MatthewBoedy) April 14, 2026

Despite the meager turnout, not everyone in the audience was a fan.

“How can you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword?” Vance asked, describing the liberation of Europe from the Nazis during World War II—a truly ridiculous analogy to Trump’s reckless war in Iran.

“Jesus Christ does not support genocide!” one audience member shouted.

“I agree, Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide, whoever yelled that out from the dark. He certainly does not,” Vance said.

“Why are you committing genocide in Gaza?” the heckler continued.

Vance: How can you say that God was never on the side of those who wield the sword…

Audience member: Jesus doesn’t support genocide. pic.twitter.com/ypaiyr295z

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2026

The crowd burst into boos at the interruption, and Vance insisted he be allowed to continue his point before he responded. A few minutes later, turning his attention back to the heckler, Vance lied that the Trump administration had ended the killing of Palestinians.

“So, if you want, sir, to complain about what happened in Gaza, why don’t you complain about Joe Biden and the last administration? We’re the administration that solved that problem.”

“You’re killing children!” the heckler shouted. “You’re bombing children!”

VP Vance getting heckled at TPUSA event

“You’re killing children!” pic.twitter.com/1rPZzghChb

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2026

Vance claimed that there was more humanitarian aid coming into Gaza now than anytime in the past five years. In reality, Israel is still severely limiting humanitarian aid into Gaza, and has closed all but one border crossing since the start of its military campaign in Iran.

When the U.S. supposedly mediated the end of Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza, the Trump administration turned it into a lucrative real estate deal, while clearing the way for Israel to continue its deadly strikes, oppression, and violent land grabs in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, in Iran, the U.S. and Israel are bombing children: At least 22 schools and 17 health care facilities have been damaged since the beginning of the war, when the U.S. conducted a missile strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab that killed at least 168 children.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump is raging in all directions. After exploding at Pope Leo over his criticism of the war, he’s now lashing out at an ally, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Why? Because she sided with the pope on the war and because she won’t help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This comes as a new polling analysis shows him cratering with noncollege white voters, who are of course a critical voting bloc. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has a high floor of support due to his base. But what if he hasn’t bottomed out yet? We’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been writing well about the catastrophic politics of Iran for Trumpworld. Alex, always good to have you on, man.

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: Let’s start with some polling, because it’s amazing. CNN’s Harry Enten looked at an average of polls to calculate Trump’s approval with white voters who didn’t go to college. Listen.

Harry Enten (voiceover): We are talking about noncollege white voters and he is sliding right into the water. This is a “ruh-roh” moment, to quote the great Scooby-Doo. Trump’s net approving with noncollege whites. Look at this. In February of 2025, it was plus 32 points and now it is minus two points. That is a 34-point shift. And I will note this is an average of polls.

Sargent: So that was overall approval. Now listen to what these voters are thinking on the Iran war.

Harry Enten (voiceover): What about the war? Well, the war ain’t helping him because just take a look here. Noncollege whites, net approval rating of U.S. military action against Iran, minus five points. You think that’s low? Come over to this side of the screen. How about Trump on Iran? Minus 13 points, a very unlucky 13 indeed for the president of the United States with a key core group of his.

Sargent: Just to recap, Trump’s general approval with noncollege whites has slid by 34 points and he’s now underwater with them. On the war, support for it is five points underwater with those voters and support for his handling of Iran is 13 points underwater with them. Alex, that is something. Your thoughts?

Shephard: It’s just terrible. There’s always been this misguided idea that Trump’s support among the white noncollege, working-class vote is ironclad no matter what. That’s just not true. We saw this during the pandemic as well. But even during the pandemic, which basically did create a global recession, we did not see the president do this level of economic self-sabotage. The extent to which many people—myself included here—overstated some of the causes of Trump’s victory back in 2024, it’s really coming into the foreground right here.

The big thing that rode him to victory was inflation. And Trump is taking a number of actions right now to cause prices to rise. If you look back, the cratering support started at the beginning of this year, so all the way back in January—it predates Iran and it’s post-tariff inflation. That was the start of the erosion of white working-class or white noncollege support. Now Trump has basically quadrupled down on that by starting a stupid war for no reason that he’s now stuck in. You’re seeing things like, for instance, gas going up by 30, 40 percent in some cases. That is forcing people to reckon with what the president is actually doing here, and understandably they are recoiling.

Sargent: Well, Alex, I followed up and asked Harry Enten if Trump has ever fared this badly with noncollege whites in polling, and Enten told me that this rivals where he was with that demographic just after January 6. That suggests he’s at a low point with them, as you also said.

What’s critical to me here, though, is it isn’t just the economy. His base is cracking over the war, too. Maybe the perceptions of the war are colored very strongly by the impact it’s having on prices. But I also think the war is just filling the headlines with awful news and stuff that makes him just look like a preposterously ridiculous moron. And so this demographic is really souring on him over that as well.

Shephard: One of the reasons why a lot of Trump’s voters stuck with him, even amidst all the erratic fire and fury, garbage and nonsense of the first term, was that Trump’s outbursts—they were relatively low stakes—were about people that Trump personally cared about. In general, he was doing things that didn’t tend to affect people’s day-to-day existence. And for some voters, that erratic behavior only communicated the fact that Trump was a different sort of politician.

And again, the stakes were relatively low in the first term. If you look back then, as bad as things were, for the most part it largely amounted to a big tax cut pre-pandemic, a big tax cut bill that any Republican president would have passed anyway. Now what you’re seeing are those voters having to reckon with what those policies look like in the real world, in a way that they haven’t had to before.

They are having to actually see that this guy, Donald Trump, who claims to be breaking the system on our behalf, is actually engaging in another stupid Middle East war. He’s not explaining why he’s doing it. Every action that he’s taken since that war began has only made it worse. It’s only made costs go up. In general, people are looking at this with understandable wariness.

Where you look at a situation like the Strait of Hormuz, it’s impossible, regardless of your political beliefs, to not to be incredibly cynical about it and say, This is a situation in which the U.S. has managed to lose in the Middle East faster than at any time in our history—maybe even going back to when we were fighting the Barbary pirates or whatever. That also matters here.

For all of the talk about the president’s ability to communicate with these kind of low-propensity voters, there has not been any of that about this war. The things that have cut through to the mainstream are Trump tweeting that he’s Jesus or whatever. It’s not a rationale for going to do regime change in Iran. That’s because there’s no one in this administration that can actually tell you what they’re doing here. If you are a voter, what you will see is, for instance, I went on vacation two weeks ago and when I came back gas was a dollar and 40 cents more expensive than when I left.

Sargent: You got to the critical point there, Alex, which is that the Strait of Hormuz situation is just really legible to a lot of voters. It’s a choke point. A lot of important stuff passes through it. Trump has said that he will obliterate Iranian civilization to compel Iran to open the strait—and they didn’t open the strait. So people are wondering, What is this half-cocked lunatic doing? He’s threatening to incinerate tens and tens of millions of people, and it’s not actually forcing Iran to do his bidding. I really think the entire mystique is just cracking up over that. What do you think?

Shephard: They’re totally high on their own supply and they have been for a really long time. If you look back, for instance, at the Iraq War; that is a much more significant use of American manpower, but that war at least had a sort of fake rationale of providing democracy to the Middle East, and it existed as a kind of post-9/11 catharsis for people. Both of those things were legible. This war is just not legible.

It is legible when you explain to people that this is a longstanding Israeli preoccupation and that the Gulf States had their own reasons for wanting the U.S. to do it. But none of these parties could understandably take out the Iran regime themselves because they don’t have the military power to do it. So they convinced Trump to do it. Which is what happened. When you look at it more broadly, people understand that that’s what happened here.

Inside the administration, my general sense is that Trump believed that he had gotten in and out of Venezuela in this way, that he could just keep doing this, and that he is the sort of sole master of reality and he can declare victory whenever he wants. We’re in a situation now where Iran—our stated adversaries—are in a much stronger negotiating position than they were before. They can hold the United States economy hostage, and they know that Trump is terrified of that as well. But he also can’t get out of a situation in which he’s not the sole winner, which is already impossible here. That’s the bind that you and I and the millions of noncollege white voters that we were talking about earlier find ourselves in right now.

Sargent: Trump’s frustration over Iran right now is just white hot. After the pope criticized the war and Trump unloaded on the pope, the prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called Trump’s attack on the pope unacceptable. This really angered Trump. He said this to an Italian newspaper: “It’s her who’s unacceptable because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance.”

Alex, this isn’t just any pointy-headed European leader. Meloni is a member of MAGA International. What’s funny about this, though, is that Meloni didn’t understand that she’s not even allowed to defend the pope if it makes the ailing American despot look bad in the least. Trump has to be above the pope, even for the prime minister of Italy.

Shephard: And of course, we all know about the Iranian nuclear threat to Italy right now, too. This tells us something that is really interesting to me, though, which is that basically from the moment that Trump really emerged—especially since him and Steve Bannon linked up—there was this idea that they were the spearhead of this global far-right movement. This was back in June of 2016. After the Brexit vote happened, Trump was going around calling himself Mr. Brexit.

This is where a lot of the Viktor Orbán links come from, the Hungarian president who went down after 16 years basically of power over the weekend. There was this idea that they were part of this groundswell of the global far right, that populists were fed up with open borders, that they were fed up with bureaucrats, that they were fed up with people in faraway places like Brussels—which is ridiculous to me—dictating how to live, and that they were going to rise up. What we’re seeing is the crackup of that everywhere.

Look at Canada, for instance—Canada was probably on the verge of electing a Trump-esque figure last year. Trump comes into power, puts in these tariffs. Now you have a technocrat, Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of England, running there. Meloni is fascinating, because she is the furthest-right Italian prime minister since Mussolini. That’s not debatable. That’s crazy in its own way. But she has really had to dial back on her populism and conservatism because of the association with Trump and how toxic that is. What you’re seeing is that even among far-right figures, tying yourself too close to him is a problem. Of course, if the president attacks the pope and you’re the prime minister of Italy, you do sort of have to step in. But that again is the absurdity of this moment.

And once you speak out against Trump, you have this ridiculous situation where Trump is watching television on Sunday and sees these three American cardinals speak out against the war and then literally—kind of literally—starts a holy war right after that. And the reverberations from that are huge. But the Orbán defeat there is not immaterial to this—global far-right leaders are looking around and saying, This is a pretty bad moment for us. People are turning against this far-right populism that has been ascendant since Trump essentially walked down the escalator in 2015.

Sargent: I want to underscore what you’re saying by pointing out that when Meloni ascended, that was seen as a real sign that this global far right, this MAGA International, was really on the march. For her to have to really start distancing herself from the unquestioned supreme leader of MAGA International is a real sign that it’s just starting to crack. That, plus Orbán going down to defeat, suggests that the global right is on much shakier ground than it looked as if they would be. And boy, it happened fast.

Shephard: This was already baked in before Iran. Iran is the most catastrophic thing an American president has done since Iraq. It’s maybe worse in some ways, which is crazy to say. But what we’re seeing here is a huge global trend that is manifesting itself everywhere and seems to be manifesting itself here as well, though we won’t be able to see its results in full view until the midterm elections in November.

Sargent: Trump’s anger at Meloni is also over the fact that she’s apparently not willing to send military help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said this to the paper, speaking about Italians: “Do they like the fact that your prime minister isn’t giving us any help to get oil? I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong.”

Alex, I don’t know if Trump understands the situation at a basic level. The problem doesn’t appear to be that we don’t have enough military firepower. It’s that military firepower can’t force Iran to open the strait. Isn’t that the essence of this?

Shephard: The other thing, too, is what Trump is doing is psychological more than it’s strategic. He wants other people to take the blame here. He is trying to bring in NATO and the European Union, which have wisely kept their distance from this entire farce. The United States does not need help militarily to bomb Tehran, but it does need the help of other nations to end this conflict.

It needs the help of countries specifically that are not Israel to end this conflict. It needs those countries to help find an off-ramp, or to build one that is acceptable to the United States, Iran, the Gulf States, and the Iranian regime, to the extent that such a thing exists right now. Instead of trying to bring those sort of partners in to find a way out of this, Trump is alienating them and demanding that they share in the blame for something that is just colossally stupid.

Sargent: Well, to return to some stuff you said earlier in this discussion, there’s an interesting through line to all this. Trump’s MAGA allies in Europe are turning against him over the war—MAGA International is splitting over it. Meanwhile, Trump’s base is splitting over the war at home. That means MAGA in America is fracturing over it.

The scale of betrayal—in a way—of what Trump is ostensibly supposed to represent and what MAGA is ostensibly supposed to represent—never mind that it was always bullshit that they were antiwar, but they’re supposed to be that. The scale of this betrayal is at the point where it’s really seriously endangering a massive movement. I find that really striking. I’ve got to say, man, if this is what brings MAGA crashing down, then boy, is that a certain satisfying, poetic justice—aside from the fact that thousands and thousands of innocent people are getting killed.

Shephard: You’ve been seeing this sort of crackup—I’ve been writing about it for the last couple of months, especially since Iran started—it started with people that are all opportunists. They are almost all, or maybe all, antisemites. They are people like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly. But these are also people that were genuinely trying to intellectually backfill the notion of Trumpism with something that’s not just the president. The first schism was between people that were trying to come up with a meaning outside of Trump for this stuff. They left. You now have these true believers that just say, Well, MAGA is Trump, it’s whatever Trump says; it’s just a straight-up cult of personality.

But one of the things that you saw this week was, after the Jesus picture, people like Riley Gaines or these Catholic influencers—they were out too. That was notable to me, not because it will necessarily last, but you see how quick these people will leave now. If there’s a sort of exit door that cracks open, they will speak out about it. That’s a notable difference from the first term, where for the most part the Trump opposition on the right was from a more establishment or moderate wing.

What we’re seeing now—in some ways it resembles the aftermath of January 6—is that there’s a sense that he’s done. He’s a loser. He’s cooked. The people that understand that they are going to have to be fighting over what power in the Republican Party looks like post-Trump are starting to position themselves and sharpen the knives. That is something that I assumed was going to happen closer to the end of this term. But it’s happening right now. And it’s causing this accelerated breakdown of this coalition.

Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up, here’s the best part of all. JD Vance can’t do that. He can’t distance himself from Trump. He’s tied to Trump very, very tightly. All he can do is get dutiful reporters to write things in newspapers saying that really, really, he totally opposed the war, and at the same time, he is really loyal to Trump, so he’s going to stick by Trump because he’s a loyal guy, even if he has misgivings. He’s the guy who’s supposed to be inheriting this movement and this coalition, and it’s cracking up under him. Yet he can’t distance himself from the dark force, the vortex that’s causing the cracks to really radiate out in all directions.

It couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy. You wrote about this. Can you sort of take us through how JD Vance kind of manages this at this point?

Shephard: I’ve been fascinated with Vance more or less since I first came into contact with him via Hillbilly Elegy. He is one of our great opportunists and cynics and is a shape-shifter par excellence. What he’s been doing this term has been really interesting to me because he’s trying to build connections with these various sort of independent movements within MAGA—whether they’re this podcast crowd or the more intellectual wing. Certainly he has his Catholic conversion story and his upcoming memoir about that. So he has a religious conversion take as well. But one thing that Vance does not have, which Trump does, is an independent base of support within the party.

Where Vance is fascinating is that you’re seeing somebody who’s trying to figure out what a Vance coalition post-Trump could look like. And he, in the lead-up to Iran, basically said, OK, well, if I can keep my hands clean here—while Marco Rubio, his main rival probably for the nomination, has his fingerprints all over that—then he can go out and say, Look, Trumpism still works, right? We moved too far with it. This Iran thing is a mistake, but you can follow me and I will take care of all of that. That’s just not going to work at all.

As we’ve been discussing, he is tied to all of this. So what we’re seeing is that there isn’t a successor who can come in and just say, I am MAGA now. We’re going to do MAGA without Trump and it’s going to be even better—because Trump has never allowed somebody like this to flourish or prosper in any way. That also points to a kind of failed-state situation. Trump will be term-limited—he’s not going to hold on to power, I don’t think ... and you’re going to have these people that are fighting over the sort of scorched earth that we’re left in, which is $6 gas, a strengthened Iranian regime, no strong ties to Europe or even to the Gulf States, maybe, in the Middle East. And a country that is more isolated, weaker, and poorer than it was 10 years ago, solely because we elected this moron twice.

Sargent: Well, there is one other thing that Trump has that JD Vance definitely lacks, and that’s charisma. Which is also a problem because he’s going to need that to try to hold together all these different competing factions who, as you say, will have their knives out for each other. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Shephard: Thanks for having me.

So the answer to long airport lines isn’t, apparently, for Republicans to reach a deal with Democrats that funds DHS while also implementing ICE reforms. It’s simply to hand over airport security to the private market.

These proponents make claims that echo other arguments in favor of the private market—that it improves quality and efficiency—and note that the U.S. airports that employ private security screeners have run smoothly amid the shutdown. But there isn’t a lot of evidence that privatizing the TSA would indeed make airport security smoother and cheaper. It would, however, reduce the federal government’s workforce and possibly save on employee salaries and benefit costs, since TSA workers are unionized and private screeners usually are not. And that, perhaps, is why Trump and his ilk are so keen on it.

We don’t really know what fully privatizing the TSA would accomplish because there hasn’t been a ton of good data collected and analyzed about the private airport security that exists now. The TSA was created in the immediate wake of 9/11, replacing passenger screening that had been handled by airlines, which often contracted with private companies. But in 2004, Congress passed a law creating a TSA pilot program that allowed airports to apply to hire private companies to perform security screenings overseen by the agency. The Screening Partnership Program became permanent after the pilot ended, and 20 airports use it today. Most of them are small, but participants include San Francisco’s and Kansas City’s international airports. In a sense, using private companies to screen passengers goes back to pre-TSA days, but today they have to follow the same stricter rules and procedures that TSA screeners do, and they have to qualify to be a TSA vendor. There are 27 companies eligible to provide airport screening, and many also provide security for other government agencies and buildings.

The Government Accountability Office evaluated the program several times from 2009 to 2015, and Tina Sherman, who leads the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice Team, told me the evaluations suffered from imperfect data. “While it will save tax dollars if they take money off the books to pay private screeners and no longer pay the federal workforce … there are a lot of questions about just costs in general,” she said.

Early reporting from the program failed to account for the costs of things like employee benefits, and didn’t fully compare private company performance metrics to the federal government’s performance metrics. The GAO recommended in 2012 that the TSA regularly report that data to Congress, but there hasn’t been a comprehensive evaluation since then. So it’s hard to say whether the program is more cost-effective.

The law creating the program also required that private security operators prove they’re meeting or exceeding the safety standards set by the TSA, but they can’t exceed what it would cost the federal government to screen at that airport. One way those companies might save money is by cutting worker pay. The federal workforce is heavily unionized compared to the private workforce, and the TSA screeners’ union argues that privatization is just a way to cut pay and benefits. Nothing prevents private security screeners from being unionized, but it’s also not guaranteed, and rates of unionization in the private sector remain much lower than in the federal government. That usually does translate to lower pay and fewer benefits.

Sherman said one thing privatization wouldn’t change is the stressful and demanding nature of the job. She pointed to a 2023 GAO study on morale of TSA screening officers and found that they had low job satisfaction, despite a small improvement in morale from a recent raise. It’s hard for them to call out sick, take breaks, or find opportunities for advancement because of the demands of the job, leading to a lack of work-life balance and complaints about management practices. “This is a difficult job,” she said. Private-sector contractors face the same demands in the same environment. “Being at the airport, how the shifts run, the kind of customer interactions because everybody wants to just get on their flight, because all of the technologies and procedures for screening are exactly the same, even though the individual is being paid by someone else, those pressures remain,” she said.

Even if airport screening were fully privatized, the federal government would continue to oversee airport security and thus would still have to ensure that private companies are meeting the necessary standards—so there would still be federal workers involved and costs associated with privatization. And it’s not clear that there would be other benefits to privatization. Because airport screeners provide an essential service—public safety—it’s not easy to compare their privatization to other such efforts. But when other countries have privatized mail services, for example, the service level hasn’t measurably improved, and while some generate profits they also struggle in hard times, like many industries do. While screeners working for private companies aren’t subject to the current shutdown, they’re still vulnerable to the kinds of layoffs and downturns that affect private companies everywhere.

Republicans have been calling to privatize chunks of the federal workforce since the Reagan era, and the results have been mixed. Elliott Sclar, an urban planning professor at Columbia University, wrote in a 2001 book that it is too complex and inefficient to transfer some public services to the private domain. And he argues that Americans are so suspicious of the government that anything that could have been privatized likely has been by now. “The reason we have so little privatization despite two decades of an ideological full-court press to change that is because Americans are also pragmatists,” he wrote.

It’s worth considering that airports haven’t rushed to sign up for the program since the GAO last evaluated it in 2015, either. “They’re all essentially the same as the ones that had been operating a decade or more ago,” Sherman said. “This [program] has been available, but it’s not something that airports have necessarily taken advantage of.… I can’t opine at all as to why.”

It’s clear that the Trump administration has an ideological interest in dismantling the federal workforce, whether it’s good for the U.S. or not. This is the second time in Trump’s second term that a fight over funding has shut down at least some federal agencies, and voters increasingly disapprove of his leadership and that of the Republican Party. The administration likely doesn’t have enough goodwill from voters to make a big change like privatizing all airport security operations. The last thing Americans want at this point is for more disruptions when they travel.

HBO Max experienced a systems failure of its own on February 26. That morning, Netflix announced that its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery—which owns HBO—was off. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, which also had been vying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, had come in with an offer of $31 per share, and Netflix dropped out of negotiations, clearing the way for conservative mogul Ellison to finalize his takeover of yet another media conglomerate. Last summer, Ellison’s company Skydance merged with Paramount in a move to consolidate several legacy media assets under a new, Trump-friendly umbrella. The changes made to Paramount post-merger have been both substantively and symbolically significant; in particular, the axing of Stephen Colbert’s resistance lib version of The Late Show and the hiring of Free Press provocateur Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Ellison has stated that entities like HBO and CNN will continue to operate independently if and when Paramount Skydance completes its acquisition, but, if you’ve been paying attention, then you know to be skeptical of such claims.

So, as The Pitt’s second season comes to a dramatic end, we are left to wonder if HBO is coming to an end of its own. For over two decades now, HBO has sold a sometimes hyperbolically praised but largely exemplary vision of creative freedom and risk-taking. There have been ebbs and flows, and the network’s recent overreliance on spin-offs and existing IP seemed to foretell the beginning of its “enshittification” era. But, all the same, the network that ruined Meadow Soprano’s college visit to Bowdoin, chopped off Ned Stark’s head, and pulled the chair out from under Tim Robinson is facing its first real looming possibility of active outside constraint. What does HBO look like if it can’t do whatever it wants?

For obvious reasons, it would be too much to say that The Pitt is about Ellison’s looming acquisition of HBO’s parent company. It is, however, a show about a virtuous and brilliant group of workers whose vision and independence allow them to thrive even as their industry crumbles around them, destabilized by new, unregulated technology, corrosive financialization, and the broader cultural devaluation of their work. This is a state of affairs that might sound familiar to people who work in television.

Season 2 of The Pitt begins with Dr. Robinavitch, or “Robby” (Noah Wyle), riding his motorcycle helmet-less across one of Pittsburgh’s many gorgeous golden suspension bridges, looking forward to either getting away from work for a while or killing himself. It’s unclear which. While each season of The Pitt takes place over the course of one long shift, during which time a never-ending stream of almost unmanageable crises unfolds, a running refrain is that this is what every day is like in the ER. The Pitt is almost always in crisis; the people who run it are able to do so because they are, just barely, hanging on.

Robby, one of the ER’s attending physicians, has been right on the knife’s edge of breakdown since we met him. In the first season, this was largely the result of post-pandemic PTSD. Robby occasionally had to duck into a corner of the ER to have a quick panic attack, and the show intermittently cut to hair-raising flashbacks of the hospital managing the fallout of Covid-19. This season, his stress is more existential. As the boss of the Pitt, he is both its primary manager and its sin eater. Every horror and every mistake, no matter whose fault, makes its way back to his mortal ledger. This season, we find him lashing out at his colleagues—residents, charge nurses, interns—mostly, it seems, because he so acutely feels the weight of all the devastation for which he is, according to the org chart at least, responsible. And he feels the start of the unraveling that he fears might take place if he were ever to leave.

Understandably, he wants to go on vacation, and our second season tracks his—alleged—last shift before he takes a three-month leave to ride his hog out to the Badlands. So the mood is a little bit apocalyptic. Several of our young docs are nearing the end of their time in the ER, deciding what to do next. Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez), a wunderkind medical student, wants to continue her work in emergency medicine, for which she’s shown tremendous skill, but her parents—high-powered docs in the same hospital—want her to dream bigger. Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), a sharply insightful resident with an intuitive bedside manner, is coming to terms with the idea that the ER is going to burn her out in the long run. Arrogant new med student James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) is pondering the possibility that he has neither the stomach nor the improvisatory genius necessary to survive in this job that, prior to his shift, he thought was hack work. A longtime patient dies, and several docs witness the last goodbyes of a young mother in hospice. Charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) keeps trying to retire but can’t walk away. Her night-shift counterpart charge nurse has taken on a day job as a death doula. The grim reaper and all four horsemen are sitting patiently in the hospital waiting room.

All of this is complicated by the arrival of Robby’s leave replacement, Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), a bright and energetic physician who seems to be treating her stint as a sub in the Pitt as a project of institutional transformation. Within a few episodes, she’s established a new patient processing system, convinced several docs to try a new AI charting app, and even suggested that people should stop calling the Pitt “the Pitt.” Throughout the season, the show emphasizes that Al-Hashimi is a good doctor, giving her lots of opportunities to impress us with her virtuosic skill and her sometimes radiant empathy, but it also positions her as an outsider who only thinks she knows how this ecosystem works and what it means to its patients and its doctors alike. She can flag inefficiencies and minor rule violations and patient satisfaction scores, but that is missing the point, the show wants us to see. These are men and women of science, but what they practice is an art.

The counterpoint to Al-Hashimi is Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard), a nursing graduate being mentored by Dana. Wide-eyed where Al-Hashimi is steely, Emma is a sponge for the Pitt’s bespoke vision of medical care. Emma helps Dana meticulously and tenderly clean and prepare the body of a homeless man for viewing, even though they know no family is coming to view him; she stays beside Dana for hours as they prepare a rape kit for a sexual assault survivor (a multiepisode arc that’s one of the most patiently detailed and humane narrative achievements I’ve seen on TV); she gets choked and nearly killed by a psychotic patient; she gives another homeless patient a fresh shave and haircut that brings him to tears. By the end of the shift, she’s a convert. Everybody around her is ready to give up or die. Emma, who walks out the door begrudgingly late in the season—after her shift ends—never wants to leave.

The Pitt could very easily tell a simple story of antagonism: executives versus docs, insurance versus the patient, new technology versus human care, Dr. Robby versus Dr. Al-Hashimi. And there is, admittedly, a clarifying simplicity to some of the program’s moral stances. When a pair of ICE agents show up with a detainee they’ve tossed around, the staff stand united against them, and Robby drags them to hell on their way out the door. The show’s frequent rage about the inequities of the U.S. health care system seethes brightly out of numerous subplots this season. But just because The Pitt is about a virtuous group of hardscrabble heroes doesn’t mean it lacks nuance.

The series spits out Al-Hashimi’s AI initiative with disgust, but it also asks us to consider that her arrival is not solely a harbinger of doom. Robby is a valiant knight in the service of humankind; he’s also a mess. As much as Al-Hashimi might seem to represent the very forces seeking to destroy his model of care—it doesn’t help that she arrives as a favorite of the aforementioned hospital execs—she also represents the possibility that someone might genuinely share the burden of the Pitt with him. As the season rolls on, she seems increasingly eager to form a partnership with Robby, rather than a rivalry. Robby is, understandably, paranoid about interlopers, but his rejection of the relief that Al-Hashimi offers, the specter of professional intimacy with another person, seems more about him than about her. Is the Pitt killing Robby, or is he killing himself?

The Pitt, in other words, is not smug or strident, despite its righteous polemics and its portraits of tortured genius. What animates this show is a sense of excitement around artistic innovation; like the best of HBO’s offerings over the past quarter-century, it is a project that rewards attention, debate, the investment of time and emotion. What David Ellison’s cynical acquisitions represent is a flattening of the ambitions of media, whether it’s journalism or entertainment. Bari Weiss’s CBS wants to silence dissent under the guise of heterodox thinking, to produce propaganda under the guise of programming for “normal” Americans. Conservative critics of series like The Pitt might claim they are liberal agitprop, the dull vessels of woke ideology. But for those watching week to week, it’s clear this show is not the same kind of blunt force political object. It’s about a group of people whose job is to remain human within a system that does not treat them that way, to practice care within a system where care is understood as inefficiency. The Pitt can feel the end coming—perhaps its own end—but it also can’t, and won’t, stop.

I envy the confidence of those who publicly broadcast their faith in the TACO maxim in the lead-up to Donald Trump folding on threats to war-crime Iran. The ability to hold no doubt in your mind that Trump will always, inevitably, back down from his most unhinged threats likely leads to sleep more untroubled than mine. Trump does follow through on his ghastly ultimatums. He does not always chicken out. Look at the tariffs, imposed imperfectly but crushing us still. Ask the people of the Twin Cities. Or, for that matter, Iran.

Whether predictions that Trump will inevitably knuckle under are sincere or not, confidence always performs better than nuance. What I have to tell you is this: The only constant in Trump’s decision-making, whether he follows through on his latest insane idea or backtracks—either as a result of real-world blowback or his suddenly losing interest—is his enormous capacity for delusion. Anyone correctly predicting his action is the person who talked to him the soonest before the decision is announced.

The true line in Trump’s decision-making is not, unfortunately, some essential cowardice. It’s transactional nihilism. The transactionality is well documented, almost hilariously obvious. He conceives of every interaction as a means to some end. Newly apparent is the changeable nature of those ends. They are gaseous, conforming to the container of his last conversation.

Observe recent Polymarket trades: The most successful bets on Trump’s Iran reversal last week happened mere hours before he announced he’d stumbled back from the brink.

One user, who created his account seven hours before Trump’s Truth Social post about the ceasefire, made $200,000. Suspiciously well-timed bets are not just predicting whether and when Trump chickens out, either. Last month, The New York Times reported that hundreds of “eleventh hour” bettors made hundreds of thousands betting on Friday that Trump would bomb Iran on Saturday. (Last week, White House staffers got an email warning them to not participate in prediction markets related to domestic politics since, as one official told The Wall Street Journal, “Congress and other government officials should be prohibited from using nonpublic information for financial benefit.” Presumably this does not apply to the Trump children, who are investors in Polymarket itself.)

Trump doesn’t necessarily want to control the flow of oil or the strategic shipping straits, achieve peace, or get credit for forcing regime change. He wants all of those things, or none of them! Maybe he wants some secret other thing: a Big Mac, a blow job, the love of his father.

Crucially, because his own desires have no anchor, he cannot conceive that others hold wants and needs that can’t be dealt down, negotiated, shifted entirely. All offers and threats are contingent. Everything is just an opening bid. That’s how he can promise civilizational destruction and believe that walking it back should still result in good-faith negotiations.

I suspect he regards bombings themselves as no more consequential than a rejected settlement in a lawsuit—as long as he dangles the promise of helping to rebuild (it’s the second, more generous offer), how can victims hold it against him? He expected to dicker over the presence of ICE goons (while holding government funds hostage) with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey after the assassinations of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. He promises to “redevelop” a devastated Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” as if the problem was a lack of topless beaches and casinos and not food and potable water.

This is not the art of deal. Transactional nihilism is existentially unstable. Some opening moves can’t be undone. He seems to truly believe that his wholesale wrecking of the economy is just a temporary downturn and that Americans will be made whole after all the numbers go back up. He clearly holds a fantasy about tariffs leading to the magical reinvention of American manufacturing and the dissolution of the income tax. But there is no quick repair for how he has flippantly remade both household economics and large-scale institutions.

America’s academic and research infrastructure will take generations to rebuild, if they come back at all. A recent survey by the academic journal Nature found that 75 percent of U.S.-based career scientists are considering leaving the country, most commonly for Europe or Canada. Among postdoc students, it’s close to 80 percent. Then there are the researchers who won’t even arrive on these shores to start building our future: New international student enrollment in the United States fell by 17 percent in 2025, the largest single-year decrease in history. (An analysis by the National Association of International Educators posited that this drop has led to the loss of $1.1 billion in contributions to the U.S. economy and the elimination of 23,000 related jobs.)

The fears he has instilled about the future among ordinary Americans, the real-time physical terror he’s kindled in immigrants and queer people: These insecurities will undercut the way most Americans feel about the sturdiness of their democracy. And democracy, to function, needs some bedrock of belief that it has a chance to continue.

Voter disengagement and distrust in national institutions propelled Trump into the White House; now he continues to sabotage them from the inside. Ironically, the left’s best chance at ousting him lies in framing that distrust of the government as a reaction to abandonment by it.

All of Trump’s various bids and offers have meaning and impact. His blindness to this is why he was not a successful real estate developer. His transactionalism was not the great tactic over which he believes he has exclusive ownership. I was once a party to a real estate deal where the opening bid was so low it derailed the entire relationship. It triggered more lawyers, delays, a longer process, and a losing deal for all parties when an honest and fair starting point might have been a win-win. The insult resonated to the point where all anyone wanted was revenge. The transactional nihilism of my counterpart didn’t even serve his own purpose. For my followers of international relations out there, does this sound familiar?

This utter inability to imagine that threats and promises have meaning beyond themselves is likely what gives the appearance of ruthlessness—but ruthlessness implies a goal; “madman theory” still requires a rational goal to be worth the manic pursuit. Trump’s untethered id is monstrous, chaotic, morally empty, inherently untethered to any goals beyond the ego boost he receives from using power. An elite few have stumbled upon a way to use Trump’s vile eruptions to get rich or die trying. Most of us, alas, won’t have that first option. He may not be crazy, but he’s beyond reason.

Trump’s foreign policy has long been misunderstood because of its inherent incoherence. He came to power in 2016 by telling Americans what they wanted to hear. He had little interest in laying out a grand strategy or a bigger worldview beyond his promise to “Make America Great Again,” itself a slogan in which voters could hear what they wanted. His forceful criticism of the Iraq War, however, differentiated him from Hillary Clinton, who voted for it when she was in the Senate in 2002. But it was never all too clear whether Trump had opposed George W. Bush’s invasion or just thought his Republican predecessor should have taken the oil.

The president’s more recent turn to militarism has led to immense changes in U.S. statecraft. In the first months of his second term, he enlisted Elon Musk and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle America’s soft-power infrastructure, notably the humanitarian and development arm USAID, but also government-funded think tanks, media organizations, and other Cold War legacy programs. In Trump’s world, soft power apparently has little value. At the same time, Trump has dismantled the global alliance system. He has slowly chipped away at NATO, built a “Board of Peace” to counter the United Nations, and levied tariffs in contradiction of the global economic order.

Trump is known to cut bait on unpopular policies, but his war continues. The risk-averse president who turned away the jets from striking Iran in June 2019, much to the chagrin of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, is gone. In his place is a careless, casual warmonger, a leader who thinks that he can recklessly use force whenever and practically wherever he wants—and that his past track record of avoiding quagmires and entanglements means he can do so with few long-term consequences.

Bolton, the perennial hawk, has transformed himself into a critic of Trump’s latest misadventures. One recalls his candid admonition from 2022: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat—not here but, you know, other places—it takes a lot of work.” In his second term, Trump has embraced the coup—but not the work.

The president’s tendency to jump from conflict to conflict has made it difficult to understand where one war ends and another begins. But Iran and Venezuela are part of the same war—and that war is at the center of America’s foreign policy under Trump.

The first act of the Iran war, it must be noted, was the strike on a girls’ school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The fact that Trump can launch a war on a whim that has already killed thousands and is sending the global economy into shock is not so much an indictment of him—although it is that, too—but of the security state he presides over. It’s remarkable that decades after the Cold War, it’s still possible to stumble into war without guardrails or stopgap measures to get in the way. The national security infrastructure cobbled together in the paranoid, red-baiting moments at the end of World War II gave the American president the capacity to launch shadow wars; after the September 11 attacks, those powers were further consolidated. There has been no real accountability for war on terrorism part one, and so here we are barreling into part two, with terrorism even more vaguely defined.

Trump is also breaking conventions and laws from the era before that. Political assassinations have technically been banned since 1976, but Executive Order 11905 was not enough to stop Trump (along with Israel) from killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the same day bombs killed the students in Minab.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973, enacted in the midst of Nixon and Kissinger’s endless Vietnam folly to prevent the prospect of secret campaigns, like the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, is no match for Trump either. Congress has long undermined its coequal foreign policy–making powers. Democratic members failed to assert themselves over Venezuela and did little in response to Trump’s strikes on Iran last June. The most Democratic leadership has offered is procedural criticisms of the warpath-president. As Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement released on February 28, the day Trump launched the first airstrikes, “House Democrats remain committed to compelling a vote on this resolution upon our return.”

The multitude of U.S. military bases in the Middle East and environs makes them far too easy to use—and to become targets for adversaries in counterstrikes that lead to Gulf of Tonkin–level flubs. More than a month into the war, 13 American troops have been killed and nearly 400 injured. In late March, Iran showed further capacity to cause havoc by reportedly launching its first intermediate-range ballistic missile toward Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-U.K. military base in the Indian Ocean. In Washington, however, the policy discussion rarely considers the deeper question of how and why the United States has a base on the island territory and other far-flung places to begin with.

And so a military budget exceeding a trillion dollars for the first time in global history can all too easily be augmented with a supplemental $200 billion for a new war. Republicans who are cautious about government spending can’t curb their appetite for military spending, which only serves as encouragement for the president’s militarism.

And the architecture of the disastrous war on terrorism had never been dismantled, including the potential surveillance mechanisms in place since the Patriot Act, the militarization of the police, and congressional authorizations for the use of force abroad. These all sit ready for new enemies, with an attendant domestic network of law enforcement powers that can be used to threaten critics of the war.

Meanwhile, the functional experts—in this case, apparently, the energy eggheads at the State Department, who may have warned that the Strait of Hormuz was kinda important—have been DOGE’d. And even if they were there, would the president have listened?

Nate Swanson, a career government official who worked on Iran policy in the State Department and most recently on the U.S. negotiating team, warned in essays that Iran would escalate. Since the United States attacked, he has warned that the war would backfire. Sage counsel. Too bad it appeared in Foreign Affairs, not in the Situation Room. Swanson was Loomer-ed last year.

One of the few constraints holding back the president’s war seems to be a shortage of weapons. When the undersecretary of defense (war) for policy, Elbridge Colby, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in early March, everyone came armed with their own questions and were listening for different things. Several investors and private-sector leaders I spoke with beforehand said they were there to hear about magazine depth—the stockpiles of munitions and the weapons production capability of the country. Stocks are low. This has major implications for Americans’ ability to fight multiple wars at once, or even this one.

Asked directly by the moderator, CFR president Michael Froman, about how depleted U.S. weapons are, Colby remarked, “Well, I just say up front that our armed forces have the necessary equipment to take on anyone and pursue the president’s goals and objectives. And nobody should have the impression that we’re somehow, you know, behind the curve.” The answer may have calmed some nerves, but the data suggests a more complicated picture. One study shows that the United States fired more than 5,000 munitions in the first four days of its war on Iran, a quantity it could take up to $16 billion and years to replace. What’s even more frightening is that supercharging weapons production, as most of Washington’s defense planners have been pushing for, would further enable more wars of choice. Rebuilding the defense industrial base was a major priority, for example, of Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and now presumably those bombs are a-flying.

Colby, who calls himself a “flexible realist,” is the Pentagon’s number three official and the author of the National Defense Strategy that was released in January. He argued in his widely read 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, that the United States ought to focus on countering China in Asia and dispense with its Middle East delusions. Yet here he was, a day after being grilled by senators on the Hill, presenting to the Washington establishment his staunch support for Trump’s war of choice. Colby took great caution to not make news or get ahead of the remarks of Secretary of Defense (War) Pete Hegseth; he regularly deferred to the president’s statements.

Critics speculated that he was holding back because of the immense contradiction between Trump’s war and Colby’s worldview. Or as Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian put it, “Resign, man. Have some self-respect. Resign!”

A simpler yet persistent constraint on the president seems to be his attention span. Early in the interview, Froman asked Colby, “Is Cuba next?” The council members in the audience laughed. Colby carefully explained how the president’s actions in Venezuela fit in with the published security strategy. Then he added, “One thing that people should calculate on and should factor is that the president … is not going to be bound by the sort of shibboleths of the past, if those are not consistent with Americans’ interests.”

When President Biden followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a ruthless war against Palestinians that many international organizations have documented as a genocide, not enough Democrats spoke up. Now, however, some are drawing a red line about Iran. “The Democrats are way better than they have been in the past,” Matt Duss, the former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders who’s now at the Center for International Policy, told me on the podcast I host, None of the Above. Duss cited Senator Chris Murphy as “a real standout here”: He has been sharing his (unclassified) takeaways from closed-door briefings, educating voters, and “making public the fact that this war does not make sense. It’s obviously illegal. It’s strategically stupid.”

The “No Kings” protests that involved millions of people in thousands of locations across the United States were motivated in part by opposition to the Iran war—but how much can a peace movement achieve? The students who fought against Gaza were silenced by law enforcement and university administrators, and Duss points out that historic protests in recent years, from Black Lives Matter to Palestine, had little effect on legislation. “Did it manage to move the needle on the policy? No, unfortunately not. And I think this goes to a bigger problem of just Americans having so few opportunities and ways and channels and levers with which to impact foreign policy decisions,” Duss explained.

A large majority of Trump voters (79 percent), meanwhile, favor declaring the Iran war a victory and getting out, according to a Quincy Institute/American Conservative survey fielded by Ipsos. Although the war is broadly unpopular, there is some reason to believe that little will shift public opinion unless its character changes substantially via the presence of thousands of U.S. ground troops. Until that happens, it is likely that the public will broadly disapprove of it, but that Trump’s base will back it—which is not a recipe for change in this administration, at least.

That has not always been the case. Nixon was much more influenced by pushback from the peace movement, mass protests, and public opinion than was previously understood, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg argues in her authoritative history of the Vietnam War, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia, which draws on newly unclassified documents.

In the book, Eisenberg revisits an iconic moment at Woodstock, where 400,000 attendees joined Country Joe and the Fish to sing in protest:

And it’s 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Ah, ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

In early March, when the United States was already in Iran and Venezuela, Country Joe passed away in Berkeley, California, at the age of 84.

Next stop is Cuba? Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.

“Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels?” he asked them at a campaign rally. “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán!” Vance was apparently not very persuasive: Hungarians backed the anti-Orbán party by such an overwhelming margin that it will have enough seats in the country’s Parliament to enact far-reaching constitutional reforms.

President Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran continues to disrupt shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing the global economy’s femoral artery. A ceasefire last week reportedly required the U.S. to accept Iranian control of the strait among other concessions, leaving the world with the distinct impression that the U.S. had effectively lost the war. Trump himself, however, was unconcerned. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” he told reporters on Saturday.

This is what happens when losers are elected to lead the world’s only superpower.

“Loser” is the president’s favorite insult. He has used it to describe, at various times, Rosie O’Donnell, John McCain, Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Graydon Carter, Russell Brand, Bill Barr, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron DeSantis, Paul Ryan, Joe Biden, Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, Michael Bloomberg, Sadiq Khan, George Conway, Hillary Clinton, as well as ABC and CNN. This is only a partial list, but I think you get the picture.

A loser is often not someone who is actually left behind, nor is it someone who simply failed at something. Failure is a part of life; it can even be the first step on the path to success. Instead, a loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, for example, Vance criticized his fellow conservatives for going soft on their own constituents. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations they had for their own lives,” he wrote. “Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.” His implication is that it is your fault if you’re a loser.

Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” Trump once wrote in a 2004 book. To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Trump, for example, often describes migrants in eugenic terms, claiming that they are “low IQ” or bring “bad genes” into the country. Conversely, he often describes himself as highly intelligent on genetic grounds. “Same genes, we have the genes,” Trump once said of an uncle who was an MIT professor, as if it were a credential for his own cognitive ability. “We’re smart people.… We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones don’t work out so well, right? But we’re no, we’re no different in that sense.” In 2020, The New York Times reported, he described a largely white crowd at a Minnesota rally as having “good genes.”

Fascism and loserdom go hand in hand because fascism is predicated on the notion that the fascist has been unjustly cheated and robbed, and that only through force can they restore and revitalize themselves. Fascists idolize losers because no fascist society has ever flourished and because they see themselves reflected in other people’s failures. It is fitting that Trump and his allies have lavished praise and public statuary upon Robert E. Lee, a Virginia-born colonel who is best known for leading a failed rebellion against the United States on behalf of a slaver aristocracy in the South.

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It helps that Trump’s administration is often populated by people whose worldview is driven by personal grievances against the world. Foremost among them is Vance, whose memoir sought to rationalize his impoverished background with his own sense of superiority. Vance’s Appalachian childhood was not an easy one: His father abandoned him, his mother remarried multiple times while wrestling with drug addiction, and his grandparents largely raised him. Even his own name changed multiple times.

That disjointed upbringing led Vance to define his identity in other ways. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast,” Vance wrote. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

Vance’s description of a distinct Scots-Irish identity is far from baseless. Distinct cultural and religious communities settled America in the 1600s and 1700s, ranging from the Puritans of Massachusetts and the Quakers of Pennsylvania to the Reformed Dutch communities in New York and the Catholic dissidents of Maryland. What Vance attempts to describe, however, is some sort of Scots-Irish American Volk that is more authentic than anyone else. He then transmuted his perceived sense of cultural inferiority into one of apparent personal superiority for escaping into the affluent world of Yale Law School and a hedge fund backed by Peter Thiel, the far-right tech magnate.

Throughout his public writings, Vance has often sounded self-consciously haunted by his origins. In a 2017 New York Times op-ed about the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, Vance described the disappointment he felt with Bill Clinton—a “poor boy with a vaguely Southern accent, raised by a single mother with a heavy dose of loving grandparents”—after the president’s personal failings dragged down his marriage and his administration. “I cared that he had managed to build the domestic tranquillity that he lacked as a child,” Vance reflected. “But here, in one sex scandal, he had blown it all up. If a man of his abilities had done this, then what hope was there for me?”

He then contrasted Clinton’s failings with Barack Obama’s happy family life. The two men weren’t on the same political wavelength at the time. (That gap has now obviously become a chasm.) But Vance professed at the time to admire Obama for overcoming his own untraditional upbringing. “Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal,” Vance said.

“At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams,” he wrote. “For that, I’ll miss him, and the example he set.” Six years later, he would be elected to a Senate seat of his own in Ohio. Vance has built the family life that he once craved: He met his wife, Usha, at Yale and they now have three children together, with a fourth one on the way.

Despite these successes, Vance seems unsatisfied. Throughout the years he has denounced “childless” liberals and “cat moms” by claiming they have no stake in the future of the country and, therefore, should not decide it. He spent the 2024 campaign spreading a racist smear that Haitian refugees in Ohio had eaten people’s pets, a claim vehemently denied by local officials and by the state’s Republican governor. Though he is now one heartbeat away from the presidency, he has no real accomplishments in public life. His recent ventures on the world stage—which my colleague Alex Shephard described as a “hell of a losing streak”—have not helped matters.

Other far-right figures are even more openly troubled. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has spent the last year trying to reshape the U.S. military into a whiter, less politically neutral, and more religiously sectarian force. Hegseth had a largely unremarkable military career in the Army National Guard and rarely stood out while working as a television host on Fox News. But he did catch the eye of Trump, who elevated him to run the world’s most powerful bureaucracy.

Along the way, Hegseth’s Senate confirmation narrowly survived damning allegations of sexual abuse and harassment. In a 2018 letter, his own mother condemned his behavior toward his ex-wife during his divorce. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote. “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” (She later recanted the accusations during the confirmation fight.)

Since being installed in the Pentagon, Hegseth has sought to redefine the American military along the social and cultural lines of a teenage Call of Duty voice chat. He oversaw the department’s rebranding to the Department of War, its pre-1940s name, and turned “lethality” into the reigning mantra. He has replaced judge advocate generals who might advise against military operations’ legality and restored medals to soldiers who slaughtered Native American women and children in the nineteenth-century frontier wars. Under his leadership, even the names of American military operations sound like something a teenager came up with. Hundreds of American service members have been killed or wounded in Operation Epic Fury—his latest creation.

In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth laid out his self-centered vision for the military. He described the nation’s service members as a “camouflaged class” of Americans who stand apart and above the sordidness of American society and politics. That changed, according to Hegseth, when Obama took office and began to impose leftist values upon American service members. Warfare and military service, in Hegseth’s eyes, are a credentialing process for masculinity itself, which the woke left had come to threaten.

“We used to see the dignity and value of men who got up early, made real things, lived by a code, and worked with their hands,” Hegseth wrote. “Cowboys were our heroes, as were soldiers, explorers, and astronauts. Now? It’s Tony Fauci and Michelle Obama who get the hero treatment. Careerist media-types only recognize so-called elite people like themselves.”

The persistent desire to overcome a young man’s personal insecurities radiates from the book. He recalled how a “stoic Vietnam veteran” told him when he was 19 years old, “Pete, whatever you do, don’t miss your first war.” He described that “the stark statement ricocheted around my brain like a stray bullet” and that he was struck by the “certainty that I had yet to hear in my short life, except from a pulpit. (And they didn’t teach that in church.)”

“Through those four words—don’t miss your war—he spoke of honor,” Hegseth continued. “Of duty. Of courage. Of God and country. Of the arena. Like an evangelical preacher of America’s civil religion—and like Teddy Roosevelt—he had been to the arena, and he was urging me.” America’s twenty-first-century wars, which involved long foreign occupations, building complex relationships with civilian populaces, and trying to suppress elusive insurgencies, must have paled in comparison in Hegseth’s mind to the pitched battles of yesteryear.

Hegseth then claimed that “coastal elites” had turned military service into a “passive-aggressive mark against a man,” blaming progressive presidents like Woodrow Wilson for the shift. (Yes, history is not Hegseth’s strong suit.) “This inversion has jettisoned a lot of attributes that virtuous men used to covet: honor, selflessness, courage, integrity,” he declared. “Instead, these values are replaced with optics-obsessed performativity, selfish careerism, effeminacy, and duplicity.” In Hegseth’s worldview, it is military service that confers dignity to the soldier, not the soldier who confers dignity to military service.

One does not need to be a veteran to sense that all of this doesn’t line up. The U.S. military’s ability to kill people has never really been in doubt; its greatest challenges over the past quarter-century have been mission creep, indefinite wars of choice, and poor grand strategic planning by the nation’s political leadership. Hegseth’s own oversight of the Iran war is both a testament to, and an extension of, these failures: U.S. forces killed numerous Iranian political leaders and severely reduced their conventional military strength, yet still managed to yield de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz to Tehran in the ceasefire.

Other personal grievances appear to have driven Hegseth’s monomaniacal focus on eradicating “wokeness” from the armed forces. In his book, he opened by recounting how he had been “deemed an ‘extremist’” by the military in which he had served for twenty years. “Yes, you read that right,” he added, apparently under the impression that this would be a surprise to most readers. “Twenty years ... and the military I loved, I fought for, I revered ... spit me out,” he wrote, complete with dramatic pauses. “While writing this book, I separated from an Army that didn’t want me anymore. The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either.”

What actually happened was that Hegseth was initially assigned to a D.C. National Guard unit that provided security to President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, only to be pulled after another soldier reported him as a potential “insider threat” for, as Politico reported two years ago, having a “tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.” While Hegseth claimed it was because of a cross tattoo on his chest, Politico reported that it was actually because of a “Deus Vult” tattoo on his arm.

A sense of betrayal permeates Hegseth’s version of events. “I could have stayed in, which would have required renewing my top secret security clearance—and an extensive background check,” he claimed in the book. “I’ve done it many times before. No sweat. I have nothing to hide. But, to put it plainly, I don’t trust this government, this commander in chief, or this Pentagon. That’s not to say the situation is permanent—hence this book—but my trust, for this Army, is irrevocably broken.” Given his perception that it defines his manhood, the shift must have been deeply psychically wounding.

Since taking over the Pentagon, however, Hegseth has largely validated those 2021 concerns about his ideological views. He approved new policies on facial hair that would disproportionately require Black men to leave the armed forces and oversaw a purge of the general-officer corps that largely affected generals and admirals who weren’t white men. Last February, Trump fired General Charles Brown, a Black man, from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after Hegseth previously called for his removal for pushing a “woke” agenda. According to NPR, Brown had supported policies that sought to “increase recruitment by attracting Americans from more diverse backgrounds.”

A common refrain from opponents of DEI is that diversity programs are anti-meritocratic because they elevate unqualified minority applicants. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon suggests that the opposite is true: DEI policies help prevent qualified personnel from missing out on merit-based opportunities by virtue of their race or sex. Hegseth made a rare intervention last month in the Pentagon’s internal promotion system for flag officers, for example, to block two Black men and two women from advancing to a one-star general rank. The move was internally criticized by some Pentagon officials as overturning the department’s meritocratic processes.

For Hegseth, symbolism and aesthetics are paramount over results. His order to purge any Pentagon material that involved “diversity, equity, and inclusion” led the department in 2025 to briefly take down a website honoring Jackie Robinson, the World War II veteran who later broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. In his book, he made a pitch that he would later carry out. “The next president should also change the name of the Department of Defense back to the War Department,” he declared. “Sure, our military defends us. And in a perfect world it exists to deter threats and preserve peace. But ultimately its job is to conduct war. We either win or lose wars.” So far, under his tenure, it has been the latter.

I could go on and on. One can also think of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has squandered his family’s legacy of public service by demolishing the nation’s public health institutions and spreading anti-vaccine conspiracies that have and will cost lives. Or there is Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and the owner of a rocket ship company. One might think that would bring a measure of personal satisfaction, but according to him, it does not. “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about,” he wrote on Twitter in February, adding a sad-faced emoji at the end. Since his divorce in 2016, and especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, Musk has increasingly devoted himself to funding far-right causes, tweeting racist conspiracy theories, and turning Twitter from a useful public forum into a cesspool of AI-driven fascist slop.

Musk’s use of Twitter is particularly ironic, since his political evolution appears to be driven in part by the algorithmic forces he now commands. A central theme of the modern far-right political project is to make people feel like they are worthless and powerless so it can exploit the anxieties and resentments that come with that. One influential figure among young conservatives is Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist and sex trafficker. His hatred of women and minorities is perhaps his best-known attribute, but he also hates the audience of troubled and alienated young men that he has cultivated.

“You’re obsessed with [Grand Theft Auto VI] because you have zero cars, women, yachts, money, or action in your real life,” he wrote in a September 2025 post on Twitter, directed at his own fans. The only way to overcome your self-described inferiority, Tate evangelizes, is by inflicting harm on those you perceive to be inferior. “Being racist is one of the last things that’s fun,” he wrote in a February 2026 tweet. “It’s basically the only remaining reason to not kill yourself.”

Nigel Farage, a far-right politician in Britain, once described Tate as the spokesperson for repressed and “emasculated” young British men. “You three guys,” he said in a podcast appearance in 2024, referring to the hosts, “you are all 25, you are all kind of being told you can’t be blokes, you can’t do laddish, fun, bloke things.… That’s almost what you’re being told. That masculinity is something we should look down upon, something that we should frown upon.” Even Farage had to concede, however, that Tate “maybe took that alter-ego of masculinity too far in his relationships with women” and that some of his social media posts were “over the top.”

Other manifestations come from incel culture, which blames some men’s failure to form romantic relationships on women instead of the men themselves. This subculture is popular among young, insecure men who are typically at an emotionally tempestuous time in their lives. Part of their online radicalization is “blackpilling,” a term for embracing incel ideology that is derived from a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.

“It’s about a feeling of gleeful nihilism,” Elle Reeve, a reporter who wrote a book on incel culture, explained in a podcast in 2024. “That all of this is corrupt. It’s hopeless. Like society is irredeemable. And so the best thing you can possibly do is accelerate towards its destruction, because what comes after will be a golden era. You can remake the world the way it ought to be. And with blackpill thinking, you can rationalize a lot of immoral and unethical actions because the morals and ethics created by this society are totally bankrupt.”

These semi-adolescent ideologies often manifest themselves in adolescent ways. In the mid-2010s, one of the precursors to alt-right ideologies and Trumpism took the form of Gamergate, a targeted harassment campaign of feminist figures in video game circles. Central to the harassers’ grievances was the perceived infringement upon video games—which they saw as a traditionally white and male space—by women and racial minorities, especially as game developers sought to appeal to broader audiences.

The newest iteration is “looksmaxxing,” where young men injure themselves and self-administer drugs to supposedly improve their looks and reach some sort of aesthetic ideal. The goal, however, is not actual self-improvement but rather the humiliation of perceived lessers. Braden Peters, a 20-year-old influencer who goes by the name Clavicular, is the most prominent figure in this online subculture. He often seeks, somewhat strangely, to try to humiliate other men by standing next to those he perceives as less attractive and “mogging” them.

Looksmaxxing is not only unnecessary for improving one’s self-image and handling body dysmorphia, but it may be dangerously self-defeating and even self-destructive. Peters told a New York Times reporter that he thinks his testosterone treatments have left him sterile and that his goal is not to actually sleep with women, which would “gain me nothing,” he claimed. This week, after 60 Minutes Australia reporter Adam Hegarty questioned Peters about the incel community and his connections to Andrew Tate, Peters suggested that the reporter was a cuckold and that he would look into “who your wife cheated with.” Hegarty noted that he wasn’t married, and Peters ended the interview shortly after. (One might even say that he had been interview-mogged.)

This relationship between some far-right influencers and their audiences can almost be described as abusive in nature. The apparent goal is to make them feel weak and unwanted, to feel lesser than their peers and cohorts, and then to provide a false sense of community to soothe their insecurities—as well as an out-group to blame for any shortcomings. Trump and other leading far-right figures have sought to apply this on a national scale, holding out themselves as the only chance for salvation. “I alone can fix it,” the president declared a decade ago during his 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention.

In 2026, there is no social problem that the Trump administration says it cannot solve through mass deportations. Trump officials and right-wing policy wonks have sought to de-educate and de-intellectualize Americans by targeting universities with anti-DEI lawsuits, slashing federal funding for sciences and the humanities, and demanding ideological compliance from the nation’s cultural, entertainment, and journalistic infrastructure. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir and a Thiel associate, recently predicted that widespread adoption of AI products “disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less” even as it “increases the power, economic power [of] vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters.”

That is a dubious assertion on both fronts, of course, but it speaks to the aspirations of Silicon Valley’s increasingly illiberal caste of tech moguls. Destabilizing sources of economic stability is an opportunity for profit. “Brexit, just the beginning,” Jeffrey Epstein said in an email exchange with Thiel shortly after the U.K. referendum in 2016, writing with the poorly structured sentences that the financier and sex trafficker always favored: “return to tribalism. counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain.” The result, if they succeed, will be an ironic egalitarianism: In this far-right future, everyone will be a loser but them.

The New Yorker published a long article Monday about the medical neglect of children under Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown, and the story highlights Amalia, who was detained by ICE with her parents and sent to Texas’s Dilley Immigration Processing Center in December when she was only 18 months old.

At the time, Amalia was a healthy toddler with no known issues. The water at Dilley smelled strange, so her parents, Kheilin Valero Marcano and Stiven Arrieta Prieto, bought bottled water at the center’s commissary for her, despite having no income in detention. (The article noted that nonprofit organizations who work on immigrants’ rights, such as Human Rights First and RAICIES, have found that families detained at Dilley say the water there is “unclean, foul-smelling, and causes stomachaches.”)

Marcano also said that one child found a bug in her food in the facility’s cafeteria, leading other kids not to want to eat. Not long after that, children in the facility began to fall sick, including Amalia. In January, Amalia developed a high fever, and at the facility’s clinic, Amalia was given ibuprofen and her parents were told the fever was “good, because it means she’s fighting off a virus.”

But after two weeks, the fever persisted, and Amalia started vomiting and having diarrhea. Going back to Dilley’s medical clinic didn’t help, as Marcano told The New Yorker she waited in line on eight different occasions without her concerns being addressed. Marcano at one point gave Amalia a cold bath to try to lower her temperature, only for her daughter to pass out. She went to the clinic and shouted, “Are you going to watch my baby die in my arms?”

A few days later, the facility’s clinic measured Amalia’s blood-oxygen saturation levels, which are supposed to be between 95 percent and 100 percent for a healthy person. Amalia’s were in the low 50s, a level so low that it can kill off parts of the brain. This was enough for ICE to allow Amalia to be sent to a local hospital, and eventually a larger hospital in San Antonio, where she was diagnosed with Covid-19, RSV, bronchitis, pneumonia, and an ear infection. She got supplemental oxygen and intensive care.

Even in the hospital, ICE agents constantly supervised Marcano and Amalia, writing down when she spoke with the nurses, and even getting upset when nurses gave her a bag of clothes and hygiene items. After 10 days in the hospital, the pair were sent back to Dilley, and Amalia was prescribed a medicine to be administered by nebulizer, which her mom said was confiscated by agents.

Amalia and her family were released after 57 days in detention without Amalia’s birth certificate, her vaccination records, or the medication. Her story later showed up in a congressional hearing with then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March. But as the article states, Amalia was one of many children suffering from medical neglect in ICE custody, most of whom we will likely never learn about.

On Tuesday, responding to Meloni’s comment the day before, Trump told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that he was “shocked by her. I thought she was brave, but I was wrong.”

Meloni had said it was “unacceptable” that Trump called the pope “weak on crime” and “terrible on foreign policy.”

“The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and proper that he call for peace and condemn all forms of war,” Meloni said in a statement. Trump told the newspaper that “it’s her who’s unacceptable, because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance.”

The war in Iran is unpopular in Italy, and Meloni announced on Tuesday that her government has suspended a defense cooperation agreement with Israel. Italy’s continued refusal to join the war has left Trump fuming.

“They pay the highest energy costs in the world and are not even ready to fight for the Strait of Hormuz.… They depend on Donald Trump ​to keep it open,” Trump said.

Almost 80 percent of Italians say they are Catholic, and Vatican City, where the Catholic Church is headquartered and where the pope lives, is located entirely within the Italian city of Rome. The pope opposes the war in Iran, and told reporters on Monday, “Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent ‌people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way to do this.”

A report last week revealed that the Department of Defense had threatened the pope in January after he criticized increased U.S. militarism during his yearly address. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned the Vatican’s U.S. representative, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and told him that “the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

That appears to have caused a ripple effect leading to Trump feuding with both the American-born pope and a right-wing leader whom he used to count as a close ally. Considering Trump’s penchant for refusing to admit when he’s wrong, U.S. relations with both the pope and Italy may be strained for some time.

Both lawmakers were facing House Ethics investigations into sexual assault allegations against them.  Gonzales, whose resignation will be effective at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, was accused of sexual misconduct with women who worked for him, including a staffer who later died by suicide. Swalwell resigned merely an hour after yet another woman, Lonna Drewes, came forward and said she was raped by him in 2018 in an incident that made her think she died.

“I had contact with Eric Swalwell on three separate occasions after meeting him socially. He offered me connections to further my software company, and I also had an interest in local politics. He invited me to two public events. I knew he was married at the time and that his wife was pregnant. He was my friend,” Drewes said on Tuesday afternoon. “On the third occasion, I believe he drugged my drink. I only had ONE glass of wine. He—we were supposed to go to a political event and he said he needed to get paperwork from his hotel room. When I arrived at his hotel room, I was already incapacitated and I couldn’t move my arms or my body. He raped me. And he choked me. And while he was choking me, I lost consciousness. And I thought I died. I did not consent to any sexual activity, although I did not undergo a rape kit at the time, I disclosed this all to the people closest to me.”

”My delay in taking action against Eric was driven by fear, not doubt. Fear of his political power, his background as an attorney, and his family law enforcement ties. I have never doubted what happened, I stand with the other women WHO have come forward. And I will be making a report to law enforcement shortly with my attorneys.”

Lonna Drewes on Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA): "I had contact with Eric Swalwell on three separate occasions...On the third occasion I believe he drugged my drink...he raped me and he choked me...I did not consent to any sexual activity...I have never doubted what happened. I stand… pic.twitter.com/1mJPrZPQrx

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 14, 2026

Swalwell—who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women—was a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, and Gonzales was actively running for reelection for the House. Now they are both out of a job.  

This story has been updated. 

During the latest episode of Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered podcast, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host the president picked to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, revealed some of the president’s unorthodox beliefs about health.

“Your dad argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass, if poured on grass, so therefore it must kill cancer cells inside the body,” Oz said.

Don Jr. laughed incredulously at his father’s apparent delusion.

Oz recounted Trump’s defense when the health official spotted him drinking Fanta aboard Air Force One. “He starts to like, sheepishly grin. He goes, ‘You know this stuff’s good for me. It kills cancer cells.’ And then he tells me, ‘It’s fresh squeezed, so how bad can it be for you?’”

Dr. Oz: Trump argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass, if poured on grass, and therefore it kills cancer cells inside the body pic.twitter.com/JNDffH8aGY

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 14, 2026

“But then, maybe he’s on to something,” Don Jr. replied, boasting about his dad’s level of energy, recall, and stamina.

But we wouldn’t recommend writing prescriptions for Diet Dr. Pepper quite yet. Trump has repeatedly been spotted dozing off during press conferences, bill signings, and Cabinet meetings, among other apparent instances of cognitive decline.

Obviously, Trump’s attitudes about diet soda wouldn’t matter if he were simply any ordinary 79-year-old man. But he’s the president of the United States, who plans to make sweeping cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal science and health care programs in order to keep waging war abroad, all while remaining less than transparent about his apparent health issues.

The bill, introduced Tuesday by House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, would establish a “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office,” a move that would allow Congress to complete its part in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process. It also calls for the commission to hold “a medical examination of the President to determine whether the President is mentally or physically unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.”

The bill essentially bypasses JD Vance, as Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment requires either the vice president and the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to determine the president is no longer fit for office.

“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ,” Raskin said in a statement. “We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation.”

It remains highly unlikely that this attempt will be successful, even as some of Trump’s staunchest former supporters call on Congress to “25th Amendment his ass.” If the bill does somehow pass the Republican-controlled House and Trump vetoes it, which he likely would, then at least two-thirds of both the House and Senate would have to agree to overturn his veto.

In a 2–1 ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a writ of mandamus Tuesday rebuking U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, saying that he overstepped his authority by pursuing the charges against former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials. In March 2025, DHS quickly deported over 100 Venezuelans that the administration claimed were gang members, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to justify their removal without due process.

The immigrants were put on planes to El Salvador as part of an agreement with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, to house them in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, where human rights abuses are alleged to take place. These flights took place in spite of Boasberg ordering them to stop.

Boasberg subsequently ruled that “probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt” for the government’s defiance of his order, but over the next year, the administration dodged the contempt charges with multiple appeals to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which deliberated on whether Boasberg had the authority to hold the federal government in contempt.

The two judges who ruled against Boasberg, Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, were both appointed by Trump, and they claimed the lower court judge abused his power with the contempt probe.

“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy,” wrote Rao in the majority opinion. “These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion.”

Incensed over Boasberg, Trump called for his impeachment last year, earning a rare and light rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who warned about attacks on the judicial branch of government. While Boasberg isn’t being penalized with this ruling, the White House will be happy that none of its officials, for now, will face penalties for breaking the law.

Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, are scheduled to accompany Donald Trump on a state trip to China next month, Kimberly Benza, a spokesperson for the Trump organization, told Reuters Tuesday.

Two sources told Reuters that Eric and other members of the Trump family planned to work on business relations between the U.S. and China, but Benza insisted that Eric was attending the trip in a “personal capacity.”

“He does not have business ​ventures in China nor plans on doing business in China. He will not be ‌participating ⁠in private meetings, but will instead stand alongside the President to mark this historic occasion,” Benza said.

Donald Trump has previously alleged that Hunter Biden made a fortune from business dealings in Ukraine and China thanks to his father’s connections. Now it appears that the president is setting his own children up to do just that. This is the kind of thing that should raise alarm bells in Washington but probably won’t.

Eric serves as executive vice president of development for the Trump Organization, which does not currently have any upcoming real estate projects in China. But during Trump’s last term, China and its state-owned entities paid a whopping $5.5 million at properties owned by the president’s family—far more than any other country.

Eric and his brother Don Jr. co-founded World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform that has attracted the financial interest of foreign investors who then benefited from Trump’s policy changes.

Eric and Don Jr. recently merged their publicly traded golf course holding company with Powerus, a Florida-based drone company, with the goal of filling the gaps left by the Trump administration’s ban on Chinese drones, another blatant move to profit off their father’s policy changes.

In October, Donald Trump and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto were caught on a hot mic discussing plans to set up a meeting between “good boy” Eric, the foreign leader, and another potential business associate. In February, speaking from his father’s gilded ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, Eric didn’t bother to push back on claims that the brothers had financially benefited from their father’s office.

“You have the authority to go ahead and release more [of the Epstein files], do you not?” Blanche was asked Tuesday on Fox News. “And you have the authority to go to Congress, perhaps?”

“No, we have released everything,” Blanche replied. “So listen, we reviewed six million pieces of paper. What we released with anything that’s associated with the Epstein file. So we are not sitting on a single piece of paper.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing that should be released. If we find something else tomorrow, we’ll release it. I don’t anticipate we will. So the misguided assumption that there is more to be released is because we reviewed millions and millions of pages within the department, millions of which had nothing to do with Epstein.… If we didn’t release it, it’s because it was not responsive to the law, and therefore not part of the Epstein files.… By law, we had to make certain redactions.… But we said to Congress, any congressman can come in and spend as much time as they want looking at everything unredacted.”

FOX NEWS: You have the authority to go ahead and release more Epstein files, do you not?

ACTING AG TODD BLANCHE: No. We have released everything. We are not sitting on a single piece of paper. If we didn't release it, it's because it was not responsive to the law. pic.twitter.com/i9dnICXNh9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

“I don’t know how this department or this president can be more transparent than saying ‘American people, here is every single document in our entire database. And if we had to redact it … anybody can come look at it if you’re a member of Congress.’”

This is facetious at best. As reported earlier this year, 2.5 million documents in the Justice Department’s investigative files on Epstein have yet to be released publicly, and many of the 3.5 million pages that were released have been redacted to hell.

“Todd Blanche needs a reminder that there’s a legally binding subpoena for documents that is different than the law,” Democratic Representative Robert Garcia wrote on X. “This investigation is not a hoax. The DOJ needs to release the rest of files.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration flagrantly defied it.

On Easter Sunday, Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, sent out a blatantly Christian email to some 100,000 government employees. The subject line read: “He has risen!”

“Happy Easter—He is Risen indeed!” starts the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.

“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed,” continues the email, signed by the secretary. “Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life—risen life—there is hope.”

Staffers were shocked by the constitutional violation.

“This has never happened before,” one government employee, who described the email as “grotesque,” told Wired. “I have never gotten a message like this from anyone.”

The same employee noted that such a message wouldn’t even be expected from military chaplains, commissioned officers who provide religious services.

Another employee, a 15-year veteran of the department, told the Post, “I have never seen that overtly of a religious email in all my years of government service.... It’s a separation of state and religion for a reason.”

Yet another employee found it telling that Rollins was “forcing religion down everybody’s throat,” noting that non-Christian USDA employees had expressed concern about their futures in the department.

A USDA spokesperson insisted to Wired that Rollins was “within her rights” to issue an Easter-themed missive.

But the note was just one of many breaches by the Trump administration of America’s longstanding religious freedom. Weeks into his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the official White House Faith Office, led by televangelist pastor Paula White-Cain. That same week, Trump issued another executive order to “end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.”

Months later in July, the Office of Personnel Management issued a similar memo, effectively allowing federal employees to attempt to convert their colleagues in the workplace and encourage them to pray in the workplace.

The Department of Labor also established its own faith office, where its religious leader, Kenneth Wolfe, hosts monthly worship services.

“Generally, people who are working for the government understand that their job is to work on behalf of all Americans,” an unnamed source at the Labor Department told Wired. “And this is something very different. This is very explicitly Christian, and even within the realm of Christianity, a very narrow representation of that.”

“People are uncomfortable. I know several who are offended and angry,” they continued. “These [worship services] are very Christian in nature.”

The evangelical infusions have been unabashed and shameless. In January, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and the senior adviser on faith and community outreach at USDA, Alveda King, told DOL employees that “we have different denominations, different faiths, and some have no faith.”

“Those are the ones I would be more concerned about,” King emphasized.

In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged Americans to pray “every day” on their knees “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Employees say the hyper-fixation on Christianity has made the federal government a very uncomfortable place to work, spurring an environment in which staffers fear religion-based retaliation. Another staffer told Wired plainly that the “vibes are bad.”

“They always spend a lot of time carrying on like, ‘No one’s forcing you to pray, these are voluntary,’” they said. “But it’s happening in the middle of a government workplace.”

Speaking on Newsmax’s Wake Up America Tuesday morning, Marshall was asked about the Iran war, and the Kansas politician was dismissive of its negative economic effects on the American people.

“I’m sorry the gas prices are going up, but help is on its way, and your national security, yes, is even more important than your pocketbook,” Marshall said.

Sen. Roger Marshall: "I'm sorry that gas prices are going up, but help is on the way, and your national security is even more important than your pocketbook." pic.twitter.com/GSUEDVHQml

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

Marshall doubled down when asked how long Americans would be paying higher energy costs, saying, “I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War II.”

“Could you imagine trying to tell the president, ‘Look, you only got so many days to defeat Hitler or defeat Japan?’ We have to do it till we get the outcome that we want. I hope it’s weeks and not months, but at the end of the day, Americans are going to be safer,” Marshall said.

NEWSMAX: How long do you think Americans will be willing to pay the higher energy costs?

SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War 2. Could you imagine telling the president, 'You only got so many days to defeat Hitler?' pic.twitter.com/eEYmUlxxUh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

This is all rather callous to say with gas prices averaging $4 per gallon across the country and more than $5 per gallon in places like California and Oregon, all because of a war of choice that had nothing to do with any imminent threats to the U.S. The latest threats to national security were actually caused by President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, and Marshall is stubbornly defending the war out of loyalty to him.

The warning came in a letter addressed to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

“Far from being a mere procedure, democracy recognizes the dignity of every person and calls each citizen to participate responsibly in the pursuit of the common good,” Leo wrote. “Democracy remains healthy, however, only when rooted in the moral law and a true vision of the human person. Lacking this foundation, it risks becoming either a majoritarian tyranny or a mask for the dominance of economic and technological elites.”

While the statement didn’t mention President Trump by name, it’s hard not to see Leo’s warning as the latest installment of their ideological feud. Trump says the pope, of all people, is “weak on crime,” and doesn’t understand why his Holiness is opposed to an illegal and deadly war on Iran. Leo has responded with the case for a democracy rooted in Catholic social teaching that “regards power not as an end in itself, but as a means ordered toward the common good.”

The letter also comes just a day after the pope stated that he was not a politician and had “no fear” of the Trump administration. Read his letter here.

Gregg Phillips, who serves as associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has repeatedly doubled down on claims that he was instantaneously transported 50 miles to one of the popular chain restaurant’s locations.

In a brief interview with CNN’s KFile, Trump was directly asked about Phillips’s wild journey.

“What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?” Trump said.

After being assured that Phillips was very much not kidding, Trump replied: “I don’t know anything about him teleporting.… It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”

Trump’s apparent disbelief underscores just how little the president knows—or cares—about anyone who works for him. Phillips has made a slew of outrageous claims in the past. He previously claimed to have spoken with God and with Satan, and claimed that he was “already dead” but was kept around to do God’s work. Phillips has said that many of these instances occurred while he was undergoing self-directed treatment for metastatic bone cancer, using ivermectin and fenbendazole.

After a 2025 incident where he said he collapsed at a Lowes and came to in a McDonald’s parking lot, with 15,000 steps logged in his health app and a Big Mac in his lap, he insisted: “The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all—it fell with me.”

“This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing,” he said.

But one of his rather outrageous claims may have been exactly what kept him in Trump’s circles. Phillips is a major proponent of the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory that Trump only lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him.

Since Phillips’s outlandish claims first began to circulate in March, FEMA’s No. 3 official has been relegated to the sidelines of his own agency—enraging Phillips, multiple insiders at FEMA told CNN.

Péter Magyar, who unseated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Sunday in a landslide, told reporters Monday that the outbound leader had diverted Hungarian taxpayer funds toward financing the American Republican conference.

Magyar noted that his government will be investigating Orbán’s expenditures, and will no longer finance CPAC or other right-wing institutions abroad.

“I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place, it was a crime,” Magyar said, according to an English translation of his remarks. “Mixing party financing with government spending from the state budget is, in my view, a criminal offense, and this will have to be investigated by the future authorities, including the National Office for the Recovery and Protection of Public Assets, since those budgetary funds were not meant to finance party events.”

The Trump administration fervently advocated for Orbán in the run-up to the election. Vice President JD Vance and State Secretary Marco Rubio both traveled to Budapest to campaign for him, while Donald Trump repeatedly praised the authoritarian, far-right politician. All three American politicians endorsed Orbán, as did CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp.

Under Orbán’s 16-year rule, Hungary became an “illiberal state” with feigned elections. Orbán dismantled democratic checks and balances, silenced and controlled the news media, and weakened the country’s judiciary system.

The day of the election, CPAC’s official account released a statement in full support of its apparent antidemocratic fundraiser.

“CPAC is closely watching this very important election in Hungary today. We stand firmly with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people as they vote,” the statement read. “We have proudly held CPAC Hungary five times, and each gathering has been wildly successful, bringing together conservatives from across Europe and the United States to champion sovereignty, family, and national identity.

“He is a true example of a leader with strong conservative values who has courageously stood up to elitists and globalists from the EU and beyond to protect what is right for his country,” it continued. “We are with you, Hungary.”

Not only did Orbán lose on Sunday, but his party did, as well. Orbán’s Fidesz won just 55 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat National Assembly. Magyar’s Tisza party won 138.

Sharon Simmons was described as a “DoorDash grandma” delivering McDonald’s to the White House Monday, and she said that not having to pay taxes on the tips she receives as a driver allowed her to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments. But in three different interviews on Monday, Simmons presented conflicting numbers on how much she saved from untaxed tips.

“I figure that I’m probably going to be saving about $3,000 to $4,000,” Simmons told Fox News Digital. In another interview with Fox’s America Reports, she said half of her income came from tips, and at the White House, she said she made about $11,000 in tips. That would make her income $22,000, a salary so low that the standard deduction is what helped her—not Trump’s “no tax on tips” rule.

On top of that, footage resurfaced of Simmons testifying before Congress last July, in which she extolled the benefits of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” claiming that it would help her as a caregiver and mother. Republican Representative David Kustoff had posted her testimony to his X account.

🇺🇸 During the @WaysandMeansGOP field hearing in Nevada, I had the privilege of hearing from Sharon Simmons about how the One Big Beautiful Bill will make a real difference in her life. As a mother and caregiver, she shared how this tax relief will help her and her family.

Her… pic.twitter.com/3nkdGBT3u4

— Rep. David Kustoff (@RepDavidKustoff) July 28, 2025

This makes it obvious the event was staged, as were the mathematically incorrect talking points. A DoorDash communications employee, Julian Crowley, seemed to be crashing out as this came to light, claiming on X that while the event was planned between DoorDash and the White House, Simmons is a real DoorDash employee.*

One X user pointed out that because Simmons is not actually a D.C. resident and was flown to Washington from Arkansas, she was receiving compensation and may be considered an “undisclosed lobbyist.” It’s clear the White House’s feel-good event Monday wasn’t what it appeared to be.

* This article previously misnamed the DoorDash communications employee.

Trump removed the post Monday after receiving a 24-hour tidal wave of backlash from his MAGA supporters, including Riley Gaines, an anti-trans activist and right-wing commentator who had struggled to make sense of the president’s post.

“Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this?” Gaines wrote on X Monday. “Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.”

When asked that afternoon if he took the post down because of Gaines’s and others’ criticism, Trump said: “I didn’t listen to Riley Gaines. I’m not a big fan of Riley, actually.”

Gaines’s response to being called out by the president was predictably sycophantic.

“I love the President and I’m so grateful he’s in the Oval Office. Of course, I’ll continue to support him and the America First agenda,” she wrote on X. “At the end of the day, I do nothing for the approval of man. Our purpose on this earth is to glorify Him in all we do. The truth social post missed the mark. It’s now deleted. Amazing!

“I know with the President it’s really not personal,” Gaines added.

So, even after Trump slighted her, Gaines still managed to find a way to exalt him. Forgiveness is a virtue, but this is just embarrassing.

Trump has offered limp excuses for the post and claimed he had to remove it because it was confusing to people. But despite his dismissals, it seems clear that some dregs of backlash did reach their way into the Oval Office.

Republican lawmakers and politicians are turning on the Catholic Church to defend the president’s warmongering.

Speaking with Fox News Monday night, Senator Lindsey Graham spoke directly to Pope Leo XIV, telling him that he was “miscalculating” by advocating for world peace.

Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Vatican ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. In the days since that report, Trump has fired off several antagonistic comments against the leader of the Catholic Church, repeatedly attempting to sour the pope’s reputation by claiming that Leo is “terrible for foreign policy” and “weak on crime.” That is, despite the fact that religious leaders are neither responsible for foreign policy nor in charge of lowering crime rates.

Graham went on to compare Iran’s ayatollah to Nazi Germany, claiming that the religious order really did not “get” the level of “evil” that Trump was contending with in Iran.

Also Monday night, in a roundtable on CNN, prominent Republican donor Hal Lambert claimed that the clash was “all about trying to hurt President Trump’s Catholic vote for Republicans during the midterms,” citing former Obama strategist David Axelrod’s visit last week to the Vatican.

The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second-most-popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.

Vice President JD Vance—who converted to Catholicism in 2019—tried to squash the beef, telling Fox News that “it’s a good thing” that the White House and the Holy See are at odds with each other.

“We’re always going to have disagreements on matter of public policy,” Vance said. “We certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican, but we’re also going to disagree on substantive questions from time to time, and I don’t think it’s particularly newsworthy.”

It’s not clear how “good” that relationship is, however. Many in the Vatican reportedly interpreted the Pentagon meeting as a threat to use military force against the religious order. The church has since rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

But feuding with a peace-loving pope has not been Trump’s only recent Christian faux pas. Over the weekend, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ to Truth Social, setting off sparks among even some of his most ardent supporters. Several Floridians interviewed by MS NOW on Monday said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, which depicts Trump as a haloed messiah.

“That’s a disgrace. I’m very upset about that. I mean, how egotistical can you possibly be?” said John North, a medical lab worker. “I’m ashamed that he would actually do that. A man I voted for and trust. How could he do that? I mean, people are going to see this at work. I’m upset about that.”

Trump has since deleted the post, telling reporters at the White House that he thought it illustrated him as a doctor healing people.

“Are you on the pope’s side or the president’s side?” a TMZ reporter asked Cruz on Monday evening.

“You know what, I’m quite confident that both the pope and the president can speak for themselves,” Cruz replied.

“Well, they are going through a very public sort of beef right now—”

“I understand you wanna get me in the middle of that,” Cruz interrupted. “I trust both of them to express their own views.”

TMZ then proceeded to ask Cruz various questions regarding Trump’s attack, all of which Cruz rebuffed. “Every way you ask the question you’re gonna get the same answer.”

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Republican senator Ted Cruz wouldn't say if he's Team Trump or Team Pope, no matter how many different ways he was asked. 👀 pic.twitter.com/AO3qbXVS0A

— TMZ (@TMZ) April 13, 2026

This beef with the pope—in which Trump called him “weak on crime” and accused him of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon—comes while Trump and his base are still reeling from the president’s AI post depicting himself as Jesus Christ. Cruz, a devout Southern Baptist, hasn’t commented on that either.

Speaking to Fox News Monday night, the vice president made a startling admission about how Donald Trump intended to end the war in Iran.

“When it comes to weapons of war, what they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. They’ve basically threatened any ship that’s moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Well, as the president of the United States showed, two can play at that game,” Vance said.

VANCE: What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. As the President showed, two can play at that game. pic.twitter.com/pd9HIdamV7

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2026

“And if the Iranians are going to try and engage in economic terrorism, we’re going to abide by a simple principle: that no Iranian ships are going to get out either,” Vance said.

Still, the vice president insisted that Trump only wanted to see Iranians “thrive and succeed,” as if the president had not threatened to end their entire civilization a little more than a week ago.

Trump’s naval blockade on Iranian ports began Monday. A sustained military blockade would be incredibly expensive and require a large number of warships, and U.S. allies have made it very clear they have no intention of helping out. While it may seem like a quick fix, taking Iranian oil off the market will only squeeze the market, causing energy prices to surge higher. Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon, as crude oil has climbed to over $100 per barrel.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

When Donald Trump viciously attacked the pope and then posted a picture depicting himself as a divine figure, it provoked a massive backlash from many in his own base. That was bad enough, but then Trump offered some rambling spin on it all that was so preposterous in its dishonesty, so insulting, that it quickly made things worse. We think this mess hints at deeper truths about how Trump approaches religious voters, particularly the right-wing evangelicals who are critical to his support. It also helps explain why the Trump coalition and the Trump project are so fragile right now. So we invited on Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of several books about religion and the American right, to make sense of all this for us. Robert, good to have you on.

Robert Jones: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Sargent: So Trump is angry because Pope Leo has repeatedly criticized the Iran war and especially Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization. In response, Trump unleashed this crazed rant describing the pope as “weak on crime,” adding this: “I don’t want a pope who thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also said, “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the president of the United States” because I’m doing what I was elected for. Robert, I wanted to get your general thoughts on that first.

Jones: Well, I’ll start with the last one. “I was doing what I was elected for”—Trump, of course, thinks that now that he’s been elected, he can be constrained by nothing but his own whims. That’s really what he’s reacting to here.

But in this case, he’s got the leader of a worldwide church who is also operating out of a 2,000-year-old theological tradition. Leo is not firing from the hip here. He really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism is not just about the war. It is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching. Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever. This is the authoritarian playbook. That you should have no dissenters, and certainly no dissenters with influence or power.

Sargent: Exactly. And it doesn’t matter whether they speak for a 2,000-year-old religion or not. So Trump also posted this deranged image that portrayed him as a divine figure in a white robe, healing a sick man by placing his hand on the man’s forehead. This got MAGA figures angry.

Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an anti-Christ spirit.” A Daily Wire reporter called it “outrageous blasphemy,” adding “he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness.” Christian MAGA activist Sean Fucht said: “This should be deleted immediately.” And former Republican spinner Ari Fleischer said “it’s inappropriate and embarrassing—it’s offensive.”

There was much more like that. Robert, can you just explain at the core why this image is seen as blasphemous?

Jones: Well, Trump is clearly displaying himself as Jesus. In the image he’s got on a white robe with a kind of red robe over it. You could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus dressed this way—this white robe, this red sash over the top. He’s got this glowing hand as he’s leaning over this person in their sickbed.

So this is also this depiction of supernatural divine healing power that he’s claiming for himself. One other thing is that this is not the first time Trump has done this. It was actually just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the pope, dressed up in papal vestments. This is not the first time he’s posted things like this, assuming either the chair of the pope himself or the image of Jesus.

Sargent: Well, Trump actually deleted the image of himself as a divine figure. Now let’s listen to how he tried to spin his way out of this.

Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, it wasn’t a depict—it was me. I did post it and I thought it was me as the doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. So I had—I just heard about it. And I said, “How did they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor.”

Sargent: So, Robert, apparently Trump thinks doctors have celestial light pouring forth from their palms and can heal people by touching them, as the picture showed. What did you make of his excuse?

Jones: He’s reaching deep for this one. The problem is that the image really didn’t allow much wiggle room. So the best he could say is, I’m a doctor, I’m at a bedside.

But there are angels in the air behind him. And as we said, these glowing palms. So he’s just trying to obfuscate and back away from it. And again, if he thought this was just an image of him as a doctor and did this innocently, why remove it? Just leave it up if you really believe in it.

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. It’s obvious and very clear that a big motivator here, a big core of this whole thing, is that for Donald Trump, he doesn’t really understand why something like this would actually bother a lot of people, don’t you think?

Jones: That’s a really good insight. Things that are sacred, things that are holy, things that deserve awe and respect and deference. These are all religious emotions that actual people who have some sense of piety take very seriously. That’s why we’re seeing some of this kind of reaction, even from some of his strongest supporters, is because they also have a religious sensibility.

Whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off very tin ear, because he just has no sense of piety. It becomes very clear, whether it’s his misnaming a book of the Bible, walking across the street, clearing it with some violence and then holding up a Bible awkwardly in front of a church. These are all things that actual religious people wouldn’t do that way. But he just has no innate sense of that.

Sargent: So Robert, I wonder if part of what we’re seeing here is that in Trump’s genuine understanding of the situation, evangelicals really do matter a lot more within his base than Catholics do. What does the data show on that? It confirms that, right? How would these different groups perceive this controversy generally?

Jones: That’s right. His strongest supporters have always been white evangelical Protestants. They have voted more than eight in 10 for him every time he has been on the ballot. Catholics are a much more complex story. His support among Catholics has actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines.

He’s always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six in 10 for him, not 85 percent for him. The real difference is that inside the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democratic, typically. In the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics that supported him, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. There’s this racial tension inside the Catholic Church, and it’s just not a monolith in the way that it is among white evangelicals.

His statement that he could walk down the middle of the street and shoot somebody in the middle of the day and people would still vote for him—I think that’s actually largely true among white evangelicals today. In fact, he made that comment at an evangelical college in the first place. It’s not so true among Catholics.

Sargent: I want to ask you about that, because it seems like there may be a fundamental difference between how devout evangelicals and how devout Catholics perceive Trump. Evangelicals are much more prone to understand Trump as a flawed vessel sent to them by God to carry out his and their plans in the world. Whereas Catholics aren’t really at that place. Is that distinction correct?

Jones: That’s fair. Catholics have much more complex reasons for supporting Trump than white evangelicals do. His messianic appearances actually resonate much stronger with evangelicals than they do among Catholics. You can see that in the favorability numbers, too—Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals, even today, is 70 percent. It hardly ever wavers, no matter what happens.

But his favorability among even white Catholics who voted for him is only about 53 percent. It’s just barely in majority territory today.

Sargent: What is his favorability rating with Catholics overall right now?

Jones: With Catholics overall, it’s actually a little bit underwater—just below majority. But that’s because his favorability rating among Hispanic Catholics is 25 percent. It’s half as high as among white Catholics.

Sargent: So let’s listen to some more of Trump here. He’s asked if he’ll apologize to Pope Leo. Then he says this.

Reporter (voiceover): You don’t apologize?

Donald Trump (voiceover): No, I don’t, because Pope Leo said things that are wrong. He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran. And you cannot have a nuclear Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You’d have hundreds of millions of people dead, and it’s not going to happen. So I can’t. I think he’s very weak on crime and other things. So I’m not. I mean, he went public. I’m just responding to Pope Leo. And you know, his brother is a big MAGA person, and he’s a great guy, Louis. And I said, I like Louis better than I like the pope.

Sargent: So, Robert, what do you make of that? All this makes it a lot worse, doesn’t it?

Jones: Well, the never-apologize mantra, right? Straight from Roger Stone all the way through. This is his MO. Just while we’re talking about religion, it was striking to me when he was running for president the first time around, where he just outright admitted he’s never even asked God for forgiveness. He outright said, “I’ve never asked forgiveness for my sins,” which for most Christians is a pretty threshold moment to joining the religion or becoming part of the religion.

This is really part of his MO. Don’t ask forgiveness, even of God. Certainly don’t apologize to any human being. Just stand by it. But you’re right that in this case, it is so far over the line—it may actually do some damage.

Sargent: Another way to put this is that he thinks of himself as answering to a higher authority than the pope, and that higher authority is Roy Cohn.

Jones: Yeah, that’s right.

Sargent: He’s basically applying his longtime policy of never backing down—which was taught to him by Roy Cohn—to his relations with the pope, a spiritual leader of many, many millions who is operating from a 2,000-year-old theology.

If you think about it, the pope is saying some fairly unsurprising things. He’s saying that violent conquest and domination are contrary to the spirit of the Lord, that we have to take care to welcome the stranger. These are things that he probably shouldn’t be surprised by coming from the pope. But Trump is only capable of understanding this as an affront to him personally. I wonder whether that makes things worse in the minds of at least some religious people. Can you talk about that?

Jones: Well, being surprised by something depends on having some knowledge of where the benchmark is in order to even know whether you should be surprised by something. Trump is so out of his depth here that he doesn’t really even realize what he’s walked into. Catholic just war tradition goes back to Saint Augustine. It is more than 1,500 years old, serious Catholic theology. It’s very developed, and it’s over the very serious question of: If there’s a state that has a monopoly on violence and can wield it at such high levels, what are the moral restraints that should be placed on a state—even on a king, in its original formulations? It turns out there are moral constraints according to Catholic moral tradition.

One of the key ones is that there’s no such thing as a preemptive just war. In other words, preemption is never a moral reason to go to war. War always has to be a last resort, after all modes of diplomacy have failed, and there has to be an imminent threat before. You could imagine a different world in which Trump knew this tradition and tried to frame a justification for going to war with Iran that might meet some of those criteria, even if it were kind of spun very heavily. But he hasn’t even attempted to do this. He just doesn’t really realize the kind of bandsaw he’s run into here with Catholic moral theology.

Sargent: I want to clarify for listeners what you’re saying here, which is that the just war doctrine and the laws of armed conflict are nourished by Catholic theology going back to Saint Augustine.

Jones: It’s really telling in that clip you’ve played about Trump that he’s simply appealing to ends. If you think about ends and means in your philosophy classes, he’s just appealing to an end and saying, We should want this kind of end with Iran. And if we want that end, then we could just go to war.

But that’s not the way moral philosophy works. There are principles that one must meet. You can’t just declare an end and then willy-nilly deploy any means to getting there. That’s the whole point of moral theology; to limit what can be done, particularly when we’re talking about wielding violence. The thing that is so revealing is that Trump can’t even recognize the functioning of a principle that might limit power. That’s just not even in his lexicon.

Sargent: It’s probably worth bringing in here Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s been holding these monthly sermons at the Pentagon, which is itself probably a violation of the church-state separation. Pete Hegseth is a Christian Reconstructionist, and that’s really a radical theology. Hegseth has also, not coincidentally, been essentially saying that maximal force and violence and brutality is a good thing. He’s been saturated with bloodlust and sadism as he’s talked about how our precision weaponry will kill people on a mass scale. He even recited one prayer which essentially said, in some form or other, the Iranian enemy doesn’t hear God when he cries to God.

By contrast, Pete Hegseth believes he does hear God when he speaks to God—God speaks to Pete Hegseth, but not to the enemy. That itself is something that, if I understand correctly, Pope Leo is rebutting. Is he not? Can you explain that?

Jones: Pope Leo rebutted it directly by saying that God does not hear the prayers of those who pray for violence. So he came straight at those in response to that. We do have these diametrically opposed things, where one is saying, We are declaring ourselves the instruments of God’s violent justice in the world and God is on our side.

What Pope Leo is saying is something quite different. He’s saying, No, we actually have to go through this process to figure out whether what we’re doing can actually put us on God’s side, which is a very different way of thinking about it.

Sargent: Do you think a lot of religious Catholics out there will understand this dimension of the debate? Will they see Trump not just blaspheming himself, but also being so diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine on principle? Will that trouble them?

Jones: I think it will. It may be a cumulative thing. They’ll see the tension between Pope Leo and Trump. They’ll definitely see it, because he’s an American pope. That’ll make it much more resonant than perhaps other popes. But I think what will happen is because of the way that Pope Leo is carving out this very careful moral theological stance—that trickles down to the bishops and to parish priests. It creates a space for very different conversations to happen.

Because the most powerful thing is what happens at the local community level. Not what happens on high. Pope Leo’s leadership here is creating more space for bishops and parish priests to have a different conversation—one where maybe they just have a whole Bible study or a whole theology study on the Catholic just war tradition. And if you do that you’re very quickly going to discover there’s no way to shoehorn this Iran war into anything to be approved by that tradition.

Sargent: Do you think that Pope Leo, by saying this stuff, is actually in some subtle way trying to invite these conversations on the local level?

Jones: I think so. That’s the church’s job, to provide moral teaching, and that’s part of what the hierarchy does. It organizes the worldwide church and can influence certain kinds of conversations and bring them to the fore. By spotlighting this as something very important, addressing it on Easter—these are very strong signals to local parishes that this is actually something important to talk about.

Sargent: What that would ultimately mean is that Pope Leo is, in some sense, subtly undermining Trump with a constituency among whom he’s already vulnerable.

Jones: I don’t think Pope Leo would think about it directly like that, but that may be the end result. I did take a little bit of a look, and what’s important to remember is that Trump’s super-support among evangelicals largely occurs among states that are very safe Republican states. So even if he dropped 10 points among evangelicals, he’d probably still be OK.

But his support among Catholics, particularly white Catholics, is very heavily concentrated in places that are all swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—these are places where elections are won or lost. If you’re thinking about very close elections in those states—again, 60 percent of white Catholics voted for him, his favorability is now 53 percent among white Catholics, only 46 percent of white Catholics support the war in Iran—if he loses 10 points among white Catholics, it’s game over in those swing states.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, can you explain how that plays out for JD Vance in 2028? He’s someone who converted to Catholicism, and he’s making that a major part of his political identity.

Jones: He did, very early on. And he’s also earned his own direct rebuke from the Vatican when he tried to bastardize a Catholic teaching about immigrants—he was trying to invoke the Ordo Amoris, the Order of Loves. He was trying to say, First we love our family, then we love our friends, then we love our community, and then we love the rest of the world. He got a straight rebuke from the Vatican saying, No, actually, that’s not the way this theology works. So he may run into the same problems, even though he himself is Catholic. And because he’s Catholic, that may actually create more problems for him than it does for Trump.

Sargent: Because he’ll have to explain himself in more detail?

Jones: I think so. And if you consider yourself to be a Catholic in good standing, how then can you be being rebuked by the head of the Catholic Church at the same time?

Sargent: Well, best of luck to JD Vance sorting that one out. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Robert Jones’s new book, which will be out soon. It’s called Backslide. It’s about Christian nationalism and democracy. Robert, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Jones: Thanks so much.

This attitude might sound an awful lot like what we’ve come to know as a “tradwife”—a woman celebrating and righteously elevating the quintessentially feminine. A woman beatific in the awareness that life’s deepest meaning lies in kneading dough, gazed upon by the adoring faces of small children, a shaft of warm sunlight in the kitchen. 

Yet this was also the woman who wrote with unapologetic frankness, “I hate domesticity.” She sent her son to boarding school when he was 3 years old, and later confessed in a letter to Hahn, a close friend, her “most passionate desire just TO GO AWAY.” West did go away, often: to Yugoslavia, to Mexico, to the southern United States. Her son had a tortured childhood and went on to excoriate West for it in a novel of his own, whose publication West tried her hardest to block.

“Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built,” wrote West in her magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. “The other half of us is nearly mad.”

West is referring here to the absurd human impulse to go to war, having just witnessed the devastation of World War II Britain. But she also, Cooke suggests, is speaking to a profound psychological tension she shared with Hahn and Gellhorn, between a desire for the traditionally feminine realms of motherhood, domesticity, stability, marriage—and an urge, as Martha Gellhorn expressed it in 1941, “to be hell on wheels.”

That tension is never reconciled, and remains a central thread of the book, and yet the story is also much bigger than this. Cooke manages to pull off the rare feat of profiling women writers without rendering their lives tragic tales of suppressed ambition, perpetual struggles against the limitations imposed on their sex, or exemplary narratives of triumphing over expectations. They’re all of these, of course, because how could they not be? But they’re also more than any story about how a woman should be. They evade the ideology that seems to have captured so much contemporary writing about womanhood, in which a woman must stand for something: a bold countercultural desire to “go back to the kitchen,” unflinching art monsterhood, leaning in and girlbossing—in which a woman’s story is an inspirational template or cautionary tale for other women about how to be the right kind of woman.

Instead, Cooke’s book illuminates the profound complexity of women’s lives without any apologizing, justifying, or moralizing. These women do not take flight into the great beyond and liberate themselves once and for all, or fail to do so and flounder in desperation. They leap and they return, they spin in place and they flee, they create nests and abandon them and create new ones and long for the old. They grow, learn, regret, reflect. Cooke’s book offers the reader the rare gift of space without judgment, which isn’t to say she endorses all of these women’s choices. She simply lets them live, without wedging them into some sort of moral or ideological framework. She presents them not as a blueprint but as a kind of permission, above all, to evolve: to move through many iterations of oneself and of womanhood.

These three women lived personal and professional lives of startling range. Of the three, Mickey Hahn may be the least well known, despite being absurdly prolific and immensely popular in her era. Hahn published her first book in her twenties and her last in her eighties, with more than 50 histories, biographies, memoirs, travel books, and novels in between—plus a handful of children’s books and an entire archive of feature stories and essays as a correspondent for The New Yorker. Born Emily Hahn in Missouri in 1905, she also embodies the restlessness of Cooke’s title, with one bout of self-reinvention after another. In her wild twenties, Hahn described mothers as “placid unafraid cowlike beings”; a decade later, she had survived the Japanese occupation of China, married a British Army major and had a daughter, and settled into rural domestic life in England. China to Me, her 1944 book about her years in China, detailed the adventures of a fearless twentysomething who reigned over Shanghai’s nightlife with a gibbon on her shoulder; England to Me (1949), her book about her time in England, “depicted a chorus of maternal and domestic complexity,” as she raised her children in a rural English village. Later, when Hahn’s daughters were off at school, she left again, returning to New York as a staff writer for The New Yorker, embarking on frequent international journeys.

Of Gellhorn, meanwhile, Cooke writes, “She had no idea how to handle a baby but decided, after traveling from Rome to New York, that flying with an infant was harder than covering the Russian attack on Finland.” In 1949, at the age of 41, Gellhorn became a single mother to an Italian war orphan, with whom she lived first in Cuernavaca, then Rome, and finally England. She could not, Cooke points out, “sew a button, make a bed, cook a potato,” and told her lover at one point that all she needed was books and travel. Yet she also described the experience of mothering her son, to adopt whom she had to fight using all her influence, as “having the sun built in to one’s private world.”

West’s story is arguably the most tragic: In 1913, she became pregnant by literary giant H.G. Wells, who declined to leave his wife and offered to support her and their son only if she kept his paternity secret and moved to the rural hinterlands. West was 21 years old. She refused to get an abortion or comply with Wells’s mandates, and yet, brimming with ambition and hunger for the world, she struggled with single motherhood. The decision to send her son away to school created a trauma he’d remember with bitterness all his life. She and her son would always have a contentious relationship, even as she tried constantly to reconcile with him, apologize, and support his own family—whom he ultimately abandoned. Her life’s deepest hurt was her desire to understand him and be understood; his was his inability to forgive her.

These women’s lives are less movements from A to B to C than revolutions around persistent longings and ways of seeing the world. The tensions—between stability in family relationships; motherhood; career ambition; and the need for movement, for finding meaning outside—never dissipate, nor are they reconciled. Cooke doesn’t overwrite their lives with political or ideological codes, instead asking us to find a kind of relief in their complexity, in the way their relentless seeking took many forms, at turns quiet, interior, loud, fearless, wild, humbled, gentle. They cycled through many identities and often did not recognize their former selves.

Cooke describes Mickey Hahn’s transformations in this perfect passage: “She would soon perform a series of roles, each canted at a slight angle away from how she saw herself, each a slightly more public person than the last: a woman alongside a well-known man; a pregnant woman; then a mother.… The independent young writer with the gibbon on her shoulder–not a monkey–would stay behind forever, drifting somewhere into the silt at the bottom of Shanghai’s river.” Yet long after this young, carefree version of herself had sunk into silt, Hahn returned to her passions and visions. Cooke defines Hahn and her compatriots not so much by who they were or weren’t—mothers, independent young writers, wives—but by how they performed and understood these roles, often in tension with one another.

Women can feel so much pressure to position themselves vis-à-vis their womanhood, or to adopt a particular identity around it: Are you more tradwife or career woman? Are you a ruthless artist or a crunchy mama? A “choice feminist” or a feminist? I felt this pressure intensely as a “woman writer,” a moniker that comes with its own baggage. I wrote a book about becoming a mother and quickly realized that for many in the literary world, this sounded the death knell of a “serious” career. I tried to look head on at this problem instead of running from it, advocating for motherhood as a significant subject for art. I essentially assigned myself the motherhood beat, though I discovered that the range of what is acceptable to write on that beat is limited. 

“Quite a job being a woman isn’t it; you cannot do your work and simply get on with it because that’s selfish, you have to be two things at once,” Martha Gellhorn wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt about her flailing marriage to Ernest Hemingway, who was pitching a fit about her reporting from war-torn Europe instead of tending to him on their Cuban finca. Yet it was precisely this condition of being “two things at once” that gave Gellhorn’s writing, and West’s, and Hahn’s, its poignancy, depth, and power.

Reporting from Spain during its Civil War, Gellhorn recounted both the expected drama—the bombs shattering buildings, the bodies on the front—and the surreal mix of tedium and tragedy that defines domestic life during wartime. While witnessing the advancing fascist troops from a bombed-out house, she wrote about both the troops and the house: the wedding photos, “the curling pins and emptied peroxide bottles in the bathroom.”

When she went to send her dispatch, a “laughing, condescending German” filed only part of it, having deemed it “human interest” instead of a war story. Gellhorn was furious but undeterred: She wrote of mothers and children, houses, wallpaper, and battle. While Hemingway tended to embellish the war experience into a profound and manly trial of life, death, and courage, eventually transmuting his time in Spain into For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gellhorn saw a confusing mess—“college kids on an outing”—that ended in devastation. She wrote in her journal: “Note the role of women in this mess.”

Later in life, Gellhorn fled her house in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and left her son—the war orphan she had recently adopted from Italy—with a nanny so she could hole up in Haiti and work on a novel about … the life of an Italian war orphan growing up in expatriate circles in Cuernavaca, Mexico. 

Mickey Hahn too embodied these contradictions. She wrote then-scandalous novels about her abortion and her friend who was a high-level paid escort in Shanghai; she wrote a bestselling biography of the Soong sisters, American-educated Chinese women married to China’s most prominent political figures; she wrote travel books that mixed memoir about her relationships and domestic life with political and cultural observations. She sailed third-class to the Belgian Congo at the age of 25, moved to Shanghai on a whim and learned Cantonese, relocated to World War II Chongqing as it was riddled by Japanese bombs, and made her career “like a he-man”—yet resisted the label of “feminist” when a New Yorker editor described her as one. Feminists had clubs, they had causes; she had her life and her writing.

Hahn had an aversion to politics in general, declaring she was interested in “everything else—art, sex, people, what they wanted, who they were, and how they got that way.” Still, her life and work were feminist in nature: She argued for women’s right to work, often to great frustration and exhaustion as the women of her era insisted a woman must stay home. She practiced the same sexual liberties as her husband when they lived apart, in England and New York. She traveled, relentlessly, as way of seeing and as a way of freeing herself from the pull of stasis, which could trap a woman. “Families are the devil,” she wrote Rebecca West. Still, she had two daughters and a marriage that lasted decades, until her husband’s death, and she described birth as her “ideal of an experience.”

West, for her part, explained in a letter, “I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships.” Yet that dedication to personal relationships arguably gave her the vision she needed to write books like The Meaning of Treason, a treatise on the Nuremburg trials that drew in part on her experience attending the trials for The New Yorker and in part on the paroxysms of drama she was experiencing with her son, who had left and then returned to his wife. She compared the inability of children to reconcile the love and hate they feel for their parents with the inability of the traitor to accept his society, and the urge to destroy it instead. This work, born as much out of psychoanalysis of her own motherhood as old-fashioned courtroom reporting, led a New York Times reviewer to declare, “She writes with such force as to make most male writers appear effeminate.”

Cooke could have taken a structural lens here: These women’s struggles, particularly those of single mothers Gellhorn and West, could have been ameliorated with more familial and societal support; all of the women swam upstream against sexism and discrimination that has extended even into their legacies, with the story of “new journalism” written largely as one of the gonzo bro journalists of the 1960s (all hail Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson). More structural support for women is something all of us should be fighting for if we care about the health of our society; if we truly value women’s lives and perspectives, and don’t treat them as an invisible safety net for all our social problems.

But even with those structural supports, the difficulty of being a woman, a wife, a mother, a writer, a traveler, all at once, in one short life, remains. It’s easier, but still there. Instead, it’s worth asking what this complexity and tension might offer.

In Cooke’s book I find a rare kind of permission: it’s OK to be all the things at once, messy and jumbled; or maybe one thing for two years here, or five years there, or even several decades, and then something else entirely. American culture is obsessed with linear narratives—a neat and tidy bio that shows how a person has become increasingly accomplished until they’ve reached a shining zenith; a satisfying story, in which someone ceases to be X and becomes Y, or finally gives up on A to embrace B. Mutability is unsettling. But the uncertainty and friction created by mutability is what makes great art.

After Mickey Hahn’s girls left home, she took a trip to Taiwan. “The sheer joy of reporting while traveling—the balance of toughness and flexibility it required, the spontaneity and grit—had all come sweeping back,” Cooke writes. After a whole lifetime raising children, having polite conversations with proper ladies in the English countryside, tending to her marriage, she returned, alone, to Asia, and found yet another version of herself—sans gibbon, sans pizzazz of the early ’20s, perhaps, but still leading “the strangest, most fascinating existence, wandering around in an inefficient manner,” carrying a toothbrush in her pocket in case she didn’t make it back to her guesthouse.

“My whole life I have spent squirming around, wriggling, shifting, scratching, trying to find a way to be comfortable in my skin and on earth, and failing,” Gellhorn wrote to an expat friend in Mexico. In its rendering of this “squirming … wriggling, shifting, scratching, trying,” Cooke’s book is a reminder that there is no end, no settled self, no ultimate definition—just cycles, revolutions, and returns, the traces of seeking in which other restless women may seek solace.

That’s thanks in part to shortages of electrical equipment like transformers and batteries. But many also face challenges from a growing, bipartisan backlash to data center construction. Maine’s legislature recently passed the country’s first-ever statewide moratorium on data center construction for projects over 20 megawatts, to last until November 2027. Similar bills have been introduced in at least a dozen states. The Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington voted by a margin of roughly 2-to-1 for a referendum requiring voter approval before the city can extend any preferential tax treatment to projects valued at or costing $10 million or more. The referendum was a reaction to the city approving tax incentives for a $15 billion data center project to be operated by Oracle and OpenAI. (That project will not be impacted by the vote.) In Festus, Missouri, last week, voters kicked out all four incumbents who’d voted to approve a $6 billion data center plan from the developer CRG.

Not all data centers are being built for AI hyperscalers. The International Energy Agency projects that roughly half of the electricity demand from new projects planned through 2030 will be for facilities equipped to meet needs for generative AI like ChatGPT, as opposed to the less energy-intensive data centers handling cloud storage and more traditional computing tasks. The upsides of those AI-specific projects aren’t self-evident, and there’s a growing divide between the glorious futures promised by big AI developers and what people see it actually doing—generating eerie school papers and TikTok content, for instance, or flooding X with AI-generated child pornography. In addition to concerns about rising electricity bills, air pollution, and noise, fights over data centers seem to be channeling deeper frustrations. What and whom, in other words, is all this stuff actually for?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year wrote that “the gains to quality of life from AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous; the future can be vastly better than the present.” On Thursday, meanwhile, Florida officials opened an investigation into whether OpenAI’s ChatGPT had assisted in the planning of a mass shooting last year at Florida State University, and the extent to which chatbots might “facilitate criminal activity, empower America’s enemies, or threaten our national security,” per Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. Court documents examined by a local news outlet show that the suspected shooter messaged extensively with ChatGPT about video games, dating, his feelings of isolation, and—eventually, less than a year before the shooting last April—guns. On the day of the shooting, where two FSU students were killed, he asked, “If there was a shooting at FSU, how would the country react?” and “What time is it the busiest in the FSU student union?” ChatGPT responded that the busiest time at the student union is “typically between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.”

News also broke this week that OpenAI is backing an Illinois bill that could exempt companies from liability in the event that frontier models—those trained with more than $100 million of computational costs—cause “critical harms,” like creating a weapon of mass destruction, killing more than 100 people, or causing at least $1 billion in property damage. U.S. bombs in February killed between 175 and 180 people at a primary school in southern Iran—mostly girls under the age of 12—with the help of an AI targeting system developed by Palantir for the Department of Defense. Since 2024, the Pentagon has awarded the defense contractor multiyear contracts for that system worth up to $1.4 billion.

On the more quotidian end of things, AI seems to be helping students cheat on their schoolwork, filling social media feeds with news of fake TV shows and bizarre AI fruit cucking videos, and leading otherwise rational people to fall in love with chatbots. Sloppily added large language model, or LLM, features in apps, email services, and search engines churn out useless summaries of two-line emails and false information spelled out in authoritative tones. While AI’s full impact on the U.S. job market remains “guesswork,” former Biden administration official Jennifer M. Harris argued last week, it’s deepening already historic levels of inequality. Investors are rewarding companies that announce AI-fueled layoffs with surging share prices. “What’s worse,” she adds, is that “much of the trillion-plus-dollar investment in the AI boom isn’t happening in the stock market at all—it’s happening in private funds out of reach to all but the wealthiest, most connected among us.”

Despite claims from AI developers that their technology will eventually solve climate change and run on renewable energy, for now—and into the foreseeable future—they are using a lot of gas. Meta is planning to fund the construction of seven gas plants to provide 5.2 GW worth of power to its Manhattan-size Hyperion data center complex in rural Louisiana. The state’s regulators previously greenlit Entergy to build three gas plants, generating 2.3 GW for the project. As part of Meta’s agreement with Entergy, it has also agreed to finance the construction of 240 miles of transmission lines, battery storage, and nuclear power upgrades. More speculatively, Meta made a “commitment” to “help” fund “up to 2,500 megawatts of new renewable resources.” As The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong notes, greenhouse gas emissions from data centers could more than double by the end of the decade—long before AI developers’ well-advertised investments in fusion power are likely to pay off. There is still scant data available on how much electricity data centers actually use.

Unsurprisingly, all this hasn’t made AI especially popular. A Quinnipiac poll published late last month found that just 35 percent of U.S. residents are either “very excited” (6 percent) or “somewhat excited” (29 percent) about AI. Sixty-two percent are “not so excited” (29 percent) or “not excited at all” (33 percent). Eighty percent of poll respondents were “very” or “somewhat concerned” about it, and 55 percent think AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives. Nearly two-thirds think AI will do more harm than good in education. Seventy percent think AI will decrease job opportunities. Sixty-five percent of respondents—including 78 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans—would oppose building an AI data center in their community.

So, again, why is the U.S. embarking on a state-sponsored spending-and-building binge for a technology that most people here think will make the world—and their lives—worse? Data center developers and supportive politicians promise construction jobs and additional tax revenues that can translate into bigger municipal budgets and tax decreases for residents of the places where data projects are built. Data centers don’t employ huge numbers of people over the long-term, though, and tax upsides for their neighbors are often undercut by generous tax incentives offered to developers. The Texas Tribune this week reported that the Lonestar State is expected to lose out on $3.2 billion in sales tax revenue over the next two years as a result of tax exemptions offered to data center developers.

To make their case, AI boosters typically pitch their products in graver terms than just jobs and tax revenue. The Trump administration, prominent Democrats, and AI hyperscalers have all framed “winning the AI race” as a national security imperative, raising fears that China will beat the U.S. to achieve a mysterious state known as “artificial general intelligence,” or something even more powerful called “superintelligence.” These terms are not well defined, and neither is the material threat posed by China “winning” and the U.S. “losing.” The United States is not at war with China. China’s government does not seem especially eager to start a war with the U.S. Our government has in the last few months kidnapped a head of state, threatened to annex Greenland, and started a stupid, reckless war of aggression against Iran—a war in which it’s used AI to kill more than a hundred children. At home, ICE is using Palantir’s AI to hunt down and disappear migrants as the Trump administration demands universities hand over lists of Jews. Criticisms of China’s domestic and foreign policy shouldn’t obscure the fact that the U.S. government is already doing extraordinarily dangerous things with AI. The companies building it are under zero obligation to further the interests of the U.S. government, much less those of most of the people who live here. If something called superintelligence is indeed real, which seems doubtful, do we really want Sam Altman or Donald Trump—who threatened to wipe out an entire civilization last week—to control it?

It isn’t a coincidence that AI hyperscalers in the U.S. have sold their models to the public, policymakers, and investors in terms of what’s likely to happen down the road. The prospect of a foreign power gaining access to a godlike, world-destroying entity certainly inspires more urgency than, say, B2B software, vibescoding, and AI therapists. But rather than taking executives’ predictions about an inevitable utopian/apocalyptic future at face value, conversations about the future of AI infrastructure should be grounded in what most people are presently getting out of it. For now, the answer is not much.

But there’s another moral to draw here. It’s that American liberals and Democrats should more firmly align themselves with anti-authoritarian, anti-ethnonationalist, pro–liberal democracy forces abroad. They can better connect the drama of the battle against Orbánism to the struggle against Trumpism at home.

The scale of Orbán’s defeat was extraordinary. Challenger Péter Magyar’s Tisza party is on track to win a two-thirds parliamentary majority, potentially enabling the reversal of many Orbánist antidemocratic policies designed to lock in his power forever. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains, the “overwhelming frustration of the Hungarian population” under Orbán unleashed a popular turnout large enough to triumph even though Orbán had “thoroughly stacked the electoral playing field.”

In other words, the victory over Orbán can legitimately be called “too big to rig,” as Trump often dishonestly describes his 2024 vote totals. Trump’s victory was historically narrow in an election that wasn’t tilted against him. By contrast, in Hungary it took record turnout against Orbán to overcome his deep counter-majoritarian rigging.

So what does all this mean for American politics? It’s true, as Damon Linker says, that this isn’t a full victory for liberals and doesn’t guarantee that “right populism is on the way out,” either domestically or globally. Magyar is a center-right politician: Though a vast improvement on Orbán, he hardly campaigned as a full-blown liberal on  immigration or LGBTQ rights, for instance.

But the Hungarian election doesn’t have to map neatly onto U.S. politics for American Democrats to seize upon it.

To see why, consider the speech Vance delivered in Hungary. It was packed with MAGA-right buzzwords, claiming Orbán must be elected to save “Western civilization” from mass migration and the “bureaucrats in Brussels”—the European Union and the woke, globalist enemies of national “sovereignty.” Obviously that message failed; Magyar campaigned aggressively on a vow to reverse much of Orbán’s hostility to the EU and NATO. That won resoundingly.

Yet Vance did several things there that deserve our attention. By my count, he used the word “future” no fewer than 10 times. He stated common cause between American right-populist voters and Hungarian right-populist voters, particularly traditionalist young people looking to start families. He offered his own vision of a shared international future: It’s one in which nations don’t cede authority to international institutions, largely don’t allow in immigrants, and resist outside influences on their supposed cultural and ethnonationalist identities.

In this rendering, illiberal nationalists in each of these countries support each other in this endeavor, in an agreed-upon understanding of democratic self-determination. Vance cast the West’s liberal small-d democrats as the enemies of this version of freedom.

Unsurprisingly, most liberals will see this as a terrible vision for our common future. But it’s still a vision, it’s shared, and it’s one with ambition. Which is exactly why its failure in Hungary provides an opening for Democrats.

What if American liberal Democratic politicians were to speak more overtly and forcefully to other liberal democrats—again, small-d—throughout the West about what our vision of a shared international future should be?

Here’s a start: They could point out that right-populist hostility to international alliances and multilateral institutions, both in Hungary and the United States, has proven disastrous. They could note that, as Noah Smith outlines, the assimilation of immigrants has historically made our country better and absolutely has been working even with those non-European immigrants that MAGA dreads.

They could point out that the Trump-Orbán illiberal-populist vision of national self-determination is a sham: It relies on countermajoritarian cheating to impose it on unwilling populations. Yes, Trump won legitimately in 2024. But after only one year, every pillar of his nationalist agenda—the tariffs, the deportations, the “America First” imperialism and conquest—has already proven profoundly unpopular.

Trump’s response? Trying to hyper-gerrymander the nation’s House map and pushing for voter suppression on steroids.

Which brings us to a powerful moment that Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times  witnessed as the results in Hungary came in:

Among those celebrating by the Danube on Sunday night were Eszter Kalocsai, a 30-year-old bisexual woman, and Milan Gabriel Berki, a 24-year-old gay man. They were delirious with joy. Kalocsai said she’s spent the last 10 years hiding her attraction to women. “It’s amazing!” she cried. “I feel like I can go out and say that I love all people! Oh, my God!” Berki added, “The feeling is overwhelming.”

In the Vance-Orbán worldview, these two people pose a profound threat to “Western civilization” and the “freedom” of peoples to live in accordance with its traditional religious and familial foundations. So an authoritarian state can legitimately repress them.

But liberals can point out that MAGA-Orbán don’t have a monopoly on “the West” or on its “civilization.” They can say “the West” has also helped shape our most cherished ideas about the dignity of the human person and the liberty to realize one’s own highest aspirations—as expressed by those two voters by the Danube.

Also among our best Western inheritances, liberals can say, are ideas about our shared humanity across borders. Those recommend a well-run immigration system—reformed to facilitate orderly legal immigration in the national interest—over Vance-Orbán ethnonationalist barbarities.

The people celebrating in Budapest had to overcome intense fear of retaliation from an authoritarian state. So too did the Americans who turned out at extraordinary personal risk to face down ICE in Minneapolis. Let’s make that link clear.

And as Trump threatens horrific war crimes in Iran, Democrats can point out that Western ideals have contributed importantly to international human rights blueprints and the Laws of Armed Conflict, including Christian just war doctrine. Democrats can say: True, we have often fallen woefully short of those ideals, but we should try harder to honor them because they can make for a better shared world.

Yes, liberal internationalism needs major rethinking in the face of the populist-nationalist challenge. So let’s talk about what a reformed version would look like—how it’s the only way we’ll tackle global warming, soaring inequality, future migration challenges, global pandemics, and rampant corruption and oligarchy among the global superrich. Let’s talk about how the Vance-Orbán vision has no real answers to any of that.

It’s not precisely clear to me how Democrats should undertake this project. The consultants will tell them many voters don’t care about such things. But we can’t avoid these arguments. Because—news flash—Vance is the likely 2028 MAGA-GOP standard-bearer. We should think now about how to win those big arguments against him later.

Illiberal right-wing populism may not be “on the way out” yet. But as Anne Applebaum notes, the Hungary results show that determined authoritarianism can lose to challengers who campaign on democracy, the rule of law, and an embrace of internationalist institutions. Between that and the catastrophic failure—and deep unpopularity—of Trumpism at home, there’s an opening for a bigger challenge to these toxic forms of illiberalism. In short: The Hungary results demonstrate how Trump’s humiliation can be made substantially worse over time—if only liberals and Democrats find the ambition to make it so.

I know that sounds harsh, but consider all the various ways Trump has told Mr. and Mrs. America that he doesn’t want their tax dollars.

In his second inaugural address, Trump spoke of replacing the progressive income tax with tariffs on foreign imports. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries,” Trump said, “we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” Never mind that foreign countries don’t pay tariffs; U.S. consumers do. The point is that Trump thinks we can return to the days before 1913 when a much smaller federal government didn’t bother with an income tax, funding the government instead mostly with tariffs.

Even before the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s blatantly illegal Liberation Day tariffs (the U.S. Court of International Trade is now contemplating whether also to strike down the temporary tariffs with which Trump replaced them), Trump’s arithmetic never added up. In the current fiscal year, the income tax accounts for 50 percent of all federal revenues. That excludes payroll taxes, which constitute another 35 percent of all federal revenues. By comparison, “customs duties” (i.e., tariffs) account for only about 7 percent of all federal revenues. Neither the Supreme Court ruling nor this unforgiving calculation from Trump’s own Treasury Department discouraged Trump from saying in this year’s State of the Union address, “I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.”

Another way Trump has told Americans not to pay their taxes was through his One Big Beautiful reconciliation bill, which cut taxes by $4.5 trillion over 10 years. In this instance, it was mostly rich people whose money Trump refused, because most of that $4.5 billion tax cut went to them. According to the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the average family earning less than $50,000 will next year get about $250 in tax cuts while the average filer earning more than $1 million will get more than $100,000 in tax cuts. Add in spending cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare, and food stamps, and the bill represents a net loss for lower-income families.

To be fair, though, Trump didn’t especially want non-rich people’s money, either. That was demonstrated by his administration’s elimination of Direct File, a vastly popular pilot program created under President Joe Biden to help people with uncomplicated tax returns file their taxes. Direct File was opposed by the tax-prep industry and its Republican friends in Congress, who believe it’s the federal government’s patriotic duty to make income tax filing sufficiently difficult that it can never be done without hiring a private-sector middleman. If that discourages some people from filing at all, so be it.

Which brings us to the main way Trump shows he doesn’t want your tax dollars: He’s making it easier to cheat. This is in accordance with a long-standing Republican policy to deprive the IRS of sufficient funds to catch rich tax cheats. Biden bucked this by adding $80 billion to IRS enforcement, but a series of congressional rescissions spearheaded by Republicans yanked nearly all of that funding back.

Today, funding for IRS enforcement is, after inflation, lower than it’s been since 1988, and the Trump administration recently proposed cutting it another 18 percent. As Rubin points out in the Journal, even the Trump IRS’s own budget report for fiscal year 2027 concedes that reducing enforcement spending increases the budget deficit because the revenue such enforcement generates exceeds the cost of paying bureaucrats to do the enforcing. But it’s not about the money. It’s about pandering to tax cheats. As one tax lawyer told Rubin: “They have defunded the police.”

Should the IRS, against all odds, successfully prosecute a tax cheat, the perp can still take comfort in the fact that Trump hands out pardons and reduced sentences to tax offenders like so much penny candy. I count nine such commutations during the 15 months Trump has been back in the White House. There’s the TV reality-show stars Julie and Todd Chrisley (“tax evasion”); the baseball player Darryl Strawberry (“tax evasion”); former Republican Representative Michael Gerard Grimm (“preparation of false and fraudulent tax returns”); former Republican Arkansas state senator—also son to former Republican Senator Tim Hutchinson and nephew to former Republican Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson—Jeremy Young Hutchinson (“aiding and abetting filing of false income tax return”); Trump $900 million political donor Imaad Shah Zuberi (“tax evasion”); Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who got the nod less than three weeks after his mother attended a $1 million-per-seat Trump fundraiser (“willful failure to pay trust fund taxes; failure to file return/information”); Joseph Schwartz, another nursing home executive (“willful failure to pay over employment taxes”); and investment broker Marian I. Morgan (“making false statements on income tax returns”).

Trump’s affinity for tax frauds may be grounded in personal experience, since Trump’s own business has been busted for criminal tax fraud. Or maybe the relatability has to do with Trump’s personal reluctance ever to pay taxes, as documented by The New York Times in September 2020. In 2016, the Times reported that the year he first won the White House, Trump paid $750 in federal income tax. In 2017, his first year in office, he also paid $750, and in 10 of the previous 15 years he paid nothing at all.

Trump’s response to the Times’ article was to sue the IRS for $10 billion for failing to prevent his returns from being leaked. (Never mind that the leaker was already serving a five-year sentence.) This failure occurred while Trump was president the first time, so apparently Trump doesn’t believe, as Harry Truman did, that the buck stops on his Oval Office desk. For Trump, the buck stops in his wallet.

The lawsuit was filed while Trump was president the second time, which puts Trump on both sides of this conflict. In March, Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer reported in The New York Times that the Justice Department was hoping to resolve by mid-April what to do. One significant obstacle was that if the department were to defend the IRS against Trump’s claim, that would put it in violation of an executive order binding government lawyers to Trump’s interpretation of the law, no matter how cockeyed.

In ordinary times, the White House informs the public every April what the president of the United States paid in taxes. It’s hard to imagine Trump will pay no taxes this year, because his net worth increased by an estimated $3 billion in 2025, much of that on the basis of a stake in World Liberty Financial for which Trump appears to have paid not a penny. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Trump will pay very much, because he really hates that. I feel comfortable opining that Trump likely cheated on this year’s taxes, and that whatever he paid was likely less than what you paid, or me. If true, that would be yet another inducement—one I strongly advise against taking—not to pay all you owe.

Representative Eric Swalwell’s career-ending news cycle began with a Friday night news dump and concluded with his Sunday night departure from the race. Suddenly, the support he had previously garnered was back in play, leaving his Democratic rivals to pursue the spoils. But before Swalwell’s disturbing history of alleged sexual assault came to light, those rivals had combined to make the gubernatorial race a torpid affair. Prior to Swalwell’s flameout, this group of campaigners were perhaps best regarded as a field of stumblers who were running the risk of handing the governor’s mansion to a Republican. The front-runner’s departure changes very little: This is a largely unexceptional field—a hodgepodge of recycled political names, neck and neck and neck in a competition to get their hands on the nation’s most powerful anti-Trump pulpit. 

The more you read the news, the more it begins to feel that’s all they were running for—America’s Next Top Trump Antagonist. The vacuum was filled by the doom narrative: What if Democrats shit the bed so badly in California’s chaotic jungle primary that they surrender California to a MAGA Republican? There are still simply too many Democrats running; they’re crowding each other out. With Swalwell in the race, it was a three-way tie in a jungle primary. Without him, who knows? For months, the California Democratic Party has been publicly begging low-polling candidates to stop deluding themselves, setting an arbitrary drop-out deadline of April 15 and releasing a poll showing the race’s two Republicans eclipsing the bumbling field of Democrats. 

Swalwell’s sudden disappearance may have changed the field, but it has not changed the race. Over the next few weeks, you can expect every campaign to make a feverish grab for Swalwell’s supporters. You should not, however, expect many former Swalwell supporters to jump feverishly aboard a new campaign. Allison Gill, the California-based political influencer known online as Mueller, She Wrote, says she was leaning toward Swalwell before the allegations but added that “I think a lot of Californians were simply looking to vote for Eric Swalwell because he was polling way ahead of everyone else, and they wanted to guarantee that we had a Democrat in the top two.”

Gill told The New Republic that her preferred candidate was former State Controller Betty Yee but that Yee was “polling very, very low.” So Gill was not a dedicated Swalwell voter as much as she was a Californian voting for Swalwell, explaining, “I vote strategically, but also, I like voting with my whole heart in the primaries and I can’t do it in the California governor race.” She remains terrified of an all-Republican general election, saying it’s “the number one thing I’m worried about.” California State Senator Scott Wiener told The New Republic that the possibility poses “an existential risk.”

Much—maybe too much—has been made of that dilemma (including in this magazine). Democratic strategists and politicians here in the Golden State dread an all-Republican ticket as an unlikely calamity, more likely than a rainy summer in L.A., less likely than yet another Dodgers World Series. They say this race has only just begun. It’s about to get prohibitively expensive, and while one of the Republicans (the British political strategist turned Fox News talking head Steve Hilton) does have money, Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco can’t remain competitive as the race’s price tag climbs into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars. 

“That guy’s going to get left behind in the dust,” one longtime California political strategist told The New Republic. “He’s not going to be able to communicate in any way that’s like, meaningful.” And now that Trump has endorsed Hilton, Bianco’s campaign has begun its death rattle, thus putting the unlikely calamity of an all-Republican slate even further out of reach. 

Lurking behind this specter of a Democratic field choking itself out of the governor’s mansion is a larger, more elemental problem: These Democrats don’t seem to be running on anything—beyond opposition to Trump, that is. Such a pose may work in some races (it’ll probably work in the 2026 midterms), but it’s not a winning platform in this kind of race. Just ask Kamala Harris. 

Here’s what I mean: In the very first minute of her announcement video, Katie Porter said, “I first ran for office to hold Trump accountable now, and I feel that same call to serve now to stop him from hurting Californians.” Swalwell one-upped her in his unveiling, declaring that “no one will keep you safer from Trump than I will.” Hop on Xavier Becerra’s website, and the first thing you’ll see is a two-paragraph elevator pitch promoting the former California attorney general as “the only candidate for Governor with the experience to tackle the man-made crises of the Trump Administration on Day One.” 

It seems the only politician in this field not selling himself primarily as an anti-Trump warrior is Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire running a campaign focused on affordability and ending corporate influence. It’s probably worth a mention that Steyer is working with Fight Agency, the slick P.R. firm behind other affordability-first candidates like Graham Platner in Maine and Zohran Mamdani in New York City.

I’m not arguing that California voters—Democrats by a 2-to-1 margin—aren’t eager for a governor who will fight Trump. I’m not even arguing that this anti-Trump messaging isn’t effective—it probably is. But with everybody saying the same thing, a regular chorus line of candidates promising they’ll fight Trump even harder than the last guy, what’s a Californian to do? I write this as a Californian who has no idea who the hell I’m going to vote for at the top of the ticket.  

Golden State politics is in the midst of what can best be described as a political thought experiment. Governor Gavin Newsom is running for president (not officially, but come on) and claiming that California is “a beacon … an operational model, a policy blueprint for others to follow.” That’s what he told us back in January, during his State of the State speech. He spent a considerable portion of that speech touting his own victories over the Trump administration; victories that juiced his popularity here. So it’s natural that his hopeful successors would try to shout out their own anti-Trump bona fides. 

But while California is a wonderful place to live, we’re still riddled with a slew of non-Trump problems. Most of us, my family included, are priced out of the hope of buying a house (something like one-fifth of the homes in this state are investor-owned); our energy bills keep increasing because one company has a stranglehold on the market and its infrastructure keeps sparking wildfires, leading to lawsuits, which are then passed down to consumers. Our state universities are probably the best public institutions in America, sure, but they’re also expensive (despite the fact that they were tuition-free for a century). The entertainment industry has all but decamped—every screenwriter I know is working another job right now, while every sound and lighting guy is shooting in Canada or Georgia or Texas. 

And while Hollywood is growing tumbleweeds, we are letting its successor industry run wild—this is, after all, the backyard of AI. We should be leading the way in regulating the industry that’s presently spooking a majority of Americans. Instead we’ve adopted a please-don’t-leave-me attitude, only instituting watered-down regulations after Newsom nixed any chance at meaningful AI safeguards. There are plenty of ways a Democrat can build a campaign for governor that stands out from the herd and addresses the actual needs of Californians. Instead they’re all running the same anti-Trump campaign—an uninventive strategy with a shoddy success rate.

This is a national problem among Democrats; it’s larger than California. The party’s brand is historically unpopular, a rake they somehow continue to step on despite the fact that they’ve spent half the past decade as the opposition party to a historically unpopular president. 

The problem with using Trump as a foil is that Democrats (and California’s crowded field of would-be governors, in particular) are wasting their precious oxygen on the president rather than offering solutions to problems that, unlike our visibly aging 79-year-old president, won’t sort themselves out. Trump single-handedly cooked our political system by making “all press is good press” a strategy for both campaigning and governing. You are losing to him simply by playing ball in his court, and too many California Democrats are presently playing ball in his court.

Steyer is probably the favorite, all the same, simply because he has unlimited resources and no problem setting money aflame (I was seeing Steyer ads on the treadmill TVs months ago, long before anybody was thinking about this race). Porter wins if this race does in fact come down to who is going to fight Trump the hardest. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is quietly expected to get an enormous financial bump from his wealthy benefactors, but it was oligarchs picking their own politicians that got us in this mess in the first place. 

The thing about Steyer is that he’s his own kind of thought experiment. The good plutocrat; the affordability-first billionaire. When Steyer jumped into the 2020 presidential race, Bernie Sanders quipped, “I like Tom personally, but … I’m a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power,” a sentiment that hits even closer to home in the Trump era as billionaires are slicing up the county piece by piece. Allison Gill told TNR that her top issue in the governor’s race is “the billionaire problem.” Her hesitation on Steyer is a bitter pill I hear often from Democratic voters: Do we really trust a billionaire to solve the billionaire problem?

My own hesitation comes from the fact that I don’t understand why Steyer is running for governor. I believe that he wants to change the system, but I don’t understand why he believes he has to be a part of the system to change it—why now? It feels a lot like he’s running for governor simply because the Oval Office isn’t up for grabs this cycle. In a recent podcast interview with TNR’s Perry Bacon, Steyer claimed he’s been involved with “virtually every policy decision in the state of California.” If that’s the case, if he can influence every policy decision in the state from outside the system, why does he need to be governor? And how does he square the overarching influence over policy matters that he claims to wield with the fact that the next Democratic governor will have to clean up so many messes? 

If there’s anything in this field to be thankful for, it’s that I don’t have to vote for any of them today. There’s measurable confidence among California’s political class that this field will sort itself out within the next month. Senator Wiener (who has not endorsed) told TNR that Sacramento is feeling “frustration about the race in general,” which might indicate that the machinery of the system is on the verge of doing something useful. Meanwhile, it feels like California voters are just now remembering that we have to vote this summer. The candidates have only recently begun to go negative. War chests will soon begin to drain. Best case: This field gets down to two or three candidates, and they stop fighting over who gets to fight Trump and start telling us exactly how they’ll fight the power companies, tech giants, private equity firms, and real estate moguls that got us here.

The frustrations of once-dominant racial and ethnic groups about losing power are reshaping politics around the world, including the United States. In his latest book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, author and Howard University professor Ibram Kendi explains the global spread of “great replacement theory.” Kendi discusses that book in the latest edition of Right Now. He also discusses the conservative attacks on his work and that of other scholars who over the last decade have written extensively about racism in the United States. Conservatives have in some places banned from classrooms and libraries How to be an Antiracist and other works by Kendi.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon, everybody. This is Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined today by Ibram Kendi. He’s a professor at Howard University. He’s also the author of a few books now—How to Be an Antiracist, The History of Racist Ideas—and he has a new book out that we’re going to talk about today. Professor, welcome.

Ibram Kendi: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So let me talk about the book itself. The book is about this idea of the global replacement theory. So talk about replacement theory and what that means. The title of the book is Chain of Ideas, I should say. We’re going to talk about about the chain of ideas ... but the book is about replacement theory, so talk about what that means for people who don’t know.

Kendi: Sure. In Chain of Ideas, I’m chronicling the reemergence of what’s known as “great replacement theory” over the last two decades, but also showing its much longer history. After chronicling that history, I ended up defining great replacement theory as a political theory that suggests that there are these powerful elites who are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives and even livelihoods of white people, who apparently need authoritarian protection.

When we hear things like “immigrants are invading the nation,” we’re hearing great replacement theory. When we hear ideas like “the enemy is inside the gates,” or “they’re poisoning the blood of the nation,” or “diversity programs are discriminatory,” or “we need to engage in mass deportation,” or “anti-DEI” programs in order to save the nation—we’re hearing great replacement theory.

Bacon: Is there a place it originated, or is it a more recent phenomenon, or has it been existing a long time but proliferated in the last decade or so?

Kendi: So a French novelist named Renaud Camus named the theory with a book he entitled The Great Replacement in 2011. And ideas are different than people, and ideas can live for quite some time before anyone names them. This is an idea that really emerged in its totality in the late nineteenth century, when you had some colonial officials thinking that if decolonization ever came—if African people who were colonized, or Latin Americans, or even Asian folks were to free themselves—these colonial officials imagined that they wouldn’t stop there, that they would then try to come and colonize Europe and engage in displacement and genocides, and essentially do to Europeans what had been done to them.

What’s ironic about that origin story is even Camus, writing in 2011, and again in 2018 when he wrote a book, You Will Not Replace Us—he described the so-called great replacement as counter-colonization.

Bacon: So in the U.S., I think the obvious example is the tiki torch–holding students at the University of Virginia in 2017. That’s when I thought about this, because they actually said, “You will not replace us.” But give other examples of where you’re seeing this play out.

Kendi: We can go all the way back to 2011. That is the year in which ... the sixth link in the chain of ideas is this notion that white Christians are indigenous to the nation. And when I say the sixth link—the chain of ideas is organized around these 10 ideas that are the building blocks for great replacement theory.

This idea that white Christians are indigenous to the nation and everyone else, no matter how long they’ve been here, are eternally immigrants, and certainly not American, is one of the ideas that undergirded birtherism, [which] of course Donald Trump expressed first in 2011.

That was also the year when a group of scholars and scientists in New England found that white people had recognized Black progress, but the majority of white people that they surveyed believed that Black progress had come at white expense. They empirically found the existence of what’s known as zero-sum theory, which is also a foundational idea within great replacement theory—an idea that has been relentlessly debunked.

Bacon: How does it play out in other countries? Because ... it’s not white versus Black, or white versus people of color, [like] in the U.S.

Kendi: So what I found is that even as Renaud Camus and even maybe a Donald Trump positioned and conceived of these as a racist theory in which Black people were replacing white people—it’s mutated. And it’s mutated to not just a racist theory. It’s mutated to be an ethnocentric theory, whereby in a country like India, Modi, the prime minister, is positioning the Muslim minorities as replacing the Hindu majority.

Or similarly in nearby China, in which it’s imagined that Chinese Muslims are replacing and displacing the Han majority, so they’re being actually rounded up in concentration camps. In other countries, it may be the minoritized ethnic group that’s positioned as a replacer.

Or in a country like Russia, whereby Putin has described queer people as replacing the traditional values of Russian Christians. Or gender. In the U.S. context, like in other countries, it’s imagined that “gender ideology,” as they call it—another term for feminist ideas, or ideas that express equality between queer people and cisgender and heterosexual people—that those are destroying the nation. Or white women who decide not to have three or four children are contributing to declining birth rates, which is leading to the replacement of white people.

Bacon: Does this depend on demographic change, or is it almost distinct from that? Because in the U.S. we’ve had a growing population of people of color, so there is a numerical case for changes—not necessarily that you’re being replaced, but ... does this theory depend on change, or is it more a feeling of change that people are expressing, that they’re really opposing?

Kendi: Again, going back to Renaud Camus—in writing and conceiving of great replacement theory, he acknowledged that data and science were not necessarily on his side. He more or less told his readers to not really look to science or data to describe what is happening—that instead you should look to how you feel.

Bacon: OK.

Kendi: I’m literally sort of quoting him. This is not a theory that makes logical sense. Even if you take the United States, which has the largest foreign-born population in the entire world—86 percent of people in the United States were born in the United States. And in the European Union, 91 percent of residents in the European Union were born in the European Union, even as it’s being described as being taken over and invaded by “African migrants” who are mostly Muslims.

Bacon: The book is called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. So connect the ideas with authoritarianism.... Why does replacement theory lead to authoritarianism?

Kendi: When you can make a group of people—or even a person—believe that their lives are under attack, that they’re indeed facing a genocide, that their jobs are being stolen, that their electoral power is being taken away, that apparently their elections are being stolen, that their culture is being eroded, that their nation is being lost—it allows you to then turn around and claim that you are going to be their savior and their protector.

What’s happened around the world is the way in which these politicians have gone about being people’s protectors and saviors has been creating these militarized, heavily policed states with some of the largest forms of kidnapping and incarceration in the world, while simultaneously taking away the rights and freedoms of the very people they’re claiming they want to protect. The authoritarian states become justified on the notion that in order to protect you from these losses, I have to apparently do away with democracy.

Bacon: Does Donald Trump—just to give an example—think there’s a replacement happening, or is he just weaponizing that? Does he know there’s not? Does he think there is? Is he weaponizing it? What’s the agency of people who are used in milking this idea? Do they know they’re lying, or is it more unconscious? I know you think it doesn’t really matter—we’ll come back to that. But do they know they’re lying, or is it more unconscious?

Kendi: As a historian of ideas, this is always a tricky subject, because I can only truly, as a scholar, convey that this is what the person said, as opposed to ... it’s always tricky when I say, This is what the person truly believes. We really don’t know what a person believes. So I actually don’t know.

What I do know is that many of these authoritarians, like Donald Trump, claim that they are against mass migration when they engage in or support policies—or even attack countries—that destabilize them, which then leads to migration. Many of these politicians are heavily funded by some of the wealthiest people in the world who are also heavily investing in AI and other new technologies that are leading to jobs being taken from the very people who they’re trying to get to believe that their jobs are being taken by immigrants, Black people, and Muslims. I certainly know it’s an effective strategy to hoodwink and distract people, but whether people are true believers is not something I necessarily know.

Bacon: So I asked about leaders, and you said that’s not certain, but there’s some polling suggesting actual, white working-class voters—to be very reductive—in the U.S. do believe this, even if it’s not true. What about the people who are being influenced? Are they being hoodwinked? Do they actually know the demographics of America?

You go to Ohio ... you can go to a Trump rally, you’ll find people who say, Black people get all these jobs and so on, but they work at companies; they know who’s in charge of the company, I think. So is this playing into latent biases? Do they really think they’re being replaced, in terms of the average person?

Kendi: This is one of the reasons why I not only wanted to write about the history of great replacement theory, but I wanted to break it down into its component parts. If we think of zero-sum theory—that if Black people are making progress, then I’m losing out as a white person—what that means is if you have a huge minority of Black people in your particular company, people could still perceive that two percent as taking from them, or that single Black person in a position of power in their space as somehow an indication that opportunities are being lost to you.

There’s also an emphasis, as I write about in Chain of Ideas, on defining racism as essentially interpersonal discrimination. What happens is it compels a white working-class person to say, if they didn’t get access to housing or that job, it’s because they’re white, even if there’s no evidence to support it.

Bacon: I remember in The History of Racist Ideas, in the conclusion, you had this part in which ... you argued basically that you have a society where there’s all this inequality based on race, so racist ideas are in some ways invoked to justify this. In some ways the racist policies lead to racist ideas. Is there a similar interplay here?

Kendi: I think so. I think the authoritarianism and the erosion of democracy is being justified via great replacement theory. I also think the policies that are allowing for growing amounts of economic inequality are being covered up via great replacement theory. What it’s allowing is an economic and political class to continue their, frankly, hoarding of power, and then getting the very people who they’re taking power and rights from—like they are the rest of us—to believe that they’re actually protecting and saving them.

It’s also operating among cultural workers. These are people who are writing or philosophizing or covering—there have been many people who are white and male, who feel that their opportunities are being lost at the hands of those Black thinkers and writers and intellectuals who they imagine are receiving preferential treatment, or they’re talking about an issue like racism that isn’t that important. So there’s also an anxiety and a resentment there. That’s why in Chain of Ideas I talked about how even as great replacement theory is primarily identified as a far-right theory, it has also infiltrated centrist and even leftist spaces.

Bacon: This idea of zero-sum—you’ve mentioned it a couple of times now—sort of rings true. What makes people think that way, and is there a way to get them to stop thinking that way?

Kendi: It is such an old idea. I even wrote about how Thomas Jefferson articulated this idea in his Notes on the State of Virginia. He argued for gradual emancipation, but then argued for colonization of Black people back to Africa, and argued that if Black people remained and were given their rights, there would be a perpetual race war. I want to emphasize: This is an idea as old as the United States, in the U.S. context.

But I talked about in Chain of Ideas what’s known as positive-sum theory, which is the notion that as that other group gains, my group gains. When you look at the history of the United States and the times in which we have instituted equitable and just policies, the majority even of white people benefited more than they benefited from the privileges that came along with racist policies and practices.

Bacon: The 1960s ... Social Security, most Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, all at the same time, essentially. You mentioned the symbolism—how much in the U.S. is this like, we have a Black president, so therefore that creates the idea? If Hillary Clinton had been president—well, she’s a woman—if Joe Biden had been president in 2008 forward, would this have taken off in the U.S. the way it did?

Kendi: Probably not. As I write about in Chain of Ideas, in 2008 there were two major historical events that allowed these theorists and politicians to really capitalize on these situations and spread great replacement theory. One was the Great Recession, in which they were able to tie people’s economic struggles to immigrants, Black people, and Muslims.

But also the election of Barack Obama—these theorists at that time positioned this one Black man being elected to the presidency as an indication that Black people in general had taken over the entire United States. Frankly, they argued that Black people had taken over the world. That became a trigger for the spread of great replacement theory.

Bacon: If you don’t mind, connect the three books ... I haven’t read this book yet—but connect the Racist Ideas book, How to Be an Antiracist, Chain of Ideas. What are you trying to do as an intellectual project, if you don’t mind me asking?

Kendi: The way that they’re connected is: Stamped from the Beginning chronicles the history of anti-Black racist ideas—from their origins in 15th-century Portugal to 2008. So the narrative ends in 2008. The narrative of Chain of Ideas largely begins in 2008 and comes to 2025, and chronicles that the most dominant anti-Black racist idea in the world today is great replacement theory. So it extends that history. Instead of taking a holistic look at a number of different types of anti-Black racist ideas, it looks at one specific one, in terms of great replacement theory, which also happens to be the most dominant bigoted idea and political theory in the world today.

What’s striking [with] great replacement theorists: You take somebody like Camus writing in 2011—even in You Will Not Replace Us in 2018—he argued as early as 2011 that the force that was bringing on the great replacement was anti-racism. He has relentlessly argued that it was anti-racism, apparently, that he imagined was genocidal, was harmful to white people, was harmful to the world.

I didn’t know, when I was writing How to Be an Antiracist, that I was walking into this building storm that was coming to really engulf any of us who were actually showing what anti-racism has the capacity to do—which is ensure democracy, ensure equality, ensure equity for everyone.

Bacon: I am glad you moved to that, because the backlash—I don’t love the term “backlash,” I think the term “countermobilization” is better, because it actually describes what happened—but we’re almost six years from when a lot of people I know bought your book How to Be an Antiracist.

I’m not sure if they all read it, but they were suddenly walking around with it, and they were purchasing it, and that was a useful thing, I thought. But by the end of the next three years, the book was banned by all these legislators, banned from classrooms, criticized by every Republican politician I can think of, and so on.

What have you made of what’s happened—with your writing, but also Nikole Hannah-Jones’s writing, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing? I hate the term “racial reckoning,” but we had something that happened in 2020, and then these last five years we’ve seen the ideas be suppressed and banned. What have you made of that, as someone who’s experienced it personally?

Kendi: It’s been interesting. The level of political force that has come down to discredit us as authors—and even to ban or restrict our books—what that says to me is that these individuals who did that did not feel comfortable having a robust conversation on the merits of the actual books, or even on the merits of our integrity as writers and journalists and scholars. Instead they had to figure out ways to get people to not take ... me or Nikole or Ta-Nehisi or others seriously, or to not read our books.

One of the ways in which they went about doing that was positioning our work as harmful to the nation, as harmful to white people, even in certain cases harmful to Black people. I talk about in Chain of Ideas what I call the inversion of anti-racism—the ways in which these great replacement theorists inverted our work as somehow anti-white. This was happening at the same time they inverted feminism, they went about inverting LGBTQ activism as somehow anti-Christian. Really any thinker who is seeking to defend or advocate for a particular group has been positioned—I should say repositioned—as seeking to harm another group, which has been one of the driving forces of great replacement theory.

But I should add this: Countermobilization, to use your term, didn’t just come at the hands of Republicans. It came at the hands of Democrats. It came at the hands of people who imagined themselves as progressive and radical, who had issues with people who weren’t themselves receiving spotlight or attention. I think we received it and were attacked really from all sides.

Bacon: What does that mean for you now? You’re six years from that, you’re releasing a new book. Can you do anything about that? I see you’re being reviewed everywhere, so it’s not like you’ve disappeared. But has it affected how you present your ideas and how you go about promoting them and talking about what you’re seeing and what you’re researching?

Kendi: One thing I will say is when you are a writer or a scholar who is under scrutiny, it becomes that much more important to ensure that you’re fact-checking, to give an example. The intensity of the fact-checking that we did for Chain of Ideas was unlike any book that I had done. We wanted to ensure that it may not have been perfect in terms of facts, but we damn near tried to make it such.

Even as a scholar, knowing that I’m writing on, frankly, propaganda, I didn’t want to—I also know the ways in which my work has been misinterpreted and misrepresented—I didn’t want to continue that age of misrepresentation. By doing that, I was very careful in trying to ensure I was representing the words of people accurately and citing those speeches and articles, and putting the entire note section for Chain of Ideas online so that people can click through the speech for themselves.

Bacon: I’ll finish here: We’re about to start a Democratic presidential primary—a lot of people are running for president. What I observe is a lot of the candidates now feel like they can’t discuss race or gender or identity or LGBT issues. There’s something called “wokeness,” something called “identity politics,” and these things are bad. Even the people I like—the AOCs, the Ro Khanna’s—are being advised: Don’t touch any issue that doesn’t affect white men the same as anybody else. Those of us who think there is racism, there is sexism, there is homophobia, there is Islamophobia—what should the rest of us be doing? Because I get the sense the politicians we vote for are no longer going to speak about these issues honestly.

Kendi: Certainly we should, as everyday people, never look to our politicians to eradicate racism. We should always be organizing among ourselves and simultaneously organizing and mobilizing and pushing them to represent our interests.

But if there is a candidate for the Democratic Party that does not talk about racism and sexism and Islamophobia and xenophobia, it’s highly likely that candidate is going to lose.

We have seen all over the world, and I document this in Chain of Ideas, that when candidates who are opposing these great replacement politicians—when they either adopt some of their ideas, in the way the Democratic Party did in 2024 by saying that it was more equipped to engage in border security, or they just don’t demonstrate how the racism and sexism that party is engaged in is harming everyone—when they don’t do that, they lose. That’s why these great replacement politicians are surging all over the world.

Can you imagine in any other field or posture of competition where someone has a very specific strategy that is winning, and you’re being advised: You can’t counter that? It’s very difficult for you to win in any capacity.

There’s a way to counter it while also not saying to white men: You are the oppressors. There’s a way to counter it by saying: White men, you’re being manipulated and hoodwinked too. They’re distracting you from those super-wealthy white men who are actually taking your jobs, through racist ideas, to convince you that those women and people of color are taking your jobs.

Bacon: I’m glad you said that, because I’ve read your books, I’ve read TNC and Nicole; I’ve read a lot of authors who write about racism and so on. This idea that they’re all portraying white men as oppressors—I don’t think that’s a line I read in How to Be an Antiracist.

Is this because white people have more numbers and power than we do? I’ve read these books. People who didn’t read these books have created this narrative about them that we can’t debunk. Is that just purely a numbers game? What do you think happened here?

Kendi: I think it’s a number of different factors. One, it’s an assumption that people have. They assume that if someone is attacking racism, then they must be attacking white people. And maybe because they themselves know how responsible white people are—

Bacon: They think we will oppress. This is what the subtext is.

Kendi: Exactly. But I also think that there are some writers who are saying those things, and so what’s happening is they conflate the people who are saying them with the people who are not saying that. To give an example—my book How to Be an Antiracist was oftentimes conflated with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, in which she did say that pretty much all white people are racist. There were things on which we had obvious disagreements on.

But what oftentimes happens—particularly when you have a popular book by a white author and a popular book by a Black author—is the ideas that are expressed by the white author become the norm that’s applied to the Black author, and then people end up critiquing the Black author as if he or she said those things.

I think that those ideas do exist and they have been misapplied. I also think it really is a projection—you have people who are deeply racist and who are white who believe that if we’re challenging racism, we must be challenging them. And actually, we are—because they’re racist, not because they’re white.

Bacon: We’ve had a discussion about ideas that are not positive, and a theory of the world that we wish was eradicated. I hate to ask the question, but do you see anything—I’ve been encouraged by the Palestinian protests, the protest movement that has emerged, which is not necessarily about a racial idea but is a call for equality. A lot of the people involved in that have been reading your books. A lot of people who were involved in the 2020 protests supported Mayor Mamdani and are also involved in the Palestinian protests. Are there any things like that you see positively happening—where people are hearing the right ideas and acting on them—that you see in your work or your travels?

Kendi: I do. I see, for instance, people in the United States not falling for the propaganda of this administration about the war in Iran that, of course, the U.S. and Israel are waging. To me that’s a positive development. That antiwar impulse—and, frankly, anti-genocide impulse—that galvanized many people when Israel was bombing Gaza, is now, to a certain extent, extending to this U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which is to me a good development, because people are recognizing the nuance.

You can simultaneously see the ways in which this regime in Iran is an authoritarian regime, while at the same time recognizing the authoritarianism regimes in the United States and Israel, and be like: All of y’all have issues, and we’re opposing, in certain ways, all of you—but we’re also opposing the aggressors in this particular situation. People are recognizing that nuance. That to me is positive, because this is a very complicated situation and people are learning and expressing those complications.

Bacon: Ibram, thanks for joining me—congrats on another great book, and on all your work. I’m so honored to talk to you. You’ve done some very important work these last few years, so thanks for the time. Good to see you.

Kendi: Of course. Thank you for having me.

BREAKING: 300+ New Yorkers have taken over the offices of Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer demanding no more weapons for Israel.

Tell Congress: Fund people, not bombs. pic.twitter.com/7VuAj01bSZ

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) April 13, 2026

At least 90 protesters were arrested, among them Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. soldier and whistleblower who leaked hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in 2011, as well as New York City Council Member Alexa Avilés and actor Hari Nef. The protests were organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and the Sunrise Movement. According to JVP, the protesters consisted of U.S. military veterans as well as Jewish, Palestinian, Iranian, and Lebanese New Yorkers.

The protesters were calling on the New York Democrats to support resolutions proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders last month that would block nearly $660 million in weapons sales to Israel. Sanders has attempted to block weapons to Israel before, and 19 Senate Democrats, including Gillibrand and Schumer, voted against his last effort in July.

Israel is bombing Lebanon and Iran with U.S. support and aid, and continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank despite a ceasefire. The war in Iran is overshadowing an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and Israel is also accused of encouraging ethnic cleansing against Shia Muslims in southern Lebanon.

“This is the moment when Schumer and Gillibrand must listen to their constituents,” Sonya Meyerson-Knox, the communications director with Jewish Voice for Peace, told the Associated Press Monday. “The majority of Americans and New Yorkers want a resolution to what the Israeli government is doing.”

The Associated Press has reported that various U.S. water utility companies across the country have struggled to obtain fluoride because Israel is one of the top providers of fluorosilicic acid. With Israel sending more people into military service, amid attacks on Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza, that supply chain has been disrupted

This has led to “decreased production, and supply shortages for the U.S. market,” Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies officer Dan Hartnett told the AP. Water facilities in Maryland and Pennsylvania have been hit particularly hard, with WSSC Water in Maryland lowering the amount of fluoride in the water from the recommended 0.7 milligrams per liter to just 0.4 milligrams.

Adding fluoride to drinking water has been one of the most effective public health measures in reducing tooth decay. What’s happening now shows the widespread ripple effects that this war is having. From the death and destruction in Lebanon and Iran to high prices at the gas pump, to no more fluoride in some of the water, to even fishermen in the Philippines struggling to get by due to fuel price spikes, this war has permeated through all facets of life around the world—and that will only worsen given the current state of things.

Let’s check the scoreboard. One week ago, Vance flew to Hungary to help out his pal Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian, pro-Russian politician who was running for a fourth term as president amid growing opposition to his quasi-dictatorial reign. Vance’s appearance at an Orbán rally broke with long-standing precedent. “American presidents and vice presidents have seldom intervened so overtly in foreign elections,” wrote Isaac Stanley-Becker in The Atlantic. But Vance was determined to remind the Hungarian people that Orbán was good for something—namely being friends with President Trump.

True to form, Vance played the too-clever-by-half contrarian, accusing the European Union of election interference. “The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” he said, at a joint press conference with Orbán, who actually has interfered with elections. “And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy.” Orbán has long been a model for parts of the right because he neutered the liberal opposition, took over the media, and transformed Hungary into a hybrid democratic-authoritarian state. Vance was there to show support for their guy, but he was also there as a kind of flex: Trumpism is worldwide.

There were problems, however. Vance tried to call Trump twice during the April 7 rally and was sent to voicemail both times. (The same day, Trump picked up a call from an MS NOW reporter who wanted to know what he thought about his wife’s decision to declare, seemingly out of nowhere, that she had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes against underage girls.) Then, on Sunday, Orbán and his party were wiped out in Hungary’s elections. In a landslide so great that the results could not be questioned, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a supermajority that could allow it to erase much of Orbán’s legacy.

Vance by then had moved on to his next humiliation, as the lead U.S. negotiator in talks to end the Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That Vance had been tapped at all was itself a kind of humiliation. Since the start of the conflict in late February, there had been leaks to the press that the vice president was not a fan of the war and that he wanted to keep his distance from it—leaks no doubt provided by Vance’s own team, which is already strategizing for the 2028 presidential election. It was a characteristically cynical bit of P.R.: The stories uniformly showed him backing the war to a point—he believed it should be “fast” (doesn’t everyone?)—but trying to worm his way out of any potential blowback.

Vance was not being a team player. His reward was being sent to Islamabad to represent the United States in talks with Iranian officials to end the war. Alongside trade representative Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Vance endured marathon negotiation sessions. How close they got to a deal is up for debate. Iranian sources have suggested that one was near before Vance pulled the rug out, though that should be taken with a grain of salt. What’s clear, though, is that Vance failed miserably. After 21 hours of negotiations, he announced he had “bad news,” that “we did not reach an agreement, and I think that is much worse news for Iran than for the United States.” Not long after, Trump announced he was ordering a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, to economically cripple Iran in retaliation for the economic damage the country has caused by closing the strait to trade involving Western nations.

Vance couldn’t end the Iran war. That may have been a tall order, but his failure has more immediate consequences for the ambitious vice president. He has spent the last six weeks doggedly trying to avoid any association with the war. He can’t plausibly do that anymore, after his failed assignment in Islamabad. It’s his war now too, and that may still be true come 2028.

Judge Roopal Patel ruled in January that the administration did not have sufficient evidence to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a Ph.D. student studying at Tufts University on an F-1 student visa. On Friday, Patel received a pink slip, formally pushing her out of the federal judiciary.  

Patel told The Boston Globe that she was not sure if her ruling in Öztürk’s case had affected her tenure. 

The White House has made it all too clear that immigration is a top priority for Donald Trump’s second-term legacy. Under ex–Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department massively shifted its resources toward arresting and prosecuting noncriminal immigrants, dropping tens of thousands of criminal probes in the process.

Immigration court is the final step of that process before the Trump administration can legally thrust the people out of the country, though the admin has not seemed to understand the limitations of the law. Instead, the DOJ has attempted to ram cases through the system in an attempt to meet the White House’s demands, placing an enormous and unusual burden on America’s judges.

“It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” Patel told The New York Times. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”

But Patel was not the only judge suddenly ousted from their job on Friday. Six federal judges were fired at the end of last week, a U.S. official confirmed to the Times. Four of those were probationary discharges, according to the official. 

One of the other immigration judges dismissed on Friday was Nina Froes, a Massachusetts judge who oversaw the government’s case against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student leader at Columbia University and green card holder who protested against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Froes ultimately ruled against Mahdawi’s deportation last April, despite an aggressive pressure campaign fronted by State Secretary Marco Rubio to push the West Bank refugee out of the country. Rubio at one point argued that Mahdawi’s presence in the U.S. could “potentially undermine” U.S. foreign policy.

Froes was similarly unsure if her ruling in the Mahdawi case had affected her job stability.

“I don’t know what’s in the minds of other people,” she told the Times. “But I can’t imagine it was helpful.”

During a press conference at Michigan State University, a reporter asked Rollins whether the U.S. Forest Service offices would close in the state, as part of a so-called “commonsense” restructuring that would result in the mass closure of 57 regional offices across the country. 

“I don’t have those talking points in front of me, but let me tell you this: the misinformation in the media,” Rollins said. “There is no closing of the Forest Service. We are moving it out of Washington, D.C. We are re-headquartering it in Salt Lake City, where it can be closer to the forests that it actually serves, and the people that those forests serve, most importantly.”

Rollins claimed it made no sense to have “thousands upon thousands” of USDA employees based in Washington, but made no mention of the dozens of regional facilities she was planning to shutter.

BROOKE ROLLINS: That's incorrect. There's no one in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that's getting reassigned to the East Coast

REPORTER: There's a Forest Service office that's closing in Houghton, Michigan

ROLLINS: I don't have that one in front of me. Any offices that are… pic.twitter.com/q7ll8aOnOh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 13, 2026

Another reporter pressed Rollins about whether USDA employees in the Upper Peninsula would be potentially reassigned to the East Coast. The U.P. is home to two national forests, the Ottawa and Hiawatha National Forests, that account for nearly two million acres of land. 

“That’s incorrect. There is no one in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that’s getting reassigned to the East Coast,” Rollins said. 

“There is an office that’s closing in Houghton, Michigan,” the reporter said.   

“So, any offices that are closing, I don’t have that one in front of me, but any offices that are closing, it’s usually because they are, the rent is way too high, and there is so much work that needs to be done,” Rollins said.

But in Houghton, rent has nothing to do with the closure.

“This particular facility is paid for,” MTU College of Forestry Professor Evan Kane told TV6 Upper Michigan Source. “We rent the land from Michigan Tech for a dollar a year. It doesn’t cost the forest service very much in comparison to some of the other units that did get shuttered.”

That’s not the only part of Rollins’s logic that doesn’t add up. If the Trump administration wants the Forest Service to go where there’s a forest, why wouldn’t Rollins relocate to Alaska, which has approximately 21.9 million acres of forest, the most of any state? Or how about California, which has the highest number of individual forests? Or why don’t they keep a number of research facilities in forests across the country instead of cutting short years of research to consolidate thousands of workers to a single site in Colorado?  

Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, has alleged that the dramatic reshuffling was actually illegal because congressional funding for the fiscal year 2026 included a stipulation that funds could not be put toward relocating offices or employees, or reorganization.

Federal agents broke down the door of ChongLy “Scott” Thao, a Hmong American, without a warrant and then arrested him in his underwear, forcing him to walk outside in the freezing St. Paul streets with just a blanket. The incident was captured on video, with neighbors shouting at several armed agents as protesters gathered at the scene with horns and whistles.

ICE released Thao after a couple of hours in custody, determining that he was an U.S. citizen with no criminal record. DHS later claimed they were looking for two convicted sex offenders, although Thao told the AP he had not seen the two men before and that they didn’t live with him.

In a news conference Monday, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Sheriff Bob Fletcher said that they are seeking evidence from the Department of Homeland Security over Thao’s arrest.

“There are many facts we don’t know yet, but there’s one that we do know. And that is that Mr. Thao is and has been an American citizen. There’s not a dispute over that,” Fletcher said. “There’s no dispute that he was taken out of his house, forcibly taken out of his home and driven around.”

The goal of the investigation, Choi said, is to find out if ICE agents committed crimes that they could be prosecuted under state or federal law, adding, “This is not about any type of predetermined agenda other than to seek the truth and to investigate the facts.”

Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, announced last month that they were looking into 17 instances of “potential unlawful behavior” conducted by former Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino and other federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, including the use of chemical agents and attacks on local residents. 

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in March that “I want to be clear with our community about the challenges these investigations entail, because the federal government has refused to provide us information about the actions of their officers in Minnesota.”  

The DHS has refused to provide information to Minnesota’s state and local officials regarding the most egregious offenses in the operation: the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In March, the state joined Hennepin County in a lawsuit against the Trump administration over their lack of cooperation. The Trump administration won’t take kindly to Ramsey County’s efforts, either. 

Trump stopped the golf cart he was driving with his grandson, Donald Trump III, to stop and greet golf content creator and MAGA supporter Nina Coates, who was jumping up and down out of excitement.

“She’s in great shape, great shape, look at her,” the president said. “You want a picture? Come on over here,” Trump said, adjusting his pants and pulling her in close. “Is she in good shape or what?”

“This is how people (Trump) treat you if you keep staying in shape,” the video is captioned.

A second clip of the interaction showed Trump still with Coates—holding her hand—while other golfers and club members surrounded them. “Is that your husband?” he asked her, pointing directly at the camera.

“Yes, sir,” the man behind the camera replied.

While sitting next to his grandson, Trump called out to a woman from his golf cart and then gave her a hug:

“She’s in great shape! Great shape! Look at her! You want a picture? Is she in good shape or what?

…Is that your husband?” pic.twitter.com/SR8TXOdT9p

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) April 13, 2026

It’s hard to brush this off as just some wholesome interaction, especially knowing what we know about the president—from his harassment of beauty pageant contestants to his friendship with perhaps the most infamous sexual predator of the modern era, Jeffrey Epstein. And even worse, he’s driving around in sunny Mar-a-Lago golfing while people home and abroad suffer because of the decisions he made.

After grabbing two bags of McDonalds from his DoorDash driver, the president repeatedly prompted the food courier to compliment his policies in front of the press—to no avail.

“Well, you’re really nice, would you like to do a little news conference with me? These are not the nicest people, they’re not nice like you,” Trump said.

“I’ll do whatever you ask me to do, sir,” said Sharon Simmons, wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words “DoorDash Grandma.”

Simmons had traveled to the White House from Arkansas to speak with the president about his No Tax on Tips program, which she told Fox News had allowed her to afford cancer treatments for her husband.

However, Trump’s press conference featured very little talk of the relevant tax cut. Instead, Trump pressed Simmons on a range of other conservative talking points, including banning trans athletes (primarily trans girls) from competing in their gender-aligned sports.

“Do you think that men should play in women’s sports?” asked Trump.

“I really don’t have an opinion on that,” Simmons insisted.

“You don’t? I’ll bet you do,” Trump pushed.

“No, no, I’m here about no tax on tips,” she said.

Trump also queried the grandmother of 10 about her opinion on the war with Iran, the scheduled White House UFC tournament, and whether she voted for him.

“And I think you voted for me? Do you think?” asked Trump, touching her shoulder.

“Uh, maybe,” Simmons said with a laugh.

Simmons later told Fox News that she was a supporter of the president.

DoorDash celebrated the success of its White House event later that afternoon, noting in a statement that Simmons had conducted the “first ever White House delivery.”

“34 Ships went through the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, which is by far the highest number since this foolish closure began,” Trump wrote in a brief post on Truth Social.

It seems the president is trying to suggest that his announcement of a military blockade was to thank for the sudden surge in trade through the Strait of Hormuz, but that “foolish closure” he referred to was spurred by his decision to join Israel’s reckless military campaign against Iran. As a result, Iran’s retaliatory attacks have brought trade through the Strait of Hormuz to a screeching halt, threatening global food and energy supplies.

Trump would like to pretend he’s the savior, when really, he’s the problem.

The reality of Trump’s blockade is a lot more tenuous. A sustained military blockade would be incredibly expensive and require a large number of warships, and U.S. allies have made it very clear they have no intention of helping out. While it may seem like a quick fix, taking Iranian oil off the market will only squeeze the market, causing energy prices to surge higher. Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon, as crude oil has climbed to over $100 per barrel.

Plus, Trump’s numbers are a little off. In the last 24 hours, 31 vessels have passed through the Strait of Hormuz, carrying oil, natural gas, and other cargo, NBC News reported. As of early Monday morning, there were 11 vessels in the waterway, including three Iranian ships. That’s still well below the prewar daily average of 138 ships. Although it wasn’t immediately clear whether the U.S. Navy had begun its operation, CBS News reported, two ships immediately turned away from the waterway Monday.

Just minutes after Trump’s military blockade was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. EST, the president claimed that Iran’s entire navy had been “completely obliterated”—except for a fleet of “fast attack ships,” which he claimed posed no threat. “Warning: If any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED,” he wrote.

Of course, that would throw a pretty big wedge in the tentative ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has also warned that any warships approaching the strait will be considered a ceasefire violation.

The Truth Social post showed an illustration of the president, in the style of art usually found in Bibles, dressed in white in a red shawl with light emanating from him while he healed a sick man in a bed wearing a hospital gown. In the picture, Trump is surrounded by men and women, all white, while the background is full of soldiers, fighter jets, a bald eagle, a waving American flag, and the Statue of Liberty.

Shortly after deleting the image, he made a lame attempt to play dumb, saying that while he did initially post it, “I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker there which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.”

Reporter: Did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?

Trump: It wasn't a depiction. I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor. And had to do with red cross as a red cross worker, which we support and only the fake news could come up with that one. pic.twitter.com/7Y1u86GjkP

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2026

Various figures on the right, including evangelical Christians and right-wing media personalities, decried the picture as blasphemous. Sean Feucht, who has performed worship music at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and the White House, called on the photo to be “deleted immediately.” Christian influencer Mandy Arthur posted on X that “we have made a mistake and accidently elected the Antichrist. Send help.”

Anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines also chimed in, saying that “a little humility would serve [Trump] well” and “God shall not be mocked.” Conservative Christian commentator Megan Basham called the post “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy” and called on Trump “to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”

Trump has not endeared himself to his Christian supporters in recent days, drawing ire from Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals alike. After a report emerged last week that his administration apparently threatened Pope Leo XIV in January, Trump doubled down on Sunday and attacked the pontiff further, calling him “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

The pope deflected Trump’s comments on Monday, saying that he wasn’t afraid of the president and that he “will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, ⁠promoting dialogue and multilateral ​relationships among the states to look ​for just solutions to problems.”

“Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent ‌people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way to do this,” the pope added.

This post alienated Christians of all denominations, even the right-wing conservatives in his base. But Trump doesn’t seem to care, and has enjoyed being compared to Jesus before, most recently at an Easter lunch at the White House by his spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain. The president has never rushed to correct anyone praising him, no matter how excessive.

This story has been updated.

“If you sexually assaulted someone, you should not be serving in Congress—[or as President],” Democratic Representative Melanie Stansbury wrote Sunday night on X. “Period.”

Some Democrats made a point to include other legislators with allegations of assault or corruption—like Republicans Tony Gonzales and Cory Mills and Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick—in their calls for expulsion.

“Congress should not tolerate representatives who abuse staff, betray public trust for personal gain, and generally violate their oath of office. Reps. Swalwell, Gonzales, Cherfilus-McCormick, and Mills should resign. If they refuse, they should be expelled,” Representative Nydia Velasquez wrote. “Americans deserve better and Congress must hold our members accountable.”

“The accusations against Rep. Eric Swalwell are serious and must be fully investigated,” Representative Greg Amo said in a statement. “The women who have come forward are brave, deserve to be heard, and have my support.... These allegations, like those against Cory Mills and Tony Gonzales, demonstrate they are not fit to serve in public office and should resign. If they do not and the House votes on their removal, I would vote to expel them from Congress.”

“I’ve seen enough. With his nuanced statement aimed at defending likely criminal charges, Swalwell all but admits a per se abuse of power under House ethics rules: sex with a subordinate,” Representative Jared Huffman wrote. “He must now drop out of the Governor’s race and resign from Congress. Rep. Tony Gonzales, who admitted to the same violation, should also resign. If they don’t, I will support voting to expel both of them.”

“I am sick and tired of watching powerful men in powerful positions be able to get away with sexually abusing and assaulting women,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal on MS NOW. “Representatives Gonzales and Swalwell should resign,” she added on X. “Otherwise, I would vote to expel them.”

Some Democrats made even stronger statements, although anonymously.

“People feel confident that the allegations against all four are credible,” one House Democrat told Axios. “[Members] are frustrated ... by what feels like a bottleneck of scandals without any real accountability yet in any one.”

“We want a full house cleaning,” said another. “Get the garbage out of here. These jerks are destroying Congress, for the American people and for all of us who came here to do good work.”

This is exactly what should be happening. The allegations against Swalwell are alarming, and there has been far too much passivity from both parties regarding the heinous conduct of their members, from sexual assault to corruption. This must be a moment of serious reckoning.

The president shared some soft words with fighter Paulo Costa cageside Sunday evening, telling the sweaty light heavyweight competitor that he’s a “beautiful guy.”

“You could be a model, you look so good,” Trump can be heard saying in a video clip, gesturing his hands to frame Costa’s image.

“You’re too good lookin’ to be a fighter. You are some fighter,” Trump added.

Donald Trump told Paulo Costa he’s too good looking to be a fighter 💀

“You’re a beautiful guy. You could be a model, you look so good.” pic.twitter.com/Xe7FRH0Sfa

— Happy Punch (@HappyPunch) April 12, 2026

Costa had previously refused to share the details of their conversation, telling reporters during the post-fight press conference that his exchange with Trump was “secret” and “personal.”

“As for Trump, I just kind of jokingly talked to him and then I said some things that were personal,” Costa said. “So just keep it a secret for now. It was just between us.”

That same evening, UFC dropped the first official promo video for the White House event, expected to take place on Trump’s birthday—June 14—in Washington.

Meanwhile, peace talks were falling apart with Iran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a social media statement that his country had “engaged with U.S in good faith to end war,” but that U.S. negotiators had instead offered “maximalism, shifting goalposts, and blockade.”

“Zero lessons earned. Good will begets good will. Enmity begets enmity,” Araghchi said.

In the wake of the failed peace deal, Trump aggressed the situation yet again, promising to block all imports and exports from Iranian ports out of the Strait of Hormuz starting 10 a.m. EST Monday. As of publication, there has been no confirmation that the blockade is in place.

In a meeting with Israel’s Cabinet ministers, Netanyahu said, “I spoke yesterday with Vice President JD Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations. In this case, the explosion in the negotiations.”

Netanyahu went on to claim that the U.S. broke off the negotiations because Iran didn’t immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz and wouldn’t commit to getting rid of all of its enriched uranium.

“The explosion came from the American side, which could not tolerate Iran’s blatant violation of the agreement to enter the negotiations. The agreement was that they would cease fire, and the Iranians would immediately open the gates. They did not do that. The Americans could not accept that,” Netanyahu continued.

The idea that the White House reports to Netanyahu daily is not likely to go over well with the growing number of Americans (including Republicans) who see the war in Iran as driven by Israel. Trump’s poll numbers are taking quite a beating over the Iran war, and after ceasefire talks failed over the weekend, those numbers are not likely to improve soon.

With more Americans now sympathizing with Palestinians over Israelis, the Trump administration appearing deferential to Israel could hurt them in the coming midterm elections, and even further down the road in 2028. President Trump and his fellow Republicans show no signs of recognizing this, and that may be at their own peril.

In Georgia, the crop of conservative primary candidates have struggled to distinguish themselves in a crowded field, without a clear front-runner or any endorsement from the president. Meanwhile, incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff has been able to keep his powder dry and maintain a considerable fundraising edge over his opponents. CPR has moved that race out of the “Toss Up” category into “Lean Democrat.”

Another race that has shifted from uncertainty toward blue victory is the Senate battle in North Carolina, where Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley is facing off against Roy Cooper, a Democrat and former governor, for Thom Tillis’s vacated seat. A recent poll by Quantus Insights saw Cooper secure a five-point lead over his opponent, continuing a positive trend since the beginning of the year.

In Ohio, former Senator Sherrod Brown is set to face off with Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed as a replacement for Vice President JD Vance. The Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for Republicans in the upper chamber, is reportedly planning to spend a whopping $79 million to help Husted hold his seat. Still, CPR has moved that race from “Lean Republican” into the “Toss Up” column.

The CPR’s final leftward rating shift was for the race in Nebraska, where Independent Dan Osborn is back once again to duke it out in an increasingly chaotic primary election. In 2024, Osborn came within seven points of defeating establishment Republican Senator Deb Fischer, a remarkable feat for a progressive independent with zero name recognition in a solidly pro-Trump state. This time around, he will challenge Republican Senator Pete Ricketts. That race has been moved from “Solid Republican” to only “Likely Republican.”

Trump has put Republicans in a tough spot. Gas prices and inflation are up; employment and consumer sentiment are down. Trump’s reckless war in Iran continues to rack up an immense price tag, which will only grow if he makes good on his promise to install a military blockade around the Strait of Hormuz. (He had stated the blockade would begin at 10 a.m. EST on Monday, but as of publication, the deadline has come and gone with no confirmation that the blockade was in place.)

It’s only a matter of time before Trump’s disastrous leadership takes its toll on his own party members, and November is right around the corner.

NATO has no intention of cooperating in the military endeavor, despite Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that “many other countries” plan to help U.S. forces take control of the vital oil tradeway.

Some of the biggest members in the defensive alliance announced Monday that they will not get involved, including Britain and France.

“We are not supporting the blockade,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told BBC Radio. He added that the U.K. “is not getting dragged in” to the U.S.-Israel war in Iran.

In light of the latest failed peace deal, the U.S. military announced that it would block all maritime traffic in and out of the strait starting at 10 a.m. EST Monday.

“The blockade will be enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement Sunday afternoon.

It is not clear exactly how the U.S. military plans to physically block ships from utilizing the waterway. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has warned that any warships approaching the strait will be considered a ceasefire violation.

The war in Iran has thrust the entire world into an energy crisis, spiking oil and gas prices, stalling movement, and tanking economies. At the time of publication, Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—had once again surpassed $100 per barrel. Before the war in late February, Brent crude was hovering around $65 a barrel.

But the U.K. and France are trying to solve the problem a different way. The two countries are co-hosting a summit with more than 40 nations this week in order to “restore freedom of navigation,” Starmer said in a statement. Its results, however, are dependent on a peace deal.

“The ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz is deeply damaging. Getting global shipping moving is vital to ease cost of living pressures,” Starmer said. “This week the U.K. and France will co-host a summit to advance work on a coordinated, independent, multinational plan to safeguard international shipping when the conflict ends.”

Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon, with some areas of California seeing prices as high as $7 a gallon. But the cost is even worse abroad: In the U.K., gas has hit the equivalent of roughly $7.50 per gallon, while in France, the price has soared beyond $8 per gallon. In the Netherlands, another NATO member, gas costs more than $10 per gallon.

The Journal successfully argued that Trump “fail[ed] to adequately allege that the statements in the Article are false or defamatory, actual malice, or special damages for his defamation per quod claim,” the judge noted, as he dismissed the case.

The infamous letter showed the silhouette of a woman containing a poem addressed to Epstein, in which Trump allegedly wrote “a pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret. Donald J. Trump.”

There is also a signature at the bottom of the woman’s figure, potentially mimicking pubic hair. It reads “Donald.”

This is a developing story.

“So, do you believe the price of oil and gas will be lower before the midterm elections?” Bartiromo asked the president during a phone interview on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.

“I hope so. I mean, I think so. It could be, it could be. Or the same. Or maybe a little bit higher. But it should be around the same, I think this won’t be that much longer,” Trump said.

As Trump warned that prices could go even higher, Bartiromo’s eyebrows shot up, her eyes widening. She blinked in apparent disbelief, but said nothing as the president continued to rant.

“They’re wiped out, Maria. They’re wiped out. And you don’t get a—you don’t get a fair shake. You know, we need a free and fair press in this country ...”

Trump continued to ramble as the camera panned over to a board that displayed that the price of crude oil had nearly reached $100 per barrel.

BARTIROMO: Do you believe the price of oil and gas will be lower before the midterm elections?

TRUMP: I hope so. I mean, I think so. It could be the same or maybe a little big higher

(Check out Maria's face as he says this!) pic.twitter.com/GW2YUbZ6Ii

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2026

The average price of gas at U.S. service stations nationwide has topped $4 a gallon for most of April—in February the average was just below $3. Gas prices continued to climb Monday after Trump said he would install a military blockade on all ships entering or exiting the Strait of Hormuz following failed peace talks with Iran.

A recent poll from CBS News/YouGov found that 51 percent of Americans found gas prices presented a significant financial hardship. Trump’s approval rating on the economy and his overall job performance ticked down slightly, with those who said they struggled the most with gas prices having the biggest problem with Trump’s handling of the economy.

If Trump’s reckless war in Iran continues to yield disaster for average Americans’ wallets, MAGA Republicans won’t have an easy time getting reelected come November. But Trump already seems more than content with alienating his base in every possible way.

In a post on X Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that his country “engaged with U.S in good faith to end war.”

“But when just inches away from ‘Islamabad MoU’, we encountered maximalism, shifting goalposts, and blockade,” Araghchi posted. “Zero lessons earned. Good will begets good will. Enmity begets enmity.”

Trump claimed in an angry Truth Social post earlier that day that “IRAN IS UNWILLING TO GIVE UP ITS NUCLEAR AMBITIONS!”

“In many ways, the points that were agreed to are better than us continuing our Military Operations to conclusion, but all of those points don’t matter compared to allowing Nuclear Power to be in the hands of such volatile, difficult, unpredictable people,” Trump posted.

“My three Representatives, as all of this time went by, became, not surprisingly, very friendly and respectful of Iran’s Representatives, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, Abbas Araghchi, and Ali Bagheri, but that doesn’t matter because they were very unyielding as to the single most important issue and, as I have always said, right from the beginning, and many years ago, IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Trump continued.

Iran has been a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1968, and its terms require them not to seek nuclear weapons. Since the Iran war broke out this year, though, Iranian lawmakers have pushed for the country to pull out of the agreement, citing the war and Trump’s decision to scrap the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama.

Iran’s former supreme leaders, the late Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, each made religious rulings against developing and using nuclear weapons. But facing a relentless bombing campaign from the U.S. and Israel, as well as broken deals and failed negotiations, Iran’s new clerical leadership might rule differently.

Lawler, who claims to be a moderate but legislates as a MAGA Zionist, remained firm in his support for Trump and the war, stating that “we need to do everything we can to ensure that this regime never gets a nuclear weapon.” The crowd was unconvinced.

One man was escorted out of the Sunday night town hall after shouting that the Republican Party is “morally bankrupt” and led by “spineless liars” while the crowd cheered him on. “You must impeach. He’s a fraud, he’s corrupt, he’s an incompetent psychopath,” the man yelled, referring to Trump. “The Republican Party and you are enabling him.... He makes genocidal threats against millions of innocent Iranian civilians.... Don’t be spineless, impeach him!”

“The Republican Party is morally bankrupt” a man shouts as he is being escorted out of a town hall hosted by Congressman Mike Lawler in the lower Hudson valley pic.twitter.com/j49Nb0eojf

— Robert Jimison (@RobertJimison) April 12, 2026

“Respectfully, you have abdicated your responsibility to the majority of the constituents in District 17,” another constituent who identified as a “military mother” told Lawler. “You have in fact endangered our young people, our service members of our country and killed civilians by not standing up to Trump on this unjustified war.”

This is just one of many rough town halls that Lawler has held, as his constituents grow tired of deference to an administration that they—and much of the country—are fed up with. The midterms can’t come soon enough.

Trump leapt into hot water with his Christian fans Sunday, when he posted an AI-generated image of himself as literal Jesus on Truth Social. In the image, Trump appeared dressed as a biblical figure, healing a sick man in a hospital bed, surrounded by bald eagles, soldiers, fighter jets, and whatever this winged creature is floating in the background behind him.

After enduring a few hours of the firestorm, Trump removed the post Monday morning. A statement blaming the post on some imaginary staffer shouldn’t be far behind.

Former MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene decried the implication he was “replacing Jesus.”

“It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit,” Greene wrote in a separate post. (Greene directly compared Trump to Jesus during his hush-money trial in April 2023.)

Riley Gaines, an anti-trans activist, struggled to make sense of the president’s post.

“Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this?” she wrote on X Monday. “Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.”

Megan Bashem, a culture reporter for the conservative outlet Daily Wire, also seemed confused.

“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy. But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God,” she wrote on X Sunday night.

Mandy Arthur, a Christian influencer, made a plea directly to the creator. “God, we might have made a mistake and accidently elected the Antichrist. Send help,” she wrote on X Monday morning.

Sean Feucht, a Christian activist in Trump’s MAGA coalition who has performed worship music services at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, also condemned the post. “This should be deleted immediately,” he wrote on X Monday. “There is no context where this is acceptable.”

In a separate post, Feucht tried and failed to justify the president’s blasphemy. “Does Trump legitimately think he’s Jesus to America? No. Is he trolling the Pope with the AI image? Maybe,” he wrote. “ Is the Pope a woke Communist (like most recent prior Pope’s have been)? Yes. Should Trump have posted that image even as a joke? No.”

But Trump’s behavior should not come as a surprise. The president’s apparent God complex is the inevitable result of MAGA’s unwavering support and outright idolatry. These are some of the same people who insisted that Trump was saved from assassination by divine intervention for the purpose of saving the nation. Now they’re disgusted that he’s taken them seriously?

Trump’s blasphemous post comes amid a veritable fall from grace, as the president continues to plummet in the polls amid his increasingly unpopular war in Iran.

Monday’s post, made on Orthodox Easter, was only slightly more ridiculous than his actual Easter post: a threat to Iran proclaiming, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

This story has been updated.

Pope Leo XIV brushed off the U.S. president’s verbal attacks Monday, telling journalists aboard a papal flight to Algiers that he’s not afraid of the Trump administration and uninterested in getting into a “debate” with the U.S. president.

“I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do,” Leo said in English. “We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker.”

Separately, the Chicago-born pontiff told Reuters, “I don’t ‌think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in ‌the way that some people are doing.

“I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, ⁠promoting dialogue and multilateral ​relationships among the states to look ​for just solutions to problems.

“Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent ‌people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way to do this.”

Leo’s remarks follow several direct challenges from the president, as well as reports that emerged last week about a meeting between Pentagon officials and a U.S. Vatican ambassador in January that included suggestive threats and a mention of the Avignon papacy.

In a lengthy rant on Truth Social Sunday, Trump claimed that the leader of the Catholic Church was “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela,” Trump wrote. “And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.”

He added that Leo should be “thankful,” claiming responsibility for the pope’s appointment by suggesting that the religious order only put an American atop the Vatican in order to “deal with” Trump.

“Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” the president added. “It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!”

Trump continued to vent in front of reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews minutes later, repeating that he’s “not a big fan of Pope Leo.”

“I don’t think he’s doing a very good job. He likes crime, I guess,” Trump said.

The president also suggested that Leo was inappropriately “worried about fear,” claiming that the Catholic Church arrested ministers and priests and “all those great people” during the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, Leo was only installed in 2025, and Trump himself was in charge of the U.S. at the height of the pandemic.

The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second-most-popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.

But on Sunday, Orbán’s Fidesz Party lost resoundingly in the Hungarian elections, ending Orbán’s 16-year reign as prime minister. Opposition party Tisza is projected to win more than two-thirds of the 199 seats in Hungary’s Parliament. This is a huge victory for liberal and pro-democracy voices not only in Hungary but across the world. Orbán is an intellectual leader of the global far-right movement that has reshaped politics around the world over the last decade. He and his allies have come up with strategies to weaken the judiciary, the media, academia, and other independent sources of power in Hungary, which Trump and other leaders around the world have then implemented in their countries. It’s also another huge defeat for Trump. Candidates that Trump supports have been losing elections across the United States over the last year, Now his losing streak has crossed the Atlantic.

It’s important to emphasize that Hungary’s voters probably didn’t go to the polls thinking about Trump or the global fight for democracy. Fidesz lost for the normal reasons that political parties do. A corruption scandal, centered around a pardon issued by some of Orbán’s allies in 2023, created deep public frustration with the party. Hungary’s economy is struggling. Tisza and its leader, Péter Magyar—no one’s idea of a liberal crusader—ran a smart campaign that unified people who were tired of Orbán and Fidesz.

And while parties and leaders in other countries, particularly Canada, have successfully leaned into anti-Trump sentiment, that wasn’t the case in Hungary. Vance and Trump interjected themselves into the race because there was some chance it would help. After all, 53 percent of adults in Hungary said they had confidence in Trump doing the “right thing” regarding foreign affairs, in a Pew Research Center poll conducted last year. That number was significantly higher than in other European nations.

But even if this election wasn’t a referendum on democracy, far-right politics, or Trump, it’s still cause for celebration. Orbán wasn’t just an autocrat—he was inventing new methods of autocracy. He was a huge proponent of the anti-immigrant, anti-multiculturalism, anti–European Union, anti-liberal politics that has taken hold among conservatives in the United States and Europe. He was beloved by Trump and Vladimir Putin, perhaps the two most destructive world leaders of this century. It’s great this man is out of power.

And while Trump’s candidate in Hungary losing an election doesn’t do much for those of us in the U.S., it’s another indication that neither the U.S. nor the rest of the world is destined to adopt right-wing authoritarianism. We are far from the dark days of 2024, when far-right parties made huge gains in the European Parliament elections and Trump was elected in the United States a few months later. Now Trump is deeply unpopular. Republican candidates are losing or underperforming everywhere. Far-right politicians in Italy, France, and Germany are increasingly keeping their distance from the American president, aware that their publics hate him. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is getting international acclaim for bashing Trump.

Let me not overstate my case. It is not clear how committed Tisza and Magyar are to reestablishing democratic norms in Hungary. Orbán (or Fidez with a new leader), could regain power, as Trump did after his 2020 defeat. Far-right parties could still win elections in Britain and France in the next few years, giving Trump-style politics an even bigger beachhead in Europe than controlling Hungary. And Trump’s growing unpopularity at home and abroad didn’t stop him from going to war in Iran and further destabilizing the Middle East. The American presidency is a hugely powerful job, and Trump still has almost three years to wreak havoc from the Oval Office.

All that said, we can still appreciate this moment. The vice president of the United States made the virtually unprecedented move of flying to another country on the eve of its election to explicitly campaign for a particular candidate. That candidate lost, badly. Embarrassing. Humiliating. Couldn’t have happened to someone (Vance) more deserving of shame and ridicule. From California to Wisconsin to Canada to Hungary, being Donald Trump’s candidate these days is a path to defeat. Scholars describe Hungary and increasingly the U.S. as “electoral autocracies.” That second word matters. But so does the first. Elections are proving to be a critical check on aspiring autocrats around the world. Good riddance, Viktor Orbán—and may his friend JD get the same treatment in 2028.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social feed can get awfully revealing at times. He just unleashed a number of posts that open a window on a lot of negative things about the man and his presidency—the transactionalism, the amorality, and the utter buffoonish incompetence. In one, he attacked his MAGA allies in a way that accidentally revealed that he has no principles. In several others, he seemed to show that he has no real grasp on the actual nature of the problem he faces now with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The clarity of all these missives raises a question: How do we make sense of the fact that this man is our president?

Political theorist Alan Elrod has a good piece for Liberal Currents, arguing that the election of Trump—twice—should prompt introspection about what we’ve become. So we’ve invited him on to work through some of this with us on a theoretical level. Alan, good to have you on.

Alan Elrod: Good to be back.

Sargent: So let’s start with your piece. You likened the national drift at this moment to the atmosphere surrounding Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech in the ’70s. In particular, you pointed out that we’re in the middle of an energy crisis—this time created needlessly by Donald Trump—and also Iran, of course, is as front and central as it was then. And we’re all reeling, as you put it, from Trump’s threat of Iranian genocide. The mere fact that the American president threatened civilizational erasure and genocide, threatened to kill tens of millions of people, is itself a crisis, is it not?

Elrod: Absolutely. We can’t take it back. The elected leader of this country, who speaks for us—he’s our president, speaks for us to the world—said he was going to wipe a civilization off the map. That’s the kind of thing our allies aren’t going to be able to forget. And it’s the kind of thing that we won’t be able to forget. American presidents, for all the wars we’ve waged, even the ones that many Americans see as having been unjust, you did not have American presidents going out and publicly saying, We’re doing this so that we could destroy as many of these people as possible.

Sargent: Former Trump allies were appalled at this. I want to highlight how Trump reacted to that. They’ve been attacking him over the war. They’ve been attacking him over the threat of genocide. Trump unloaded with this furious tirade that went on for hundreds of words. He attacked Alex Jones this way, saying, “Alex Jones lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.”

Alan, that’s a reference to Alex Jones’s well-known denial that the Sandy Hook massacre ever happened. But at the time in 2015, Trump went on Alex Jones’s show and hailed him as amazing. And during Trump’s first term, Sandy Hook people begged him to denounce Jones’s conspiracy theories and Trump refused. Yet now, solely because Jones crossed him, he is suddenly willing to fault the conspiracy theorizing. It’s just an extraordinary window into this guy’s utter lack of any principles. I want to get your thoughts on that.

Elrod: To reference George Conway, who makes this argument all the time—this is what happens when you have a malignant narcissist as the president of the United States. This man is simply not capable of thinking or feeling or conceiving of other people beyond himself.

If you’re saying that he’s great, then you can do no wrong. And it doesn’t matter if you perpetuate conspiracy theories about the murder of elementary-school children. And if you criticize him, then you’re a terrible person and you should die, whether you’re Alex Jones or whether you’re the entire population of Iran.

Sargent: You had a line in your piece which really struck me: “The president speaks to the people.” I want to apply that to this Sandy Hook case because we can see that Trump recognizes zero obligation of any kind to speak to all of the American people. This is a fundamental fact about this presidency. At the time, people in Newtown, Connecticut begged Trump to exercise that option—to speak to the American people by denouncing the conspiracy theorizing about the shooting. He refused.

He only sees this sort of thing as purely transactional. If he can use a shooting like this to punish an enemy like Alex Jones; at that point, he’ll acknowledge that it’s bad to lie about the shooting, but not when it’s not in his own personal interests. Political theorists like yourself call this personalist rule. Can you talk about that dimension of this and why it essentially abdicates such a major responsibility of an American president?

Elrod: We can add to this that Connecticut is a blue state. Trump might have maybe rebuked Jones earlier if we were talking about a shooting in a place that was very pro-Trump; in Florida or some other place that he feels more like is his people. Because that’s the other thing. He not only lacks the empathy to care about or think about these victims, but if they happen to be in a place that he sees as having not voted for him, then he’s especially un-inclined. He has no interest in what happens to people. We’ve even seen data that this administration has, at a historic scale, denied emergency relief to blue states.

He does not care about other people. If you are seen by him as being in any way not with him, not worshipping him, not only does he not care about you, he’s actively malicious toward you.

Sargent: Right. He enjoyed what Alex Jones was doing at that point. And now all of a sudden, because Alex Jones has betrayed him on a personal level, he turns right around and talks about this shooting in a more human way. It’s almost staggeringly unprincipled. I have a tough time getting my head around it.

Elrod: Yeah. It’s not like Donald Trump suddenly magically found the morally correct position on Sandy Hook. He’s not doing this because he discovered his compassion. He’s mad at Alex Jones for criticizing him. He does not suddenly care about these people in a way that he didn’t before this week. That’s not what’s happening.

Sargent: I want to highlight a couple more Trump posts about the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is mad because Iran has not reopened it to his liking, and he says he stopped bombing Iran on the understanding that Iran would stop. He posted this: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable, some would say, of allowing oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have.” Then he posted this: “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards other than a short-term extortion of the world by using international waterways. The only reason they are alive today is to negotiate.”

Alan, he keeps saying he’s the one with all the leverage because the U.S. military is powerful. And because he’s apparently willing to wipe out their entire civilization, including tens of millions of people. But he doesn’t appear able to force Iran to reopen it. I don’t know that he understands that. Does he get the situation at a basic level here or not? It seems like he doesn’t.

Elrod: No, he doesn’t. I’m not the first to say this. Other people have observed Donald Trump’s entire idea of dealmaking is subterfuge and bullying and gaining usually some kind of illegal leverage over someone and then using that.

Iran’s leverage in the strait isn’t short-term—geographically they’re there forever. They have it as long as they can apply military force. It’s clear that we haven’t been able to take that capability away. I guess if he wants to use just massive destruction, if he wants to nuke Iran, he can do that.

I will say, I don’t encourage people to talk about Trump sort of TACOing on this. One, it’s not settled—he’s president for another ... more than two and a half years. And two, he clearly is a psychopath and a narcissist and I don’t put it past him to unleash millions of deaths on Iran.

Sargent: I want to remind people that Donald Trump was briefed on exactly this situation. He was told about the Strait of Hormuz’s difficulties, its inherent challenges, its geographic challenges, and he brushed it off, essentially saying, We’re so strong, we can just overcome anything. That’s what he’s discovering is not true.

Elrod: He doesn’t have any understanding of the limits of raw military force, and neither does his secretary of defense.

Sargent: That’s exactly right. Now, here’s where we get to the big questions. We’ve got pure transactional amorality, a personalist presidency that orients all decision-making around his personal interests and corruption, a sociopathic willingness to threaten to kill tens of millions of people, and staggering incompetence that’s so bad that Trump doesn’t even know how incompetent he is. You wrote this in your piece: “We cannot pretend that we are well as a nation. No morally healthy country would put this man in power twice. We have become a morally insane, civically disordered, and self-regardingly decadent country.” Why don’t you make that case? Go ahead.

Elrod: Well, part of it is a little bit self-evident. Donald Trump is a bad person and he didn’t hide that. He was a candidate in 2016 who bragged about wanting to use force and bragged about his sexual harassment of women and in every way laid out that he was a terrible human being. You could write off 2016, perhaps, as a blip—an accident of people thinking Hillary had it in the bag and then some tiny marginal votes here and there in swing states, and the electoral college is weird. And then we did it again.

Donald Trump was president. He presided over a catastrophic mismanagement of a global pandemic. He led an insurrection to try to overthrow the election he lost. And then we put him back in power again. In his reelection campaign, he wasn’t any more secretive about who he is. He was just as frank. It was just as clear who he was. Did he win with just amazing majorities? No, he didn’t win 60 percent of the vote. But he won, and this time he actually won the popular vote.

What I’ve tried to say in this part of the piece is yes, that is damning. It’s damning of the Americans who voted for him, but it’s also more generally damning—I’m sure you want to get into this—of where the country is as a whole, that this person has been able to dominate our politics for a decade, and that so many Americans are in a place to be persuaded and seduced by the politics he’s offering.

Sargent: We suck pretty bad right now. I don’t contest that. We are a shithole country in many ways, as he would put it. But let me offer a slightly different take on this, which a lot of political scientists might go for. Point one is voters have always been poorly informed—this is just a fact about politics, it’s always been the case. Voters often vote on identitarian grounds.

Point number two is that it was an extremely strange and unique situation in which incumbent parties around the world went down to defeat precisely because of the post-Covid shock. Voters just weren’t really thinking very clearly about exactly who was to blame for what. It was just a purely anti-incumbent sentiment.

Point number three, a lot of the young people and a lot of the nonwhite working-class people—the types that Trump was able to win over—these were low-information voters and they actually had a reason to be pissed about inflation. And they weren’t thinking beyond get the people out who are there right now.

Point number four, Biden was a weak communicator. He was in many ways a weak public figure. And point number five is that it was an incredibly close election, closer than in other countries where incumbent parties went down to defeat. I want to point out that there’s something of a risk in overreading the meaning of his election. It plays into his hands in certain respects.

Now I don’t think you’re doing that, but as a general matter, I worry that if we read too much into the meaning of that election, we head down some bad intellectual paths. Am I wrong about that?

Elrod: I don’t think I would say you’re necessarily wrong, because it’s important that we don’t say that Americans are necessarily, as a majority, intellectually committed to Trumpism. But there’s also on the other side of this a chance of underreading. What I mean by that in the essay is that if we don’t take seriously some of these more underlying problems—that we are a deeply isolated and lonely and distrustful country that is focused on material wellbeing and status and is more dislocated and civically apathetic than maybe we’ve ever been—we’re going to get more Trumps, because that’s just fertile breeding ground for people like him.

It’s not so much that there’s 50-something percent of the country that is committed to Trumpism. But there’s just a huge amount of the country that is not doing well—and I mean that in an emotional way, I mean that in a political way, civically. Those conditions, so long as they persist, continue to make us vulnerable to more cycles in the future of this kind of politics.

Sargent: People are very easily manipulated, is the baseline point we can agree on here, don’t you think?

Elrod: Yeah, they are.

Sargent: You see it as a social crisis of some kind.

Elrod: I do. I see it as a social crisis. I think it comes down to a combination of the continuing crisis of social capital that people like Robert Putnam have talked about for, at this point, decades—people aren’t joining clubs, they’re not getting involved, they don’t know their neighbors. When that’s true and you combine it with the age of the smartphone, with increased, conspicuous consumption and preoccupation with envy and status, then you create a world where people are constantly being rubbed raw by resentments and constantly feeling dissatisfied and not getting the things that nurture good civic health because those opportunities are declining where they were.

Sargent: I’m a little skeptical of social crisis–mongering on some very big level, but I want to grant your point and bring it back to the Newtown, Connecticut situation because in a funny way that sort of bundles a lot of this stuff together. If you think about mass shootings in general and gun violence in the country—this is one of the things that makes the United States stand out as a really fucked up place. A lot of people agree on that.

When something as horrible as the thing in Newtown happens, that’s the sort of moment where you think you can actually hope for a little national cohesion and some civic health in a sense, some kind of outpouring of solidarity among people. It’s at moments like that, when you have conspiracy theorists start to really screw around with stuff, and you have presidential candidates like Donald Trump was in 2015 fueling those conspiracies, that you really throw up your arms in despair. The fact that he would do that at a moment when the country is so traumatized by a moment like the killing of 20 children in an elementary school—that makes me despair a little bit. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that problem in the broader context of what you’re talking about.

Elrod: That problem is also related to QAnon. On the one hand, it is a crisis of empathy, people being able to see events like this—that they’re consuming a lot of times through digital media—as being about other human beings. But it goes back to the dislocation and loneliness I mentioned, because I see these things as deeply intertwined. Really, they are. Because one of the major proponents of Sandy Hook conspiracism is Alex Jones. He’s also one of the major vectors of QAnon conspiracism. This goes back to that social crisis.

One of the books that I have found really interesting in this moment is this excellent book—I didn’t cite it in the piece, but it’s wonderful—called The Quiet Damage by Jessalyn Cook. It is about people whose family members have fallen into QAnon and many of them who have not come back from it. The damage that it wreaks on their lives, their relationships.

Moments of high conspiracism—America has always had a paranoid tendency in its politics—but moments of really heightened conspiracism are indicative of broader social problems, because people are more attracted to them when we are struggling through these serious deficits of connection and social capital. I don’t think we can separate it. But the phone is a big problem too, because the digital age makes these things just more potent.

Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up—in the Sandy Hook case, we had Trump show the very worst of himself, and we just had him show the very worst of himself again, by actually paradoxically allowing that there actually was a mass shooting, not indulging the conspiracy theorists. What are your parting thoughts on all this? Do we have a way out civically, other than just organizing and winning the next election or two?

Elrod: You know what? Organizing and winning the elections are great. Doing things in your community is more important. This is a generational fight. Beating Trump and beating MAGA at the polls is great. But if you don’t get out there and know your neighbors, if you don’t get out there and try to fix the social capital problem we have—start a book club, start a movie-night club, do something like that—if you don’t do those things and engage in those face-to-face interactions that really revive civic life around you, where you are, then I don’t think this is a problem we’re going to get out of anytime soon. That’s my hopeful message, actually, because I am hopeful about it. But winning an election is actually the short-term fix. Doing this stuff is long-term.

Sargent: Well, Alan Elrod, that was all very beautifully said. It’s pretty dispiriting, got to say, though. Alan, thanks so much for coming on.

Elrod: Thanks for having me.

In contrast to the mutant plastic visage of Kristi Noem, you probably can’t call up a visual mental image of Zeldin’s eminently forgettable face. It’s also hard to call to mind any memorable utterances by Zeldin. That’s an achievement in a crowd that normally will not shut up. Consider, for example, the luridly reactionary and genocidal statements of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who last month called wartime rules of engagement “stupid” and “politically correct,” and recently reposted a video of the founding pastor of his church calling for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. Or consider Stephen Miller, who baselessly accused ICE murder victim Alex Pretti of being a terrorist, a charge he lobs against left-leaning protesters all the time. Or take Trump himself, who gleefully bragged that he was going to destroy Iranian civilization this week and that it wouldn’t be a war crime because Iranians are “animals.”

At one point in 2022, when then-Congressman Zeldin ran for governor of New York and a violent attacker interrupted one of his campaign events, commentators noted that the unfortunate incident could help him by increasing his name recognition; a Siena poll that year found that 57 percent of New Yorkers either did not know who he was or had no opinion of him.  

By last summer, as EPA chief, of course his profile had risen, but nearly a third of New Yorkers were still not sure what to think of him until the pollster explained what he was doing at EPA, at which point in the conversation his negatives tended to rise. (He’s so boring that national pollsters rarely even ask about him.) By contrast, 48 percent in a February poll had a negative view of RFK Jr, and only 5 percent of respondents said they had never heard of him.

Inasmuch as he has been perceived at all, Lee Zeldin hasn’t been perceived as an extremist, even in his blue state of origin. Although he lost his 2022 bid for governor, he came close, garnering over 47 percent of the vote. (The last Republican to win election in New York state was George Pataki, a moderate who expanded health care access for the working poor.) In fact, Zeldin was particularly well regarded on environmental issues: He has long been a tireless advocate for conservation on Long Island, fighting to protect the Long Island Sound—especially Plum Island, an area off the North Fork with extraordinary biodiversity.

But all this masks a truly extreme anti-environmental record at the EPA thus far—one that the nation’s premier pollution fans are ecstatic about.

Last Thursday, Zeldin appeared at a Heartland Institute conference of anti-environmental, pro-polluter lobbyists and activists who have been working for years to dismantle climate regulations. Before Zeldin took office, this group would have been considered quite fringe. Politico, reporting the conference last week, called them climate “contrarians.” I suppose that’s one word you might use to describe people who argue that fossil fuels are actually good for the environment and once put up a billboard comparing climate advocates to the Unabomber. The Heartland gathering had one message for Trump, Politico reported: “Please keep Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in place.”

Zeldin’s keynote address at the gathering received a standing ovation. It surely wasn’t about the speech itself: He was just as forgettable as usual. But this average-looking fortysomething lawyer was greeted like a K-pop star at the climate deniers’ conference because he has delivered for them beyond their wildest dreams. He has cut billions of dollars from climate grants the Biden administration had awarded, eviscerated pollution rules and enforcement capacity, and perhaps most significantly, wiped out the legal basis of much climate regulation: the 2009 endangerment finding, which says that greenhouse gases can be regulated because they imperil human life and health. At the Heartland gathering, a leading anti-climate activist called Zeldin “the most consequential EPA chief in the agency’s history.”

Zeldin’s significance may be the one thing the Heartland crowd is right about. No other EPA head has ever done as much damage as he has, undoing climate progress and other environmental regulations. In his first year, the EPA lost and forced out employees at more than twice the rate of other agencies, bringing staffing to a “40-year low,” with disproportionate losses of staffers with doctorate degrees and people working on public health. For 2027, Trump’s proposed budget cuts EPA spending in half.

But the toll on bodies—the sheer loss of life—will be greater still. The January announcement that the EPA will no longer consider lives saved when setting pollution rules is not only ghoulish in its logic but will make it harder to regulate numerous pollutants, including greenhouse gases, and will exacerbate deadly climate-related disasters like wildfires, which kill people both directly and indirectly, through damage to infrastructure as well as long-term health effects. A recent study estimates that smoke from U.S. wildfires already kills over 20,000 people a year. The repeal of the endangerment finding and consequent worsening of the climate crisis will also drive up food prices, increasing food insecurity for many all over the world; more people will die from hunger. That’s on top of the damage already inflicted last year: In March 2025, in a move Zeldin triumphantly called the “greatest day of deregulation that our nation has ever seen,” he announced the rolling back of air quality standards, carbon pollution limits on fossil fuel–powered plants, vehicle standards, mercury limits, and methane standards—an anti-environmental blitz that will, according to multiple analyses, cost some 200,000 lives.

Those of us who survive Lee Zeldin’s stint at EPA could still become sick or impaired because of his policies. According to the EPA’s own website, mercury exposure in the womb can cause serious developmental problems for children. In addition to its neurological effects, it also can hinder kidney functioning. Air pollution too is linked to asthma and lung cancers. These are just a few of the ills that Lee Zeldin, the least offensive man in the Trump administration, is inflicting upon Americans.

None of this can simply be reversed with a stroke of a pen by subsequent administrations: Humans and ecosystems that die will stay dead. And the damage to the government institutions that study and regulate the environment is also serious: Defunded departments can be tough to recreate; it won’t be easy to get scientists who have left government service to come back; and the deterring effect of all this on a new generation of experts, currently in school, can’t be overstated.

Not everyone has been fooled by Zeldin’s bland vibe. Those who closely follow EPA actions recognize the true disaster that his tenure has been. Even those who may have initially been optimistic about his EPA leadership have been horrified. Acknowledging his past praiseworthy record on Long Island conservation—and even climate policy—Adrienne Espostito of Citizens Campaign for the Environment wrote an op-ed last year asking, “What happened to the Lee Zeldin we knew?” His current attack on climate regulations would devastate “coastal communities across America, including his hometown,” she wrote, while undoing the endangerment finding would be “catastrophic to America’s security and future.” Some MAHA activists began a petition campaign to fire him over his deregulation of harmful chemicals.

It’s worth considering how Zeldin measures up to Scott Pruitt, Trump’s notoriously terrible, scandal-ridden EPA head in the first administration. Pruitt was far more widely vilified, even by Republicans in Congress, with Joni Ernst calling him “as swampy as you can get,” a reference to Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption. But Pruitt, despite numerous moves to gut environmental regulations, also did less long-term damage than Zeldin because his corruption made him much less effective: He was under at least a half a dozen investigations by the time he resigned.

Zeldin has, by contrast, served the polluters better and with less drama. You can see why Trump would want this deceptively dull extremist in the attorney general role. After all, Pam Bondi was the opposite, attracting negative attention while disappointing Trump by not going all in on his agenda or prosecuting his enemies.

The obvious, loud, vulgar, sensationalistic evil of much of the Trump Cabinet is a liability for Trump in this attention economy, when a creepy appearance or one callous comment can become infamous on social media within minutes. But what if—think of the stereotypical serial killer—it’s the quiet ones we need to worry about? The Stephen Millers and Pam Bondis do deserve our ire, but perhaps we should fear Zeldin’s boring, methodical destruction of our natural environment, our government institutions, and our regard for human life even more. Don’t be fooled.  

Swalwell is from California, but one of these incidents allegedly happened in Manhattan, where the district attorney is bringing criminal charges. CNN found three more women making similar allegations. It’s sickening. Late Sunday, Swalwell bowed to the inevitable and announced he was ending his campaign. It appears that he may well be expelled from the House this week. Good. 

How on earth do men who engage in this kind of behavior think they can get away with it? How in the world does he think he can seek higher office—the governorship of the largest state in the union—without this coming out? He ran for governor with a bomb strapped to his chest. It boggles the mind. Except that, well, most men who do this sort of thing do get away with it, don’t they? It’s still terrifying for most women to come forward, risking their young careers in a field they love. That makes it harder to report these stories—again, we must give enormous credit to the Chron for locking this down. Men who know the system and work it to their advantage are just scum. House Democrats need to vote en masse to kick Swalwell to the curb.

A number of commentators, our Perry Bacon among them, had observed previously what a train wreck the California’s governor’s race had become. Eight Democrats are running, and they threaten to split the Democratic vote enough to potentially enable a Republican, and a Trumpy Republican at that, to prevail in the state’s jungle primary system, under which the top two vote-getters on June 2 face each other in a runoff. 

There’s been pressure on other Democrats to stand down so the party can coalesce around one or two candidates. California electing a GOP governor would be a horror show, especially heading into a presidential election the Republicans show every sign of wanting to steal. Putting California’s hefty 54 electoral votes in anything resembling play and forcing Democrats to spend money in the state for the first time in about 30 years would be a dream for the GOP.

So now, it’s time for some of the other Democrats to drop out of that race tout de suite. I sometimes miss the days of the old party bosses, because what California needs in this case is someone who can say what obviously needs to be said here, which is that the field needs to be cleared for Tom Steyer.

Do I adore Steyer? No. Hedge-fund billionaires aren’t the type who normally make my heart throb. His brief presidential run in the 2020 cycle was unimpressive. I don’t remember a word he said. He’s been taking heat lately over a revelation that his company invested $90 million in a firm that today manages two ICE facilities in California. Those investments are 20 years old, and it’s 14 years since Steyer even ran the company, but such are the matters on which campaigns sometimes turn; something of a person’s character is revealed in how they handle these things once they’re under the klieg lights.

So, no, Steyer wouldn’t be my first choice. But politics isn’t about personal fulfillment. It’s about winning, and stopping the bad guys. The main bad guy in this case is Steve Hilton, who is British (?!) and, perhaps predictably, a former Fox News host. Donald Trump endorsed him recently. On Sunday, the state’s Republicans convened in San Diego and decided to endorse neither Hilton nor his opponent, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. 

The Democrats need to unite behind one candidate, and according to the polls and common sense, that candidate is Steyer. He can win. Easily. Besides, my friend Harold Meyerson, who knows California politics as well as any journalist in America, tells me that Steyer actually holds some progressive positions. He’s funded several liberal ballot measures, supports the 5 percent proposed state wealth tax, wants to end a limit on commercial real estate tax increases, and backs a number of alternative energy measures.

Over the longer term, the most important lesson the Democratic Party needs to absorb here is to turn away from California and find its national leaders from elsewhere. Swalwell seemed promising, but it turns out he’s a hideous person. Katie Porter, also running for governor, was a terrific member of the House of Representatives. She should have stayed there. Nancy Pelosi was a great speaker in a number of ways, but the Democratic Party doesn’t need any more leaders with a net worth of—sit down—$278 million. Governor Gavin Newsom opposes the wealth tax Steyer backs and angered younger progressives with the way he threw trans athletes under the bus. I don’t know a single person who wants him to be president. And is Kamala Harris really, seriously going to inflict another presidential candidacy on us?

Finally, let’s not forget that all or some of these people undoubtedly knew about Swalwell’s dark side ages ago. They should have gotten together to sink him before he even became a gubernatorial candidate.

I feel similarly about New York, for the most part. Putting completely to the side the personal merits or demerits of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Party shouldn’t have as its top national leaders two guys who live less than two miles away from each other in a very sui generis city that has about as much in common with middle America as corned beef does with a corn dog.

If this fall’s blue wave is large enough, Democrats will represent a lot of districts across the country that they haven’t for a very long time. They should seize on that moment and identify their future leaders from the heartland. It would be a good thing for them if their future House leader who goes on CNN to speak for the Democratic Party does so with a Midwestern or even a slightly Southern accent (though not too Southern!).

Those Democrats, incidentally, will also be less beholden to the neofascist tech bros and the private equity greedheads who tend to populate California and New York and subvert the liberal politics in those states. Becoming the party of working people once again means becoming a party that can represent middle America on the national stage. The Swalwell scandal is a hard lesson to learn today, but learning it now can light the way for a brighter tomorrow.

MORE TOMASKY NEWS: I have a novel coming out later this month, my first foray into fiction (although I suppose my critics would say otherwise). It’s called Killing Baby Hitler, from O/R Books. It starts out in the future with a group of scientists unlocking the secret to time travel. They decide after much hand-wringing to send two of their number back to 1889 Austria to do the dirty deed, and, well, hijinks ensue. 

Kurt Andersen compares it to Vonnegut. And my friend and yours Molly Jong-Fast calls it “savagely funny [and] inventive” and says it “really explains the dark times we live in.” I agree! Order it here—from the publisher, please, and not from Amazon. Thank you.

Hujar’s fascination with the interplay of life and death dated back at least a decade. In 1963, he’d traveled with his lover, the painter and sculptor Paul Thek, to the Capuchin Catacombs in Sicily, where mummified bodies were preserved and often posed in lifelike suspension. The crypt offered Hujar evocative portrait subjects and the opportunity to experiment with light, shadow, and the theatricality of the human figure. Candy Darling enacts these concerns, presenting a body on the threshold of mortality yet incandescent with calculated glamour. The image sanctified Darling in the queer imagination as eternally alluring, eternally 29.

For Thek, the visit to Capuchin was similarly formative. He was struck by the sense of mutability he encountered underground. “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers,” he told the curator Gene Swenson. “We accept our thingness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.” Over the next several years, he found acclaim—mostly in Europe—for sculptures and installations that reinterpreted the evanescence of the body. His own most famous work, completed in 1967, was a life-size wax effigy modeled after himself entitled The Tomb.

“If they can be said to have shared a subject, it was almost certainly death,” Andrew Durbin writes of the artists in The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, a joint account of their entangled careers. Death is not only the leitmotif of their work but a tragic near simultaneity in their biographies. Both men died of AIDS-related illnesses less than a year apart: Hujar in 1987, at 53, and Thek in 1988, at 54. Their legacies have diverged sharply since. Despite a retrospective at the Whitney in 2010 and frequent inclusion in group shows, Thek remains somewhat subliminal in American art history, partly because of his years abroad and partly because many of his improvised, transient assemblages were lost or destroyed.

Hujar, meanwhile, is safely canonized, an instance of posthumous consecration that recalls that of Vivian Maier or Francesca Woodman. He’s a fixture of international galleries, and last year was unlikely fodder for a biopic starring Ben Whishaw, Peter Hujar’s Day, based on the transcript of a conversation he had with writer Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974. Portraits in Life and Death (1976), the only book he published in his lifetime, was reissued in 2024. More recently, Paul Thek and Peter Hujar: Stay Away From Nothing, a collection of his early photos accompanied by Thek’s letters, was released by the Brooklyn art publisher Primary Information. Another stand-alone biography is in the works.

Durbin, the editor in chief of Frieze, deliberately restricts the time span of his book to the roughly two decades before the rise of AIDS. He begins just before Hujar and Thek met in the 1950s and ends in 1975, when they had an inexplicable falling out and rarely spoke again. This was a time when their lives “were filled with light and color, exuberant personalities, extraordinary art; they were beloved, even if loving them was difficult at times.” Durbin writes of their deaths in an epilogue, but as the book’s title implies, Wonderful World resists the grim inevitability of AIDS narratives and tells a story that is sweeter, more domestic, and cliquish. Among the “exuberant personalities” that formed the artists’ inner circle were Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, and the various luminaries who sat for Hujar’s camera. His work persists less as a document of 1970s New York—an era that remains a cultural infatuation—than as a record of how he and his milieu collaborated in their own self-mythologization.

“Things get more beautiful as they get more fragile,” Thek once wrote in his journals, a maxim that describes his art and, occasionally, life itself.

Neither had an idyllic childhood. Hujar was born in New Jersey in 1934, the son of an absentee father and a waitress mother who couldn’t raise the boy on her own. She sent him to her parents’ farm, where he frolicked among cows and geese and vegetable gardens. This pastoral upbringing informed his earliest photos—of cows in a field—and would echo in some of his later images of animals and landscapes. Thek was born in 1933 and grew up on Long Island, the second of four children. His father, George, was a prototypical “man in a gray suit” who commuted to work in the city, leaving his wife in the suburbs to booze and dash off sad poems. Durbin relates a vivid anecdote about George wearing a head device in the evenings to help “reactivate” nerves paralyzed by cancer. “The gadget would interrupt the television signals, prompting a fit in Paul’s mother, who might otherwise have fallen into an alcoholic stupor that Paul thought was a kind of trance.”

Both men were drawn to art early, and both approached their sexuality as something to explore rather than as a fixed fact. Hujar, who had his first gay encounter at 16, was markedly more precocious and self-assured in this regard. “By 1970, he guessed that he might have had sex with at least fifteen thousand people,” Durbin writes. Thek identified as bisexual and was more ambivalent: “No one was much convinced of Paul’s attraction to women, even when he started sleeping with them.” Still, by the 1950s they were in relationships with other men—Hujar with the painter Joseph Raffael, and Thek with the set designer Peter Harvey. In 1956, Raffael traveled to Florida to visit Thek, whom he knew from Cooper Union, where Thek lived in a small house in Coral Gables and flitted through odd jobs: taxi driver, gardener, bookstore clerk. Hujar went, too, camera in hand.

The photos he took during the trip “have a soft, almost neo-romantic tone,” Durbin writes, comparing them to the cloistered, coded tableaus that PaJaMa—Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French—staged in the 1930s and ’40s along East Coast beaches. One portrait presents Thek barefoot and boyishly coy on a forest floor, while another captures him plaintively indoors. “Here are the many faces a pretty boy is supposed to make when trying to charm the camera,” Durbin notes. The session allows him to introduce an idea that will recur throughout the book—that Hujar’s radiographic eye could penetrate a sitter’s artifice and reveal something like a soul: “His camera reached into you, rummaged around for parts of you that you might not have realized were there, parts he then brought forward, into the open—the raw and undigested, the real.”

By 1960, Hujar and Thek had become lovers; the details of exactly how and when went unrecorded. They traveled together to Italy, where Hujar was on a Fulbright scholarship, studying film. In Europe, Thek immersed himself in the Old Masters and Van Gogh, absorbing something of the latter’s gestural urgency into his own paintings. Hujar continued taking photographs—of children playing on village streets, religious processions, ruins, the sea. Their European sojourn culminated in a visit to the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo in 1963. According to their friend Ann Wilson, “The catacombs were, in their eyes, a sculptural installation [in which] the body is a visible relic referring to the Resurrection.” Soon after, Thek’s sculptures would begin resembling unidentifiable meat molded into biomorphic forms, while Hujar’s images formalized—almost eroticized—contrast and lighting.

Eroticism was another signature of Hujar’s and Thek’s work, perhaps even more pronounced than death—or, rather, inseparable from it. In the late 1960s, Hujar began documenting the “little death” of orgasm. (His 1969 photo Orgasmic Man, a close-up of his friend Dutch Anderson climaxing, was later ubiquitous as the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 bestseller, A Little Life.) For Thek, eroticism emerged obliquely, a by-product of his sculptures’ viscerality. He sometimes told an anecdote about stumbling upon a woman masturbating to his sculpture Meat Piece With Warhol Brillo Box when it was included in a group show at MoMA in 1966. That assemblage—a hunk of wax made to mimic raw, sinewy beef, a tube poked in its middle, planted inside one of Andy Warhol’s infamous Brillo boxes—carries a sexual je ne sais quoi, although it wouldn’t titillate any but the most fetishistic of butchers. As Thek recalled, “She leaned forward and touched her lips to the tube extending from the Brillo box. He never forgot the slurping sound she made.”

Susan Sontag, Thek’s sometime lover, titled her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” after one of Thek’s offhand remarks. She ends that piece by rallying for an “erotics of art,” an approach that privileges experience over analysis, in which erogenous and neural responses are preferable to intellectual dissection. In this sense, the bootlegged carnality of Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box or the candid immediacy of Orgasmic Man exemplifies Sontag’s principle: The work’s power resides in its capacity to be felt, not explained.

Hujar’s images also depend, however, on a controlled performance. In his photos, sitters are attuned to the camera and finesse their presentation accordingly. Contrary to the notion of Hujar as a clairvoyant who could excavate a subject’s essence, he was a studio photographer by inclination—a kindred spirit to Richard Avedon, with whom he studied in 1967 as part of a master class. Just as Avedon’s white backdrop became a psychic vista, so Hujar’s apartment functioned as a domestic theater for people’s rehearsals. In his portraits, electrical outlets, baseboards, scuffed floors, and stark walls add accents of drab realism that only underscore the illusion of unmediated truth playing out in front of the camera. All of Hujar’s subjects are in drag; some of them literally, as in his portraits of Ethyl Eichelberger, and others in the practiced faces they assumed when posing for posterity.

Durbin compares Hujar to Diane Arbus, a guest lecturer in Avedon’s master class: “If Arbus’s most recognizable portraits capture the unsettled and even deranged outskirts of American life … often in nagging isolation, then Peter would strive for a more understanding portraiture.” Arbus tends to treat her subjects as specimens, while Hujar sees his as models, perhaps a holdover from his much-resented gigs as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines. A model’s job is to sell a fantasy, and in Hujar’s images, sitters compose oblivion-proof versions of themselves. (Sontag used a photo that Hujar took of her in 1966 as the author image for Against Interpretation.) In a 1975 follow-up portrait, Sontag reclines on a blanket in front of a bare wall, hands behind her head, seemingly entranced by clouds on the ceiling—an icon of leisurely erudition that could just as well be a billboard or an ad for public radio. It was a posture Hujar recycled; John Waters, William S. Burroughs, Ray Johnson, Divine, and others recline in their portraits, intimating a vulnerability that’s easy to mistake as sincere. Hujar perfected the mannerism in his 1985 photo of Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis lying in her open casket; here, vulnerability and sincerity have no choice but to coalesce.

His rapport with animals is another refrain in Wonderful World. “Peter communicated so fluently with animals as to seem to possess an almost magical linguistic power, like that of Saint Francis,” Durbin writes, adding later that “with animals, Peter waded into mystery.” To my eyes, the drama of Hujar’s animal portraits is overstated, though there are exceptions. In his 1985 photo of Will, a shar-pei with a deeply corrugated coat, the dog looks wistfully off camera, as if satisfied that he’s finally being taken seriously. Another image shows a cow emerging from darkness, flash-lit, nothing else discernible except the silhouette of a skeletal building and foothills in the distance. The photograph startles; you don’t know who is confronting whom—both you and the animal are fellow wanderers in the field of night.

Thek’s work startles, too, in a more graphic manner. The Tomb (also known as Death of a Hippie, much to Thek’s chagrin) took six weeks to make and became the epitaph for a strain of ’60s idealism that, even then, had turned gangrenous. At the center of the piece is a wax replica of Thek’s own body, tinged pink, displayed on its back like an embalmed corpse. Its blackened tongue protrudes. In early versions of the installation, the figure was placed inside a ziggurat, also painted pink, that mimicked a shrine or a crime scene. “This was still the so-called Summer of Love, yet [Thek] had seen through the hippie hype, the dope clouds, the be-ins, to the madness lying beneath the surface of everything: The gnawing disappointment, the deepening despair,” Durbin writes, an analysis that would have irked Thek, who denied the piece’s sociological subtext. His meat pieces, which he called Technological Reliquaries, were further dispatches from a berserk American id, sounding “a note of horror from the psychological depths of the country itself,” per Durbin.

Thek first exhibited the meat pieces at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964. The show was, briefly, a curiosity, and made Thek an artist to watch. Still, almost none of the pieces sold—then or ever. The work unnerved museums and collectors, who likely didn’t appreciate Thek’s mischievousness. As he explained the pieces to a journalist, “I see it as a form of barbaric humor—a violation of humanism.” He elaborated in a conversation with Artforum in 1981, connecting the Reliquaries to an effete estrangement from real-world concerns:

I was amused with the idea of meat under Plexiglas because I thought it made fun of the scene—where the name of the game seemed to be “how cool can you be” and “how refined.” Nobody ever mentioned anything that seemed real. The world was falling apart, anyone could see it. I was a wreck, the block was a wreck, the city was a wreck; and I’d go to a gallery and there would be a lot of fancy people looking at a lot of stuff that didn’t say anything about anything to anyone.

After the Stable Gallery show, Thek returned to Europe, where he had bit parts in a few spaghetti Westerns and embarked on a loose body of work called Processions. These temporary, ritual-like actions and sculptural arrangements were ephemeral by design. Thek, who already had a mystical bent, had begun speaking about art as a spiritual and collective experience rather than a permanent object in a gallery. By using perishable materials—paper, fabric, flowers, cheap paint, candles, food—he made works that couldn’t easily be bought, preserved, or owned. In one work from 1969, for example, he toted a wooden cross on his back through the countryside and hung it in a tree. Many of these pieces no longer survive except in photographs.

At the same time, he began exhibiting symptoms of the undiagnosed mental disorder that shadowed the final stretch of his life—“a severe case of going down in flames,” he called it. His friends suspected bipolar disorder, or even untreated syphilis. “By [Thek’s] own count, he had gone mad two or three times, and he looked to Christianity for answers,” Durbin writes, noting that the artist considered joining a monastery in Vermont. By the mid-’70s, he and Hujar had drifted apart; the latter’s career had remained steady back in New York. Hujar’s commercial work had appeared in major fashion magazines, on album covers (the Fugs, Iggy and the Stooges), and in advertisements for companies such as IBM. He shot celebrities and scene-makers, and a number of nudes, including a well-known triptych of Bruce de Ste. Croix manhandling his oversize erection. “Why can’t you have someone ... touching himself and still have the same artistic considerations?” Hujar mused. If his photographs feel genuine, it’s because they accept performance as the condition of authenticity, not its opposite.

Hujar’s photos enshrine a volatile moment in which New York found itself at a crossroads. The city was derelict and falling apart, but subversive ways of living and art-making flourished in the cracks. His visual grammar—black-and-white portraits with sparse backgrounds and sitters who meet the camera with a mix of susceptibility and resolve—condenses the era into a mood, an aesthetic that feels like shorthand for truth itself. His style remains a template for how serious celebrities and thinkers want to be seen: austere, self-possessed, authentic, as if depth registers on the mask of the face. Thek, by contrast, resisted any stable image, insisting on fragility and spiritual unease. Yet together they mark a shared refusal of commodification. Hujar dignified the individual body through restraint; Thek dissolved the art object through ritual and decay. Both proposed that meaning emerges from exposure—emotional, physical, and moral.

In the summer of 1975, Hujar photographed Thek for the final time. One of the images from that session appears in Portraits in Life and Death. Compared to his earlier images of Thek, this one seems off-the-cuff, as if captured between setups. Thek looks at the camera open-mouthed, his expression flat, light gently halving his face. It’s a portrait neither flattering nor ugly, but ambiguous—much like the artists’ relationship at that point. “It was hard for anyone to put their finger on where things began to go wrong between them,” Durbin writes. “Probably, it was a gradual accumulation of moments, of slights and snide remarks, most of them hidden from the record.” Their split would be permanent, although Thek didn’t realize it then. “Any time you want to make love, just ask me,” he told Hujar. There’s no evidence Hujar ever accepted the offer.

In one of those coincidences that almost make you believe in cosmic irony, Hujar died in room 1423 at Cabrini Health Care Center—the same room where he’d photographed Candy Darling on her deathbed more than a decade earlier. His friend and former lover, the artist David Wojnarowicz, photographed Hujar’s body in the immediate aftermath. These close-ups of hands and feet and Hujar’s face—mouth ajar, eyes cracked—recall images that Hujar himself would have taken. Less than nine months later, Thek was dead, too, another casualty in that cavalcade of loss that brought to an end a certain era of queer self-invention. “Nothing lasts forever, other than paradise,” he’d once written. He might have put it more honestly: Paradise is what’s left after you’ve tried everything else.

Days earlier, Governor Brad Little had signed into law the most punitive anti-trans bathroom bill in the United States, banning “knowingly and willfully” entering a bathroom or changing room “that is designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person”—with penalties including up to one year in jail for a first offense, “essentially making it a misdemeanor for trans people to use the bathroom that aligns with their identity,” said Scar Rulien, a board member at Trans Affirm, a statewide trans rights group. Subsequent offenses could result in felony charges and up to five years in prison. “The bill doesn’t ban illegal activity in a bathroom,” Rulien told me. “It makes a new crime out of something.” The ban is not yet in effect. The arrests on April 3 were the culmination of a protest against the law—resulting in six charges of misdemeanor trespass and two charges of resisting arrest—but they were a preview of what trans Idahoans may soon face.

Laws endangering transgender and nonbinary communities are now so common. Dozens are introduced every legislative session in many states: banning bathroom use, prohibiting gender-affirming care for young people, forcing schools to out trans students, denying changes to government-issued identity documents. The onslaught from anti-trans lawmakers is now so constant that it may be hard to remember that just 10 years ago, it was not like this. Human Rights Campaign identified 55 anti-trans laws introduced across the United States, with three passing, in 2015. The next year, when North Carolina passed an anti-trans bathroom ban, there was national resistance by entities from civil rights groups to professional sports organizations and corporations. A narrative began to take hold: Republicans had gone too far, and such bans were costly, extreme, and politically reckless. As North Carolina news outlet The Assembly marked the anniversary of the bathroom ban, it reminded readers that the state’s attorney general called the bill “a national embarrassment” and that Trump, during his 2016 campaign, said North Carolina was “paying a big price” for the law.

Now, in 2026, when Idaho’s legislature has passed the country’s most comprehensive and most punitive bathroom ban, the national response feels comparatively muted. There were no calls for boycotts from major organizations, like the one from the NAACP in North Carolina. Bruce Springsteen did not cancel shows. PayPal—a company co-founded by the gay neoreactionary Peter Thiel—did not threaten to take its business out of state, as the company had done when it withdrew a planned expansion to Charlotte. Bathroom bans have since proliferated, but very few threaten trans people with arrest as Idaho has. While Florida, Kansas, and Utah have bathroom bans with some criminal penalties in some public bathrooms, Idaho has the only ban extending such penalties to any “place of public accommodation.” The bill was opposed by a range of groups and interests, from Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates–Idaho to the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police. It was not even the state’s first bathroom ban; the first was in 2023, targeting students, then it expanded to colleges and universities in 2025, and now it has been expanded to all bathrooms and for the first time criminalizes trans people themselves. Legal challenges to both those bans have already been brought by trans students in Idaho, represented by Lambda Legal. “We are tremendously concerned about the new law that criminalizes transgender people for ordinary restroom use,” said Kell Olson, counsel and strategist at Lambda Legal, in a statement last week. “We are talking to people across the state whose daily lives are being affected.”

Given all this, it is unnerving to witness something like public acquiescence despite Idahoans’ loud and persistent resistance to the bathroom ban, just one among a host of other anti-trans laws passed this year in the state. As if to make the point for the public, Governor Little signed the bathroom ban into law on Transgender Day of Visibility, as trans Idahoans rallied outside the Capitol. “We were in our own world,” said Rulien of Trans Affirm, who had co-organized the rally. “We were in the moment.”

“The law doesn’t go into effect until July 1, but the trans community is already feeling the anxiety,” said Preston Pace, an activist and co-founder of the group Trans Joy Boise. The message had been sent: The state’s government was officially excluding trans people from civic life. “We’re already starting to see the public try to enforce these things, and getting aggressive with people in public restrooms,” Pace told me by phone last week. In hearings on the ban, state Senator Brandon Shippy claimed the bill doesn’t target trans people because trans people are not mentioned in the bill. “There is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here,” said Shippy, “because there is only male and female.” He called the trans community a “myth.” When the opposition claims it has no opposition, why would they entertain testimony at all? Shippy said in 2025 that he had voted against that year’s bathroom ban because to do so would affirm that trans people existed.

The hearings, such as they were, were rushed affairs, with limited public comment. In one Senate committee, testimony was cut off after only five people spoke (two in support, three against). “We see this tactic happening a lot,” said Rulien. “Push them to the end of the session so that they can justify not giving them an adequate hearing.” Rulien testified against the bill, and as they told me (and told the panel considering the bathroom ban bill), “this is the second time I’ve testified against this exact same thing.” Both Pace and Rulien were clear about what little they can expect from the legislature. “When we go to the hearings, we go into them knowing they are going to pass anyway,” said Pace. When they prepare what they’ll say about a bill, Rulien told me, what advocates are asking themselves is, “How are we going to frame our testimony so that when this goes to court, it can potentially be overturned? Because that’s the only real reality for us to win in these deep red states.”

This is not at all uncommon. In 2021, I met a Texas middle schooler who had already testified against three sessions’ worth of anti-trans bills that targeted her education and her medical care. Any anti-trans strategy that Republicans introduce in one state predictably spreads to another, and another. Idaho has been dealing with this for a long time too: In 2020, it was the first state to adopt a blanket ban on trans women and girls participating in women’s sports.

With the Republicans’ supermajority in the legislature nearly guaranteeing passage of anti-trans laws, the fight isn’t even really about those lawmakers. It isn’t really about the law at all. “We go to show that there are people that are fighting against this,” Pace explained, “and to also show other people in the trans community that we are fighting for you.”

In addition to local organizations such as Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise, new media outlets in Idaho are now regularly reporting on anti-trans legislative developments and community resistance at the Capitol. Idaho activist and independent journalist Jaewon Lee livestreamed the bathroom protest on their Boise Blackbirds Instagram. When we spoke last week, Lee told me that he only really got into activism after Trump’s reelection. “I’m noticing kind of a pecking order here,” he told me, “where you have immigrants being targeted, trans people being targeted.” Lee is a naturalized citizen, and at least for now, they told me, being involved in activism feels safer than it might be for immigrants without that status. “I felt an obligation to get out there, and say, I’m somebody who is on that pecking order.” Lee realized they weren’t alone in that, that they were seeing people who said, as he put it, “We’re gonna show up wherever we can and do what whatever we can, not only for the queer community but for the immigrant community.” By now, they’ve been seeing “a lot of familiar faces coming together.” Lee is one of the very few people who is keeping that record in real time.

The same week as the bathroom arrests at the Capitol, a group of activists held a sit-in in Governor Little’s office, requesting a meeting and demanding he veto the bathroom ban, along with a bill that would force teachers to out trans students to their parents. Lee noticed that the people there were really active in the community, and were coming from different causes: “We understand there’s a lot of overlap, and the things we are standing up for in Idaho against white Christian nationalism right now.” At the governor’s office sit-in, he saw many of the people involved were faith leaders who wanted to confront Christian nationalism, as well. Preston Pace was there too, but wasn’t one of those arrested. “Being in that setting, surrounded mostly by allies, which consisted of a lot of older, cis white church women,” they told me. “Having these people so willing to not only stand up for our rights and protect us, and put themselves between us and danger, was incredibly moving.”

One of those arrested, Nikson Mathews, spoke at a Trans Day of Visibility rally at the Capitol, telling supporters how important it was to show up “in front of this building, when, year after year, they continue to bring bills that try to remove us from public space and remove us from our public lives.” When Mathews offered testimony opposing the bathroom ban in the House, like Rulien, it was far from the first time he had testified against a bathroom ban in the state. “In the past five years, this body has passed 17 laws targeting trans rights,” he said, noting that five were introduced this session. “When is it enough? When do we reach the point when it’s been enough?”

Republican lawmakers were not content merely to file and pass as many of these bills as they have. They also tried to keep opposition off the record, voting to suppress a report by Democrats on the likely harms of a the forced outing bill—“a dangerous bill,” the ACLU of Idaho said in a statement, “that would require trusted adults, such as teachers and counselors, to monitor children for signs that they are not conforming to gender stereotypes.” The Democrats’ report attempted to get on the record objections that will be important when the law is enforced or challenged, such as its lacking any “safety exception for children at knowable risk of abuse, homelessness, or parental violence” and creating “compelled speech obligations that conflict with professional ethical and legal duties,” among other concerns. House Republicans “do not want Idahoans to see the serious legal, constitutional, and practical problems this bill creates,” said House Democratic leader Ilana Rubel.

In his testimony, Nikson Mathews pressed the lawmakers to think through what the bathroom ban meant for trans people, “what this law forces me to do,” he said. “It forces me to use the women’s bathroom,” where people would see a bearded young man enter, in apparent violation of the law. What if someone took enforcement into their own hands, attacking a “man” in a “woman’s bathroom”?

“It’s worth noting that based on existing Idaho code”—Mathews offered a sheaf of printed pages—“if I were assaulted, that person would face a lighter punishment than I would for using the men’s bathroom.” The law becomes an instrument for creating public spaces where violence against trans people is more likely, and where such violence is deemed less worthy of punishment than a trans person’s mere presence. Mathews would thus be left to choose, as he put it: “Do I feel like going to jail today? Or do I feel like being attacked?” Given the experiences of trans people in jails and prisons, the likelihood that someone arrested under this law would also be attacked while in custody is also high, not to mention the violence of the arrest itself.

Hours before Little signed the bathroom ban on March 31, he signed a petty and mean-spirited law banning Pride flags on government buildings. That day, Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise were also recognized with a proclamation by Boise’s Democratic mayor, Lauren McLean. The contrast is too obvious to dwell on for long, but that night Boise City Hall was lit magenta, blue, and violet to mark Trans Day of Visibility, even as its Pride flag had been removed by state decree. Since then, “the mayor has kind of maliciously complied,” Scar Rulien told me, “and they have put a giant rainbow up,” inside and visible in the window. The City Hall flagpoles are also now wrapped in Pride colors.

Idaho Republicans are not stopping anytime soon, but the session is done for the year, offering some time to regroup and ready for the next one. “I know the reality of how red it is in Idaho, and at times, it is a losing battle,” Pace told me. Pace is headed out of state soon—but not for good, as many trans Idahoans have had to do. Pace is going to attend law school, so they can return “and help continue the fight.”

A year ago, “abundance” was being widely discussed in Democratic Party circles. The concept is essentially that liberals should concentrate on reducing unnecessary regulations and bottlenecks to make it easier to build houses, public transit, and other essential products. With these policy changes, Americans would then in theory have an abundance of these goods to choose from. Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance, released in March 2025, became the guidebook for this new worldview. But a year later, Democratic politicians are talking much more about affordability than abundance. In the latest edition of Right Now, Lindsay Owens, executive director of a D.C.-based economic policy group called Groundwork Collaborative, explains how affordability surged ahead of abundance in liberal discourse. Polls showed that voters are much more likely to blame greedy corporations than excessive regulations for high prices. They are more excited about increasing taxes on the wealthy than changing housing regulations, she says. The success of Zohran Mamdami’s campaign, which focused heavily on affordability, also looms large in the minds of many Democratic officials. But Owens says the party is still thinking about affordability wrong. She argues that the spate of tax-cut proposals from Democrats such as Senators Chris Van Hollen and Cory Booker are wrongheaded. Fighting excessive corporate power is the best way to make life affordable for average Americans, not simply giving them tax cuts, Owens argues. She also discusses Groundwork’s work on the scourge of dynamic pricing.

Perry Bacon: I want to start by taking us back to about a year ago. Last March, the book Abundance was released by Derek Thompson, then of The Atlantic, [and] Ezra Klein of The New York Times. This book really caught a lot of attention because they’re left-of-center people, very thoughtful in terms of economic policy. The book basically argued that the problem for the left was that things are not being built fast enough, and it really detailed how we need to reduce regulations on housing and things like that to have more abundance—was the phrasing.

At first that book really took off. You heard a lot of Democratic senators and governors talking about it. But over the last year, I’d say another word—affordability—has taken the lead. I wanted to talk to you about that, because you followed these economic policy debates. One factor is obviously the Zohran campaign—we should get into that a little bit. But talk about how, if there’s a zero-sum compass—and I’m being a little silly about this—how affordability got ahead of abundance.

Lindsay Owens: It’s a really interesting question. You’re right—Abundance just had such an incredible moment as a book, as a policy project, a set of policy ideas. And there was a large—still is a large—policy movement around the book. Some of it predated the book, some of it was buoyed by the book. These are YIMBY organizations all across the country, new think tanks and policy shops at the federal level as well as at the state level—the Inclusive Abundance Institute—this whole cottage industry of new players. So it had a really big moment.

Importantly, it was also the first big new idea on the left after our big loss in the general election. And the party is reeling after losses in the general election, Trump’s reelection. We have been hemorrhaging the working class—there are a lot of people asking questions about how this happened, who’s to blame, and what the path forward should be.

One thing we knew is Democrats were wildly unpopular—we have got to do something different, we have got to shake up the status quo, we can’t support the same old stuff, we have got to be change agents. Abundance is really the first offer of how we can change things. My organization was really interested in understanding not just Abundance as a policy project—although we have a lot of interest in it as a policy project, there are pieces of it that we find very agreeable; we’re also interested in boosting the supply of affordable housing in the United States, for example—but we were more interested in whether or not Abundance could hang as a political project.

We teamed up with some really smart political people to help us answer that question. We hired Geoff Garin of Hart Research, who’s a top pollster for the Senate Dems and has been doing polling on the economy for a long time—he was Harris’s pollster, for example. We also hired Brian Fallon, who advised on our project and has worked for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and others, and is just a really smart political thinker and communicator. We teamed up with some other folks—brought Rama Murty on the project, and some great folks at Groundwork. We just said: Let’s put abundance to the test. Can abundance get working-class voters engaged with the Democratic Party again? Is the abundance agenda resonant as a political project? Does it address voters’ top concerns, top priorities? And can abundance compete with some other leading ideas—economic populism, fighting oligarchy, other candidate ideas that Democrats might put forward in a future election?

The data was very clear. This is just anodyne to say at this point, but the first thing that came through in the data is everyone is focused on affordability, cost of living, prices. That’s your top concern. So any economic agenda you put forward has to be responsive to that concern and you can’t even get in the arena if your policy agenda can’t meet Americans where they are. Where they are is: Stuff is fucking expensive. I need my Democratic lawmakers and my candidates to offer me a way forward. So that was the test—how does abundance do on its own merits, then stack it up in a horse race against populism?

Then because we were really devoted to quite a serious empirical exercise here—it was the first horse out of the gate and the first big idea; can we use this one?—we even gave it various advantages and saw if it could hang.

Bacon: In polls or in focus groups, or both?

Owens: We did quite a few focus groups on it. And then our qual boards, an online version of a focus group. Then we did the polling. And in the polling we not only tested abundance against a straightforward populist approach, but we also tested a hybrid. Because it isn’t zero-sum. Candidates can run on a whole variety of ideas, and they can take a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B, and they can take the best ideas from every set of intellectual theorists, or advocacy groups.

Bacon: Explain what a test might sound like. So ... you described abundance as X and economic populism as Y. Give a short sentence of how those things might sound.

Owens: Yeah, I brought a few examples so that I could read them. For example, in asking voters whether or not they thought abundance-style policy solutions were responsive to the affordability problem, we would say things like: Which would address the high cost of living more—cutting red tape and regulation, a very abundance-style approach, or cracking down on price gouging? And that’s 60-30. Sixty for price gouging, 30 for cutting red tape and regulation.

Bacon: Is that all voters, swing voters, working-class voters? What is the sample?

Owens: That one was everybody—that 60–30.

Bacon: Who’s the 30? Just curiously, do you know who’s in the 30?

Owens: Great question. I’ll give you another one, which will answer that one more definitively. When we say: Which approach do you think is better for rebuilding the middle class—this more populist solution, or this more abundance-style solution, 59 percent want the more populist solution, 41 percent want the more abundance-style solution. All subgroups, except for Republicans, prefer the populist solution. So Democrats prefer it by 42 points, independents prefer it by 20 points, working-class voters prefer it by 26 points.

We took a forensic look at this policy agenda. And it has some appeal—it is absolutely the case that there are elements of the abundance agenda that majorities of voters like, building more affordable housing. It’s just that when stacked up against alternatives, it’s really an inferior choice. More importantly, when put through the test of: Can it be resonant with voters’ top concern, which is affordability—can it appeal to the coalitions that we’re trying to pull back into the party, the working class?—it does particularly poorly.

To answer your question of where did it go, it faded from the political conversation because ultimately it couldn’t compete as a political project on the merits. That isn’t to say that it’s not a viable and important policy project—abundance adherents right now are interested in the housing bills that are moving through the Senate. Senator Warren wrote the housing bill, and there’s plenty of room for the policy project. But as a political one, it’s a horse that can’t really run. It is interesting that people do tend to try to run on winning and popular messages.

Bacon: The one thing I remember when they were talking about the book—Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein—one thing they said was essentially the idea you framed. The question is: Does the agenda help with affordability? Part of their framing was that people perceive Democrats as not governing effectively ... and if housing can be developed as fast in California as in Texas, that’ll show that Democrats govern well, and that’ll help the party nationwide.

It’s a little common, but how do you view that argument, which is a bit separate from affordability?

Owens: Yeah, it’s a really important one. It is absolutely central to their thesis. And if you remember, their book came out at a really interesting time in the country last year, when Elon Musk had the keys to the castle and was prosecuting this larger DOGE agenda. He was going to cut all the fat in the government and come in and bring the kind of technologist CEO approach—make stuff faster, bring in the Geek Squad, sit them in the office with their own laptops. It was a very resonant conversation in that respect. They positioned themselves as an alternative to Musk, a different form of approach. But they agreed with Musk’s premise that there was room for more efficiency in the government, et cetera.

We also did a separate project with Geoff Garin about Musk and DOGE. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it is similarly a two-to-one margin. When you ask Americans why government isn’t working for them—broadly speaking—the biggest impediment to government working for them is that the government is working for the wealthy and corporations. Not that it’s just an inefficient, outdated place, and that’s the biggest problem with it.

There is a analysis that most Americans have of government and efficiency and effectiveness—or slowness—that actually stems from an analysis of power. Similarly, when you test abundance-style focuses on housing ... this is a great one. So you ask people why their rent is too high. They’ll tell you it is greedy landlords; they’ll tell you it’s private equity’s footprint in the rental market. They do not think that the reason their rent is too high is red tape.

So there are these additional common threads related to your question, which is: Most Americans don’t really think it is just red tape and bureaucratic inefficiency that is standing in the way of government working well.

That being said ... we really tried to be even handed. In our Interested Parties memo we talked about this: There is some appeal to the abundance agenda. There are not Americans who are lining up for red tape, they’re not Americans who are lining up for more bureaucracy, to be sure. It’s just that the diagnosis of the problem and the potential solutions for the problem just aren’t resonant with Americans’ theories of why these problems exist. Americans don’t think that if you fix those problems, they’ll get as much as they need on the flip side.

Bacon: Jumping back to 2024 a little bit—I know the Harris campaign had a lot of things going on, but there was a period where she was talking about price gouging, and then she stopped doing that—where she was talking about we’re going to build several million more homes. I’m not opposed to that. It was clear that they had gone from a more populist approach to a more abundance approach even then. Campaigns are out there to win elections, so in that sense I was confused. So your data says that price gouging is a more salient issue for voters than maybe development of houses is. But why did an actual campaign trying to win—what am I missing here? Why did they also lean into this sort of abundance—

Owens: Without disclosing too much inside baseball—I think one of the reasons why it didn’t take me very long to persuade Jeff and Brian to come onto this project is they understood the potency of the more populist argument, and they understood the lack of resonance of the more abundance-style argument. And Perry—this is one of my favorite hobby horses which I’ll borrow from Chad Maisel—they actually didn’t propose two million homes. It was two million units. And just, what is a unit? And—

Bacon: Unit of housing, meaning an apartment.

Owens: It was very austere. As a communications tool, as a policy that would resonate with Americans, it lacked a lot. It left a lot unsaid. People didn’t see themselves in that proposal. Where will the unit be? How big will the unit be? Will it be a nice unit? How much will it cost? All of these questions were left unsaid. We’re just going to build two million—

Bacon: The reductive answer is Kamala stopped talking about price gouging because the donors didn’t want her to. Is that what you think, too?

Owens: I don’t know that it was just the donors. My understanding is there were a couple of particularly vocal folks from the economics class who called her directly and pled their case.

Bacon: You mean like policy people, not just donors?

Owens: The more neoliberal or conservative economists were very upset with it; they thought it was a problematic proposal. But the largest independent expenditure PAC activity that was spending on her behalf—they were running price gouging ads, because it was the top-performing ad. When they finished analyzing the cycle, it was the top-performing ad.

Bacon: So moving to 2026 to 2028 ... you frame it as populism versus abundance, and I think that’s probably correct. But—I’ll just use the names—if you’re Josh Shapiro, if you’re Pete Buttigieg, there are people who are not going to run on a populist economic plan because they don’t agree with that. You don’t have to agree with the names I gave. But in a certain sense, if Abundance is an agenda, is it the agenda for center-left Democrats who don’t like populism? That would seem like a regional project. Is that where we’re headed? Where abundance will be spoken of by the non-populist candidates and the other candidates will speak about the way you talk?

Owens: No, I don’t. Not to be too bullish. I think everyone is going to run on populist economics. I just don’t think—

Bacon: Josh is not going to run on the wealth tax. So what do you mean by that? You mean public economics, then?

Owens: I think a more populist-oriented economic platform is a necessary but not sufficient condition to winning a presidential [election]. The data is really clear on that. And the political class, by the way, is really clear on it. The softest audiences for our economic policy work that is populist are staff, operatives, campaign consultants, people in the political class—

Bacon: I guess what I’m saying is—if they’re saying the public is for economic populism, then yes, everyone agrees with what they’re saying. What are they saying when you test versus price gouging, taking on corporations? I don’t know that a lot of Democratic leadership people are for that. Maybe I’m missing something—maybe I’m not in the right meetings.

Owens: I think there are two things. There’s what people run on, and then what they do when they get into office. And that gap—that’s huge, that’s wide as the day is long. You’re right that there are a lot of candidates who may run on populist economic messaging who may govern in more conservative ways. But I don’t think it’ll be viable for a candidate not to lean in on economic—what do I mean here?

First of all, obviously, taxing the wealthy and corporations. Second of all, centering taking on corporate power as primary in your analysis of what has gone wrong with the economy and how to get it back on track.

Bacon: You’re confident even the sort of centrist candidates will say things about corporations. That’s interesting.

Owens: Yes. Look at how Pritzker is doing that.

Bacon: Yeah, Gallego is—

Owens: He led the surveillance pricing bill in the Senate to take on the role of big tech in price gouging. Pritzker is saying, Hey, these AI companies are using a lot of residents of Illinois’s data—maybe they should have to give us some money for that. I don’t think it’ll be enough. There are a whole host of other issues that are complex, and I stay mostly out of that space because I focus solely on the economy all day long, which is a pretty big job in and of itself. But I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of veering from a populist approach to the economy.

And look, Obama ran on populist economics. Ran against Mitt Romney and Bain Capital and private equity. So I do think actually that is likely to happen.

Bacon: You define economic populism—you said taking on corporations and corporate power, raising taxes on the rich. Is there anything else you want to list? When people think about this term—that term can become ambiguous.

Owens: On affordability, you will have to be in favor of some guardrails on price. Whether that’s a certain price for insulin or a certain price for a certain class of drugs, whether that is a certain maximum price that we’re comfortable with people paying for healthcare, whether that is a certain price for energy. Much more aggressive posturing around pricing will be a big part of how folks will approach the affordability agenda.

I don’t think it will be viable to say, We’re going to build a bunch more stuff, we’re going to make markets more efficient, we’re going to get rid of red tape. And look, Zohran did that well. It was universal childcare—that’s free. What is the price? Zero dollars. Free. And fast buses—also zero dollars. And then public grocery stores, which, the assumption being that they would have more price-setting power for essentials.

Bacon: We’ve seen an early round of what are affordability policies, but they’re not what you’re talking about. They are Chris Van Hollen, Cory Booker, Katie Porter, Keisha Bottoms—there’s a long list of Democrats calling for various tax cuts on various groups, very large tax cuts on various groups—basically on the working and middle class, basically saying you’re exempt from taxes. That will put money in people’s pockets, to some extent. It’s not taking on corporate power or anything else. So talk about that as a policy vision, because they’re clearly aiming it at affordability.

Owens: It’s interesting to look at those policies through the affordability lens, because at the end of the day there are like a couple of different ways to square the circle. You can make stuff cheaper. Or you can put more money in people’s pockets and then they feel like they can cover the basics and have a little extra left over for a vacation or a baseball game. Which is the number one thing people are looking for—when we look at economic messages and how people define success in the economy, what they’re really hoping government can deliver—they’re like, I want to afford the basics and just have a little bit left for some extracurriculars, a family outing, a big moment, a Disneyland trip—whatever that moment is for you. A concert, attending the World Cup once in a generation. That’s what people are looking for.

These tax proposals are saying, at least in the context of the proposal: We’re agnostic about the price of everything. We don’t have a plan to take on health care and bring down health care pricing within the context of this bill. We don’t have a plan to make childcare more affordable. What we’re going to do is just mechanically remove the amount of your paycheck that goes to the federal government in taxes. You’ll take home more of what you earn; that is how we’re going to make your life more affordable.

They’re not actually addressing or bringing down the price of anything that is unaffordable. The problem is if we don’t do anything to address the underlying cause of the affordability crisis, this stuff is going to keep getting more and more unaffordable. Health care costs are going to keep going up, and you aren’t going to have the fiscal space—or more importantly, the political space—to take on the big healthcare challenges if you burn all your political capital and all your revenue on a big tax break.

And companies aren’t stupid—they’ll see that the middle class has more disposable income. These are not perfectly competitive markets. They’re going to plan to capture some of that surplus. I think you could expect corporations to take a large portion of the surplus after these tax bills are passed.

Bacon: You talked about polling a few minutes ago. I have seen some of the polling I’ve seen is just—people, and my brain suggests people like the idea of tax cuts. I think—yeah, if you make less than $90,000, or what have you—the sort of—one easy thing Zohran did is his ideas were easy to understand.

And some of these tax proposals are basically saying: if you make less than $90,000 as a family, you pay no federal taxes—easy to explain, easy to implement. Are we sure this is not going to be politically salient, even if it’s not the best idea in a sense?

Owens: Oh, I think it has a real strong chance of being politically salient. I think the reason that these bills are on offer right now is that there was a strong belief from many in the Democratic Party that Trump’s tax proposals were really important to his victory—his no-tax-on-tips, his no-tax-on-Social-Security-income, his no-tax-on-overtime—those—

Bacon: Do you believe that or not? Because you said “some people,” as if—oh, or you’re not sure.

Owens: They’re popular. They poll—I think, do we like—deciding how central it was for a swing voter—how many swing voters were no-tax-on-tips voters? I don’t know. Maybe somebody has done the analysis and I missed it, but I guess I’m open to being persuaded that it was.

Bacon: I talked to Bharat last week. He was very confident this was a big swing, this was a big issue in Nevada.

Owens: Yeah. I think that’s what I would say. There’s some regional—that’s what I would’ve guessed too, that it was central in Nevada. And I think that’s why the Nevada Democrats moved quickly to put forward a similar proposal.

Yes, broadly speaking, if you ask Americans who are working-middle-class if a policy that results in them having a lower tax burden—they’ll say, yep, like you’re not going to find a lot of disagreement there.

Interestingly, if you ask Americans what the biggest problems with the tax code are, and what the biggest needs are in tax policy, what they should be addressing—their own tax burden doesn’t come up at the top. They’re really worried about how lopsided the tax code is, how corporations don’t pay enough, how the wealthy don’t pay enough. They think the tax code is overly complex, right? There are a lot of things that stack up higher. So I guess my concerns are—there’s a sort of straightforward political case, but the question is: it’s popular, but it’s not very high salience. Maybe that’s not great, and maybe it doesn’t matter as much electorally.

But I think the bigger concern I have on the politics of it is: we actually do have a pretty good body of research about the political benefits of tax cuts—not on the campaign side, but once they are enacted. And what we know from people like Vanessa Williamson is: you don’t get a lot of credit for your tax cuts. People bank them and move on to the next thing they are grumpy about. So in the sort of world where you’re doing political things to gain political benefit, neither party historically has gotten a lot of juice from tax cuts—Democrats or Republicans—when they’ve implemented them.

Bacon: Let me switch to tax increases for a second. You’re going to hear next year—you’re already hearing—a lot [about this]. The governor of California, he doesn’t really oppose a wealth tax, he just thinks they don’t really work unless they’re national. The governor of New York is saying she’s not opposed to taxing the rich as such, she just thinks it doesn’t work for the economy. We’re going to have a lot of versions of that next year.

And so ... is it better to debate sincerely with Gavin Newsom about the wealth tax, or is it better to call out the sort of—you’re saying this because the donors want that? Is it better to talk about this in terms of morals or in terms of economics? I’m just curious what you think. Maybe both, or maybe neither.

Owens: I’ll just say: this is exactly what’s happening in New York right now with Zohran. He has put forward a budget to balance the giant, insane shortfall that Eric Adams left him. The more I started digging into this when I learned about it, the more stunned I was—just, what a mess he was handed. And he’s put forward this budget that does some important cuts and makes some needed reforms, but also fills the shortfall with new revenue—a tax on millionaires, some changes to corporate income tax in New York. And the legislature has basically passed a version of this, and Governor Hochul is a no on it.

Bacon: Yes—for reasons. But she’s not saying—she’s not Republican about it. She’s more of a—it happens—going to take away businesses in New York. Yeah, that’s what she says.

Owens: Yeah. The big thing that you get when you do a tax policy like this—and we’ve seen this over and over again, whether it was in Massachusetts or in New York the last time, or New Jersey or California—you get a big scary conversation about millionaire migration. This is like one of my all-time favorite topics, because my dissertation advisor is like the world’s foremost expert on millionaire migration.

And when I was in grad school, he was refining his magnum opus. And so I listened to him present this like 7,000 times. So I feel like I’m the second world expert on it because I’ve heard the expert talk about it so many times.

But there’s no evidence of it. Look—who moves to New York? People move to New York for economic opportunity. Who leaves New York? Retirees who go to Florida. The millionaires’ networks in New York are actually really stable, right? They have particular social networks they like in New York, they have particular schools they like for their families in New York, and their jobs are particularly New York-based—people in finance who work within a certain social network. So millionaire migration is much lower than migration of other income classes. It’s actually people who are seeking economic opportunity who move, not people who are already in good stead.

So yeah, you’re going to hear all of these arguments about migrating economic opportunity, these arguments about it being bad for business. But businesses are still going to be going to New York, businesses are still going to locate in the U.S., because there are a whole host of other factors about the U.S. that are still really great for businesses—including our wonderful, educated labor force.

Bacon: Let’s close with an issue Groundwork’s worked a lot on recently. I don’t know if it’s—surge pricing—I think the dynamic pricing—you can tell me the right term for that when you’re answering.

But I’ll be honest: I got more personally interested when I learned that where I used to work, The Washington Post, is now trying to charge people different prices for their news service subscription depending on how much money they have, which I had never thought was possible before. So talk a little bit about what is happening on this dynamic pricing, and then secondly, what people can do about this.

Owens: Yeah. The way pricing works—how companies set prices—has completely changed in recent years. For almost 150 years we have had a price tag in this country. For thousands of years before that we haggled—there were no price tags. The Quakers thought haggling was super discriminatory. We thought all men should be equal, pay the same amount for the same item. They got rid of haggling, instituted a standardized price. Wanamaker takes that, puts it in his department store in Philadelphia—the price tag is invented. For 150 years we see a price tag, and you and I pay the same amount for the same item.

In the last decade or so, that has quietly—without really a lot of warning—completely changed. And now, increasingly, companies are not just looking at how much something costs to make—the labor costs, the input costs, whatever. They’re also finally calibrating exactly how much you’re willing to pay, and they’re figuring out the price based on that assessment, and they’re charging you and I a different price. And of course in e-commerce it’s really easy to do, because you and I don’t realize we’re paying different prices—we’re not standing in line next to each other at the grocery store or picking up lipstick at Wanamaker’s.

So it’s really taken off in e-commerce, and a place like The Washington Post is a place for doing surveillance pricing. But oh, by the way, The New York Times does it too, right? This is not unique to the Post—they’ve been pretty tech-forward, they haven’t been shy about their interest in bringing more AI to the newsroom, and that obviously is true for the finance desk as well.

Bacon: Sure.

Owens: And basically they’re looking at how interested you are in the content, and where you’re logging on from—your location—and what kind of device you log on from, if it’s a computer or a phone, an iPhone or an Android—all of these things.

Bacon: Oh, they’re trying to analyze. So if you live in Manhattan and have an Apple computer, you might have lots of money. Is that the idea?

Owens: Yeah, that’s—we don’t know exactly how the Washington Post algorithm works. We should be honest about that. But these are the types of inputs.

Bacon: Yeah. That’s what I’m trying to—

Owens: And then they also were analyzing your taste and your—for the content. If you’re someone who—you’re a real news monger and you’re just like crushing stories—they’re like, oh, this person seems like they’re really on the line, let’s double their price. If they think you’re addicted to the Wordle at The New York Times, like the bundle price is going to go up. So this is—this is just—

Bacon: This is countywide—where journalism is a small part of this. I’m sure it happens countrywide. That’s what you’re saying, right? Yeah.

Owens: Look, in journalism I think it’s been changing since—again, since the sort of print newspaper gave way to the digital subscription, right? Because of course, with the print newspaper, the price of it was printed on the newspaper, right—you knew exactly how much you were going to pay for it.

[Going up in price based on who you are] is something that Americans hate. I think it should be banned. I don’t think companies need to set individual prices based on spying on you. I think there are plenty of ways to do business without it. It undermines transparency—

Bacon: How would that work?

Owens: So there are proposals in Congress right now. Greg Casar has a bill in the House, Ruben Gallego has a bill in the Senate. New York actually passed—part of the reason we know about what The Washington Post is up to is New York passed a law requiring companies who price algorithmically based on your data to disclose it. And when you log on and buy something in New York, if it’s priced according to an algorithm set using your data—

Bacon: Some fine print somewhere, probably.

Owens: Yeah. Yeah.

Bacon: Little better than nothing. Okay.

Owens: But yeah, the disclosure is better than nothing, honestly. The best part about the disclosure from my perspective is it helps people like me blow the whistle, know where to spend our research hours, things like that. I just finished a book on this topic, so you can see I’m very passionate about it.

But I think there are a lot of states that are moving forward with bans on surveillance pricing. We haven’t seen any reach governors’ desks yet, but there’s very active movement in Colorado and Illinois and Hawaii and Maryland and New York and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and California and Tennessee. So I think this is the intersection of two things. Americans hate being ripped off, overcharged, gouged—and being spied on, having their privacy invaded. And that combination is something that will get folks pretty frustrated with you if you’re a company.

Bacon: Last question. I was reading your bio for this and I realize you’re a sociologist—is that right?

Owens: Yeah.

Perry Bacon: So talk—because most people who do economic policy are economists or lawyers—’cause lawyers run government, apparently. But I’m just curious: does that training help you in any sense? Or how does it make you see this world differently, perhaps?

Owens: I think—yeah, it’s a good question. I think there are two things that I get from my sociological training—and it’s always hard to know if I had them, and that’s why I became a sociologist, and then the sociology degree honed them.

There are two things that I focus on a lot when I look at the economy. The first is power. I’m a little less interested in just the price signal, and I’m a little more interested in the structures of power that underlie how the economy works and who it works for. And the second thing I’m really interested in is what sociologists call stratification, which is really just this: there are unequal societies, and inequality in societies is problematic for a whole host of reasons. And I have a very materialist-focused—I care a lot about the wellbeing of Americans, their pocketbooks—not just because I think material wellbeing is important in its own right, but I think it’s also important to a healthy democracy. That’s the lens that I bring to the work.

There are a handful of us in town, actually. The chief of staff for Senator Warren is a PhD sociologist. There aren’t many of us, but we’re in some interesting corners of the world, and we’re focused on the economy, just like economists are—but with a slightly, I think I would argue correct—a slightly more correct lens, but really a broader lens, and a more particular and keen interest in the role of power in shaping economic outcomes.

Bacon: Finish up—where can people find you? You mentioned a book, so talk about that. And where can people find Groundwork’s work more broadly?

Owens: Yeah. You can look Groundwork Collaborative up—we’re groundworkcollaborative.org. We’re also on Twitter and Bluesky and TikTok and Instagram—we’re everywhere. And yeah, the book is called Gouged: The End of a Fair Price and What That Means for Your Wallet, and it’s out in September with Penguin Viking, and it’s available for pre-order wherever you order your books.

Bacon: All right, great place to end. Great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Owens: Thanks for having me, Perry. Bye.

Although I was armed with a map of the cemetery’s celebrity graves, it took me half an hour to find the Rimet family’s. Nobody seemed to have tended it in years. The flat tombstone with its stone cross was overgrown with moss.

There was a sprig of withered leaves that someone must have left months before. Only one inscription in the stone was still legible: “Simon Rimet, 1911–2002.” Perhaps the family had died out.

The sole sign of the man I had come for was a small gold plaque inscribed, “Jules RIMET, 24/10/1873 – 15/10/1956.” It didn’t mention anything he had done in life. Only the golden colour evoked the gold of the Jules Rimet Cup – the original World Cup trophy, which has vanished even more fully than its creator.

Rimet’s name lingers in football memory, but the man himself is forgotten. Who was the white-haired Frenchman with the careful little moustache who stood at the centre of every group portrait of football officialdom? Very little has been written about him, and that almost entirely in French. But even in France, he is “practically unknown,” writes the historian Renaud Leblond.

Nonetheless, the World Cup that we know today bears the fingerprints of its maker, a man whose desire to create the tournament stemmed partly from his years fighting in the First World War. After encountering nationalism in its rawest forms, Rimet helped steer international football through a second war, during which he collaborated (uneasily) with France’s pro-Nazi Vichy regime. He oversaw every World Cup between 1930 and 1950.

Who was Jules Rimet, and how did he shape this tournament?

Most of the moustachioed Europeans who created the great international sporting competitions ranged from upper class to full-blown aristocratic. Rimet was different.

He was born to a peasant family in the eastern French village of Theuley in 1873, three years after his country’s catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The Prussians had swallowed France’s Alsace and Lorraine regions to create a united Germany. The Franco-German frontier had shifted westwards to just sixty miles from Rimet’s village. The French economy had been devastated and Rimet’s father had sold his farm and become a grocer. Rimets had lived in Theuley since at least the seventeenth century, but during Jules’s childhood his parents migrated to Paris, leaving their eldest son and his four siblings with their grandfather, who ran a windmill. Jules became a prize-winning pupil and a choirboy, but when he was about eleven, poverty forced the family to sell the windmill. After the boy took his First Communion, he followed his parents to Paris, where they ran a grocery on the rue Cler, in what was then a lower-middle-class neighborhood a few streets from the Eiffel Tower.

Rimet would recognize the street as it is today: a lively shopping district, dotted with a few Haussmannian buildings. The facade of a horse butcher’s that probably dates from his era is still there, but it’s now a fancy seafood restaurant. Groceries advertize “bio” fruits in four languages to tourists and local bourgeois shoppers.

The most modern sport in Rimet’s village had been conkers. He probably discovered football in the streets around the rue Cler. Another French biographer, Jean-Yves Guillain, has him kicking balls (as well as playing a medieval fighting sport called barres) on the nearby Esplanade des Invalides.

But play was never a big part of Rimet’s life. He was what Parisians call, with some disdain, un ambitieux: a pious provincial striver. He worked in the family grocery, but also read the classics, took evening courses and studied law at university. Later he worked for a debt collection agency, which would have brought him into intimate contact with the local poor. He established himself several cuts above them: one photograph captures the young man and two friends in top hats.

By the 1890s, football clubs were sprouting in Paris. In 1897 the twenty-four-year-old Rimet and some friends met in a bistro to create their own club. They called it Red Star, a name suggested by Miss Jenny, the British governess employed by the Rimet family. As well as football, the club had sections for fencing, cycling, running and literature. (Rimet was a bad poet.)

Rimet served as Red Star president until 1910, and afterwards remained vice president of the Catholic-inspired football federation CFI. His speeches were heavy on abstractions (“liberty,” “youth,” “moral and physical progress”) but he was also a canny diplomat and a bureaucratic tiger. In short, he was a born football official.

He doesn’t seem to have fallen in love with the game itself. He only played in matches if a Red Star side was a man short. Rather, being a pious Catholic with a social conscience, he saw the game as an instrument to uplift the poor. He wanted them to rise as he had. Football would give working men dignity, and a sense of solidarity. He’d been inspired one day watching players who battled and sweated during a match, then had a drink with their opponents afterwards. In sport everyone worked together, referees were respected and cheats were punished. If only the world worked like that, he liked to say. It was his version of what Victorian Britons called “muscular Christianity.”

The grocer’s son understood that if poor men were going to play the game full-time they would need to be paid for it. His support for professional football—which was already thriving in Britain—put him firmly on one side of the great sporting argument of his age. Also in Paris in the 1890s, a slightly older Frenchman named Baron Pierre de Coubertin was reviving the ancient Olympics. Like Rimet, he thought that sport could help moralize the masses, but Coubertin’s creed was amateurism and he didn’t see why athletes needed to be paid. The baron’s modern Olympics were strictly amateur. He was happy for football to remain a niche elite sport.

The provincial ambitieux Rimet took on the baron, writing: “The Olympic ideal is of a refined essence. It’s the ideal ethic to lead men to perfection, but is perfection of this world?” In an unfinished polemic that he wrote later in life, he denounced amateurism as a way to allow “the arbitrary domination of a privileged oligarchy.” By the 1910s, Red Star was signing international footballers from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and paying them semi-covertly—in so-called “expenses,” or by giving them sham jobs.

Victorian Britons invented most modern sports but couldn’t see the point of playing them against foreigners. That left it to the world’s rival elite, the Parisians, to create international sporting competitions, which they did in a whoosh around the turn of the twentieth century. Coubertin staged the first modern Olympics in 1896. The newspaper L’Auto created the Tour de France in 1903. A year later, two international federations were founded within a few minutes’ walk of each other in central Paris: the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile began writing the rules for motor racing, and in May 1904, on a courtyard off 229 rue Saint Honoré, seven European men created the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA.

Today, the shopfront at number 229 is a travel shop selling luxury suitcases. The historical plaque in front describes a seven-teenth-century Cistercian church that stood on this spot. There’s no reference anywhere to FIFA. Number 229’s courtyard still houses various small businesses, as it probably did in 1904 and in the main downstairs space, where FIFA might have been founded, there’s now an orthopaedist – the foot tradition lives on.

As early as 1905, FIFA’s official bulletins raised the notion of holding a championship of national teams, but at this stage it was still a pipe dream. The only existing international football tournament was the Olympics. On 27 and 28 June 1914, at a FIFA congress in Norway, a motion was passed to recognize “the Olympic football tournament as an amateur World Cup, if organized in conformity with FIFA’s regulations.” Rimet, who was present, grumbled quietly about the amateurism—“We’re far from a real World Cup!”—but, knowing he was in a minority, he let it go. Then, on the second morning of the congress, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Instead of a World Cup, there was going to be a world war.

Rimet was already forty-one, with a wife and three young children, but he seems to have volunteered for the front. He joined the army on 4 August 1914, the day after France entered the war, and was still in the trenches in the autumn of 1918. It’s a small miracle that he is buried in a civilian’s grave at Bagneux and not in one of the cemetery’s adjoining fields of military tombstones for French and British soldiers killed in the Great War.

A remarkable photograph survives of Rimet’s war. It is 1916, and he is sitting in a trench, wearing his officer’s kepi, surrounded by seven black infantrymen. These must have been some of the “tirailleurs sénégalais”—literally, “Senegalese riflemen,” though they were in fact recruited all over French west Africa—who fought for France in the Great War. Their presence was decried by the Germans as a scandalous introduction of “savagery” into “civilized warfare.” The French themselves were embarrassed by their reliance on black men. They rarely mentioned it afterwards, and fobbed off the African veterans with tiny pensions. The war may have been Rimet’s only lifetime encounter with Africans—but presumably quite an intimate one.

Even freezing in a trench on the western front, he remained at heart a football official. His pre-war fellow official in Paris, Henri Delaunay, a bony, bespectacled young nerd, spent much of the war plotting to create a French version of the English FA Cup. It was to be called the Coupe Charles-Simon, named after Delaunay’s former boss in the CFI federation, who had been killed in 1915 by German shrapnel. On 16 April 1917, Rimet wrote from the front to Delaunay:

My apologies, when your first letter reached me I was on the lines and very busy … I don’t want to delay longer, and I send you my trusted approval. Yesterday I saw Reichel [another football official serving in the army], who took the trouble to come 15 kilometers on horseback to tell me disagreeable things about the negotiations for the competition in question …

He didn’t give me good reason not to approve, and his intervention does not modify my first intention. I am shivering as I write to you, so please excuse my scribble.

Rimet was scribbling this at a fairly dramatic moment in the war: days later, French soldiers staged mutinies against their army leadership. Having lost over a million of their comrades, they were refusing orders to attack. But the French Cup was set up. (Delaunay would eventually create an even bigger football competition; he spent decades pushing for a European Championship for national teams, which finally launched in 1958, three years after his death.)

Rimet had a “good war.” As always, he was upwardly mobile, “promoted from private to corporal to sergeant to lieutenant and finally, in 1919, to major,” write the academics Philippe Vonnard and Grégory Quin in a biographical paper on Rimet. He also invented a cheap rangefinder that, as he explained in an accompanying booklet, would allow “everybody, the soldier like the chief, to assess a distance with the least risk of error.” A military dispatch of May 1916 singled him out: “In a delicate position, this machine-gun officer gave proof of judicious initiative, tireless zeal and a lot of sangfroid during various bombardments.” Another dispatch, just before the Armistice, said:

Monsieur Rimet, lieutenant, at the front for three years now, while engaged on October 20, 1918 with determining the elements of an indirect machine-gun assault, and caught in a violent enemy bombardment, did not leave the terrain until he had accomplished his task.

He won the Croix de Guerre three times.

France lost 1.3 million soldiers in the war, including several Red Star players, while another million Frenchmen were invalided. But almost immediately after the Armistice, in the winter of 1918–19, Rimet was back in action as a football administrator. In April 1919 he became president of the new French national football federation, which united the various squabbling federations of pre-war days. Delaunay was his general secretary, and both men would remain in their posts until after the Second World War. In 1921 Rimet was also elected president of FIFA. Oddly for such a proponent of professional football, he was a strictly amateur president, only accepting travel expenses (though, given his constant motion, these would have added up).

He put his life’s energy into these roles. When off duty, he lived quietly as a DIY enthusiast, a reader of Voltaire and Plato, and a gardener who liked pottering around in his clogs in his country cottage north of Paris.

He barely mentioned the Great War after 1918, but it seems to have remade his world view forever. Like many French ex-combatants, Rimet had returned from war obsessed with peace. FIFA, in his mind, was the footballing equivalent of the new League of Nations. His lifetime preoccupation became, to quote the title of a pamphlet he published aged eighty, “Football and the reconciliation of peoples.” He would always say that FIFA sought “international solidarity.” He thought the game could eliminate “suspicions and rivalries that today still set peoples against each other.” Baron Coubertin believed much the same thing, but Rimet argued that Olympic amateurism was at odds with universal brotherhood, because it reserved top-flight sport for men with “a golden paw.”

Rimet’s mission in the 1920s was to realize FIFA’s original dream and set up a World Cup. Finally, in May 1928, the FIFA congress in Amsterdam voted to create a competition open to all football nations. By “all,” FIFA meant Europe and the Americas; non-white peoples such as the “Senegalese riflemen” were colonial subjects who didn’t count.

Rimet’s World Cup would be white, and it would be professional, unlike the Olympic football tournament, which excluded many of the world’s leading players because they were paid. He was snaffling football’s world championship from his posh amateur rivals at the IOC. FIFA’s World Cup would never be hamstrung by the snobbish arguments about whether to admit paid players that beset the Olympics as well as rugby, tennis and American college sport. And so Rimet helped establish international football as a commercial pursuit, played and watched mostly by working-class men. There was nothing inevitable about this. When the World Cup was conceived, professional football still hadn’t been legalized in France.

Once the decision had been made to create the tournament, one obstacle remained: money. “FIFA didn’t have a sou at the time,” recalled Yves, Rimet’s beloved grandson, decades later. The federation in the 1920s was a tiny outfit, without even a bank account. Its headquarters was the Amsterdam home of its secretary-treasurer Carl Hirschmann, a stock trader who managed FIFA’s money. His fellow officials seem to have thought he kept it safely in the bank. In fact, Hirschmann was investing it in the stock market. Then came the Great Crash of 1929, and he went bankrupt. He eventually admitted that he had lost almost all the 400,000 French francs that FIFA had entrusted to him. It was the first in a rich history of FIFA’s financial scandals. “Loss of money is never fatal,” shrugged Rimet. Still, Hirschmann’s downfall prompted FIFA to move its headquarters from Amsterdam to Zurich, where it remains to this day.

Even with a responsible treasurer, FIFA couldn’t have afforded to fund the first World Cup. The federation needed to find a host country willing to finance the whole thing. Luckily Uruguay, at the time one of the world’s richest countries and planning to celebrate its centenary in 1930, volunteered. “The host pays” has remained the tournament’s organizational principle to this day.

Thirteen countries entered the first World Cup, with most of the European teams crossing the Atlantic on the same ship, the Conte Verde, their passages paid by Uruguay. Rimet’s late-life memoir, L’histoire merveilleuse de la Coupe de Monde (“The Marvellous History of the World Cup”), published in 1954 and never translated into English, recounts all his World Cups. L’his-toire merveilleuse is now so thoroughly out of print that I could only get hold of it at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the national library. The book’s tone is light, with frequent attempts at humor. Rimet doesn’t waste space on political or any other complexity, not even with the hindsight of an old man who had lived through two world wars. He seemed to have emerged from the wreckage with his optimism intact: the memoir reads like a jolly chairman’s report of the lads from the first team having fun on foreign tours.

But there is some delicious detail. Rimet spends pages recalling the pleasure of that first crossing to Uruguay—sitting in a rocking chair, gazing out on the sunny Atlantic, spotting dolphins and sharks, with nobody able to phone him, and no irritating unexpected visitors. He was carrying in his baggage “a statuette 30 centimeters high and weighing four kilograms”—the new World Cup trophy. He had commissioned it from a friend, the Parisian sculptor Abel Lafleur, “of whom one cannot say that he is a sportsman, but who had acquired the sense of sport sufficiently profoundly to express it with talent.”

Sailing on the Conte Verde with Rimet and the footballers was the great Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin. The captain asked him to sing at the traditional party to celebrate the crossing of the equator. In Rimet’s telling, Chaliapin refused, asking, “If I were a cobbler, would you ask me to make you a free pair of shoes on the pretext that we were going to pass The Line?” Chaliapin was a professional, like Rimet’s footballers. The ship made do with a fancy-dress ball.

Landing in Montevideo five hours late, they were “acclaimed by a joyous crowd,” writes Rimet. The president of Uruguay, Dr Juan Campisteguy, immediately invited him for a barbecue, not so much because Rimet was president of FIFA but because he was a Frenchman. Campisteguy, the proud descendant of a French émigré, regarded Rimet as “a quasi-compatriot.” At the asado, he carved a choice piece from the cow’s head and presented it ceremonially to his guest.

The visiting teams stayed near each other by the beach, and, writes Rimet, immediately became great friends, as if “at a family party.” Football was creating international brotherhood. Meanwhile, construction work continued day and night at the Estadio Centenario. It would only be completed days after the tournament kicked off.

In the first World Cup final, Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2. Afterwards the Uruguayans ran around the pitch waving their own trophy, apparently made of silver—possibly a prize won in some other competition. Rimet, standing lost on a field packed with celebrating fans, eventually just seems to have handed Lafleur’s trophy to the chubby bow-tied president of the Uruguayan FA, Raúl Jude. The first World Cup was considered a success.

Soon afterwards, Rimet’s belief in human brotherhood began to collide with fascism. In March 1933, weeks after the Nazis took power in Germany, he accompanied the French team to a friendly in Munich. The German crowd listened quietly to the French anthem, and an impressed Rimet promised his hosts that on his return to France he would correct mistaken views of the new Reich. A year later, the second World Cup was staged in Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. By this time, writes Rimet, the tournament had grown to encompass “the entire world” (again meaning Europe and the Americas). He did his best to get on with his Fascist hosts, though it wasn’t always easy. He wrote that he often had “the impression during the World Cup that the real president of the international football federation was Mussolini.” When the two men sat side by side during matches at Rome, the dictator watched play “with sustained attention, without distractions,” showing no interest in the Frenchman’s attempts at chit-chat. Mussolini had commissioned a huge bronze winner’s trophy that dwarfed the actual World Cup. Luckily, wrote Rimet, the Italians beat Czechoslovakia in the final and kept the thing, “as we would not have known how to carry it away.”

The night after the final, the jubilant Italian dignitaries forgot about the FIFA delegation. Rimet and his colleagues felt lost until General Vaccaro, head of Italy’s football federation, kindly invited them to dinner by the sea at Ostia. The general drove them there himself, a terrifying journey along a winding coastal road, but the meal was superb. Rimet, writing after the war, understood that Vaccaro might be in bad odor with some readers for his spell commanding Italian Fascist troops on the eastern front. It was not necessary to “appreciate his political persona,” grants Rimet, but Vaccaro had been a “prestigious president” of Italian football, and a nice chap. FIFA’s consistent willingness to embrace brutal regimes, from Argentina’s military junta of the 1970s through Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, was baked in from the start. It was all part of “peace through sport.”

A photograph from the 1936 Berlin Olympics shows Rimet walking with the FIFA delegation through the swastika-bedecked streets of Hitler’s capital—his French federation had opposed a press campaign to boycott the Nazi Games. In Berlin, the men of FIFA voted through another of Rimet’s dreams: France was named host of the 1938 World Cup.

Rimet’s six-year-old grandson Yves performed the draw for the tournament, standing on a table in shorts amid besuited officials, pulling names from a glass vase held up by his beaming grandfather. Soon after the draw was made, Hitler’s Anschluss swallowed up Austria, one of the competing nations. This was a nuisance, as it left the tournament with just fifteen teams. FIFA had to cancel the match between Austria and Sweden.

The hosts France met the reigning champions in the quarter-final. Before kick-off the Italians, playing in an all-black kit for the first time, gave the Fascist salute, whereupon French fans pelted them with stones. Italy won the game. After they beat Hungary in the final at Colombes, and the Italian flag was hoisted in victory, Rimet was pleased to see the French crowd applaud, despite the “serious political disagreements” between the two countries. He commented: “I can see hardly anything else but sport that is capable of creating these spontaneous appeasements.”

At the FIFA congress in Paris on the eve of the tournament, Germany and Brazil had both bid to stage the 1942 World Cup. But FIFA officials, already sensing that “politics” might intrude before 1942 rolled around, delayed choosing a host.

Rimet doesn’t say a word about the Second World War in his memoir. In life, he initially tried to ignore it. Having fought one terrible war against the Germans, he entered the second dedicated to his belief that football could bring peace between nations – even if one of the nations was Nazi Germany. France declared war on Hitler on 3 September 1939. Forty-eight days later, on 21 October, Rimet travelled to an urgent FIFA meeting in Bern, Switzerland, which was attended by two prominent Germans: FIFA’s secretary general Ivo Schricker, and Peco Bauwens, a senior figure in the Nazi-aligned German football federation, the DFB.

When Rimet returned to France, he found himself in trouble. Why had he been consorting with Germans? On the morning of 27 October, he was summoned for an interview at the office of Amédée Bussière, the head of the Sûreté Nationale, the French police. Later that day, one of Bussière’s underlings typed up an account of Rimet’s self-exculpations:

He had thought that given the very important interests that he represents within the Fédération Internationale, in which are represented at least 50 nations, that he could go to Bern to attend the urgent committee meeting and, above all, he thought the German representatives would abstain …

M. Rimet has a son at the front, and he is profoundly saddened … it was with tears in his eyes that he asked me to be excused.

That same day, Rimet wrote Bussière a three-page letter in purple ink, providing further explanations. He said the Prefecture of Police had granted him a visa for Switzerland. He knew he was going to meet Schricker, who admittedly was German, but the man lived in Zurich, and had assured Rimet “that he was acquiring Swiss nationality.”

Schricker had met Rimet’s train at 9.15 a.m. on 21 October. He then informed an “astonished” Rimet that Bauwens, who headed FIFA’s committee on the rules of the game, would also be attending the meeting. Bauwens had been summoned by FIFA’s Italian vice president Giovanni Mauro, supposedly to discuss “certain divergences in the translations of the rules of the game in different languages,” and to opine on the regulation of Olympic football. Rimet didn’t say it, but the Axis powers clearly wanted to pack FIFA’s first wartime meeting with their own men.

Rimet wrote to Bussière that when he discovered that Bauwens was coming, he hotfooted it to the French consulate to ask what he should do. The consulate told him he could proceed provided that Bauwens spoke only about the rules of football, and that he and Rimet didn’t talk. Rimet concluded: “My encounter with Dr Bauwens was wholly fortuitous and involuntary.”

He told Bussière that he had led FIFA for twenty years, having repeatedly been unanimously elected. “I have always sought to use this confidence in the service of France. Many of our diplomatic agents abroad can testify to this.” He offered to resign if that was what the French government wanted, or to hand off his presidential duties for the duration of the war to one of the vice presidents, the Italian Mauro or the Belgian Rodolphe Seeldrayers. If France let him remain FIFA’s president, “I would be very happy to receive the directives that would permit me, in this position, to serve my country as I always have.” He signed the beseeching letter “Jules Rimet, Croix de guerre – three citations.” The Sûreté Nationale let him keep his post. After all, the FIFA presidency represented French soft power.

In June 1940 France surrendered to Hitler, and Marshall Pétain established the collaborationist Vichy regime. Rimet now saw his domestic mission, as head of the French football federation, to keep his sport going, but he soon found himself at odds with Vichy. He seemed able to live with the regime’s fascism; what he couldn’t accept was its support for his old enemy, amateurism in sport. The Vichyistes, like the Nazis, regarded professionalism as a profound moral evil. Also, Vichy wanted to appoint the country’s football officials itself. In March 1942 Rimet stepped down as president of the French federation after twenty-three years, though he remained honorary president.

Meanwhile, the Axis powers were planning a coup at FIFA. Their opportunity came with the meeting of FIFA’s executive board at the federation’s headquarters in Zurich in January 1941. Football officials travelling to Switzerland from occupied Europe required German or Italian visas. The Axis powers pulled a trick: they first granted the visas, so that the meeting would go ahead, but then suddenly withdrew them.

The hope was that if officials from occupied countries couldn’t travel, there would be a German-Italian majority at the board meeting, and the Fascists could capture FIFA. No doubt Schricker, the German secretary general, was in on the plot. It failed, largely, it seems, because the neutral Swiss didn’t like political interference in the organisations they hosted.

As it was, Rimet and the other senior FIFA officials in their various warring countries contrived to exchange some friendly messages during the conflict. Schricker, in Zurich, helped keep letters circulating between them, and Rimet managed to visit the city twice in the war years. The footballing brotherhood treated the calamity as a mere interruption.

Almost immediately after Paris was liberated in August 1944, Rimet returned as president of the French federation. Nobody afterwards seems to have held his two-year collaboration with Vichy against him. People understood that football was much more real to him than fascism. And soon after Germany’s surrender, as president of FIFA, he was once again holding meetings with FIFA’s senior German, Bauwens.

Bauwens had had a complicated journey through the Third Reich. He had applied to join the Nazi party in May 1933. A membership card in his name was written out. But the party never issued it, rejecting him because of his marriage to a Jewish woman, Elise Gidion.

Bauwens and Elise didn’t have a perfect marriage. He would lock her in the bedroom when he received one of his mistresses. Elise became a heavy drinker, and took her own life in 1940—or so it appears. Their son later accused Bauwens of encouraging her suicide, or possibly even adding the fatal overdose of sleeping tablets to her wine glass.

During the war, Bauwens’ family construction company ran its own forced labour camp, which appeared on a post-war list of 2,500 “Slaveholders in the Nazi regime.” Yet after the German surrender, Bauwens sent Rimet a letter in which he portrayed himself as an anti-Nazi: “Would I not be the worst person in the world, if I had performed only the smallest henchman services for the people who have my wife on their conscience?”

Other FIFA officials resented Bauwens for his “brown” past, but Rimet didn’t. Given his life experience, for him peace through sport meant above all peace between Germany and France. He and Bauwens were brothers in football.

With the war over, Rimet could focus on what mattered: the World Cup. In 1946 a FIFA congress in Luxembourg renamed the trophy the “Coupe Jules Rimet”—”to my great confusion,” he writes modestly.

For the first post-war World Cup, in Brazil in 1950, Rimet repeated the transatlantic crossing that he had made for the inaugural tournament twenty years earlier. He aimed to restore the comity of the pre-Fascist world. The Axis powers Germany and Japan had been banned from FIFA, but Rimet was smoothing the path for their swift return. In 1950, Bauwens became president of the German football federation. A FIFA congress in Rio de Janeiro, held on the eve of the World Cup, agreed “to not let politics introduce itself into sports.”

Travelling around Brazil during the tournament, Rimet observed that the country “seems to live only for football and the cup.” When the Coupe Rimet itself was exhibited in a shop in Rio, the crowds flocking to see it were so large that a security firm had to be hired. The Brazilians were certain that they would keep the cup. As Rimet noted: “By a curious phenomenon of collective psychosis, all the city was celebrating victory before it was won.” FIFA officials weren’t invited to the opening ceremony in the new stadium, the Maracanã. Rimet explains in his memoir that for the Rio authorities, “the World Cup is a strictly Brazilian affair.” The stadium with its 200,000-person capacity was so packed for matches that even VIPs had to fight their way to their seats. Rimet was told that the Archbishop of Rio, “caught in a besieging crowd, could not free himself except by roughly knocking over his nearest neighbors.”

The 1950 tournament had no official final, just a second stage of group matches. But the de facto final turned out to be the Brazil-Uruguay game. A draw would be enough to make the Brazilians world champions, and a grandiose victory ceremony was planned. While their national anthem played, the Brazilian team were to walk to the centre of the pitch through a guard of honour to receive the Coupe Rimet. With the match tied at 1-1 and only a few minutes remaining, Rimet descended with the trophy through the innards of the Maracanã to the touchline, ready to make his congratulatory speech for the hosts. But by the time he emerged from the tunnel, the crowd was silent. During his descent, Uruguay had scored the winning goal.

Rimet writes: “There was no longer a guard of honor, nor a national anthem, nor a speech in front of a microphone, nor a solemn awarding of the trophy.” Instead he found himself jammed amid a throng of pitch invaders, the cup in his hand, not knowing what to do with it. He was forced to repeat the rushed handover of 1930: “I end up spotting the Uruguayan captain, and I give him the cup while shaking his hand, as if in secret, without being able to say a word to him.”

It was Rimet’s last official act at a World Cup. Aged seventy-six, he was being phased out as president. At the FIFA congress in Bern, on the eve of the 1954 tournament, he was replaced by the Belgian Rodolphe Seeldrayers (who would die the following year).

The peasant boy from Theuley had overseen the growth of the World Cup into an event that moved the white world. During his thirty-three-year reign, the federation’s membership had grown from twenty-nine countries to eighty-five. His associates at FIFA proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1956, while they were assembling the supporting dossier, Rimet died, aged eighty-two. Though he lies forgotten in his suburban grave, his obsessions still mark the World Cup.

On Thursday, the president hit back at these critics, specifically Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones. “They have one thing in common, Low IQs,” he wrote in an unusually long missive on Truth Social. “They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” The post contained a litany of other criticisms of them. They’re “NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.” It was shrugged off by its targets. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” Owens replied.

It’s not 2016 anymore. It’s not even 2024. Trump is weak, and opportunists on the right are betting against his administration. That hardly seems like a dicey position, given the Iran war, high gas prices, persistent inflation, and the increasingly widespread belief that the president has lost touch with reality. They’re risking Trump’s ire now because they think it’s a better long-term bet, one that will position them to take the reins of MAGA in the near future.

Greene, Carlson, Owens, and Jones are all stars on the right. Greene was one of the first truly post-Trump Republican politicians; elected to Congress in 2020, she was loudly and proudly MAGA—and prone to pushing zany, often antisemitic conspiracy theories, like one that claimed “Jewish space lasers” were responsible for wildfires in California. Carlson, a longtime conservative commentator, is one of media’s great opportunists; over 20 years, he has evolved from a dorky, bow-tie-wearing supply-sider on cable news to a raucous populist podcaster who rants about the global cultural and economic elite. (In recent years, and especially since being fired by Fox News in 2023, he has embraced a growing array of conspiracy theories, many of which have been criticized as antisemitic.)

Owens’s bloom has faded a bit after a sharp turn toward conspiracy theorizing in recent years, especially regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk—for which she blames Israel, a claim in line with many other antisemitic theories she espouses. Jones, a longtime radio host (of Infowars) whose prominence predates Trump’s political career, will seemingly embrace any conspiracy theory, no matter how vile. He recently declared bankruptcy after being found liable for $1.4 billion in damages for claiming that the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting were “crisis actors” working on behalf of the U.S. government, which intended to use their tragic deaths as a pretext for seizing firearms from law-abiding citizens. (He is also a raving antisemite.)

Greene, Carlson, Owens, and Jones—all in slightly different ways—have been channeling many of the novel parts of Trump’s politics: populism, conspiracy theorizing, and a profound distrust of political, economic, and cultural elites. They have advanced Trump’s agenda while also filling its holes and fleshing it out—part of a larger effort on the right to translate his rambling, discursive speeches and unhinged tweets into a coherent, populist movement. But in his second term, Trump has all but abandoned the idea that his movement has any intellectual foundation or, for that matter, coherence: MAGA simply means whatever he says it does, even if it directly contradicts past promises. In March, responding to early critics of the Iran war who rightly attacked it as a betrayal of his anti-interventionist promises, Trump responded with three words: “MAGA is Trump.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the war, where a president who promised to end stupid, costly foreign interventions is bogged down in one. Carlson went as far as to urge U.S. military figures to disobey orders that could kill Iranian civilians: “Now it’s time to say, ‘No, absolutely not,’ and say it directly to the president: ‘No,’” he said in a recent episode of his podcast, where he described Trump’s threats against Iranians as “evil.” Greene used the same word and went even further, tweeting, “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization.” (The Twenty-Fifth Amendment allows for the removal of a president who “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”) Jones also called for Trump’s removal, saying his threats were “the definition of genocide.”

They’re not alone on the MAGA right. Steve Bannon, the onetime Trump campaign svengali who helped get him elected in 2016 and briefly served as his senior adviser during his first term, has grown more critical of the war and recently hosted a guest who suggested Trump’s threats might constitute “war crimes” if carried out. Mike Cernovich, another conspiracy-minded member of the far right, suggested not only that Trump had lost touch with the movement but that it was “silly to claim Trump is MAGA” at all, thanks in large part to the war. As far as factional battles go, this one doesn’t have a lot of drama, at least in the short term: None of these figures have anything close to the level of influence Trump does right now.

But what if that changes? And what if Iran is the thing that brings that shift about? The growing MAGA divide over the war points to a significant long-term problem on the right: Without Donald Trump, what is MAGA? For that matter, what is the Republican Party? MAGA arguably means less than it ever has before, which suggests that the fight over the party’s future will not just be a post-Trump succession plan but a contentious, bitter, and confusing existential battle over its identity.

Trump’s critics know they have little power to shift the president’s course. They have no influence over the war and surely know that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a fantasy. But as his approval rating continues to fall, and the Republicans brace for a shellacking in the November midterm elections that will deprive them of unified control of Washington, these critics can see around the corner—which, frankly, doesn’t require any prescience. Trump is a lame-duck president who is about to become even lamer. So they’re simply getting ahead of the conversation on the right by defining Trump’s second term as a failure—and a betrayal.

Indeed, a sense of betrayal runs through each of their statements: These critics thought they were building a movement built on a shared set of convictions, but Trump was building one based on himself. “Well, President Trump came out on Truth Social and attacked myself and all the original MAGA supporters today,” Jones said in a video. “I supported the old Trump who got so many good things done.… I just feel sorry for him and pray that God touches his heart and soul, and frees him from the demonic influences that he’s under.” Carlson, meanwhile, said he still “loves” the president—perhaps somewhat ironically—but that he “feels sorry” for him. “The Israelis have him in a hammerlock.”

You can see an argument starting to form here—that they represent the future of MAGA, not the president, who can no longer be trusted to run anything. They’re setting up a factional battle ahead of the 2028 Republican presidential primary that’s between two groups: those loyal to MAGA’s “ideals” and those loyal to the president.

The supposed current front-runners—Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—are both closely tied to Trump. Which means the “true MAGA” lane is up for grabs. Could Carlson seriously be considering a run? Just how crazy would a Candace Owens presidential campaign be? We just might find out, and it will make the 2016 Republican race—otherwise known as the “circus” or “clown car” primary—look like a staid, predictable contest.

The Maryland lawmaker sent a letter to White House physician Sean Barbabella, imploring the doctor to administer a cognitive test to the president. Raskin cited remarks Trump made earlier this week as justification for the exam, including Truth Social statements in which Trump threatened to annihilate Iran’s “whole civilization.”

“Experts have repeatedly warned that the President has been exhibiting signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline. And, in recent days, the country has watched President Trump’s public statements and outbursts turn increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening,” wrote Raskin.

“His apparently deteriorating condition has caused tremendous alarm across the nation (and political spectrum) about the President’s cognitive function and continuing mental fitness for the office of President, and prompted concerns about the President’s wellbeing,” Raskin noted.

Trump’s escalatory threats haven’t just alarmed his usual critics—they’ve also driven a wedge into the MAGA movement. Some of Trump’s longest and most fervent supporters denounced his warmongering behavior this week, including former Fox News titans Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as far-right influencers such as Alex Jones and Candace Owens.

The president then smeared his conservative acolytes in turn, claiming that they were losers with “low IQs.” That didn’t sit well with his voting base, who turned against the president en masse on his historically sycophantic social media platform Truth Social Friday. Many were shocked and appalled by the president’s brazen display of disloyalty to his own cause, announcing their sudden withdrawal from the MAGA movement.

“At a time when our country is at war—especially when the war was initiated by the President without congressional declaration or consent—the American people must be able to trust that the Commander-in-Chief has the mental capacity to discharge the essential duties of his office,” Raskin wrote.

Nonetheless, Trump’s White House staff brushed off Raskin’s message with an unserious smattering of insults.

“Lightweight Jamie Raskin is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Hill in an emailed statement. “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the past four years when Democrats like Raskin intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.”

Raskin had anticipated the Biden remark, claiming in his letter that Republicans’ fervent interest in Biden’s wellness was a good reason for them to take interest in Trump’s mental acuity.

The ranking member also demanded that the test be conducted before April 25, the results be made public, and that Barbabella testify before Congress regarding the findings.

In a letter Friday to Pulte, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden and Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren accused the president’s ally of sending Trump money under the guise of giving to charity.

In 2023, Team Pulte Inc., Pulte’s nonprofit organization, told the IRS that it had donated $65,000 to another One World Love LLC, another nonprofit, for the purposes of “assitance [sic] underserved people.”

Mother Jones first reported in February that One World Love LLC isn’t really a charity at all, but a corporate entity founded by a partner at Binnall Law Group, a firm that helped represent Trump after the deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol and in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.

Pulte’s donation to One Love LLC occurred just as the pressures of Trump’s legal bills started to escalate, the senators’ letter stated, and the so-called charity was dissolved later that same year.

“One World does not appear to be an actual nonprofit devoted to underserved individuals,” the senators wrote. “These facts raise serious concerns that Team Pulte Inc. may have illegally funneled cash out of a charity to support President Trump.”\

The Democrats also questioned Joshua Hinkle, current president and director of Team Pulte Inc. They requested the men turn over all documents from Team Pulte Inc. and its employees related to One World Love LLC or the Binnall Law Group, and their employees, by April 24.

Warren and Wyden also pressed Pulte and Hinkle on a series of discrepancies with their organization’s filings to the IRS. In tax filings, Team Pulte Inc. incorrectly listed One World Love as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, though the IRS has no entity with that name, and provided a fake tax identification number, as well as the address to a seemingly random apartment building.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump told staff in a private meeting that he’d “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval.” Another person told the Journal that the president said he’d pardon anyone who came within 10 feet. In fact, White House aides reported that Trump makes the claim quite often in meetings.

The White House claims that he’s obviously joking.

“The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke, however, the President’s pardon power is absolute,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

Biden pardoned several family members and top officials targeted by Republicans, like his son Hunter and former NIH head Anthony Fauci, before leaving office. Last year, Trump declared all of Biden’s pardons “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” an accusation that has little effect on the legitimacy of the pardons, which are still valid.

Trump has already pardoned a cadre of questionable characters, including former Honduran President and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, dark web drug dealer Ross Ulbricht, Texas Representative and fraudster Henry Cuellar, and nearly every single convicted January 6 rioter, among others.

Last month, Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host who Trump tapped to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), claimed that last year, New York’s Medicaid program had provided five million people—nearly three-fourths of the state’s 6.8 million enrollees—with personal care services, meaning housekeeping, grooming, and meal preparation.

Oz announced on March 3 that CMS would launch a federal investigation into the apparent fraud. “Heart surgeons are trained to look at the numbers. When something doesn’t add up, you don’t ignore it, you investigate,” he said. “And right now, the numbers coming out of New York’s Medicaid program don’t add up.”

Apparently, they don’t add up because the ones Oz cited are just plain wrong.

CMS spokesman Chris Krepich told the AP that the number of New Yorkers who used personal care services last year was closer to 450,000, or between 6 and 7 percent of the state’s Medicaid enrollees.

He told the outlet that the agency had misidentified New York’s approach to applying billing codes. “CMS is committed to ensuring its analyses fully reflect state-specific billing practices and will continue to work closely with New York to validate data and strengthen program integrity oversight,” he said in an emailed statement.

Despite this revelation, Krepich said that the federal investigation of New York state’s high health care spending is still ongoing. Health analysts have argued that the state’s spending reflects higher costs for service and policies committed to providing New Yorkers with at-home care.

Not everyone is buying that this was an innocent mistake. Cadence Acquaviva, senior public information officer for the New York Department of Health, told the AP that Oz’s initial false claims about the program were “a targeted attempt to obscure the facts.”

Fiscal Policy Institute senior health policy adviser Michael Kinnucan said the discrepancy “could have been cleared up in a phone call.”

“It’s really slapdash,” he said.

The CMS administrator appeared to make other false and misleading statements in his video on X. He claimed that New York had lowered the bar for receiving personal care services to include providing aid to people who are “easily distracted”—a phrase that does not appear among the program requirements that have only become more rigorous in the past year.

New York is just one target of the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on supposed fraud in slue states. The Trump administration enjoys singling out Minnesota and California when discussing nationwide fraud, frequently equating the alleged fraud with its Democratic leadership, personified by Governors Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom.

The Board of Peace, a pet project cooked up by Donald Trump late last year, has received just a tiny part of the total $17 billion pledged to the charter by various countries, reported Reuters Friday.

Ten countries promised to cumulatively throw billions of dollars at the post-war remodel, which Trump has envisioned as a sprawling seaside playground similar to Dubai. Some of the nations that pledged their funds for the reconstruction effort—and the prerequisite peace plan—include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey.

But practically none of them have actually put their money where their mouths are.

A person with direct knowledge of the peace board’s operations told Reuters that just three countries have donated to the board’s operations thus far: the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and the U.S. itself. Together, their funds amounted to less than $1 billion.

The person added that the Iran war has “affected everything” and thwarted rehabilitation efforts for the devastated region.

The board was already off to a rocky start in February, when dozens of countries convened for the project’s inaugural meeting. Trump, however, had a difficult time pronouncing his peers’ foreign names. Last month, Semafor reported that $1.2 billion of Trump’s own pledged cash for the board was actually siphoned from State Department funds, effectively forcing the American taxpayers to pay for the enormous Trumpian construction plan. At the time, Trump said he would defer $10 billion to the Gaza scheme.

Countries interested in being permanent members on the board are required to pay $1 billion for their spot.

Trump initially floated his peace board idea back in September as part of a 20-point peace plan to control Gaza, promising to include major heads of state as well as former world leaders, such as former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But the board’s charter makes little mention of Gaza. Instead, its goals appear to be as lofty as they are broad, seeking to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”

The concept came under renewed scrutiny in January as Trump aggressed Greenland and NATO. The U.S. president has also invited leaders of nations with terrible track records on human rights, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, to join the board.

Longtime U.S. allies warned that the Board of Peace could upend the current world order, with several refusing to join the board at all, including France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Slovenia.

The renderings were filed by the Department of the Interior along with the Commission of Fine Arts. The 250-foot arch will dwarf the Washington, D.C., skyline, sitting on a roundabout between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.

The planned arch would be over twice the size of the Lincoln Memorial, which is about 100 feet tall, and would block views of the cemetery, one of the reasons why a veterans’ group has sued to block its construction. At 250 feet, the arch would even be larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

“I’d like it to be the biggest one of all,” Trump said in January. “We’re the biggest, most powerful nation.”

Harrison Design’s renderings show a white monument with a golden inscription reading “One Nation Under God” and a winged statue of Lady Liberty at the top. The arch’s base, with stairs, will have statues of four golden lions, an odd choice considering that the lion has historically been a symbol of England, not the U.S.

Trump is asking for $15 million in taxpayer funds from the National Endowment for the Arts to pay for the arch, despite previously claiming it would be paid for by leftover donations from his $400 million ballroom project, and spent part of Easter Sunday driving slowly around Memorial Circle observing the site instead of attending services.

Even with the economy struggling thanks to a war he started and is now desperate to end, Trump is prioritizing building monuments to himself without getting legal permission first. His ballroom construction has already been halted, and his arch could be next. But if there’s one lesson from Trump’s second term, it’s that he’s doing what he wants without any regard for the consequences.

Just weeks after reporting that Bryon Noem—currently married to proudly anti-LGBTQ former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—liked to dress in drag as a large-breasted woman in his spare time, the Daily Mail has revealed that Noem had a nine-year online relationship with a large-breasted dominatrix, during which he frequently disparaged his wife and discussed transitioning from man to woman.  

“I felt he was very hypocritical for standing ten toes on American family values while he was in my messages about wanting to be a trans bimbo bitch,” said dominatrix Shy Sotomayor, now 30. Bryon first reached out to her in 2016, keeping consistent contact with her until 2020—when his ultraconservative wife became governor of South Dakota. He returned to Sotomayor in 2025. “He just popped back into my life like a little groundhog,” she said. 

“Besides the fact of who your wife is, no one is prettier than me. No one is as powerful,” a text from Sotomayor read, after she discovered his true identity.

“Fucking true. Do you want me to be a woman?” Bryon responded.

“Do you want to be a woman for me?”

“I think I do.”

Other text messages obtained by the Mail reveal Noem wanted to become a woman and change his name to Crystal, writing, “I want to be a Crystal so bad.… I want to be a woman so bad.” He discussed various plastic surgeries to make him look more feminine.

One recording has Bryon telling Sotomayor he loved her, and that he could see them “leaving our spouses for each other.” In another, he professed his need to be Sotomayor’s “trans bimbo slut.” He even alluded to “family stuff” and things being “really bad at home” around January 16, after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis—the lowest point of his wife’s tenure at the Department of Homeland Security. 

Mr. Noem’s kink is fairly harmless as far as those things go. But his recklessness, his clear gender identity crisis, and the wanton, Bible-toting conservatism that his wife carried with her while terrorizing hundreds of people at DHS make this story all the more absurd. 

Mr. Noem has yet to comment on recent revelations. 

Unearthed audio reveals Kristi Noem's husband professing his love to a dominatrix:

"I do love you... You're so much better [than my wife]. Would you ever marry me?" pic.twitter.com/hizwSzjKBc

— FactPost (@factpostnews) April 10, 2026

For some reason, Virginia’s new Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger hasn’t signed the bill—and the deadline for her to take action is Monday.

The bill attaches a number of conditions to ICE activity, requiring agents to have a judicial warrant to investigate a person’s immigration status and to enter homes, to notify local partners of their enforcement actions with at least one week’s notice, to refrain from being within 500 yards of a polling place, and to clearly identify themselves.

ICE agents would also be subject to Virginian courts if they violate state laws, and state police and prosecutors would have investigation and charging powers over “any shooting involving any agent” working with or for the agency. All of this would prompt heavy pushback from ICE and the Trump administration, who would likely refuse these conditions and end ICE contracts within Virginia.

Is that why Spanberger hasn’t taken action on the bill yet? She pulled state law enforcement out of ICE’s 287(g) cooperation program in February, but she hasn’t said anything about this bill despite it being nearly a month old. If she doesn’t veto or sign it by Monday, though, it will become law per Virginia’s constitution.

On Thursday, Spanberger vetoed a bill that would have brought a casino to Fairfax County, citing local opposition. Like the rest of the country, many Virginians also oppose ICE’s violence and legally questionable actions. Will she listen to them and sign a bill restricting ICE into law?

But buried in Trump’s rant is some actual news.

Trump’s eruption—which singled out critics like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Alex Jones, who have attacked the war and declared Trump’s genocidal threat disqualifying—specifically attacked Jones this way:

Bankrupt Alex Jones … says some of the dumbest things, and lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.

Wait, so Trump thinks it was “horrendous” that Jones claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was a “hoax”? That’s interesting. Because after Jones first pushed his vile conspiracy theories about the 2012 mass shooting—which took the lives of 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut—some in Newtown publicly called on then-president Trump in 2017 to condemn Jones’s conspiracy theorizing about it. And they say it never happened.

It turns out that there’s a whole backstory here involving Trump, Jones, and Newtown that goes back many years. Now that Trump has reopened the topic, it deserves a recapping.

To wit: Back in 2015, when Jones was prominently questioning whether the Sandy Hook massacre really happened, insisting that it was staged by the government, Trump was untroubled by Jones’s claims. Running for president the first time, Trump appeared on Jones’s “Infowars” show that year to boost his candidacy. He praised Jones’s ability to get attention with his conspiracy-theorizing, declaring: “Your reputation is amazing.”

This understandably upset people in Newtown. In 2017, soon after Trump took office, the Newtown school board sent a letter to the new president, urging him to “clearly and unequivocally” recognize that the massacre had happened and denounce Jones’s lies about it. A perfunctory White House statement only condemned “hate” generally.

“We were hoping the president-elect would denounce Alex Jones for the damage he caused to families who did lose somebody and other families impacted by the tragedy,” Eric Paradis, who helped coordinate the letter as a member of Newtown’s Democratic Town Committee and whose own daughter survived the shooting, tells me. “He never did. We were disappointed in the lack of response.”

It’s important to emphasize that Jones’s conspiracy-mongering was profoundly painful to the survivors’ families and many others in Newtown. Conspiracy theorists descended on the town and harassed them. (Their lawsuits against Jones resulted in the liquidation of his personal assets.)

“We once had people associated with Jones come to a school board meeting to film us while asking why they couldn’t see pictures of the dead children to prove that they existed,” Keith Alexander, chair of the Newtown board of education at the time, tells me. “For a town recovering, it was an awful blow.” Yet Trump would apparently not denounce it.

All this gets at a deeper reality involving Trump and MAGA. Trump and many of his allies have long enthusiastically accommodated or even embraced the most vile fringe elements on the right, because the Trump coalition relies in part on them. In the wake of the recent controversy over Nick Fuentes’s overt white supremacy, for instance, JD Vance suggested that he would not subject Fuentes or others of his ilk to “self-defeating purity tests.”

Jones has long been a prime example of this. As Trump rose to power, he would sometimes give voice to Jones’s conspiracy theories in his own words, including the claim that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were the founders of ISIS.

In the case of Jones’s Sandy Hook denial, the deepest sensitivities of a lot of living, breathing human beings were involved. Newtown had experienced the worst trauma imaginable, and the conspiracy-mongering about it was profoundly hurtful to many in the town. Yet while Trump did speak about the shooting back in 2012, when Jones was pushing his vile lies, Trump was apparently unable to see those affected as real people who didn’t deserve such deranged and malicious abuse.

To the people impacted by the shooting, then, seeing Trump issue this condemnation of Jones now—apparently only because Jones has been attacking him—is doubly insulting. “I’m totally shocked,” Alexander, the former board of education chair, told me. “It amazes me he would return to this to try and get attention.”

“It’s too bad that it takes something actually happening to the president to make him feel empathy for this community,” added Michelle Embree Ku, a Newtown resident and school board member at the time.

The perversity here runs deep. In describing Trump as unfit for the presidency over his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, Jones actually got something right, as did Trump’s other critics. But rather than simply climb down from this monumentally deranged vow to commit massive war crimes and murder tens of millions, Trump is able to perceive criticism of this only as an intolerable display of personal disloyalty to him. Incredibly, that’s what it took to get Trump to denounce Jones and, by extension, fully recognize, well over a decade too late, the horrors that the people of Newtown endured.

The former Homeland Security chief has barely put in a lick of work at her new government job, sparking questions about Noem’s ongoing tenure within the Trump administration, State Department officials told the Daily Mail.

Noem was ousted from her position atop Homeland Security last month for playing a starring role in several major scandals, including a sprawling $220 million DHS advertising campaign that prominently featured her on horseback and reportedly funneled money into the pockets of her friends and allies. Her reputation—and consequently, Donald Trump’s immigration agenda—were also marred by the actions of ICE agents in Minnesota, where Noem’s subordinates killed two U.S. citizens in January.

But despite the drama, Trump was not willing to let Noem exit his administration entirely. Instead, the president demoted her to the position of special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a multinational security coalition within the folds of the State Department formed two days after she was fired.

So far, the bloc has not achieved much under Noem’s stewardship.

At least four officials who followed Noem from DHS to the brand-new security coalition have been placed on administrative leave, unnamed sources told the Mail Thursday. The outbound officials include former deputy chief of staff Troup Hemenway, ex-deputy general counsel Giovanna Cinelli, and junior staffers Josh King and Octavian Miller.

Noem, meanwhile, took just one meeting last week via teleconference, senior State Department officials told the British gossip tabloid.

“This post was intended as a soft landing so it didn’t look like Noem was immediately being fired,” one State Department insider told the Mail. “But no one really thinks she should have this job. The State Department was not happy to have her here and the understanding is that she’s not going to be here for much longer.”

At least 22 schools and 17 health care facilities have been damaged as a result of Donald Trump’s reckless five-week war in Iran, according to an analysis published Thursday by The New York Times.

Most of the damage was caused by strikes in crowded neighborhoods, namely Tehran, the nation’s capital, which is as densely populated as New York City, according to the Times. In most instances, the target of the strike was unclear. It is also unclear exactly which strikes were American or Israeli.

The outlet acknowledged that this may only be a sliver of the total damage. The Iranian Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian organization, reported that at least 763 schools and 316 health care facilities had been damaged or destroyed as of April 2.

Attacking schools and hospitals is one of the six grave violations identified by the United Nations Security Council to protect children from armed conflict. Under international law, both schools and hospitals are protected as civilian objects.

Trump’s war began with the U.S. conducting a missile strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab that killed at least 168 children and 14 teachers. A preliminary inquiry found that the use of outdated intelligence caused the school to be labeled as a military target. On the same day, a missile strike ripped through a boys’ elementary school, killing one child.

Two students were killed in another strike on a high school in Tehran, and six people, including four children, were killed in a strike on a sports hall where a girls’ volleyball team was practicing at the time, according to Iranian state media.

Dr. Mohammad Hassan Bani Assad, the president of Gandhi Hospital in northern Tehran, told Iranian state television that bombings near health facilities forced medical staff to evacuate their patients. “We have newborn babies,” he said. “We had eight patients in the ICU, two in critical condition. Women giving birth. Embryos in our fertility department.”

Hegseth has previously accused Iran of “moving rocket launchers into civilian neighborhoods near schools, near hospitals to try to prevent our ability to strike.” But he has provided no evidence for this claim, and the Pentagon declined to comment on it.

At the same time, Hegseth has openly bragged about sidestepping the “stupid rules of engagement,” and dismantled the legal guardrails that would prevent the U.S. military from committing horrific war crimes.

“Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” the president wrote on Truth Social, even going so far as to put Palantir’s market ticker symbol in the post. “Just ask our enemies!!! President DJT.”

This blatant positive press for a private weapons manufacturer with multiple government contracts and extensive ties to the president profiting off the war he started once again raises questions of market manipulation. Last month, Trump postponed strikes on Iran just two hours before markets opened, causing skyrocketing oil prices to temporarily dip. At the time, Iran’s Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf referred to Trump’s Truth Social announcements as “a setup for profit-taking.” This move by Trump appears to be no different, and the market shows that.

Writing on Truth Social Thursday night, Trump once again endorsed Orbán, the strongman leader who captured the imagination of conservative populists, just days before the country’s election.

“GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBÁN. He is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary,” Trump wrote.

But Trump’s latest endorsement comes shortly after Vance railed against foreign interference in Hungary’s elections—while stumping for Orbán in Hungary.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Orbán Wednesday, Vance said: “What has happened in the midst of this election campaign is one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I have ever seen or ever even read about.”

No, he wasn’t talking about his unprecedented decision to actively campaign for a foreign dictator; he was talking about the European Union.

“The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary. They have tried to make Hungary less energy-independent. They have tried to drive up costs for Hungarian consumers. And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy,” he said.

Vance insisted that he was there to “help as much as I possibly can help” with Orbán’s reelection.

“Your success is our success,” the vice president said.

Hypocrisy that’s this blatant has become a staple of the Trump administration and its shameless shilling for foreign dictators.

It’s not clear that the European Union has engaged in any election interference—certainly none more blatant than what Trump and Vance have done this week. EU officials have been careful not to publicly endorse any candidate in Hungary’s election, according to The Guardian.

As for trying to “destroy” the Hungarian economy, roughly $21 billion in EU funds to Hungary have been frozen due to concerns over Orbán’s leadership, including threats to judicial independence and human rights violations. As far as energy independence goes, Hungary opposed the EU’s decision to phase out reliance on Russian oil, even though the country benefits from the lowest energy prices in Europe thanks to solar energy production.

Vance also accused the EU of engaging in “digital censorship” by instructing social media companies what they could show to voters. In fact, the EU is investigating a range of social media companies for a variety of reasons.

Clearly, Vance has been working with Trump for too long, because he even claimed that EU officials had threatened to exact their “revenge” on Hungarian voters if the election didn’t go a certain way.

“God does not bless any conflict,” wrote the official X account for the Chicago-born pontiff on Friday. “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

“Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples,” he continued.

The message is nothing unusual out of the Vatican, except for its timing. Earlier this week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had threatened an ambassador from the Holy See in January, days after the pope made similar antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

That month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby reportedly summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. The atmosphere of the occasion was anything but friendly: Pentagon officials openly threatened the religious ambassador, asserting that the Catholic Church needed to get behind the Trump administration’s global whims due to America’s military prowess.

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century when the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death, and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon.

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo canceled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported independent journalist Christopher Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

The Vatican also rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

This is the pope’s second clear snub to Trump just this week. Leo met with Obama adviser David Axelrod Thursday morning, a major step toward getting the pope and the forty-fourth president in a room together. Trump has yet to meet the pope.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House Management Office sent out a staff-wide email on March 24 telling administration employees not to engage in the practice following President Donald Trump’s announcement the previous day that he was pausing strikes against Iran.

The email was likely prompted by the rise in suspicious wagers and investments being made just before Trump announces major policy decisions. Only 15 minutes before Trump announced the pause in bombing Iran, $760 million in oil futures contracts was traded in under two minutes.

Three accounts in the prediction market Polymarket correctly bet on the timing of the Iran war ceasefire earlier this week, netting over $600,000. One of those accounts, with a 93 percent accuracy rate, was able to profit by betting on when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes would occur in 2024, 2025, and 2026.

The timing of those bets raises the question of whether one of Trump’s staffers or associates is using insider information for profit. Online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket allow their customers to bet on everything from political events to sports, and suspicious bets have been going on for months.

In January, one trader, who had only created their account in December, made $400,000 by betting that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power less than five hours before it actually happened. Israel arrested and charged two people, including a military reservist, in February for allegedly using classified information to make bets on Polymarket.

Insider trading in the White House is a disturbing phenomenon, made worse by Trump’s embrace of corruption as president and because it’s an even more perverse form of war profiteering. It extends further than Polymarket or Kalshi, which are problematic in their own right, and could go all the way to the presidential Cabinet, as a broker for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth allegedly tried to invest millions of dollars in defense companies just before the U.S. began bombing Iran. One wonders if Trump himself is also engaged in insider trading, or if his corrupt Department of Justice even takes the issue seriously.