Here’s a Better Idea Than Trying to Assassinate the President

Cole Allen, the 31-year-old California man who, by his own admission, armed himself and attempted to breach the security at this past weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was officially charged this week with attempting to assassinate the president. The case—at least what’s been publicly disclosed—is still quite murky; questions remain about whether Allen even fired his gun in the bowels of the Washington Hilton Hotel. Still, the takeaway, to me at least, is clear: You should not try to assassinate the president.

I know, this is probably not something that you need to be told. Murder is, after all, inherently immoral and a criminal act to boot. Murdering the president of the United States also comes with a high degree of difficulty given his 24/7 protection by a posse of well-trained armed guards. In just about every conceivable scenario, you will likely fail and you will definitely not be able to go back to living your previous life. Still, there are some additional things to consider that are specific to the Trump era itself: whether killing the president won’t make matters much worse, and whether there is a better way to channel your discontent.

Allen is an unusual would-be assassin. There’s nothing about him that reminds me of any number of mass shooters of recent vintage. There’s no air of glory-seeking; no meme-sludge in his rhetoric. In his manifesto, he spends quite a bit of time apologizing to various people in his life for betraying their trust and takes no evident pleasure in the task he’s put himself to doing. (He also seems prematurely disdainful of the security measures that ultimately foiled his plot.) What’s most unique, and perhaps most troubling, is that his decision to try to take the president’s life is, as TNR contributor Elizabeth Spiers noted on Bluesky, rooted in a sense of moral injury.

The Huffington Post’s David Wood, who has written extensively about how soldiers often suffer from moral injury after their tours of duty have concluded, describes the condition as the “sense that [one’s] fundamental understanding of right and wrong has been violated, and the grief, numbness or guilt that often ensues.” In his manifesto, Allen wrote, “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” For all intents and purposes, he is saying that he is implicated in Trump’s evident corruption and misrule. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior,” he wrote, “it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

This is perhaps the most worrying part of this story—that there might be others out there who feel this way, and who might be compelled to take the same action. These are the natural consequences of our current age of elite impunity, in which a corrupt president transforms the government into an instrument of self-dealing and revenge, and justice is perceived as slow in arriving, if it arrives at all. Allen spends a considerable amount of time in his manifesto building the moral scaffolding necessary to accommodate his decision to travel to Washington, D.C., to dole out a quick dose of accountability. Based on his writing, I think he works harder than most would-be mass shooters to illuminate a humane logic for his actions. I still think he draws all the wrong conclusions.

One thing that Allen gets badly wrong is the idea that killing Trump might have provided a short cut to putting things right. I think many people believe this about the efficacy of political violence, even if they would never engage in it themselves. But I’m unconvinced, at least as it pertains to Trump, because MAGA is something of a cult movement, steeped in its own byzantine mythology and awash in conspiratorial thinking. The one thing you probably don’t want to do if you want to bring the country back from the brink of this madness is to give this movement a martyr.

At the moment, MAGA is cracking up under the weight of the Trump administration’s many failings. As Greg Sargent noted about a recent Fox News poll, Trump’s coalition is contracting: “On both his general approval ratings and many major issues, his numbers among voter groups that have reliably supported him in the past are awful. They’re also terrible among the non-Trumpy groups that he pulled into the coalition in 2024.” It seems the worst possible thing anyone can do is interrupt this free fall. Don’t shoot a man who’s busy shooting himself in the foot.

Had Allen been successful in his attempt to kill Trump, he might have altered the thermostatic chemistry of the electorate, goosed Trump’s support, and brought back morally affronted fence sitters who were ready to leave Trump behind. It also might well have touched off a wave of political violence in the other direction—which was a thing he really should have considered before he acted. As it is, I worry that TNR contributor Ana Marie Cox is correct that Cole’s attempt will bond Trump and the White House press corps together in a shared trauma, further eroding the latter group’s already withered sense of duty in holding the administration accountable, thus exacerbating the original problem.

So, at the risk of stating the obvious, don’t attempt to—or even daydream about—assassinating the president. The best path to thwarting Trumpism lies in the deliberations of lawful democracy. This is not a path that favors quick fixes and instant gratification. We must organize in numbers to boot Trump and the GOP from power and install leaders who can command a majority to put things right, up to and including possible impeachment and putting people in jail.

On a more personal note, I was saddened to read that Allen felt alone in his grave misgivings. While he enumerated a community of people surrounding him—family, friends, work colleagues, his church—he separated himself from what sounds like a vibrant network of people rather than seeking them out. Had he done so, he might have found a better path to take that might have relieved his moral injury and contributed much more to the anti-Trump cause.

Around the same time Washingtonians were preparing for this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I was catching up with an acquaintance from Minneapolis, who was giving me an intimate view of what it’s like to participate in anti-ICE resistance in the Twin Cities. Her phone was a warren of group chats and text chains in which concentric orbits of organized citizens went about the daily business of protecting their neighbors and keeping watch over their neighborhoods. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, democracy is a well-oiled machine with regular training sessions from skilled political organizers.

One thing she mentioned about those trainings has stuck with me after the events of Saturday night. The trainers told the people they were organizing that sometimes they’d end up on the front lines of ICE violence—that they’d bear witness to some terrible sights, see things that would make them angry. The trainers, she said, made it clear that anyone who did not think they could handle these circumstances without succumbing to violent, retributive impulses needed to find some other role—that there were plenty of other ways they could help where their despair or anger wouldn’t get the better of them.

Given the success of this faction of Trump resistance, we’d do well to heed this advice. There are plenty of things we can do, right now, to fortify our communities and protect our neighbors—to materially impact the lives of others for good, find fellowship along the way, and absolve any sense of moral injury that may be creeping into our psyche. It’s more lethal to Trumpism long-term if we organize in opposition than it is to grab a gun and take a run at the president. I’m sorry that Allen couldn’t find his way to this realization. He might have done some good.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Make ready the orchestra of tiny violins, everyone! This weekend, Washington, D.C.’s greatest collection of reprobates and dweebs will gather at the Washington Hilton for the annual tribute to meretriciousness that is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Alas, there is bad news to report: President Donald Trump will be ruining the affair by attending it, after several years of ruining it by not attending it. As a result, people are so upset that they’re calling for this weekend’s big party to be called off entirely.

It almost goes without saying that Trump’s personal opinions on free speech put him at odds with the theme that the White House Correspondents’ Association concocted for its annual bacchanal: a celebration of the First Amendment. A few weeks ago, Trump threatened to jail journalists over coverage of an Iranian airstrike on a U.S. fighter jet. Meanwhile, Paramount has decided to invite to its table Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr, who has spent the last year launching spurious probes into various news organizations for unfavorable coverage of the Trump administration.

As if that were not enough open hostility, The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday that Trump plans some sort of “revenge attack” speech against the press corps Saturday night, after which he intends to turn tail and run home. The WHCA’s response to these aggressions seems maximally ineffectual by design: Its members will wear “pocket squares or pins touting the importance of the First Amendment.”

But should we regard the journalists into whose punchbowl the president is pissing as worthy and capable guardians of those freedoms? Or, honestly, guardians of anything? It was at last year’s party that Axios reporter Alex Thompson, upon winning the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence, rode in on his high horse to perform a ritual admonishment of those in attendance for not properly covering the story of President Joe Biden’s advanced age. “Being truth tellers,” he chastised, “also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

Well, since we once again have an infirm and mentally dysfunctional man running the country that few in the media seem worried about, it’s worth asking if anyone in the D.C. press corps actually learned anything. It’s also worth answering: not really. While The New York Times, notably, has gone long several times on Trump’s decline in recent months, good luck finding similar reporting from the likes of Axios.

I’m not the only one with knives out for the WHCD, though Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher has a decidedly different reason for calling for the dinner’s cancellation. “An event celebrating the free press should not spotlight Donald Trump, the biggest threat to the free press,” he writes. Scher is certainly right to criticize the WHCA for the way it has “reconfigured the event to make it more to Trump’s liking, chucking the comedian slot and, instead, naming as headliner Oz Pearlman, described by The New York Times as the ‘manosphere’s favorite magician.’” But the lion’s share of the piece—which begins with Scher’s “confession” that he’s a “fan” of the event—is devoted to making the chummy party seem aboveboard, for the purpose of suggesting that it’s Trump’s presence that, finally and at last, has created something truly odious.

Cue the self-serving justifications. “I always view such events as opportunities for source-building, vetting of coverage ideas and networking,” argues NPR’s Eric Deggans. “I may be having fun with my colleagues from NPR, but I’m also low-key working my beat.” I have heard variations on this idea from all sorts of reporters over the years. Maybe things are different when you’re on the media/celebrity beat, but I don’t find this argument compelling for political reporters. If you broke a story because you attended the dinner, tell your readers—they deserve to know that you’re not just there collecting selfies and canapés. Here’s a fun fact: President Barack Obama executed the hit on Osama bin Laden on White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, almost as if he knew the best time to run a secret special op was when every reporter would be nearby, basking in their own self-regard. (A better-sourced Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson famously scooped everyone on the bin Laden raid.)

At least The Atlantic’s Paul Farhi is willing to state up front that the fête was extremely tacky long before Trump became president. “Even in the best of times, the [dinner] is an awkward and ethically fraught affair,” he writes: “The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.” It’s actually a little under-sung just how bad the dinner was during its supposed halcyon days of the Obama administration. As Meredith Shiner wrote in Rolling Stone back in 2022, it was during this period that the WHCA really rammed its head up its own ass by making “celebrity the end goal of public service” and setting the stage for the parade of horribles to come. As Shiner observes:

Of course, it also should be noted that [Trump’s] attendance at the dinner in 2011—and Obama’s joke about him during his set—helped fuel the hate fire for his own White House run. Nothing about the grossness of this one weekend of cocktail parties or Democrats wanting to be cool by association invalidates the much more significant grossness of how media and celebrity normalized Trump, helped him attain power, and profited off keeping him there.

In this way, having Trump in attendance at this year’s dinner isn’t some troubling aberration. It’s really the logical end point of the whole affair; the apotheosis of Official Washington and its trashy pretentions. Far from canceling the dinner, let’s make it mandatory that Trump, his Cabinet, and all media elites attend, so we can bar the doors and force them to answer for their sins against our civic fabric.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Good news has been something of a precious commodity of late, what with the Trump administration still engaged in its slop-conflict with Iran and the president himself taking to depicting himself as a messianic figure online. But in last weekend’s elections in Hungary, Péter Magyar and his Tisza party resoundingly defeated international fascist darling Viktor Orbán and his far-right Fidesz minions. Tisza did so well in these elections, in fact, that they will have the numbers to enact crucial constitutional reforms and undo at least some of the damage of 16 years of authoritarian rule. As a side note, Orbán’s defeat is a black eye for his stateside backers, including Vice President JD Vance, who had personally stumped for the defeated strongman in the waning days of the campaign.

This was, in other words, a good outcome for freedom-loving people everywhere and a result that will hopefully yield further fruit. But there is one by-product that’s truly been a puzzlement. Across the media landscape, the chattering class has assayed the election and made what is—to it, anyway—a fresh discovery: What if political corruption is bad? And what if campaigning against corruption is a winning issue?

The Washington Post’s edit board said that “the main reason for Orbán’s fall was endemic corruption” and the fact that he had constructed “a mafia state.” The Wall Street Journal’s William Galston similarly enthused that Magyar’s focus on “a handful of issues—cronyism and corruption, economic stagnation and inflation, and decaying public services” was a “lesson for Democrats.” And The New York Times edit board, in a piece titled “Here’s How to Defeat Trumpism,” highlighted the fact that Magyar “made corruption a core campaign issue,” and then confidently intoned, “It is easy enough to imagine an American version of this strategy.”

It’s something of a marvel to have so many people so confident in their public declarations that they’ve finally cracked this code, several years after it might have been a useful insight. Trump, who will never be on a ballot again, is corrupt—and maybe that’s his Achilles’ heel! As someone who was trying to explain the depths of Trump’s corruption and the importance of safeguarding the constitutional bulwarks against a president using his position to enrich himself before Trump’s first inauguration, I can only say that these folks are a little late to the party.

It’s extremely cute that so many media elites have decided that this is a lesson Democrats need to learn when, in fact, many Democrats have actually already figured it out. Here, for example, is Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, speaking in September 2025 to Pod Save America: “Vast sums of corporate and billionaire money in our political system—with or without Trump—are why ordinary people are so ill served by elected officials and by Congress.… If we don’t solve this problem, even once we put Trump back in the box in the midterms and once he’s gone, the country will still be in deep trouble.”

Ossoff is one of 120 Democratic candidates who long ago signed onto End Citizens United’s “Unrig Washington” pledge, which asks candidates to support three agenda items: a total ban on congressional stock trading, a refusal of corporate PAC money, and a promise to undo the damage of the Citizens United ruling and to crack down on dark money in our politics. Maybe everyone at the big newspapers missed this. Notably, NOTUS—the upstart publication that’s lately been eating The Washington Post’s lunch—took stock of the scene two months ago and found that “Democratic candidates are leaning into anti-corruption messaging this cycle, seeing it as an opportunity to emphasize what they see as excessive corporate influence, unethical stock trading and shady behavior from their opponents.”

Democrats coming out against corruption in the Trump era isn’t even this recent a phenomenon. The Washington Post’s editors would do well to occasionally read their own newspaper’s reporting: As their own Mike DeBonis reported in the run-up to the 2018 midterms, anti-corruption was a major plank in the Democratic Party’s (successful) campaign.

So what, if anything, has been holding Democrats’ efforts back despite this being such a robust line of attack on Trumpism? Well, as the aforementioned NOTUS report noted, “Democrats were seen as more corrupt than Republicans by a five-percentage point margin in a 2025 battleground poll by End Citizens United.” There’s no doubt that some of this was a self-inflicted wound: There’s been significant intraparty resistance to a ban on stock trading, for instance. And the party has been slow to deal with its own corrupt members—like letting noted sleaze-pump Bob Menendez hang around the Senate until his crimes finally became too comical to tolerate.

Still, for the public to have the opinion, in 2025, that the Democrats were more corrupt than a party whose leader enmeshed himself in several Teapot Dome–level scandals in that same calendar year—including the creation of an unaccountable crypto slush fund to facilitate all manner of quid pro quo exchanges—suggests that the same media that’s recently tripped over the idea that corruption is a bad thing has impeded the public’s ability to see this for themselves.

It’s absolutely the case that we would know very little about Trump’s crimes were it not for the reporters who’ve ferreted out all these important stories. But where the mainstream media falls down on the job is its lack of civic impulse to properly paint Trump and his enablers as agents in a de facto criminal enterprise. And just as the media has indulged in sanewashing the president’s demented ravings, so too has it sanded off the edges of Trump’s corrupt practices. The way Trump’s story gets told, serial violations of the Constitution become mere “departures” from previous norms; his mafioso-like demands of the international community aren’t described as extortion—Trump is simply being “transactional.”

Just this week, days after the Associated Press joined their peers in the post-Orbán Great Corruption Awakening, they reported at length about how the Trump White House is basically a racket of double-dealing, favor-trading, and self-enrichment. Somehow, the word corrupt doesn’t appear in the article. There are no plain-English explanations of the historic criminality, either—merely allusions alongside laughable denials from various Trump spokespersons. In fact, the AP’s main concern, per their headline, is that the “Trump family deal spree could open [the] door for future presidents to profit from office.” This is the View From Nowhere at work: What if the criminal president we have now corrupts a future president?

Look, I think it’s great that so many media elites have woken up to the fact that political corruption is a great civic evil, and that Trump is politically corrupt. But by the transitive theory of equality, that means Trump is a great civic evildoer, and a media that can’t tell that truth—and which instead seeks to obscure it—is this corrupt president’s brilliant ally. I’m hoping this will change, but I rather think that the people who possess the means to shape the discourse back into something that reflects reality, and actually help restore our once flourishing democracy, all lack the guts to join this fight. Hopefully, as in Hungary, we will end up not needing them.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Most of us were duly alarmed on Tuesday morning when the president of the United States threatened to end a civilization by 8 p.m. Eastern time. It seemed entirely possible that if Iran did not “Open the fuckin’ Strait,” as Donald Trump put it, he would drop a tactical nuke on Tehran or do something slightly less apocalyptic but nonetheless genocidal. When a feebleminded lunatic runs the world’s most well-funded war machine, it’s best to worry and risk being accused of overreaction. The problem is that a significant swath of Americans aren’t alarmed enough.

I am speaking of the “Trump Always Chickens Out” maxim that has taken root since the beginning of Trump’s second term. This refers to the persistent belief that Trump is perpetually climbing down from his most dire threats—a paper tiger forever on the verge of folding. TACO theory always gives you the out when it comes to worrying about Trumpian misrule. It also gives Trump’s opponents an easy shorthand for insulting him and making themselves feel better. But it’s worth questioning whether TACO actually has much merit. Off the top of my head, I’m guessing that an untold number of obliterated Iranians may take issue with this contention.

It’s fitting that the TACO meme was largely birthed by Wall Streeters, operating under the shield of plutocratic wealth and chronic naïveté that is intrinsic to the financial services sector. As the Huffington Post reported back in May 2025, the term was cooked up by the Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong to refer to how the markets reacted to “the president’s tendency to announce massive tariffs, causing the markets to plunge, only to back off days later, causing them to rise again.” A certain swath of investors were using TACO theory to do some heavy-duty buckraking. As Ted Jenkin, the president of Exit Stage Left Advisors, told the New York Post, the strategy worked like this: “Once he delivers bad news, investors are buying those stocks when they are beaten down waiting for him to chicken out and watching those stocks rebound in value.”

Over time, TACO morphed from a form of tariff-whispering to a sort of catch-all delusion for markets to pretend that the damage Trump is doing to the economy never really has to be priced in. But it also expanded beyond the concerns of Wall Streeters to become a comforting security blanket anytime Trump either seems to be on the brink of doing something catastrophic or has backed down from escalations.

The Trump administration has actually grown pretty adept at managing and manipulating the TACO theory to its own advantages. Earlier this year, the ouster of Customs and Border Protection commander Greg Bovino, the real-life version of Sean Penn’s character in One Battle After Another, was widely depicted in the press as a sort of chickening out: Trump was forced to retrench in the face of widespread public horror over the administration’s deadly operations in Minneapolis. But under the new management of border czar Tom Homan, the terror machine kept running in the city for several more weeks. Similarly, at the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem’s dismissal in favor of Markwayne Mullin was seen as a setback for the administration, but really it just traded new excesses for old ones. If you were sitting there thinking that the temperature had been lowered or the administration had been chastened, you got played.

It may be comforting to think that in Iran, Trump once again chickened out. After all, a civilization threatened on Tuesday has made it to the end of the week, and there’s a two-week hold on all the proposed war crimes in Trump’s latest atrocity pitch deck. If you’re of the mind that any of this is true, check yourself. Trump has not chickened out; he’s already gone all in: This war of choice has bequeathed a mountain of casualties, tons of destruction, and economic ramifications that will linger for years. What you think looks like a cowardly retreat is actually Trump flailing. He is not in control of the situation, and the danger is far from over.

Also not over: the aforementioned buckraking. Trump’s TACO cycle continues to be fodder for insider trading and market manipulation. Trump’s late-March threat to “obliterate [Iran’s] various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” was followed by a belligerent response from Iran and a hasty Sunday-show appearance from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to head off any market volatility on Monday morning. Trump retreated from his threats in an early morning missive on Monday, citing the phantasmal success of nonexistent diplomatic discussions. But as FT reported, people were getting rich behind the scenes: “Traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Donald Trump’s post touting ‘productive’ talks with Iran sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.”

Once you crack open the shell of this TACO, what you’ll find isn’t a source of reassurance or a fun gibe to toss in Trump’s direction. It’s all the same misrule, criminality, and corruption. Paul Krugman, who credibly argues that these insider trades are tantamount to treason, bottom-lines it in this way: “You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.”

As the events of this week prove, life under these arrangements is scary and frustrating. We bear the cost of Trump’s belligerence and suffer psychically as he swings from one unimaginable threat to the next. Meanwhile, insiders get to manipulate the mass media and the markets to further their authoritarian political goals and self-enrichment. This TACO party is proving to be extremely profitable for an elite few, but I’d bet you won’t be invited to it anytime soon.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

In recent months, we’ve reached the stage of President Donald Trump’s second term where some of his greatest problems are the result of misguided solutions to his previous screwups. We are spending millions on farm bailouts to cover Trump’s devastating tariffs. We’re in a war with Iran to reopen a shipping lane that was open before we started the war. And we are lifting sanctions on the oil that’s floating around at sea on tankers from the country we’re at war with because we need that oil in the market to reduce the cost of gas that spiked because, again, of the war we chose to start.

Essentially, the backlash to the problems Trump first caused forced a response that is destined to lead to more backlash. It’s a comically vicious cycle, but hey, this is kind of what you get when you elect a president who ran on the platform of “If I become president they can’t prosecute me for my many crimes.” But now, everyone who is flying out of a major U.S. airport can have themselves an up-close look at the clattering irony of Trumpian misrule as they stand in epically long security queues to watch recently redeployed ICE agents lumber around, stewing in their own pointlessness.

This decision by Trump, like so many others, really requires one of those “Let me get this straight” paragraphs to truly appreciate the ouroboros of ineptitude on display. So let me bang one out. ICE agents previously deployed to terrorize American cities have engendered such a heavy amount of blowback from the American public that Democrats were able to find the courage to stand firm against further funding of the agency until significant reforms are agreed to in a deal. Trump, who can’t tolerate negotiating with Democrats, has killed off compromises that would permit the funding of the Department of Homeland Security’s other agencies. Because of this department-wide shutdown, the TSA is unfunded, so unpaid workers are dropping like flies and people are having to spend hours in the airport security lines.

The solution to all of this: Send hundreds of ICE agents to these airports to … well, beyond a few reports of agents making cursory and redundant ID checks, it’s not clear what they were meant to do in this situation, and by all accounts they aren’t improving things at all. (Though Lauren Boebert did claim that ICE was making things great again at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport before it was pointed out to her that ICE had not been deployed to that airport.) Because this is ICE we’re talking about, there was mayhem to be had: San Francisco travelers were witness to a particularly horrific arrest this week. But as Defector’s Barry Petchesky reported, the agents are mostly just standing around, diddling on their phones, and begging for a coffee shop manager to hit them with a classic, “If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean.”

The origin story of the plan to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs to the airport truly is nutty. As CNN reported, this all began when “Linda from Arizona” called in to The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show last week to make her pitch: “I think I have a solution to the TSA problem.” She said, “We need to bring in ICE agents.” Travis took the idea to Fox News to make a direct appeal to the president. Per the report, “CNN searched TV transcript databases and found no other mentions of the idea on major networks until Travis brought it up.” Naturally, Trump ended up insisting that the idea was his. Look, I know this has been a bad week for the AI industry (or as I call it, the “use-up-all-the-energy-to-build-soulless-data-centers-to-steal-the-whole-of-human-endeavor-and-creativity-in-order-to-make-shittier-facsimiles-of-things-people-already-do” industry), but for all the talk of AI slop, here we have some human slop that, against all odds, is substantially worse.

ICE deployments have caused no small amount of harm to the American people. Besides the terror they cause, they are one of the big drivers of the affordability crisis in the United States. Just this week, the Financial Times reported how ICE crackdowns have essentially broken the home-building industry in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. So the decision to make ICE agents—who are a sort of sprawling reminder of how Trumpism isn’t working—more visible to the public is an odd one.

While no one wants to encounter Trump’s brownshirts on the streets of their town, their presence has proven to be oddly galvanizing to the growing dissident movement against Trump. It takes the stupidity and ineptness of authoritarianism and shifts it from a theoretical concern to something local and tangible. It gives people the opportunity to perceive misrule for themselves, and provides a target for their ire. And it keeps people well brined in the salty swirl of everything being politicized.

I personally don’t know if the wreckage of Trump’s own policy stupidity is evident to him. He is, after all, fighting a daily battle with his flagging cognitive abilities. He may perceive the economy as great solely because his many avenues to personal self-enrichment are all paying off. We learned this week that his daily Iran war briefing consists of two-minute montages of stuff blowing up. The barriers between Trump and information awareness, in other words, remain strong. But with his approval ratings tanking, the economy cratering, and the undistilled chaos of his presidency spreading, Republicans might rue the day Trump decided to send a potent reminder to your local airport about how he’s making everything suck.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

What can be said about Trump’s war with Iran that isn’t already abundantly obvious? The answer: not much. It is not going well, and it probably won’t end well. But having spent time in the salt mines of Trump punditry, I can tell you that we’re going to endure a difficult round of think pieces purporting to explain How This Happened. So maybe this is the best time to assert the obvious, using my favored rubric of Trump analysis: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. Then imagine he started a war with Iran. Now check the news. One look, and here’s what you should be thinking: “Yep, that tracks.”

As with all of Trump’s presidential exploits, success is always constrained by two factors: The aforementioned sharp limitations of his intellectual capabilities and the fact that he is perpetually surrounded by an inner circle made up of clowns somewhere on the spectrum between “rampantly evil” and “thoroughgoing dipshit.”

“Why did President Trump decide to attack Iran?” The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg recently mused. “It depends on what day of the week you ask.” On some days, Trump was acting on (roundly discredited) intel that Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. On others, there is a scent of regime change in the air. Sometimes we are told that we were doing a classic “leading from behind” maneuver, trailing Israel into a conflict it’s long sought. Frankly, I give a lot of credit to the “wag the dog” scenario: With the economy in shambles and Jeffrey Epstein riding high in the headlines, Trump needed a distraction. Also, we mustn’t forget that he’s a warmonger who just thinks it’s fun to blow things up. (For Iran War Stupidity completists, Popular Information’s Judd Legum has rounded up 17 separate and frequently contradictory reasons that the administration has submitted for our approval.)

I’ve been reading the comment sections (of the Financial Times, anyway), and Trump is getting his ass roasted: “Let me get all of this straight in my head. They want their allies to join in an ill-thought-out war of choice with unclear aims and an uncertain chance of success for any of the myriad aims stated so far. They want everyone else to just absorb any of the externalities, like influxes of refugees, disruptions to shipping, higher oil and commodity prices, and maybe even some incoming missiles. And then they also want to tariff everyone at 15 percent.” Brother, you seem confused, but you got it absolutely correct.

Trump is really going through it with the nations that were once, putatively, our allies before Trump launched a trade war with all of them and threatened to seize Greenland in an act of colonial conquest. In the space of days, Trump has gone from begging for European naval support to free the Strait of Hormuz to having those requests punted back in his face to spiraling out on Truth Social about how he didn’t actually need anyone’s help in the first place. Since then, he’s petulantly suggested that he might wreck the whole shop and leave the nations that rebuffed him to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, countries like France and Italy are simply working on side deals with Iran to be allowed to use the strait.

My colleague Heather Souvaine Horn recently expressed to me how maddening it is to see the Trump administration treat Iran’s clampdown of the Strait of Hormuz as if it’s some unfair trick the Iranians pulled and not one of the most singularly obvious strategic choices the regime could make under the circumstances—the other being Iran’s decision to attack other Gulf states, knowing that it would be a pain point for the U.S. both economically and diplomatically. But by Trump’s own admission, the very fact that Iran retaliated in any way has caught him completely flat-footed. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” he told reporters on Monday. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked!” Right now, there are 13-year-old kids about to invade Kamchatka in their first-ever game of Risk that look like Carl von Clausewitz compared to Trump.

This week, The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote that it will be Iran, not Trump, that dictates when and how this conflict ends. At least one anonymous administration official concurs, telling Politico that Iran’s leaders “hold the cards now.” “They decide how long we’re involved—and they decide if we put boots on the ground. And it doesn’t seem to me that there’s a way around that, if we want to save face.” Sounds great. Until then, if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a rake—forever.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

During his recent State of the Union address, President Donald Trump took a few minutes to talk about the affordability crisis that’s been gripping the nation—which is to say, he threw some balderdash in the direction of Democrats. Blaming the high prices he once referred to as a “hoax” on the “dirty, rotten lies” of the opposition party, he then neatly pirouetted into his next point: declaring the crisis over. “Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them,” he said. “We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward.”

It’s not hard to understand why Trump wishes this to be true. He is, after all, a one-man driver of the affordability crisis. As we’ve noted before, the mayhem he has unleashed on the streets of cities like Minneapolis is making it harder for ordinary Americans to make ends meet. The American people are bearing most of the cost of his chaotic tariffs scheme. And gas prices are set to spike anew now that he’s launched a war in Iran. Still, as with any problem playing out in the pocketbooks of voters, the president has plenty of company on the wrong side of the fight—like the corporate privateers who are driving the crisis deeper while profiting off of our pain.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS, takes a deep dive into the battery of corporations they call the “Low Wage 20”: 20 firms that currently employ 6.7 million people across the United States. The names are familiar—Amazon, Starbucks, FedEx, Walmart, and Tyson Foods are habitual malefactors—but their sins are growing more mortifying by the day.

The most mortal of these, per the IPS, is the way these 20 firms’ “low-wage business models have left many of their workers with no choice but to rely on public assistance.” Fifteen of the companies’ median pay last year was “below the $35,631 income limit for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states”; at 13 of them, the pay fell short of the “$33,576 threshold for a family of three to be eligible for SNAP.” It’s bad enough when your business model essentially plans for government programs to provide the money you’re not willing to pay. But as TNR’s Grace Segers has relentlessly reported over the past year, the funding cuts and regulatory hurdles embedded in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” have pushed these programs, and their beneficiaries, into crisis.

The IPS says corporate power is driving the affordability crisis in other ways, as well, including a very basic one: They’re just paying people less. “Half of Low-Wage 20 firms reported a decline in their median pay between 2019 and 2024, after adjusting for inflation,” the report says. “Average median pay for the group dropped 4.6 percent, from $30,474 (in 2024 dollars) to $29,087.” These workers are increasingly getting priced out of the American dream too. All 20 of these corporate miscreants’ reported median pay last year was below the $59,600 needed to afford the rent on a two-bedroom apartment; seven of the firms’ median salaries are lower than the $25,533 average price of a used car.

Meanwhile CEO pay is doing what it always does—driving income inequality. The average CEO pay at these 20 firms was $18.6 million last year, while average CEO-to-median worker pay ratio “stood at a staggering 899 to 1, compared to the S&P 500 average of 285 to 1.” Brian Niccol of Starbucks took home the award for the most nonsensical disparity between CEO and employee income: He earns $95,801,676, while the median salary for a Starbucks employee was a mere $14,674.

There are a slew of policy decisions that can be made to alter this trajectory, from raising the minimum wage to bolstering labor rights to imposing a tax on stock buybacks. The IPS even suggests we adopt the practice of “bad business fees” designed to penalize companies for paying such paltry wages that their employees have no choice but to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. And of course, corporate democracy would go a long way to taming these excesses. As TNR contributor Osita Nwanevu has argued, more worker ownership can help limit income inequality while also providing firms with ballast to survive economic downturns.

It goes without saying that the ideological orientation of the White House and Congress guarantees little progress will be made on any of these fronts—especially with Trump looking backward to blame Democrats for the wreckage he’s meted out. But November’s elections loom—and as TNR contributor Dylan Gyauch-Lewis reported, poll after poll reveals a public hungry for lawmakers to confront corporate power directly, and that “large majorities of Americans blame corporations for their affordability issues.” There’s never been a better time to make some corporate enemies. These 20 will do for a start.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

This time last week, I had accountability on my mind, and the need for liberal leaders in a post-Trump future to transform frustration into lustration by bringing the agents and enablers of Trumpism to heel and forcing them to pay a price for their misdeeds. One thing I could have been more forthright about is what put me in the mood: It’s the old and ongoing story of the abuse being meted out by Trump’s brownshirts. Whatever you’ve been told about these goons standing down or lowering the temperature isn’t the straight story. Every day there are fresh tales of their villainy.

It may seem overwrought or cartoonish to call these people evil. But the story that recently cemented it for me took place last year at a deportation detention center in Dilley, Texas—which you may be familiar with because among the allegedly dangerous “worst of the worst” people they have in custody is a 2-month-old infant. As NBC News reported, last November the child detainees were sent to the gymnasium under the pretense that after months of eating contaminated food, they would be treated to a Thanksgiving dinner. But after being made to stare at tables stacked for a holiday feast, they were told that the food was for their jailers, not them.

So, yes, this is evil—despicable and Dickensian. But what’s particularly hair-raising is that we’ve only learned a fraction of what’s going on behind the closed doors of what are essentially concentration camps; what we don’t know is much more vast. And with the Trump administration splashing billions of taxpayer dollars to develop a network of these warehouse prisons, this evil may metastasize—and get better at keeping us in the dark.

It can already be said that 2026 is off to a grim start. As the American Immigration Council, or AIC, reported earlier this month, there were six deaths in ICE detention centers across the country in January. This includes the death of 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos, which was ruled a homicide after a medical examiner concluded he’d died of “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” The AIC noted that while ICE is “legally required to report deaths that occur in its custody, its public disclosures often come late and have little information. Independent investigations frequently contradict these findings later.”

Reporting on what’s going on inside these facilities is notoriously difficult, but sometimes we get a shocking glimpse behind the walls and razor wire. In late January, The New Yorker offered one such look at the kaleidoscopic horror taking place in a detention facility in the Mojave Desert. There, detainees with experience at other detention facilities told reporter Oren Peleg that the California detention center “was unique in its mistreatment of those held in its custody,” with abuses ranging from “extremely delayed appointments with health-care professionals, the denial of medications and treatment, experiences with unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, and a general antagonism by medical staff toward detainees.”

A class action lawsuit filed against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security echoes these accounts. Therein, detainees describe the remote facility as a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.” Tess Borden, an attorney at the legal nonprofit Prison Law Office, told The New Yorker that “the conditions at the facility are so terrible that detainees are resigning themselves to self-deportation, instead of pursuing asylum and other immigration cases,” and that others were “also trying to take their own lives.”

If stories of this kind disappear from the news, it won’t be because ICE has reformed itself. Rather, it will probably be the result of a clampdown on information. In mid-February, guards at the Dilley detention center raided the family dormitories to seize and destroy letters and drawings made by the children detained there, after their letters were included in a ProPublica report describing the conditions. And lawmakers seeking to do their own lawful oversight continue to find their access denied. As Senator Alex Padilla mused after recently being denied entry to a detention center in San Diego County, “The big question I come with is, what do they have to hide?”

The other big question is what can be done to thwart the Trump administration’s effort to complete its network of prison camps. While we shouldn’t expect Democrats in the federal government to make headway on this matter anytime soon, we’re seeing a mass movement against these detention centers emerging at the local level. Public protest in Ashburn, Virginia, convinced a Canadian billionaire to scuttle a deal to sell warehouse facilities to ICE. Lawmakers in South Fulton, Georgia, preemptively passed a law banning DHS from acquiring warehouse properties in their jurisdiction.

And ironically enough, local jurisdictions are wielding the tools of proceduralism—the endless array of hoops to jump through that The New Republic contributor J. Dylan Sandifer has indicted as the means by which progress too often gets blocked—to throw a wrench in ICE’s works. State officials in Maryland led by Governor Wes Moore—who, per Sandifer, is a notable skeptic of proceduralism—have filed a lawsuit against ICE and DHS in an attempt to block the agency from transforming warehouses in their state into detention facilities. As The Washington Post reported, the state’s complaint borders on the mundane, but it’s really pulling out all the tricks: “The Trump administration did not conduct an environmental review nor seek public input on the project or provide a reasoned explanation on their decision-making, as required by law.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently fielded a question from a self-described “ordinary citizen” on social media, who asked, “What can we do to get the concentration camps shut down and restore accountability for those imprisoned against the law?” Her answer: “Local zoning is the way! A lot of these are being stopped or stalled by neighborhood organizing. These warehouses often need to be purchased, permitted, approved for occupancy and specs. Each one of those steps can be interrupted.”

One of the people who heartily approved of AOC’s advice was M. Nolan Gray, the author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. “As the guy who wrote the book on zoning abolition,” he wrote, “I’d like to go on record as saying: If you can use zoning to stop the concentration camps, fucking go for it.” It’s great to see everyone on the same page.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

One of the weirder journalistic spectacles of the Trump era has been watching mainstream news organizations parachute into the hinterlands to try to understand the voters who ushered in, and continue to support, this age of cruelty in America. A recent classic was The New York Times’ herculean effort to find one Minnesota diner whose patrons were willing to talk shit about the ICE resistance in Minneapolis. There has not, however, been an equivalent effort to reveal the everyday people who saw the dangers of Trumpism coming. But this week, TNR contributor Toby Buckle returned to these pages to do just that.

I’m petty enough to enjoy a good round of “I told you so.” One of the better value propositions of your TNR subscription is that you’ll more frequently find yourself in the company of writers who recognized the dangers of Trumpism from several miles off and unflinchingly told the truth about it. That’s why Buckle’s warning that a mere election victory won’t be sufficient to right this ship has stuck in my mind: “We must undertake an ambitious program of accountability and reform in order to create liberal democracy in America again.” So here’s something else I’m going to be right about in advance: The failure to hold the malefactors of Trumpist fascism to account will only ensure its return.

This isn’t some loose theory. Perhaps the best proof of this fundamental fact can be found in recent history, as both Trump’s rise and his return were preceded by Democratic administrations that showed little regard for civic accountability. The Obama administration made the conscious decision to make “looking forward, not backward” the order of the day, to the great relief of Wall Street crooks and war-on-terror torturers. Obama extended grace to those who capsized the economy, and kept showing extreme deference to them throughout his administration.

As The American Prospect’s David Dayen reported this week, an email from recently disgraced Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler to pedo-oligarch Jeffrey Epstein—in which she seeks advice on how to defend Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’d been stoking outrage about White’s constant granting of deferred prosecution agreements to corporate criminals—is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the Obama administration’s laxity. This vacuum of accountability was filled by Trump’s right-wing faux-populism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Much of this could have been headed off.

And while there were some significant areas in which Joe Biden seemed to learn from his former boss’s mistakes, the need for a more robust campaign of accountability was not one of them. Despite the ample reasons to launch investigations and obtain redress for past corruption, Attorney General Merrick Garland did little more than attempt to radiate an ambient virtue, perpetually endeavoring to shield his agency and the Biden administration from the perception that they were seeking purely political prosecutions. Not that this ever stopped Trump from crying foul about witch hunts! Garland’s first major investigation into Trump’s misconduct wasn’t launched until three days after Trump announced his reelection campaign—the very thing that the Biden administration should have been trying in earnest to prevent after the Senate failed in its duty to impeach him. Once Trump entered the safe harbor of a presidential candidacy, efforts to hold him responsible fizzled—and the Supreme Court all but crowned him king.

As I’ve argued before, these “look the other way and cross your fingers” ways of the past aren’t going to cut it anymore. There shouldn’t be Democrats running for election anywhere who aren’t fully committed to using their regained power to take Trumpism down. That means large-scale investigations and hearings. That means pursuing criminal charges and jail sentences. Yes, that means everyone currently employed by ICE gets a pink slip. And that means doling out punishments to the corporate scofflaws and institutional enablers that allowed Trumpian misrule to flourish.

Axios reported this week that corporate America is being warned that the “subpoenas are coming.” I want that to be true; if we end up with political leaders on the left who are too timid to do what needs to be done, we will fall short. The Beltway-brained are perennially concerned with “political capital,” the allegedly short supply of which creates the perpetual demand for scaling back Democratic ambitions. Future party leaders need to shed these phantasmal fears. And they need to be ready for the political press to lobby hard against these efforts. After all, the sight of so many people being held accountable will raise serious questions of how much went wrong on their watch.

All that said, I continue to be buoyed by the sense that Democratic voters are bent on elevating real fighters—and cheered by the sight of those whom they’ve been elevating repaying that faith. There is already ample material to fuel the ambitions of would-be warriors. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that massive swaths of Americans are using brutal terminology to describe the Trump administration: 47 percent of respondents say they would describe Trump as “racist,” 49 percent would characterize him as “corrupt,” and 46 percent would describe him as “cruel.”

These numbers indicate a very favorable environment for Democrats to attack Trump on these fronts—to explicitly say that Trump is a cruel and corrupt racist who’s enriched himself in office at the expense of the American people while egging on a secret police force that is increasingly evil in the purest sense of the word. It will take effort and commitment to provide real accountability, but the prize at the end of the quest is a democracy with restored resilience and a repellent right-wing movement beaten back into irrelevance. If it’s done correctly, the next time anyone goes looking for the point of view of Trump voters, they won’t be able to find anyone willing to admit they ever supported him.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Sunday’s Super Bowl was mostly an exercise in foregone conclusions: Bad Bunny’s halftime show would show off his talent and creativity, the Seahawks would grimly dominate the pitiable Patriots, and I would shout “Get fucked!” at the television when the inevitable commercial for ICE aired. But there was one surprise discussion that sprang to life the morning after the big game—involving lost dogs, the all-encompassing surveillance state into which we’ve gotten locked, and what it means to be a neighbor.

The proximate cause of all this agita was the commercial for Ring, whose doorbell cameras are among the most popular in the country. In their Super Bowl spot, Ring touted a feature called Search Party, a new(ish) AI-enabled “familiar faces” tool that the Amazon-owned company has billed as a way for lost pets to be easily recovered: Just upload a picture of the missing pet into Ring’s database, and it will deploy all the Ring cameras in the area as a dragnet to search for the wayward animal. As Mashable’s Chance Townsend reported in July 2025, these AI tools were the brainchild of recently returned founder Jamie Siminoff—who, perhaps not coincidentally, reversed the company’s previous decision to back away from working hand in glove with law enforcement.

Against that backdrop, it was perhaps inevitable that Ring’s commercial went over so badly with viewers. In fact, one of the few nice things I can say about the ad was that it was the first thing in a long while to invite unified criticism from voices all across the political spectrum. That included Matt Nelson, of WeRateDogs fame, who published a blistering video critique of the ad: “Neither Ring’s products nor its business model are built around finding lost pets,” and even if they were, it’s a job that Ring does very badly: “Ring claims that the ‘Search Party’ feature finds one dog a day,” Nelson said. “This would equate to roughly .03 percent of the over one million lost or found pet reports posted to the Ring app annually.” If this is something Ring is touting as a core competency, it could be that they’re pulling the wool over your eyes.

What Ring is, Nelson observed, is “a lucrative mass surveillance network” that turns “private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants.” Jason Koebler of 404 Media concurs:

With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool. After years of saying it wasn’t doing facial recognition and that it was focused more on “object recognition,” it has now explicitly launched “friendly” versions of facial recognition and facial recognition-adjacent technologies.

CNBC reported on Thursday that Ring canceled its partnership with Flock because of the public backlash over this Super Bowl advertisement. The report noted further friction building at other tech companies, with Salesforce employees pressuring company CEO Marc Benioff to “cancel ICE opportunities,” and employees at Google making similar demands that the firm “divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

The transformation of “friendly” tech into tools for the police state has been something of a trend lately. Flock security cameras deployed at schools across the country, ostensibly for the purpose of keeping kids safe, have been used to “assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign,” according to a recent report from The Guardian. And while firms like Ring and TikTok go to extravagant lengths to say that they do not directly feed your data to law enforcement agencies, the fact is that data originating from these firms can frequently find its way into the hands of partners, data brokers, and other third parties who’ve made no such commitment. From there, as TNR contributor Logan McMillen pointed out this week, the government can simply purchase that data, circumventing your constitutional rights. It’s always best to assume that any technology firm not explicitly against the surveillance state will eventually become a tool of it.

With more and more of us reading stories about ICE’s predations—or experiencing them firsthand—it’s not a surprise that Ring’s happy puppy commercial landed the way it did. As I’ve said before, ICE and Customs and Border Protection aren’t actually doing immigration enforcement. They are a tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people, armed with cutting-edge technology. People are slowly waking up to the dystopian nature of these arrangements.

But there’s another awakening happening in the cities and towns currently facing down the threat of state violence and terror. People are rediscovering what it means to be a neighbor and to live in a community. In places like Springfield, Ohio, faith communities are banding together to protect those targeted by Trump’s mass deportation machine. In Minneapolis, neighbors are assisting one another in keeping their kids safe, bringing food to those who fear venturing out, and raising rent money for people who can’t go to work with federal agents lurking around. Here’s a fun fact: This sort of neighborliness is how we used to find lost dogs.

We talk all the time about how Trump and his minions are shredding the fabric of democracy and tearing apart the civic institutions that have served us in good stead. But wherever Trump’s hammer has fallen the hardest, good people have responded by working together as neighbors, to reknit what has been torn asunder and reinforce their bonds to one another and their commitment to our patriotic values. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observed: “Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about ‘Western civilization,’ while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.”

It’s an auspicious coincidence that Sunday’s Super Bowl offered a counterargument to Ring’s dystopian vision in the form of Bad Bunny’s halftime spectacle, which featured the “La Casita” concept that made his recent San Juan residency so critically acclaimed. In his vision, the front porch isn’t some fortress ringed by fear and suspicion; it’s a window to a wider world of neighbors, community, and joy, all washing up on one’s doorstep, inviting us out.* I know which neighborhood I’d rather live in—and I know which one I’d trust to find my dog, as well.

* This article previously misstated the location of Bad Bunny’s residency.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.