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 just wanted to get your general thoughts on that first.

Jones: Well, I guess I’ll start with the last one. “I was doing what I was elected for”—I mean, Trump, of course, thinks that now that he’s been elected, he can be constrained by nothing but his own whim. And so I think 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. So Leo is not firing from the hip here. He really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism, again, is not just about the war. It really is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching. Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever. I mean, this is the authoritarian playbook, right? 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. So, in the image he’s got on a white robe with a kind of red robe over it. And you could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus, dressed this way—this white robe, this red sash over the top. And he’s got this glowing hand, right, as he’s kind of 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 I would say is that this is not the first time Trump has done this. You know, it was actually just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the Pope, dressed up in papal vestments. So, you know, 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 picture. 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: Well, he’s reaching deep for this one, I’ve got to say. I mean, the problem is that the image really didn’t allow much wiggle room. So the best he could say is, yeah, OK, I’m a doctor, I’m at a bedside.

But there’s angels in the air behind him. And as we said, these kind of glowing palms. So it’s very clearly—he’s just trying to clearly just obfuscate and kind of trying to 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 he really believed in it.

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. And I think 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: I think that’s a really good insight. I mean things that are sacred, things that are holy, things that deserve kind of awe and respect and deference, right? These are all religious emotions that actual people who have some sense of piety take very seriously. And so I think 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.

And I think that’s the thing that makes so much of what—whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off very tin ear, because he just has no sense of piety, I think. It becomes very clear, whether it’s his misnaming a book of the Bible, walking across the street, clearing it with kind of 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 I think 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? And 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. And Catholics are a much more complex story. His support among Catholics has actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines.

So he’s always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six in 10 for him, not 85 percent for him. And the real difference though is that inside the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democratic, typically. So in the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics that supported him, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. So there’s this kind of 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: Yeah, 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 kind of a flawed vessel sent to them by God to carry out his and their plans in the world. Whereas Catholics, I think, aren’t really at that place. Is that distinction correct?

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

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

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

Jones: Yeah, 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, right? 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 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, Luis. And I said, I like Luis better than I like the Pope.

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

Jones: Well, look, I mean, the never-apologize mantra, right? Straight from Roger Stone all the way through. I mean, this is his M.O. It’s also—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. Like he outright said that, I’ve never asked forgiveness for my sins, which for most Christians is a pretty threshold moment, right, to kind of joining the religion or becoming part of the religion.

So I think this is really part of his MO. Don’t ask forgiveness even of God. Certainly don’t apologize to any human being. It is just kind of stand by it. But I think you’re right that in this case, it again is so far over the line. I think he’s going to—it may actually do some damage.

Sargent: Well, I think 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. And I really 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. I think 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 St. Augustine, right? It is more than 1,500 years old of serious Catholic theology. And so 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 even on a state—or even on a king, in its original formulations? And it turns out there are moral constraints according to Catholic moral tradition.

And 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—and none of those things has—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 just hasn’t even attempted to do this. I think 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 in a sense nourished by Catholic theology going back to St. Augustine.

Jones: I think it’s really telling in that clip you’ve played about Trump that he’s simply appealing to ends. So if you kind of think about ends and means in your kind of philosophy classes. he’s just appealing to an end and saying, well, we should want this kind of end with Iran. And if we want that kind of end, then we could just go to war. But that’s not the way moral philosophy works, right?

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 entirely the whole point of moral theology—to limit what can be done. Particularly when we’re talking about wielding violence. And I think the thing that is so revealing here 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: Right. And I think 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. And Pete Hegseth has also, not coincidentally, been essentially saying that maximal force and violence and brutality is a good thing. He’s been kind of saturated with bloodlust and sadism as he’s talked about how our precision weaponry will kill people on a mass scale. And he even recited one prayer which essentially said, in some form or other, that 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 back to Pete Hegseth, but not to the enemy. And it seems like that itself is something that, if I understand this correctly, Pope Leo is rebutting. Is he not? Can you explain that?

Jones: Well, 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. And so I think 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.

And what Pope Leo is saying is actually something quite different. He’s saying that, no, 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: So do you think that a lot of religious Catholics out there will understand this kind of dimension of the debate, and will they see Trump essentially—not just blaspheming himself, but also being so diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine on principle—will that trouble them?

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

Because the most powerful thing is what happens at the local community level, right? Not what happens on high. But I think Pope Leo’s leadership here is creating more space for bishops and parish priests to have a different kind of conversation—one where maybe they just have a whole Bible study or a whole kind of theology study on the Catholic just war tradition. And if you do that, I mean, 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: Can I ask, 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: Well, I think so. I mean, I think that that’s the church’s job, right, is to kind of 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. I think by spotlighting this as something very important, addressing it on Easter—these are very strong signals, I think, to local parishes that this is actually something important to talk about.

Sargent: And I guess 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: Yeah, I don’t think Pope Leo would think about it directly like that, but I think 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, right? So even if he dropped 10 points among evangelicals, he’d probably still be okay.

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. And so, if you’re thinking about very close elections in those states, if he loses—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, after all, someone who converted to Catholicism and he’s making that a major part of his political identity.

Jones: He did, and very early on. And he’s also earned his own direct rebuke from the Vatican when he tried to kind of really bastardize a Catholic teaching about immigrants—he was trying to invoke the Ordo Amoris, right, 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. And 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 kind of 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: Why? Because he’ll have to explain himself in more detail.

Jones: I think so. And you have to explain—like, 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.

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.

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 earlier this 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.

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.

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; United States 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 calculations 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 their 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 longstanding Republican policy to deprive the Internal Revenue Service 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 Rep. Michael Gerard Grimm (“preparation of false and fraudulent tax returns”); Former Republican Arkansas state senator—also son to former Republican Sen. Tim Hutchinson and nephew to former Republican Arkansas Gov. 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 this 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.  

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. Yeah, I think you’re going to hear next year—you’re already hearing—a lot [about this]. The governor of California—he happens to not—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. I think we’re going to have a lot of versions of that next year.

And so how is it—I’m just curious, from you—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.

Hey, I know. How about breaking up NATO and trying for regime change in Cuba?

He may, he may not. Who ever knows with this guy? But both are live possibilities. Trump threw a tantrum about NATO this week, issuing an “ultimatum” to European countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bellyaching about their general lack of support for his war. Cuba is largely under a U.S. blockade that has resulted in massive energy shortages. A month ago, before the reality of Iran had quite set in, Trump bragged that Cuba was next, saying, “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon, by the way.” Just yesterday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said he wasn’t going anywhere.

Here’s the important thing to understand about Trump at this particular point in time. He does not think like a democrat (small d). He thinks like a dictator. A democrat who understood his obligations in a democratic system to the voters who put him in office would stop and think: Gee, the people don’t approve of what I’m doing. Maybe I should pull back a little. And who knows—maybe he will. There are peace talks with Iran this weekend in Pakistan, even though Iran is walking into them with a 10-point plan that Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu) want no part of. But there actually is precedent for Trump seeing that what he was doing was unpopular—the ICE disaster in Minneapolis, most notably—and making a course correction.

Granted, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of other situations in which he’s responded to public opinion. America doesn’t like anything he’s doing, except on sealing the border. Otherwise, he’s in the tank. And by the way, I alluded above to his weak numbers among Republicans: In one recent poll, he’s down to 81 percent among Republicans. That may sound high, but in fact, for that particular category, it’s low. A president’s support within his own party ought to be close to or above 90. Here’s a little context. The 1988 presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was a blowout, right? Right. Dukakis got 83 percent of Democrats’ votes. And he got shellacked. That’s what 80-ish percent among your party leads to.

But even as the walls close in on him, Trump is no more likely to think like a democrat. He will think like the dictator he imagines himself to be. He will think, as dictators do, about three things: To the extent that he cares what the public thinks, he will focus his thoughts on how best to distract their attention and get them thinking about something else; he will think about ways to clamp down on dissent (and more specifically in this case, leakers); and finally, and never to be forgotten with this grubby mountebank, how to make a buck off the current mess.

Let’s break these down. The first thought is the one that will carry Trump to try something with Cuba, or to try to bust out of NATO. He needs headlines that aren’t about Iran. But he also needs headlines that start “Trump moves to” and “Trump declares.”

That’s what matters. It scarcely makes any difference whether these moves are popular. Busting up NATO would of course be monstrously unpopular (and the president cannot simply leave NATO, though laws haven’t stopped him before). Toppling the Cuban regime might in fact be somewhat popular, depending on how it goes. But again, we’ll need to see what China and Russia have to say about that before the final verdict is in. It is liable to be more complicated than Trump imagines, simply because these things usually are.

The second thought is one to take very seriously right now. Zeteo’s Asawin Subsaeng reported this week that Trump is directing a furious hunt for people who leaked info to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for that huge piece about how Trump decided to start this war. The piece is actually an excerpt from their upcoming book, which is expected to contain still more embarrassing details about the Trump regime. “In conversations with close aides and advisers, President Trump has loudly demanded to know who in his Cabinet or his team blabbed” to the reporters, Swin wrote. This is the sort of thing that obsesses dictators.

And finally, never forget that Trump is always on the lookout for his next swindle. Coming up on April 25 is a luncheon at Mar-a-Lago billed as “the most exclusive crypto & business conference in the world.” The announcement of the luncheon jacked up the price of the $Trump meme coin for a minute. It’s not 100 percent certain Trump will be there. But where else would he be? Maybe the golf course.

Consider this week in full. The abominable Easter Sunday social media post that dropped the f-bomb and mocked Islam. The far more abominable post two days later about destroying one of history’s most accomplished civilizations. The complete and utter backing down from it hours later. The phantom ceasefire, which Netanyahu obviously intentionally wrecked. The phony peace plan, on which the belligerent nations are miles apart. Anemic economic growth (0.5 percent, and yes, that’s point-five). Inflation above 3 percent.

And perhaps most of all, Trump’s wife appearing to throw him under the bus. Not that she’s any hero. But she’s pretty clearly preparing for the day when the Epstein files are made public and she may have to cut bait, depending on what’s in them.

To any other president, this would be the time to straighten up and fly right. To this one, it’s the perfect time to blow up the most important and durable military alliance in the history of the human race.

The president reamed out several of his longtime acolytes Thursday, smearing ex-Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as far-right influencers Candace Owens and Alex Jones. The quartet had each issued their own condemnation of Trump’s warmongering rhetoric, slamming the president’s various promises to completely annihilate Iran as vile and unpresidential.

And for once, Trump’s base was not willing to back him up in this fight. Instead, droves of MAGA supporters seemed shocked by the president’s sudden turn on his own political disciples, writing their own critiques of the president’s behavior under one of his Truth Social rants.

“Trump just going against everyone that fought for him to win, just because of the Epstein files and being at war with Iran for Israel,” wrote a Truth Social user called Deportation News. “You had so much potential, Trump. Voted for you all three times, and I feel so betrayed.”

“LOST MY SUPPORT,” responded user Mark Winslow.

“As of last week, they’ve done nothing but make excuses for your behavior and you think they’re the enemy??? They are why I am a triple Trumper!” posted Misty. “Whoever is telling you this is very wrong!!!! They have been trying to tell you how a large percentage of Americans see things... I was confident that you knew what you were doing but this is truly SCARY.”

The president posted 482 words to his Truth Social account Thursday afternoon, complaining that the four conservative commentators had been “fighting” him “for years” because of their “low IQs.” Trump further claimed that the MAGA-aligned media personalities were “stupid people” and that they “don’t have what it takes.” He also mentioned that he believed Owens was less attractive than the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, who has sued the far-right podcaster over her repeated claims that Macron is transgender.

But the mouthy tirade only seemed to inspire Trump’s voters to lose respect for him. In his Truth Social replies, supporters referred to Trump’s missive as “childish,” “rambling,” and “pathetic.”

“What am I am hearing is your ego is so fragile you think anyone who questions any of your decisions is a low IQ person,” wrote Truth Social user shannstine. “Sir, statements like this say far more about you than them.”

“You’re the terrorist that kills people for politics,” wrote user RealTedFrancis.

“They’re fighting you because you sold us out,” posted another user on the platform, PapaSteve72. “We aren’t getting anything we voted for. No DOGE cuts, no mass deportations, no fraud and abuse getting cut, no arrests of pedofiles and traitors, and a brand new war nobody wanted and in fact voted explicitly against. You are an absolute failure and pathetic loser and I am so sorry I voted for you 3 times. I will never be tricked like this again. I’ve learned my lesson. Fuck you asshole!”

Trump was initially told that the ceasefire would apply to the entire Middle East region, including Lebanon, multiple diplomatic sources told CBS News Thursday.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, who helped mediate the plan, announced on X Tuesday that the U.S. and Iran had “agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere.” Lebanon was even included in the version of the deal originally circulated by the Trump administration.

Trump then abruptly changed his position on Lebanon following a phone call with Netanyahu, CBS News reported. Israel has waged an escalating military campaign in Lebanon using heavy munitions on densely populated areas, killing hundreds of civilians in its pursuit of Hezbollah. On Thursday, Netanyahu insisted that there was no ceasefire in Lebanon, as Israel launched a fresh round of strikes.

The Trump administration has resorted to a sort of collective amnesia about the whole thing. Vice President JD Vance told reporters Wednesday that he believed there’d been a “legitimate misunderstanding” about the terms of the ceasefire. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted earlier that day that all parties were aware that a ceasefire in Lebanon was not included in the deal.

A State Department official told CBS News that the U.S. will lead diplomatic talks between Israel and Lebanon. It’s not hard to guess how that could go. 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 letting Israel continue its deadly strikes, oppression, and violent land grabs in the West Bank.

Trump caving to Netanyahu threatens to upend the fragile ceasefire deal that Iran now claims the U.S. is violating by allowing Israel to continue strikes in Lebanon. Iranian media said that Tehran would continue to suspend traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and was considering pulling out of the deal with Washington altogether.

The most recent consumer price index report reveals inflation rose by 3.3 percent in March from one year ago, with energy prices being hit particularly hard. Gas prices went up a record 21.2 percent in just one month, and energy prices rose 10.9 percent. 

Prices overall are up 0.9 percent through March, the biggest monthly spike since 2022. 

Meanwhile, the American Automobile Association reports that gas costs nearly 40 percent more than it did since the war began in February, and Americans are paying an average of $4.15 per gallon. All because Trump listened to war hawks telling him to bomb Iran, leading Iran to close one of the most vital trading routes in the world, and causing you personally to spend more of your income to fill up your tank.  

Several of his victims released a statement blasting the first lady after her remarks in the White House Thursday attempting to distance herself from Epstein and calling for survivors to publicly testify before Congress.

“Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony,” 15 of Epstein’s victims said in a statement in response. “Asking more of them is a deflection of responsibility, not justice.”

The statement called out Trump for “shifting the burden onto survivors under politicized conditions that protect those with power: the Department of Justice, law enforcement, prosecutors, and the Trump administration, which has still not fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”

“It also diverts attention from Pam Bondi, who must answer for withheld files and the exposure of survivors’ identities. Those failures continue to put lives at risk while shielding enablers,” the statement added. “Survivors have done their part. Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.”

The first lady’s statement Thursday raised a number of questions, chief among them why she chose this moment to address her proximity to Epstein. Several of the files released from the government’s Epstein archive show her corresponding frequently with Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Her speech is only drawing more attention to an issue her husband, President Trump, has desperately tried to sweep under the rug. Survivors of Epstein’s crimes are correctly pointing out that the first lady’s goal in speaking out now is clearly self-serving.

Trump specifically called out Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, despite praising all of those people in the past.

“Well, President Trump came out on Truth Social and attacked myself and all the original MAGA supporters today. And I’m just so sad that whatever’s happened to him has just changed the man he once was,” Jones said. “At the end of the day I just feel sorry for [Trump] and pray that God touched his heart and soul, and free him from the demonic influences that he’s under.... When Trump’s calling for wiping out whole civilizations and acting like a supervillain, I have to come out and say I don’t support it, it’s that simple.” 

Owens put it more succinctly. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” she wrote.

“Go back to 2016, 2020, or even 2024.  You’re a die-hard Trump supporter. You have to join one of two groups. Group A is Candace, Tucker, Alex, and Megyn. Group B is Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham, and Ted Cruz,” Owens collaborator Baron Coleman wrote. “Who changed?”

“THAT DOES IT. I AM DONE. THIS WAS THE LAST STRAW,” MAGA podcaster Tim Pool seethed. “I’M SO ANGRY.”

Carlson responded in his newsletter later Friday morning, suggesting that Israel could even be blackmailing Trump, as they were accused of doing to President Clinton in the 1990s.

“We do not know for sure whether that is happening, but the mere possibility is haunting enough to keep the president up at night. He is under a level of pressure that most people cannot fathom, with rabid Israel Firsters viciously harassing him any time he dares to stray even slightly from their favorite country’s agenda. Their shameless pursuit is steadfast enough to make even a man like Donald Trump go mad,” Carlson wrote.

“We decided to write about this after Trump published a Truth Social post attacking our company, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, each of whom supported him for years. Rather than engaging in petty name-calling, we want to give the president some grace. He is facing a level of pressure that is dark enough to make him abandon his campaign promises and morph into the precise kind of politician he once vowed to destroy. He would not have let that happen unless his personal stakes were really high. We hope he overcomes,” Carlson continued.

While Trump made some points in his rant—Owens and Jones are raging conspiracy theorists with despicable track records—they aren’t jumping ship because they suddenly don’t like him. Carlson, Jones, and many of their ilk are leaving Trump because he broke the promises he made to MAGA.

This story has been updated.

After we recorded this episode, Trump erupted in a long, angry tirade yet again at Greene and many other critics.

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 really angry at Marjorie Taylor Greene right now, and it’s because of this. In an improbable turn of events, Greene has emerged as a very effective critic of the president. A remarkable new CNN interview demonstrates why. In it, Greene said that Trump is mentally unfit for the presidency, that the people around Trump really need to rein him in, and that Trump is catastrophically failing. This is the watershed moment. Trump’s disastrous Iran war and his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization are clearly pushing Republicans to look past him. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte had a good piece arguing that in some basic sense, Iran is breaking Trump. So we’re talking to her about this obvious sunsetting that we’re seeing in the president. Amanda, always nice to have you on.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So Trump had this really stupid and juvenile tweet about Greene. He called her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown”—because green turns to brown under stress, he said. Trump claimed she’s deranged and even suggested that she smells. On CNN, Greene was asked to respond to this. Listen.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): You don’t respond to bullies and you don’t pay attention to people when they’re failing. And President Trump is failing right now. And so he’s the man that’s lashing out. I mean, after all, this is the man that threatened to wipe out an entire civilization of people. You can’t respond to someone like that. They’re mentally unstable.

Sargent: Amanda, I think the kill shot there is that Trump is failing. Everybody knows this is the case. At this point, Trump is making Marjorie Taylor Greene look like a stateswoman, which I didn’t see coming. What did you think of all that?

Marcotte: Yeah, what’s funny is the very thing that made her such a thorn in people’s side before is what’s her superpower right now, which is she is in a lot of ways a normal person. Like when she was a conspiracy theorist whose mind got a little deranged by the pandemic—when she was in Congress—she was channeling a lot of low-information, normal people’s reactions—on the right, but nonetheless, normal people’s unhinged reactions—to those set of events. Now that things have normalized a little and she’s gotten a little better educated about politics, she is channeling a very different kind of normal-person reaction. But at the end of the day, she is not coming from an elite point of view.

Sargent: And she’s a businessperson herself. She probably speaks to these certain elements in the Trump coalition that aren’t MAGA, that are business owners, the reactionary car dealer owner, for instance, small-business people—they clearly got the brunt of the tariffs and are really getting clobbered by inflation under Trump. She crystallizes a sense among those demographics that this guy is just fundamentally unfit, that this is just a failure. The whole enterprise is a failure. Does that seem right to you?

Marcotte: That’s really insightful. He always connected with what Marxists would call the petit bourgeoisie—the small business owner types, because they actually mistakenly saw themselves in him. He presented himself as an entrepreneur. That was always untrue. He was actually just a nepo baby living off of his dad’s money. But they therefore thought that he would at least have their best interests in mind. And now it’s very clear that he has nothing but contempt for the actual entrepreneur because he does not do anything to support them.

Sargent: Absolutely. Well, let’s check out a little bit more of Greene. After Trump tweeted his threat to obliterate a nation of 93 million people, Greene called for his removal via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. She was asked on CNN why that was the final straw. Listen to this.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): This should never be tolerated. I know that it’s a very difficult, hard stretch to see it actually coming through. But the conversation needs to be had. And he’s out of control, and people within the administration need to step up, take responsibility, and rein this in.

Sargent: Amanda, we’ve been talking about how unfit Trump is for years, but there’s something in both the Iran war and in his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization that I really think caused something to snap in a lot of his allies. It’s that they finally realized that this man is unfit to have the American military at his fingertips. And here’s the critical part—that there’s really no barrier of any kind to the unthinkable. He’s got to be reined in. Your thoughts on all that?

Marcotte: One of the things that really held the MAGA coalition together under Trump was the conspiracy theory mentality. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a classic example of this. A lot of people are conspiracy theorists. It’s kind of fun to be a conspiracy theorist. It gives some shape and meaning to things in the world that you don’t like. The pandemic caused a lot of people to really dig into conspiracy theories.

I’ve been fascinated by conspiracy theories for my whole career. And I can say what’s interesting about them is the people that engage in them nonetheless still often have limits and they will shun somebody who has crossed the line. For instance, when Alex Jones went full Sandy Hook truther, there were a lot of other conspiracy theorists who were here for his 9/11 conspiracy theories and moon landing or whatever—they were like, These are little kids that were shot to death, do we really have to go there?... It’s a moral limit. You could probably dig deep into the psychology of conspiracy theorists—why it is that it’s about morality and not factuality that they set their limits.

But it is what it is and I’m glad for it in this case. It’s just very difficult for people to say, I still want to live in the space of unreality when they’re being faced with the reality that a lot of us are really struggling with psychologically right now, which is the complicity as Americans in what is happening to Iran. I didn’t vote for Trump and I still feel terrible about it. So I can only imagine what it must be like to feel that moral weight if you’re actually allowing yourself to, and you did vote for him.

Sargent: Well, I have a piece up at TNR.com—I’m just going to take this occasion to plug it—which gets into some of what you’re talking about there, that there’s actually a major psychic cost to the American people in seeing Donald Trump threaten genocide like this. And critically, there’s an even deeper psychic cost to suddenly realizing that we don’t have any mechanism to stop this guy if he decides to do that stuff. Is that right to you?

That’s what is really precipitating a new level of alarm about Donald Trump—this realization that the Republican Party has been faced with a madman who was willing to commit genocide, potentially with nuclear weapons, although they denied that. Even that wouldn’t get the Republican Party to step up and stop him. So there’s no barrier. There’s nothing between us and the unthinkable and between us and this madman. That’s a breaking point for a lot of people. What do you think?

Marcotte: I think so. Certainly the people in my life, my coworkers, my friends, have been struggling mentally and psychologically with the situation in a way that’s very hard to wrap your mind around—lost sleep, lots of stress, lost appetite. It’s actually affecting people on a really profound level.

Sargent: More broadly, it seems like the Iran catastrophe is precipitating a new urgency in MAGA world to start thinking past Trump. Another critical tell here is all these leaks that are positioning JD Vance as this sage-like figure who privately warned against the invasion. But of course he said, Mr. President, if you really want to do this, I will support you. Because he’s not just filled with wise foresight, he’s also very loyal.

But it’s clear that some of the key MAGA people don’t want the movement to be tainted by this catastrophe and recognize extreme peril for its longer-term prospects and the GOP’s longer-term prospects and being associated with this war. What’s your reading of the MAGA landscape, and do you think they can get out from under that problem or not?

Marcotte: That’s a good question. That article in The New York Times that was obviously sourced by JD Vance and Marco Rubio and Susie Wiles, all basically throwing Pete Hegseth under the bus, being like, It was his idea, we said no—does tell you that there are a lot of people who are hoping they can sort of escape with their reputations intact at the end of this. But I wish it was a moral thing.

I wish that they were doing this for moral reasons, but I think it is mostly that most of them do remember the Iraq War and the very long-term damage to the Republican brand that it had. And I would say Donald Trump won because of that damage, because so many Republicans—it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around, but even in 2016, so many Republicans were still feeling shame and failure from Iraq. And Donald Trump seemed to be a different Republican, a way to get away from that history. And now he’s just doing it again. So they’re just like, What are our options here? It weighs them down. The American people hate it. That said, I don’t think they can escape it. Who out of the Bush administration was able to escape that vortex?

Sargent: It’s interesting you say that. It brought something to mind to me, which is that it’s probably not a coincidence that the two most charismatic—Trump in his own twisted way—and successful movement politicians of the last two decades both emerged from the post-Iraq malaise: Barack Obama and Donald Trump. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?

Marcotte: No, not at all. Everyone I knew who backed Obama—and I backed Obama in 2008—we all explicitly said it was because it was a rebuke to the Democrats who went along with the Iraq War. We could see that happen again. One of the reasons—if not the number one reason—that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 was she was so associated with Biden’s backing of Israel in the war against Gaza. These become hard red lines.

They may stand in for larger issues that people have with the parties, but I would warn both Republicans and Democrats that if you want to win, find somebody that’s plausibly anti-war and run them. That’s obviously what people want.

Sargent: Another key tell that Trump knows how lethal this whole thing is for him is that he erupted a few times on Truth Social over Iran. In one case, he raged that if Iran doesn’t comply with the “REAL AGREEMENT,” then “the shooting starts bigger and better and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.” He also tweeted that the U.S. military is “looking forward to its next conquest, America is back.” And in another tweet, he lashed out at the media for reporting on a “FAKE 10 POINT PLAN” as the basis for talks with Iran.

Everybody knows Trump failed miserably here, so now he’s saying it’s all fake news. But that’s really kind of a critical tell. Trump knows it’s absolutely deadly for him if this enterprise is seen as a failure, if America is seen as in some sense a paper tiger. So he’s saying we’re strong and mighty, we’re ready to pulverize the next enemy, so stop thinking about what just happened. What do you think?

Marcotte: It’s destined to fail. His ideology and Pete Hegseth’s ideology is very obvious and very straightforward, and it’s fascistic. It’s this notion that the only power that actually matters in the world is violence. And that everything else is some BS that stupid liberals—the idea of soft power, diplomatic power, the power of persuasion, the power of diplomacy, even to a certain extent economic power—are all illusions and that the only thing that matters is breaking kneecaps.

Sargent: Let’s listen to one more CNN segment from Marjorie Taylor Greene. She was asked about polling that shows that MAGA voters still support the war. Listen to what she said here.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): The polling that I have seen is it’s mainly the baby boomers, Republicans that watch Fox News all day, every day, are the ones that are primarily, mostly supporting this war in Iran. However, it’s the majority of Americans, especially 50 and under, that do not support this war in Iran. I would argue that the baby boomer generation—my parents’ generation, whom I love very much—needs to think clearly about how a war in Iran could have long-term implications for their children and their grandchildren.

Sargent: So, Amanda, I thought that was a really striking message to MAGA and the Republican Party. She’s basically saying that it’s time to focus on the younger elements of the Trump coalition and more or less forget about the deadweight boomers. Isn’t that what she’s saying?

Marcotte: I wouldn’t say she’s going so far as to say that, but she’s definitely saying that the boomers are not the future, for sure. I was struck by that comment too, because ... for a piece that’s going up at Salon tomorrow, I was rewatching Franklin Graham’s speech at CPAC a couple of weeks ago, and he was basically justifying the Iran war by citing the hostage crisis of 1979. To a large extent, that’s probably true for Donald Trump too, that he sees this as revenge for the hostage crisis, which was experienced by baby boomers who were in their twenties and thirties at that time as this great humiliation. But it doesn’t mean anything to everyone who was born after that or was a child at that time.

I was two when that happened and I’m not a spring chicken. It’s an interesting and profound insight of hers that the kind of people that are willing to go along with this idea that Iran is this huge threat—and not even necessarily a geopolitical threat, but a threat to the American sense of self—are only the people that remember the Iranian hostage crisis.

Sargent: Just to tie this all together, where does this leave us? Marjorie Taylor Greene—it turns out that her America First version of antiwar politics seems to have some actual substance to it, which is a real surprise to me. I didn’t expect that. Probably JD Vance is in that camp as well, but he’s under the thumb of Donald Trump. A lot of Republicans are still under the thumb of Donald Trump.

Is the Republican Party going to be able to move to a post-Trump place where they’re not overshadowed by this Iran catastrophe and this madness that we’re seeing right now?

Marcotte: I don’t think in the near term. I will say that historically, parties are pretty good at reinventing themselves—obviously the MAGA movement is a reinvention of the GOP after the debacle of the Iraq War, I think that’s how history will remember it. It’s not like Democrats are doing a much better job of redefining themselves right now.

So it’ll be interesting to see, but I honestly don’t know what that would look like because they’ve exhausted this option. The idea that another Donald Trump figure is going to emerge that’s going to convince everybody that there’s a new antiwar GOP seems unlikely to me, but people are weird and there’s a lot of hunger for novelty in our politics right now. So we’ll see.

Sargent: It occurs to me there’s a deep irony to this, which is that JD Vance wanted to be that person. He wanted to be the standard-bearer for a form of populist Republicanism that was in some sense genuinely opposed to foreign interventions and the toll that takes on Americans. And because he decided that Donald Trump was the hammer to smash the liberal establishment, prevent Western civilization from succumbing to the hordes and the demons and all that—he’s kind of screwed. He can’t be that person.

Marcotte: No, he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s a dead man walking, politically speaking. You love to see it. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Sargent: Well, I sure hope you’re right. Amanda Marcotte, pleasure to talk to you as always. Thanks so much for all those insights.

Marcotte: Thank you so much for having me. Always a fun time here.

In Greenville, South Carolina, photographer Celina Odeh, also 30, feels it too. As a digital tech on commercial shoots, her work has become a parlor game of elimination: Which skills will AI kill off next? She’s taken up knitting to stay sane.

As humans fade into background and AI enlists workers in their own demise, it feels like it’s Soylent Green meets The Hunger Games: Middle-class labor is forced to eat itself. For white-collar workers across the country, the upheaval is psychological and existential as much as technological. They are grappling with what we call apocalyptic insecurity: the realization that something massive is underway but there’s no clear timeline or playbook. Everything moves at incomprehensible speed.

It’s made work itself into an uncertainty, with dark impacts on our behavior, careers, and health of mind and body. A massive 71 percent of Americans are now scared that AI will steal livelihoods. Tech leaders issue Magic 8 Ball musings: white-collar jobs gone in months; half of entry-level jobs wiped out in five years; or, depending on who’s talking, jobs will simply “transform.” But how? When? What, if anything, is the plan?

Of course, the narrative that AI is destabilizing middle-class work is both very real and hype. But that’s exactly what makes it maddening—it’s close enough to be terrifying but too ill defined for people to act on. Knowledge workers drift in a twilight of not knowing.

That can hurt even more than jobs. One researcher in business psychology we spoke to framed job insecurity as a diffuse condition that makes us feel less in control, which is ultimately paralyzing. A growing body of research concurs, linking chronic workplace uncertainty to anxiety, depression, burnout, and even physical symptoms. A new report on AI-driven insecurity establishes a novel work hazard: “AI replacement dysfunction.”

Brooklyn-based brand copywriting expert Lexi, 56, is living that insecurity. After 30 years perfecting her craft, she now watches AI spit out this kind of work in minutes, albeit with near-zero personality. She’s burning through her savings, unsure what comes next. “I made my living for decades helping people figure out what to say and how to say it,” says Lexi. “But now it kind of doesn’t matter if things are well written. It’s just AI writing things for AI to read. It frees me up to do my own writing, although I’m not sure who’s reading that, either.”

Labor sociologist Victor Chen of Virginia Commonwealth University says that part of why the current automation wave is so unnerving is that there’s no clear answer for what workers should do. “There’s no obvious solution like ‘Get a college degree’ or ‘Get a STEM degree,’” Chen says. “That makes it difficult to plan your career, much less your life and your children’s futures.”

Every point in a career adds a new layer of AI-infused insecurity, a bot-ified version of the stages of man. The youngest should be better able to adapt but are struggling to land entry-level jobs and are often the first fired. Older employees worry it’s too late for a second act—a dubious concept to begin with. And for someone in midcareer, the pressure can be suffocating: kids to support, bills piling up, and a future that keeps erasing itself.

Ria Julien, a literary agent and lawyer representing everyone from blue-collar workers to tech employees, sees the same mood everywhere. “It’s an absolute climate of fear,” she says, one driven by a growing sense that the middle-class script is fraying. When some of her more well-off clients’ earnings drop to zero, and the idea that they’ll find new work is far from guaranteed, “it is absolutely devastating.”

Of course, in America’s brand of pitiless capitalism, job insecurity has long been a feature not a bug. Over the last decades, we have seen globalization ship work overseas, financialization siphon profits from those who do the work, and waves of technology set the labor market spinning again and again. AI is simply the latest vector. What’s different, though, is its speed and scale, and the epochal dread it provokes about human relevance.

Some economists are optimistic about automation, averring that AI could boost wages and job quality. (We find them cheery to the point of delusional.) But many others are profoundly skeptical. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz observes to us that “a lot depends on how we manage this technological transition,” and he worries that history offers us little reassurance. “Looking back, we didn’t manage industrialization well, and we don’t appear to be managing this well, either,” he warns.

The market can’t be relied on to retrain workers or prepare them for this shift. William Lazonick, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, calls out American corporations structured to extract value for shareholders, not invest in workers: “Companies want to use AI as a way to reduce costs, increase profits, pay massive dividends, and do stock buybacks,” he warns. “What does any of that do for human workers?”

Thomas Ferguson, research director at the Institute of New Economic Thinking, is blunt about the power imbalance: “The problem is that workers don’t run American companies: Business does. Conventional economic academic accounts don’t recognize this enough.”

In many ways, this is a story that has been on repeat for over a century. In the early twentieth century, Taylorism—Frederick Taylor’s so-called scientific management—recast skilled machinists as extensions of the assembly line. Thinking belonged to the boss; the worker was there to obey. Autonomy and morale withered. Today, this same logic is migrating to office towers. Shortsighted companies roll out AI to surveil and dictate and, at the same time, de-skill and diminish. Some white-collar workers tell us it’s an assault on their minds.

Take Claire, 34, a data scientist in New York City, watching her role at a security camera start-up blur as AI agents take over most of her coding work. “Even three months ago, I was doing a completely different job,” she says. “Now I’m not even sure what to call myself. AI engineer? Manager of AI agents? I don’t know.” Overseeing multiple agents has created what some are calling “AI brain fry”—a mental overload from multitasking and AI babysitting. In handing off the work, Claire senses some essential part of herself slipping away. “I miss the flow of coding, the creative problem-solving, the thrill of wrestling with abstract ideas,” she admits quietly. “I’m afraid of losing my dreams to AI.”

Work has started to feel oddly alien. Employees tell us about a tech-weirding of office jobs as emails, meetings, and even casual interactions are machine-filtered. Jade gets chirpy emails from management at her insurance tech firm insisting that AI is there to “help,” not replace. “Ironically, those emails are the most AI-sounding writing,” she says. “It’s creepy.”

What economists call information asymmetry only amplifies the unease. Ferguson says it’s one thing to know that what we call the “robot gaze” (which monitors worker data to maximize profits) exists. But it’s another to have no clue what’s being tracked and whether it might be used against you. “And you might want to learn AI on your own computer,” he advises. “Lest you teach your employer how to eliminate you.”

Invisible algorithmic eyes can watch every keystroke, spy emails patterns, and predict who might be “at risk” of underperforming. Executives say it’s for our own good; that’s what they always say.

People understand that their work—and their worth—is being dictated by AI, and they’re losing the parameters in which to succeed. Sociologist Janet Vertesi, who studies AI and robotics at Princeton, puts it like this: “We are effacing expertise instead of enabling expertise.” Giorgio Ascoli, a neuroscientist at George Mason University, says that in his field, the formative years of learning by doing are disappearing, and without that, “you’re cutting your own roots,” leaving a workforce that never gains the experience needed for the part of the scientific method that demands human capability.

Lazonick calls this both shortsighted and backward. By cutting loose the employees who carry institutional memory, judgment, and hard-won skills, companies are tossing out the very knowledge that makes innovation actually work. “For creativity and innovation to happen, you need a workforce that’s equipped, engaged, and actually has a stake in what comes next,” he says. Bots can’t provide that spark.

Diana Enriquez, a sociologist who studies large-scale automation, warns of companies following a “tech playbook” pressuring workers to trust technology, even when the algorithm is, well, wrong. Middle managers are forced to claim successes the system hasn’t actually delivered. Why? Because the C-suite mindset in tech companies, says Enriquez, holds that “workers are a problem that needs to be solved.”

In offices, the impact is obvious. An AI bot handles Jade’s meeting minutes—and half the time, they don’t even make sense. “You end up spending more time fixing them—a person could have done it better and faster.” In this example, AI becomes the problem to solve. Some, like Joanna Popper, CEO of the film and AI content company Laurel Beach, see a split screen for workers. On one side, she finds opportunities. On the other side, these opportunities aren’t evenly spread. “AI tools can act as a lever, letting creators move faster and cheaper, which could help those historically sidelined,” Popper says. “But it also shrinks how many workers are needed.”

Natasha Lennard, author of a forthcoming book on the philosophy of uncertainty, warns that we can’t let large language models put humans in a subordinate seat. “We’re told, ‘You don’t understand this; it’s beyond what you can imagine.’ Or, ‘AI will doom us all; AI will save us all,’” says Lennard. The real danger, she points out, is what she thinks of as “AI determinism”—unquestioned assumptions about how technology will develop.

The real story is about power. Darrick Hamilton, chief economist of the AFL-CIO, says that dealing with AI labor uncertainty starts with asking the right questions. Who does AI actually serve? What’s it for? Who benefits?

Collective action offers a way out of the fog. Hamilton points to a 2022 Gallup poll showing union approval at its highest level since 1965. It’s true that white-collar workers remain far less unionized in the United States than their blue-collar counterparts, but with apocalyptic uncertainty knocking on their doors, they might want to join the club.

Which brings us to a potential plot twist. For years, office workers were told they were safer from the turmoil that marked many blue-collar jobs. But with the “middle precariat” feeling the AI squeeze, there’s a chance for something truly powerful—a cross-class bloc, united in its need for stability and a say in the future.

It wouldn’t be the first time. In the New Deal era, shared economic shock pushed white- and blue-collar workers into a broader labor coalition. It was imperfect and incomplete, but it showed that collective angst can bloom into collective power.

Early signs of AI-driven organizing are already visible: U.S. entertainment striking over AI, Germany’s Verdi negotiations, and the Communications Workers of America, or CWA, setting up principles for AI. Across industries, workers have wrested victories from resistant bosses that limit AI’s impact on their jobs, including advance notice, human oversight, and safeguards against automatic replacement.

One thing we can be certain about: Human relatedness, expertise, insight, and imagination can’t be substituted. Protecting them will require smart policies, retraining programs, and worker participation.

The tech overlords may rattle on about AI and the billions they are investing and making. Few are talking about what’s actually required for human beings and for shoring up America’s middle class: education, dignified and well-paying jobs, and robust social safety nets.

If the middle class is going to thrive or even persist, our government has to step up to set rules, enforce protections, and put in place bottom-up AI policies that reflect human needs, making sure that the benefits of AI don’t just go to corporate boards. And if the federal government drags its feet, then states have to take action. Many are already doing just that, despite the murky political climate.

We don’t have to stand back and let AI write the script for the middle class. We still get to choose. For now.

As if the community college system wasn’t strained enough by these privatization efforts, the tech bros have recently swooped in and are striving to cause further disruption. Community colleges operate with a combination of taxpayer funding, donations, and tuition revenue. But Campus, a predominantly online school that markets itself as a community college, uses a different financial model. The school has been injected with venture capital funding from the likes of Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Joe Lonsdale.

Thiel, Altman, and Lonsdale are the types of investor who fund enterprises that could serve a role in remaking the world more to their liking. Like virtually every other of these would-be overlords’ ventures, Campus is a play for even more power and control. And it’s a scammy one at that.

The Campus pitch is that it gives underserved students access to professors from elite schools. But after looking into the instructors listed on the school’s site, it’s clear that calling them “professors who teach at the world’s top universities” is deliberately misleading. Most of the Campus teachers either work, or worked, as part-time instructors at the schools advertised under “Also teaches at.” Multiple no longer teach at the prestigious universities Campus leverages in its advertising. At least two of the “professors” were actually graduate teaching assistants. Showcasing the well-known institutions where these instructors also teach, or have taught, is a brazen move to profit from those schools’ reputations. Rather than helping underserved students, this marketing is designed to dupe them.

Having been made aware of the more nuanced reality that’s intentionally glossed over in the school’s marketing, former Campus students I spoke with felt misled. Overall, these students say they had good experiences with their instructors. But they felt it was dishonest to call them all professors—and to claim they all still teach at elite universities—when many, in fact, no longer do. This deceptive marketing draws students to Campus, and the ones I spoke with wish the school was more transparent about the people that make up its ersatz “faculty.” One student said that he had been counting on a recommendation letter written by a professor from a top school. He now worries that the recommendation won’t carry the same weight if it comes from an adjunct instructor or graduate teaching assistant.

I was a graduate teaching assistant for three years, and an adjunct English instructor for eight. I taught at several schools and found little job stability, but I loved teaching, especially at community colleges. As an adjunct, I often felt like I was doing a better job than some senior faculty members, who, for one reason or another, had grown complacent and out of touch. So my aim here is not to say that classes taught by adjunct instructors are inherently inferior to those taught by tenured professors. But the gulf between an adjunct instructor and a full-time professor is large to anyone familiar with this world, and Campus seems to be banking on the likelihood that most undergraduate students aren’t aware of these underlying structures of higher education.

Considering the deceptive marketing, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that students’ best interests in other areas, including their safety, weren’t always front of mind for Campus leaders. A glib tech entrepreneur, Tade Oyerinde, is the CEO/chancellor of Campus, and he operates with the hubris of a typical tech bro.

In the spirit of Shark Tank, Oyerinde hosts an annual competition called Campus Grind where students pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges. The top three win cash prizes of up to $20,000. Along with NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale was a judge for the inaugural Campus Grind.

Students knew for a few weeks in advance that Lonsdale would be a judge, but it was only days before the competition when they learned that the event would be held at Lonsdale’s home. Students, most of whom flew to Austin for the contest, weren’t told beforehand that they’d have to sign an NDA in order to enter Lonsdale’s house. They also weren’t told about Lonsdale’s highly contested relationship with a student while he was a mentor at Stanford. To have a chance to win the cash prize, those Campus students, all of whom paid their tuition with need-based Pell Grants, had to sign the NDA on the fly and enter Lonsdale’s home.

When I asked Oyerinde about the past allegations against Lonsdale, he said, “That was not on my radar at all.” But wasn’t it his job to know about things like this, especially involving someone students would be around at a school event? “These are all students over 18,” Oyerinde said. “It was the opportunity of a lifetime for them. Think about it. You’re a student. You’re a Pell student. Every student we took there was Pell. Now you get to go to a billionaire’s house, which is, like, the coolest place they’d ever been. And they’re there with their family. They each got to bring a family member with them. Multiple students said it was the best day of their lives.”

One student at that first Grind competition was a Mexican immigrant. In 2003, along with Peter Thiel and three others, Lonsdale founded Palantir, the now infamous tech company whose tools for mass surveillance are used by ICE goons to locate and kidnap people like that student and her family. Lonsdale also donated millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Watching those Grind episodes, it’s bleak to see college kids nervously pitch their business ideas to someone who’s dedicated so much of his time, energy, and resources to instituting fascism in the United States—and in that person’s home, no less.

When asked if he felt any obligation to tell students about Lonsdale’s extreme politics before the contest, Oyerinde said that he “doesn’t spend time getting into [his] investors’ edgiest, most divisive views.” I also asked Oyerinde how he could justify funding his school with investments from known fascists. “Forget whether or not you agree with Peter or Joe’s vision for what the world should be,” he replied. “There are only a handful of investors in Silicon Valley who are actually trying to build something in America—and that have some mission behind their investments. Peter and Joe are some of the guys who have that vision.” Even if that vision is shaped by an affinity for race science and admiration of apartheid-era South Africa, it didn’t seem to matter much to Oyerinde. After all, in the world of for-profit education, money will always win.

Before acquiring MTI College and starting Campus, Oyerinde founded a learning management system, or LMS, company called Campuswire that he still owns and operates. Campus students use this LMS for their classes, giving Oyerinde privileged access to valuable student interaction data. When colleges use Canvas, Blackboard, or any other third-party LMS, the schools get to put restrictions on how much data the LMS company can access. But since Oyerinde owns the school and the LMS, he can decide how to use the data himself—when he’s already demonstrated a concerning level of carelessness when it comes to protecting students. In 2025, Campus acquired Sizzle AI, a company founded by Meta’s former head of AI, Jerome Presenti, who’s since become the chief technology officer of Campus. Sizzle’s mission is to create AI learning companions. Campus’s unique access to student data, such as how they interact with course materials, is no doubt very useful to such an endeavor.

This is exactly what people like Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, and Campus’s other V.C. investors want: a privatized education system that entrenches an AI-first agenda instead of rigorously questioning the use and ethics of this technology, as proper educators should do. Teachers at Campus are pushed to integrate AI into their classes, despite overwhelming evidence that LLM use severely inhibits critical thinking. For tech plutocrats, AI is simply easier to control than human educators.

Notably, Campus isn’t Joe Lonsdale’s first foray into disrupting higher education. Along with CBS CEO Bari Weiss and two others, Lonsdale started the University of Austin in 2021, offering “forbidden courses” more aligned with right-wing politics than classes at traditional universities. Students at the University of Austin can enjoy courses taught by tech accelerationists and learn about the “epidemic” of anti-white discrimination in higher education admissions. Take a quick look at the University of Austin’s marketing collateral—and the sea of white faces therein—and it’s not hard to get a sense of what that school is about.

Considering Lonsdale’s and Thiel’s illiberal beliefs, their reasons for investing in Campus, with its woke-coded marketing and claim to serve underserved students, are opaque at first glance. But this for-profit school is another step toward the goal of privatizing higher education in the United States, which Trump and his oligarchs are eager to accomplish. From the perspective of someone whose mental faculties are wholly consumed with thoughts of accruing more money and more power, public schools are unruly things—too hard to control and too little devoted to the accumulative desires of the plutocratic class. Many Campus students pay for their tuition with federally funded grants that are getting siphoned away from actual community colleges and public universities. Those timeworn institutions are foundational to our democracy, so any chance to weaken them is a prime investment opportunity for the tech fascists who want to shape the future to their ends.

The idea of a protean, veteran creator waiting out his own private exile is fascinating on its own terms; it deepens nicely in the context of Soderbergh’s intense—some might say pathological—relationship to his own process and prolificacy. Soderbergh has won an Oscar and a Palme d’Or, and his films have collectively made billions, but his true identity is as the contemporary Renaissance Man of American Cinema. Since his 1989 debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape—an analog-era allegory of both the insatiable desire to create and the ethical consequences of getting behind the camera—he’s directed 38 features in 37 years, a pace that puts even industrious indie-bred contemporaries like Richard Linklater to shame.

The number becomes even more astonishing when one considers that Soder­bergh “retired” from feature filmmaking for four years in the mid-2010s, citing a combination of burnout and disappointment with the diminished stature of his chosen medium. “I just don’t think movies matter anymore,” he told New York magazine in a 2013 interview that made international headlines. In addition to waxing philosophical (and more than a little cynical) about big-studio commercial calculus and waning mainstream attention spans, ­Soderbergh spoke extensively about his interest and inspiration from visual art; the interview was conducted in his painting studio near the Flatiron Building in New York City, a vivid backdrop for a chat that kept digressing into aesthetics.

“I go back and forth between portraits and abstracts,” he said of his paintings—though there is also a similar division in his cinematic oeuvre, with its share of intimate, close-up character studies (Erin Brockovich, The Informant!, Behind the Candelabra) and cool, distanced systemic analyses (Traffic, Contagion, High Flying Bird). But it’s another one of Soderbergh’s observations that seems to prefigure The Christophers. “When I think of a film I’m about to make,” Soderbergh mused, “I see a face with a certain expression on it.”

The expressions that Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) paints in the film are, in a word, uncertain. In his series of portraits, also titled The Christophers, each frozen gaze is as enigmatic as a Mona Lisa smile. The identity of the model, the eponymous Christopher, is one of several mysteries woven through Ed Solomon’s screenplay—as is the question of how he felt about being placed on the canvas (and thus under a public microscope) by his lover. Solomon, whose mother is a painter, already owns a sweet little piece of film history as the brains behind the Bill and Ted movies, with their gloriously goofy, dudes-rock metaphysics. Here, working with Soderbergh for the fourth time in a decade, he shapes the material as a chamber drama: a two-hander whose protagonists spend most of the slender running time with their dukes up.

In one corner is the sacredly monstrous Julian, a mutant combination of living legend and cautionary tale, who has treated his own cancellation as a form of house arrest. Several years ago, Julian parlayed his celebrity into a talking-head spot on a reality show called Art Fight, a gig he treated, like most of his public appearances, with mercenary contempt. Now, having retired from the celebrity grind (and ceased painting), he huddles inside his house in London recording Cameo-style video messages to fans and haters at £149 a pop. “Happy birthday, stay in school … blah blah,” he blusters, his withered face haloed by a ring light.

His opponent is Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who could be a Pulp lyric come to life: She studied art at Saint Martins College, where she was a prodigy, but is now reduced to sneaking sketches in between shifts slinging noodles at a Chinese food truck by the Thames. Lori’s precarious position makes her a likely collaborator for a scheme being hatched by her former classmate Sallie (Jessica Gunning), who happens to be Sklar’s estranged adult daughter (and, based on the available evidence, a lousy artist). She and her similarly aggrieved brother, Barnaby (James Corden), long to get their hands on whatever money Julian didn’t waste or fecklessly give away at the peak of his fame. Their plan is to have Lori audition to become the great man’s assistant, infiltrate his inner sanctum, and purloin a cache of eight unfinished Christophers, which she’ll finish off surreptitiously after his death. The future owners will be none the wiser, and of the millions of dollars of profit, one third will go to Lori. “You said this was a restoration job,” she offers coolly. “It’s a forgery.” “Really,” retorts Sallie. “Does it even matter?”

Well: Does it? Solomon and Soder­bergh have staked the success of their film on the devilish, pleasurable complexity of that question. Soderbergh himself is an inveterate tinkerer who occasionally likes to recut films by himself and other directors; Ocean’s Eleven, Solaris, The Underneath, and Traffic are all remakes of a kind. How different is Lori’s mission? The character may not be a precise surrogate for her director, but her dilemma is right in his thematic wheelhouse. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, at least until it becomes a form of identity theft. Is it justifiable for a stifled creator denied entry to the gallery-industrial complex to play copycat as a means to an end? What does it mean, as Barnaby jokes during their brainstorming session, to literally forge a path toward success?

The Christophers doesn’t waste much screen time in introducing Julian, but the buildup is nevertheless effective. Tentatively ascending the stairs to her mark’s cavernous London flat, Lori could be seeking an audience with Picasso—or maybe Hannibal Lecter. That the reveal is worth the wait pivots on the masterstroke of casting McKellen, whose own pace has understandably slackened in his eighties; his last role in a major Hollywood film was as a grandiloquent senior feline in Cats, a victory-lapping cameo that rose slightly above the embarrassment of the film as a whole. Solomon gives one of the greatest living actors more to do, in a part that flits between playful loquaciousness and cutting bluntness. “Never get old,” Julian tells Lori upon her arrival, and the tone suggests that the wizened painter is talking mostly to himself. He’s monologuist by nature, and McKellen, whose great gift, whether as Richard III or Magneto, is a tragic flamboyance, ably sustains his logorrheic tour de force from beginning to end.

Coel’s role is arguably trickier. Where Julian seemingly can’t keep silent for even a second—he’s eager to weigh in on anything and everything, including the attributed and inebriated quotes on his Wikipedia page—Lori is obliged, both by the situation and her own temperament, to keep her cards close to the chest.

This aspect of Solomon’s script is slightly mechanical, but the gears grind smoothly because of Coel’s inverted performance style. While McKellen lets everything hang out, slouching around bare-chested in flowery housecoats and offering up amusing line readings, Coel makes a minor, galvanic spectacle of holding things in. It’s the same quality she projected as the writer-director-star of the BBC-HBO co-production I May Destroy You, where she played a writer dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault; her layered acting style and spectacularly angular features embody a sort of emotional cubism.

The first half of The Christophers is pressurized by Lori’s guilt and Julian’s suspicion. The latter comes to the fore in a wonderfully written scene where the older man pulls up an essay written by his new charge that not only inventories his bad behavior over the years but accuses him, in purplish prose, of “squatt[ing] on property unaffordable and hence uninhabitable for generations to come.” The comedy of McKellen’s delivery—the way Julian flatly etches each word like a knife in his back—only sharpens the larger critique of the entrenched hierarchies of the art world. Julian may resent being so dissected, but he can’t really argue with the diagnosis. Nor does he have much to say when Lori offers an empathetic, if brutal, assessment of the declining quality of The Christophers. She can see that Julian was in love with his subject, and also that his technique ebbed and flowed in sync with his feelings; by the end of the series, she notes pointedly, “the lightness was forced and the joy was a lie.”

The dynamic, combustible energy of two fine actors in conversation—and the elegant self-effacement of Soderbergh’s direction—gets The Christophers most of the way over the hump: It’s funny and absorbing and enjoyable. If the film doesn’t quite transcend its own small-scale conception, it’s less a failure of execution than a by-product of Soderbergh and Solomon’s reluctance to think too big, or score obvious rhetorical points off their subject matter. The ultimate evenhandedness with which the film treats Julian finds its most eloquent expression in a subtle but pointed detail near the end, when he tells Lori he’s thinking of mounting an exhibition of new work before he kicks the bucket. When he hands her the title scribbled on a piece of paper, she can’t tell if he’s written “Julian Sklar Revived” or “Julian Sklar Reviled.” “Exactly,” he replies. McKellen’s smile tingles with a wise, unsentimental kind of acceptance: not of complacency or equivocation, but the pleasurable contradictions—the unforced lightness and the true joy—from which art and artists are made. The final scene, meanwhile, wrings its own aching, humane variation on the maxim about art and abandonment; it suggests that even after we’re done, we’re never truly finished.

I followed Mike’s advice for nearly half a century, but events now require me to disobey him. Earlier this week, Jonathan Karl of ABC News asked President Donald Trump how he felt about Iranians charging a toll for ships that pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump replied: “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it—also securing it from lots of other people.”

It’s hard to know how serious Trump was about this (or indeed, how serious he is about anything). Later the same day, Trump’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said Trump wants Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz “without limitation, including tolls.” The tollbooth that Iran installed in the Strait, and the sharing of toll revenues that Trump considered at least briefly, are both in blatant violation of the Law of the Sea treaty—and reason to regret that the United States never signed it. (Neither did Iran.)

The Law of the Sea treaty guarantees “innocent passage through the territorial sea” of any nation. A ship’s passage is innocent provided “it is not prejudicial to the peace, good order, or security of the coastal State.” Mostly that means the ship can’t be engaged in any military activity, but neither may it commit “willful and serious pollution” or fish the waters. An exception is made if the nation in question provides “services rendered to the ship,” including the construction and maintenance of a man-made canal. Panama and Egypt are thus free to charge upward of $1 million for a large tanker to transit the Panama or Suez Canal. Without these fees, both nations would be flat broke.

Another exception was long ago granted to passage through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits. These are not man-made, but in 1936 the League of Nations decided (in the Montreaux Convention of 1936) that sure, OK, Turkey can charge tolls for passage. This was permitted to keep Turkey, which had joined forces with Germany in World War I, from allying with Germany once again in World War II.

It’s not hard to see why the “innocent passage” rule exists. Global commerce and global peace depend on freedom of the seas. After World War II, the United States, at least in theory, became guarantor of such freedom, but that’s an imperfect solution, not least because our Navy, with half as many ships as during the Cold War, is a diminished presence in international waters. The last time the United States played sea-lanes cop was 39 years ago, during the Iran-Iraq War. The setting, then as now, was the Strait of Hormuz. Kuwaiti tankers were outfitted with American flags and accompanied by American warships to protect them from attack from Iran. It was a mixed success; the episode is remembered today mostly for our accidental downing of a civilian Iranian airliner, killing everyone onboard. The current muddle in the Strait of Hormuz, with a sort-of ceasefire in effect and Trump begging the Europeans to reopen the strait (and throwing a tantrum as they hesitate), shows how little our allies can rely on Pax Americana.

Rather than pretend the United States Navy still rules the seas, we’d have done better to ratify the Law of the Sea treaty. In 1982, Ronald Reagan rejected it because he thought it would curtail commercial deep-sea mining, an environmentally disruptive practice that remains theoretical 44 years later. After the United Nations made some concessions on deep-sea mining, President Bill Clinton signed the treaty and submitted it to the Senate for ratification. But the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a well-meaning but aging patrician Democrat named Claiborne Pell (cruelly nicknamed Stillborn Pell) failed to move the treaty before Republicans retook the Senate in 1995, elevating the reactionary xenophobe Jesse Helms to the chairmanship. Helms deep-sixed the Law of the Sea.

President George W. Bush signaled that he would support the treaty, but his fellow Republican, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, declined to move it. Even after Democrats retook the Senate in 2007, the treaty lacked sufficient Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. By now the irrational political polarization that plagues America today had advanced sufficiently that the Heritage Foundation (in a memo co-authored by Ed Meese) could argue against the Law of the Sea merely because it was a multilateral treaty negotiated by the United Nations. “International bodies created by such treaties,” Meese and Company concluded, “often lack proper protections to prevent unaccountable behavior and corruption and result in the U.S. being by bloc voting led by countries with an interest in limiting U.S. freedom of action and sovereignty.” The only thing missing was a reference to our precious bodily fluids. When President Barack Obama tried to revive the treaty, Republicans shot it down again.

The United States, in addition to being the only NATO member to threaten war against another NATO member (Denmark, over Greenland) is also the only NATO member never to sign the Law of the Sea treaty. Add on top of that the affront that we never consulted our NATO allies before we attacked Iran, and you can kind of see why NATO doesn’t much feel like helping return the Strait of Hormuz to its status quo ante. It’s therefore not inconceivable that these new tolls will become permanent.

If they do, we may soon see China do the same in the Strait of Taiwan, Morocco or Spain do it in the Strait of Gibraltar, Indonesia do it in the Strait of Malacca, and Trump do it wherever he pleases. We’d all be much better off today if the United States had signed the Law of the Sea treaty before this country lost its mind—way back when, as Mike Kinsley told me nearly five decades ago, the whole subject was pretty much a snooze.

The president posted a 482-word rant to his Truth Social account Thursday afternoon, lashing out at some of his longest supporters for their recent criticisms of the war in Iran. Some of the name-dropped acolytes include former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as far-right influencers who have made their stamp on MAGA politics, such as Candace Owens and Alex Jones.

Trump claimed that the conservative quartet had been “fighting” him “for years” because of their “low IQs.”

“They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” Trump continued. “Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did!”

The Republican icons turned on Trump earlier this week over his rhetoric in the war, torching the president for pledging to completely annihilate Iran and its civilization.

Carlson—once the largest figure in conservative media—described Trump’s language as “vile on every level” and “the most revealing thing the president has ever done.” Kelly went on air on SiriusXM Tuesday to proclaim that she’s “sick of this shit.”

“Can’t he just behave like a normal human?” Kelly asked rhetorically. “His negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians: men, women, and children? An American president? So that the Strait of Hormuz will be opened? It’s just wrong. It’s not hard to say it; it’s not hard to recognize it.”

In his post Thursday, Trump claimed that the right-wing commentators were simply disagreeing with him for some “free” and “cheap” publicity.

While smearing the quartet, Trump mentioned that he felt Owens was less attractive than the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron.

“Actually, to me, the First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Candace, in fact, it’s not even close!” Trump wrote.

Macron and her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, have sued Owens for defamation after the far-right podcaster claimed that Brigitte Macron is transgender.

“They’re not ‘MAGA,’ they’re losers, just trying to latch on to MAGA,” Trump continued. “As President, I could get them on my side anytime I want to, but when they call, I don’t return their calls because I’m too busy on World and Country Affairs and, after a few times, they go ‘nasty,’ just like Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown.”

Despite the wordy rant, Trump then went on to insist that he “no longer care[s] about that stuff” and that he only cares about the country.

“MAGA is about WINNING and STRENGTH in not allowing Iran to have Nuclear Weapons,” the president wrote. “MAGA is about MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and these people have no idea how to do that, BUT I DO, because THE UNITED STATES IS NOW THE ‘HOTTEST’ COUNTRY ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!”

The first lady said in prepared remarks at the White House that the first time she met the sex criminal was in 2000 at an event she and Donald Trump had attended together, and that she had no knowledge of his crimes at the time. She also denied being a witness to any of them.

“Numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been percolating on social media for years now,” she said. “Be cautious about what you believe. These images and stories are completely false. I am not a witness or a named witness in connection with any of Epstein’s crimes.”

Melania Trump: Numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been percolating on social media for years now. Be cautious about what you believe. These images and stories are completely false. I am not a witness in connection with any of Epstein's crimes. pic.twitter.com/dPfcpoMQZS

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026

Melania also called on Congress to hold a public hearing for all of Epstein’s victims in her remarks, a surprising move given the allegations against her husband in the Epstein files.

Why would Melania Trump say all of this now, out of the blue? Some on social media are speculating that she is trying to get ahead of a major upcoming revelation connecting her to Epstein. In February, several unredacted emails were released from the government’s Epstein archive showing that Melania was in frequent contact with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime criminal associate.

Commentators on X quickly posted one of those emails on Thursday in which Melania compliments Maxwell, as well as an often-circulated photo of Donald, Melania, Epstein, and Maxwell together at a party.

Melania’s remarks will likely draw more attention to the Epstein files, which had been pushed out of the news cycle thanks to the war with Iran. One wonders what the president thinks about her remarks, and whether they are by design.

“I call on Congress to provide the women who have been victimized by Epstein with a public hearing specifically centered around the survivors, give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath in front of Congress with the power of sworn testimony,” she said. “Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the congressional record.”

Melania Trump: Now is the time for congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course this does not amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to… pic.twitter.com/2CEtxQp2uL

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026

The first lady made the statement during a televised White House announcement on Thursday, most of which she used to reject any rumors or assertions that she had any relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

“I have never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach,” she said. “To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, Maxwell.”

Melania Trump: I've never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time… pic.twitter.com/OO3RtPRMsU

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026

A 52-page memorandum from the Justice Department reveals that the agency is putting up a fight against the Presidential Records Act. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel argued on April 1 that the 1978 law, which was passed in direct response to the fallout of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, is actually “unconstitutional.”

The office further claimed that the congressionally passed act “exceeds” the legislative branch’s powers and “aggrandizes” Congress “at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.”

In doing this, the DOJ is trying to keep the president’s records private—rather than public, as mandated by the country’s representatives nearly 50 years ago.

The DOJ’s position already faces several legal challenges. Days after the memorandum was released, the nonpartisan watchdog organization American Oversight joined with the American Historical Association to sue a couple dozen figures within the Trump administration. In a 46-page legal complaint, the two nonprofits argued that the Oval Office was attempting to nullify and supersede the constitutional authorities of the other branches of government, and trod over the separation of powers.

“In the Administration’s view, the records of the official activities of the President and nearly 1,000 White House employees—generated using taxpayer funds, on government property, regarding official government business—belong to the President personally, and not to the American people,” the complaint reads. “Government for the people, by the people, and of the people this is not.”

Donald Trump has expressed little to no respect for the laws and regulations that bind him to public accountability. At the end of his first presidency, Trump allegedly broke seven laws by retaining hundreds of classified documents. He was charged with 37 felony counts in 2023 as a result, making him the first president to be criminally charged. Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the charges the following year, arguing that special counsel Jack Smith, the man appointed to investigate and prosecute the case, had not been properly installed.

The president has also not shown any interest in offering the public an inside view into the maneuverings of his administration, even retroactively. Trump’s presidential library is expected to be a glass skyscraper, operating as more of a hotel rather than anything close to a facility dedicated to learning.

Renderings of the building posted to Trump’s Truth Social late last month included a red, white, and blue needle on top, a U.S. flag hanging down the side, and a gargantuan plane on the first floor that resembles the super-luxury jumbo jet Qatar gifted him last year.

Trump spoke to Netanyahu on the phone Wednesday, a senior administration official told NBC News, and told him to pull back. Trump later told the network in an interview Thursday that Israel would be “scaling back” its attacks on Lebanon.

“I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it. I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key,” Trump said.

What that means is anyone’s guess. Lebanon was supposed to be included in the 10-point ceasefire deal, according to Iran and mediator Pakistan. Netanyahu said Wednesday that he “insisted that the temporary ceasefire with Iran not include Hezbollah, and we continue to strike them forcefully,” and following more bombs on Thursday, claimed his government is ready to negotiate directly with the Lebanese government (but not till next week).

These negotiations, Al Jazeera reports, are the result of U.S. pressure. The Trump administration is requesting a pause on Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon to help negotiations with Iran. But Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday that “the war will not be stopped,” even after Netanyahu’s announcement of negotiations with Lebanon.

Israeli strikes killed over 300 people in southern Lebanon Wednesday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, with over 1,000 wounded. At least seven people were killed in the southern Lebanese town of Abbassiyeh on Thursday. Democrats and leaders around the world have condemned Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon. Is Trump really going to let Netanyahu just “low-key it” and wait to see what happens next?

“The use of massive outside spending to support or oppose candidates based on their positions regarding international conflicts or foreign governments raises concerns about undue influence over democratic debate and policymaking, potentially constraining elected officials’ ability to represent the views of their constituents,” read the nonbinding resolution.

At least two potential 2028 Democratic nominees may have played a role in killing the resolution, with one DNC member telling Politico they received direct calls from the presidential hopefuls expressing concern about the resolution.

The DNC resolutions committee also punted on two other resolutions on recognizing a Palestinian state and conditioning military aid to Israel.

It’s clear that the Democratic establishment is not ready to let go of AIPAC, even as Israel’s genocide on Gaza and influence on American politics has become perhaps the defining progressive issue of this era. AIPAC wouldn’t be spending millions of dollars every year trying to oust progressive Democrats if that wasn’t the case. And while public opinion continues to shift sharply against it, party leadership continues to squirm and offer nonanswers when confronted with that reality.

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.

Five privately owned ships flying the U.S. flag were nearby carrying students from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine, and the transportation industry when the U.S. military started the war in Iran, NOTUS reported Thursday.

Unlike previous conflicts, there was no advance word or warning to the ships to evacuate, effectively trapping them as the violence began.

“Nobody told them. They were caught unawares,” one source close to the situation told NOTUS. “It was very strange that [officials] weren’t even given a whiff, weren’t even given an indication.”

The military had no plan to transport the vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the students were forced to find safe refuge in harbors around the Gulf, living on their ships. They were evacuated a month later, three sources told NOTUS, though it is not known whether all the students have made it back to American soil.

“If they’d had even just a day’s notice, they could have gotten them out,” another person familiar with the situation told NOTUS.

But the cadets weren’t the only Americans in the region that the White House forgot.

The Trump administration also failed to properly notify regional embassy staff of the impending bloodshed that week. In an email delivered February 27, Ambassador Mike Huckabee gave nonemergency workers at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem less than 24 hours to exit Israel, informing them that anyone planning to leave the country “should do so TODAY.”

The order and its timeline were highly unusual: Embassy staff are typically provided several days’ notice in order to comply with state-mandated evacuations, with some warnings given as much as a month in advance of the anticipated departure date. By comparison, Huckabee’s 24-hour deadline was shockingly short.

The Washington Post reports that acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya made the decision because he was purportedly concerned about the report’s methodology, even though it has been used by the agency for years to examine vaccine effectiveness for other respiratory viruses like the flu.

In fact, the agency published a similar report about the flu vaccine with the same methodology on March 12 in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The Covid-19 vaccine report had cleared the CDC’s scientific review process, and was scheduled to be published in the MMWR before Bhattacharya’s decision.

The same methodology is also used to evaluate vaccines by numerous medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, the Lancet, and Pediatrics, according to the Post.

The newspaper obtained a copy of the report, which states that between September and December 2025, healthy adults who got the vaccine cut their likelihood of visiting urgent care or the emergency room by 50 percent and of Covid-related hospital stays by 55 percent, compared to those who didn’t get a Covid vaccine in 2025.

Bhattacharya was a staunch critic of the CDC’s Covid-19 response, calling for an early end to lockdowns in the “Great Barrington Declaration” he helped write, and said that calling for masking was “pseudoscience.” However, he did tell a Senate committee in February that he didn’t think vaccines cause autism.

On the other hand, Bhattacharya’s boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a longtime anti-vax activist, calling the Covid-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made” in 2021. Last year, Kennedy announced that the CDC would no longer recommend the vaccine to healthy pregnant women and children.

In Trump’s second term, vaccination has been discouraged, resulting in rising and more severe illnesses. Meanwhile, the administration, under the thrall of Kennedy’s MAHA pseudoscience, is burying anything that proves their ideology wrong.

In a previously unreported whistleblower letter to Congress, a military lawyer who served as a temporary immigration judge before being fired, quoted an official who’d offered a frank—and dark—description of the standard for granting asylum under the Trump administration: “Maybe if you were Jewish and escaping Nazi Germany in 1943, you should get it.”

Illegally denying immigrants their lawful pathway to citizenship is just one way that President Donald Trump transformed the country’s immigration court system into the engine of his mass deportation agenda. Since Trump reentered office, his administration has carried out an unprecedented purge of the country’s immigration judges, culling 100 judges from a body of about 750 officials, according to the Times.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to replace these officials with a class of so-called “deportation judges” and has announced the appointment of 143 permanent and temporary judges, many of whom previously worked as immigration prosecutors or military lawyers. As a result, deportation rates have skyrocketed and the number of successful asylum claims has seen a precipitous drop.

An analysis by the Times found that many of the judges who were fired under the Trump administration had been appointed under Democratic administrations, and tended to approve more asylum cases than their peers. Some immigration courts, such as one in San Francisco, that were viewed as friendly to asylum claims were shuttered altogether. Judges who were fired as part of Trump’s purge approved about 46 percent of asylum claims, while those who remained approved roughly 15 percent.

By comparison, the administration’s new hires have approved roughly 6 percent, according to an analysis by the Times.

The Trump administration wanted immigration judges to act as “puppets for the administration with a singular goal of deporting as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” Shuting Chen, an immigration judge who was dismissed last November, told the Times.

The immigration judges who remain have found themselves in a precarious position. More than two dozen immigration judges who spoke with the Times said they felt pressure to go along with the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda or risk losing their jobs.

Last June, a memo from a top DHS official accused certain judges of tolerating bias so long as it was “in favor of an alien,” and warned that judges who favored one side “may be subject to corrective or disciplinary action.”

“All of us are looking over our shoulders,” said Holly D’Andrea, an immigration judge in Texas who spoke with the Times in her capacity as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges union.

Multiple sources told The Hill that Hegseth, who has ousted multiple senior military officials both before and during the war on Iran, sees Driscoll as a rival of sorts. Sources noted that Hegseth’s paranoia had been heightened in recent weeks following Trump’s firing of his two Cabinet colleagues, Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem. And Driscoll has previously been floated as a potential successor to Hegseth if he ever gets canned.    

“He’s just really uncomfortable with anyone who could potentially be outshining him,” a current Pentagon official told The Hill. The Pentagon itself denies this, stating that Hill sources were “serving up fake news to anyone gullible enough to write about it.” And head Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote that Hegseth “maintains excellent working relationships with the secretaries of every service branch.”  

But another Pentagon official claimed that Hegseth’s inner circle “believes they’ve uncovered proof that Driscoll has become a resistance figure within the Pentagon not only against Hegseth, but against President Trump as well”—raising major doubts about just how copacetic things really are inside Hegseth’s Pentagon right now.  

Hegseth has also made moves targeted at Driscoll’s support network, firing his chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, and two other high-ranking military officials. The new plot against Driscoll fits into a larger pattern with Hegseth, who at the start of his term was overcome by paranoia and suspicion so intense that he made Pentagon employees take polygraph tests and would only speak in confidence to his wife.

It’s unclear what exactly Driscoll has done to elicit this alleged treatment from Hegseth, other than to be reasonably well liked and respected. 

“From what I’ve seen in the press, and from whatever it’s worth, what I hear from people in the Army, it’s not like Driscoll is scheming and plotting to make Hegseth look bad. I mean, Hegseth takes care of that himself on a regular basis. It’s just, it’s all just very strange. And it’s just irresponsible,” retired Army reserve colonel and Pentagon staffer Kevin Carroll told The Hill. 

Driscoll has no plans to resign, and has stated that “serving under President Trump has been the honor of a lifetime.”  

“Painting a picture that ‘one squeaked through’ is a falsehood,” one of the injured soldiers told CBS News Thursday. “I want people to know the unit … was unprepared to provide any defense for itself. It was not a fortified position.”

The injured soldier, a member of the Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command who spoke to CBS News under the condition of anonymity, highlighted the valiant efforts of his fellow service members who were left in a dangerous situation by their leadership.  

“I don’t think that the security environment or any leadership decision diminishes in any way their sacrifice or their service,” the injured soldier told CBS in an interview. “Those soldiers put themselves in harm’s way and … I’m immensely proud of them, and their family should be proud of them.”

Ahead of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. troops in the Gulf region were instructed to move away from the “X,” or danger zone. But a group of soldiers were sent from Kuwait City to Port of Shuaiba, still well within striking distance for Iran. There, they would establish a makeshift portside tactical operations center in a series of small tin buildings.

“We moved closer to Iran, to a deeply unsafe area that was a known target,” another soldier told CBS News. “I don’t think there was a good reason ever articulated.”

The soldier described how the troops had been protected by only a thin layer of vertical standing blast barricades. “From a bunker standpoint, that’s about as weak as one gets,” he told CBS News. Images of the base showed that it had limited defenses against drone or missile strikes. 

When asked to describe the degree of fortification at the makeshift operations center, the soldier told the outlet: “I mean, I would put it in the ‘none’ category. From a drone defense capability … none.”

This runs counter to the Pentagon’s repeated assertions that the operations center was fortified. “Every possible measure has been taken to safeguard our troops—at every level,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X in March. 

The Iranian strike on that base killed six U.S. service members, making it the deadliest Iranian strike of the first five weeks of the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran. More than 30 military members were hospitalized, with dozens suffering from injuries, including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma. 

The Defense Department did not initially release information about how many were hurt in the strike, and U.S. Central Command initially claimed that five had been seriously wounded. This isn’t the only case of the Pentagon downplaying the toll of Trump’s reckless war in Iran The government has published outdated numbers in statements on casualties, resulting in an undercount of how many troops have been wounded or killed, and a U.S. official said last week that the Pentagon appeared to be engaged in a “casualty cover-up” in Iran.

Pope Leo XIV met with Obama adviser David Axelrod Thursday morning, reported Substack journalist Christopher Hale, marking a major progression in the quest to land the 44th president a meeting with the Chicago-born pontiff.  

Obama’s enthusiasm for meeting the pope was made apparent in February, when he joined Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast for a Valentine’s Day episode.

“I’ll be honest with you, being president or even being an ex-president, I can kind of meet everybody, so I’ve met a lot of folks,” Obama said at the time. “The person who I have not yet met that I’m looking forward to meeting—and I hope I get an opportunity sometime in the future—is the new pope, who’s from Chicago, and a White Sox fan.”

Axelrod worked as Obama’s chief strategist on both of his presidential campaigns. It’s not clear what Axelrod and the pope discussed, but the shrinking degrees of separation between the global figures bodes well for Obama’s dream.

The effort to pair the two has been actively in the works since at least March, when Hale reported that the Holy See had been in communication with Obama’s team about arranging a meeting.

That could mean that Obama meets Pope Leo XIV before Trump does.

Leo became the first American-born pope on May 8, 2025, but Trump has not managed to meet him over the past year. Instead, the Vatican has shied away from the Trump administration, in no small part due to threats made by Defense Department officials who were unhappy with the pontiff’s various criticisms of Trump’s warmongering.

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his “State of the World” speech in January, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. The atmosphere 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 the country’s military prowess.

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which 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 cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported 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.

The New York Times reports that Luxembourg-based company ArcelorMittal will be providing millions of dollars in steel for the project, all produced in Europe. Trump said in October that he was offered $37 million worth of donated steel for the ballroom, but didn’t say where it was from.

He told ballroom donors at the time that a “great steel company” had come forward with a gift.

“He said, ‘Sir, I’d like to donate the steel for your ballroom,’” Trump recounted to the donors. “I said: ‘Whoa, that’s nice.’ And I found out—‘How much is the steel?’ I called the contractor. ‘Sir, it’s down for $37 million.’ I said, ‘This is a nice donation, right?’”

He called the steel “great steel as opposed to garbage steel, because they dump a lot of garbage around. You know, steel is like everything else, including human beings. Steel could be high quality, and it can be low quality. He wants to make sure it’s high quality.”

Days after Trump made that announcement last year, he halved tariffs that applied to automotive steel exports that ArcelorMittal happens to produce in Canada. An unnamed White House official told the Times that despite ArcelorMittal being a foreign company, it was benefiting the U.S. through a joint venture with Japan’s Nippon Steel in Alabama and an iron mine in Minnesota, and denied that the company received anything in return for its donation.

Last year, the Trump administration allowed Japan-based Nippon Steel to take over U.S. Steel in exchange for a “golden share” in the company, which allows the government to block major decisions such as offshoring or layoffs. Why would Trump get steel from ArcelorMittal when the government already has a close (and controversial) stake in U.S. Steel?

On top of that, going with a foreign steel company contradicts Trump’s stated “America First” ethos, which critics seized upon Wednesday.

“While the White House imports foreign steel to build Trump’s ugly Epstein Ballroom, California is opening its first new steel plant in 50 years,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office posted on X. “Thanks, Gavin Newsom!”

“Make America Luxembourg Again?” Newsom also posted on his personal account.

“Foreign steel in the White House? Are you kidding? We’ve got Iron Range mines shut down & 100’s @steelworkers laid off. Instead, they’re outsourcing one of the most iconic American buildings overseas! American steel built this country, it should build the White House too,” Minnesota State Senator Grant Hauschild, a Democrat, said on X.

Eight justices agreed that Colorado had violated the First Amendment by taking sides in a social controversy involving so-called “conversion therapy” on minors—efforts to alter a child’s chosen sexual orientation or gender identity.

Colorado in fact did take sides in that debate. But a closer look reveals that while the majority’s decision might be doctrinally sound, it is at the same time shortsighted and harmful.

In 2019, the Colorado legislature banned licensed counselors from practicing conversion therapy on minors. It did so on the basis of overwhelming professional consensus: The American Psychological Association had found no empirical evidence that any therapy can alter a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity; former participants reported lasting psychological harm, including depression, PTSD, suicidal ideation, and family rupture; and the therapy’s core premise—that a gay or transgender identity is something to be fixed—was itself found to stigmatize patients in ways that cause long-term emotional distress.

The plaintiff was a licensed Colorado counselor who identifies as a conservative Christian and who wanted to continue offering exactly the kind of talk therapy the legislature had determined is harmful. She did not argue that conversion therapy is always effective or benign. Rather, she said that because her version of treatment involves only speech—no physical interventions, no medications—the First Amendment shields it from regulation.

The court, 8–1, agreed. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority. Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joined a concurrence. The majority held that Colorado was practicing blatant viewpoint discrimination, which is nearly always impermissible. Colorado’s law permitted counselors to affirm a client’s gender identity while forbidding speech aimed at changing it.

That asymmetry, Gorsuch concluded, is precisely what the First Amendment prohibits: the government picking sides in an ideological debate and licensing only one viewpoint within the treatment relationship. He closed by invoking the foundational premise of First Amendment law: “a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lone dissent, and she took the extraordinary step of reading her dissent from the bench, a gesture reserved for rare, vehement disagreement with the majority. Her anchor point was that the majority had failed to appreciate the crucial context: The state had good reason for its action, anchored not in viewpoint discrimination but in the regulation of medical practice—a classic proper area of review for the states.

Jackson stressed that all medical standard-setting is unavoidably viewpoint-based. A state that prohibits a dietitian from giving an anorexic patient the medically unsound advice to eat less is taking a side. A state that forbids a psychiatrist from encouraging a patient to commit suicide is taking a side. Standards of care are, by definition, the state’s judgment about which treatments help and which harm.

So conceptualized, Colorado’s action fit neatly within its well-established police power. The speech “suppression” was incidental to regulation of medical professionals’ conduct—and under that characterization, it should have been subject to more lenient scrutiny.

It’s worth examining more closely Gorsuch’s paean to “a faith in the free marketplace of ideas.”

The marketplace model works when the harm from speech is epistemic: A listener hears a harmful idea, and the antidote is exposure to better ideas. More speech corrects bad speech. That is sensible for political debate, for journalism, for the ordinary exchange of views.

It is not a sensible model for the clinical relationship between a licensed therapist and a vulnerable minor.

Consider recovered memory therapy—one of the most catastrophic therapeutic fads in American history, practiced in the 1980s and ’90s by licensed clinicians using nothing but verbal suggestion, guided imagery, and hypnosis. Therapists convinced patients, including children, that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse that had never occurred.

The results: shattered families, wrongful prosecutions of wholly innocent childcare workers, patient suicides. More speech didn’t un-implant those false memories. It didn’t un-traumatize children who spent years being convinced they had been abused by their parents or others. States disciplined practitioners. Malpractice verdicts ran into the millions. The harm was medical, not informational, and the marketplace of ideas had nothing to offer it.

Jackson’s core argument is that talk therapy is a medical treatment, and medical treatments are subject to state regulation. The fact that this particular treatment is delivered through speech rather than a scalpel or a syringe does not exempt it from the rules that govern every other form of medical care.

Chiles remains free to write papers defending conversion therapy, give speeches praising it, tell patients she thinks Colorado’s law is wrong. What she cannot do is practice the therapy. The restriction falls on the treatment, not the speech.

The stakes are not abstract. Jackson’s dissent catalogs what the majority has put at risk. Mandatory reporting laws that compel a therapist to speak when a patient presents a threat involve only speech. Prohibitions on guaranteeing cures—speech. Ethics codes requiring humane treatment—speech. Licensing boards’ authority to discipline an incompetent counselor—speech, if the incompetence consists of saying the wrong things. On the majority’s logic, providers who offer cruel speech-only therapies can assert a First Amendment right to carry on.

The court’s answer is that malpractice handles it. But as recovered memory therapy demonstrated, by the time malpractice is litigated, lives are already destroyed. Prophylactic regulation exists to stop harm before it happens. That is what a license is for. That is what a standard of care means.

It’s facile if accurate to call that discrimination based on viewpoint. But it’s myopic to miss the more central context of regulating medical practice and shielding citizens from quackery. In Chiles, Jackson alone had the clear long-range vision to see the flaws in the court’s brittle approach to the case.

German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Trump is expecting NATO members to help reopen the strait, which Iran closed in retaliation for the war Trump started without speaking to any of those NATO members. He’s also threatening to pull U.S. military support from any countries that don’t help reopen the strait.

Trump’s demand is equivalent to an “ultimatum,” several European diplomats told Der Spiegel.

“None of these people, including our own, very disappointing, NATO, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social early Thursday morning, hours after his meeting with Rutte.

This isn’t the first time Trump has begged NATO to help him reestablish a status quo that he disrupted. Last month, Trump claimed that other countries—such as China—depend more on the Middle East waterway than the U.S. does, and should therefore be leading the charge in reopening the bomb-laden strait.

“I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory. It’s the place from which they get their energy. And they should come and they should help us protect it,” Trump said. “Why are we maintaining the Hormuz Strait when it’s really there for China and many other countries? Why aren’t they doing it?”

The president issued another violent threat against Iran Wednesday night, promising that the “shootin’ starts” if the two countries do not reach a “REAL AGREEMENT.”

“All U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.”

“It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary—NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE,” he continued. “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

Iran offered a 10-point peace plan on Monday that the White House tepidly agreed to work with, mere minutes before Trump’s deadline the following night to completely obliterate the country.

The plan includes various demands for an immediate end to the regional violence, including proposals for a permanent end to the war, guarantees that Iran and its allies would not be attacked again, and an end to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

It also seeks the lifting of all U.S. and international sanctions on Iran; the imposition of a new $2 million toll per ship through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil passageway situated between Iran and Oman; and a $1 toll per barrel of oil delivered through the waterway.

But there was an additional detail included in versions of the ceasefire arrangement distributed in Farsi—Iran’s native language—that was not included in the English edition, specifying the “acceptance of enrichment” for Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting that the country was not yet willing to let go of its plans to develop nuclear technology.

While it’s hard to see how any components of the deal offer a benefit to the U.S., the final point undermines Trump’s rationale for the war entirely: The president’s primary interest in fighting Iran was to cripple the country’s nuclear program, stripping any potential for the country to create a nuclear weapon. Failing to do so would imply that the war—which has so far cost the lives of 13 U.S. troops and billions of dollars in munitions—was a complete waste of time, even by the White House’s own metrics.

Between October and December, America’s real gross domestic product fell from 4.4 percent to just 0.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday.

That figure is significantly less than the agency’s second estimate of 0.7 percent growth, reported last month.

The government reported that the economy grew 2.1 percent last year, compared to 2.8 percent in 2024 and 2.9 percent in 2023. If GDP growth is beneath 2 percent annually, that can typically be considered a recession.

The surprising economic slow-down in the fourth quarter can be attributed to the government shutdown, which cut federal spending and investment by 16.6 percent and trimmed 1.16 percent points off of growth in Q4. Consumer spending expanded at a pace of 1.89 percent, down from the previous estimate of 3.5 percent in the second quarter.

This weakened economy has set the stage for Trump’s increasingly expensive war in Iran. The president’s reckless military campaign in the Middle East has triggered significant disruptions in global commerce and sent energy prices surging.

In a post on X Thursday morning, Iran’s speaker of parliament Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf posted three points emphasizing Lebanon’s importance to the ceasefire deal, noting that it was part of the first point in Iran’s 10-point plan, that mediator Pakistan “publicly and clearly stressed the Lebanon issue,” and that ceasefire violations “carry explicit costs and STRONG responses.” 

“Extinguish the fire immediately,” Ghalibaf warned. 

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X Wednesday that “the Iran-U.S. Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose—ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both.” 

“The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments,” Araghchi said. 

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian echoed Araghchi.

“Renewed aggression by the Zionist regime against Lebanon blatantly violates the initial ceasefire. Such actions signal deception and non-compliance, rendering negotiations meaningless. Our hands remain on the trigger. Iran will never forsake its Lebanese brothers and sisters,” Pezeshkian posted on X Thursday. 

At least 203 people were killed in Lebanon in Israeli strikes on Wednesday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, with over 1,000 wounded. Strikes continued Thursday, with at least seven people killed in the southern Lebanese town of Abbassiyeh.  

Meanwhile, the status of the Strait of Hormuz was unclear Thursday morning. Few ships were traversing it despite the supposed ceasefire, and Iranian officials said Wednesday that traffic was once again blocked due to the strikes on Lebanon. But U.S. and Israeli officials are claiming, contrary to Pakistan, that Lebanon wasn’t part of the ceasefire.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on X in Hebrew Thursday morning that “we will continue to strike Hezbollah wherever required, until we restore full security to the residents of the north.” 

Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that “if Iran wants to let this negotiation fall apart—in a conflict where they were getting hammered—over Lebanon, which has nothing to do with them and which the United States never once said was part of the ceasefire, that’s ultimately their choice. We think that would be dumb, but that’s their choice.”

So, is the ceasefire all but dead? Will the White House do anything about Israel’s continued bombing of Lebanon? If this two-week peace deal is meant to hold up, then these questions have to be answered, otherwise more civilians will die and things will only get worse. 

While registration into Selective Service—the massive database that tells the United States how many men it can force into war in the event of a national emergency—has historically been required for every U.S. male upon turning 18, the sign-up process was manual.

“On December 18, 2025, the President signed the FY 2026 [National Defense Authorization Act] into law, mandating automatic Selective Service registration. The Agency engaged with Congress throughout the NDAA process regarding the automated legislative proposal,” the Selective Service System said in a public statement. “This statutory change transfers responsibility for registration from individual men to SSS through integration with federal data sources. SSS will implement the change by December 2026, resulting in a streamlined registration process and corresponding workforce realignment.”

Multiple Democrats were quick to call out the administration’s misplaced priorities.

“If they can automatically register you for WAR, they can automatically register you to VOTE,” Democratic House of Representatives candidate Sarah McGee wrote on X. Others posted old tweets from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller about how young men should vote for Trump lest they be “drafted to fight in Kamala’s and Cheney’s 3rd World War.”

The last time the U.S. had a draft was in 1973, for the Vietnam War, which caused institutional and ideological damage that this country is still dealing with today. A draft in this era would be even more catastrophic.

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

Now that Donald Trump and Iran have agreed to a very fragile ceasefire, the administration is facing mounting questions about his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost her temper under tough questioning about this topic. Pete Hegseth also tried to spin about this threat and he too flopped miserably. All this comes as some of Trump’s own allies are questioning whether he got a good deal out of this fiasco. We think this all reveals deeper failures. Trump and Hegseth sought to show that the threat of overwhelming military force can accomplish literally anything, yet that too failed. We’re talking about all this with a great commentator on national security affairs, Georgetown’s Rosa Brooks. Rosa, really nice to have you on.

Rosa Brooks: Good to be here, Greg.

Sargent: So we have a ceasefire now, but it’s a little hard to see what we got out of it. The U.S. largely destroyed the Iranian military and killed some of Iran’s senior leaders. The Strait of Hormuz might be reopening, but it was open before the war and Iran’s grip on it appears tighter now. The basis for the new talks seems to be somewhat more friendly to Iran than before. Rosa, is that about the size of it? What’s your reading?

Brooks: It’s not even clear that the Strait of Hormuz is in fact open. It sounds as though two ships have gone through as of the time we’re recording this podcast, but that then it re-closed again. So it’s not even clear we have a ceasefire, and already there are disputes. The Israelis are continuing to attack targets inside of Lebanon. The Iranians are saying, Well, then we’re closing the strait again, because that wasn’t the deal. You’re supposed to stop. The Israelis are saying, No, no, attacking Lebanon wasn’t part of the deal. So this may be collapsing as we speak. It’s a little hard to know.

But yes, even if it held, it’s not entirely clear what we’ve accomplished aside from killing a lot of people, which we have certainly done. We have eliminated several layers of Iranian leadership. Arguably, remaining members of the Iranian leadership are even more hardline than their predecessors in terms of domestic repression of the Iranian people. I don’t know that we’ve done the Iranian people any favors. It’s a little too soon to say. We’ve obviously eliminated a lot of Iran’s stockpile of offensive weapons, which is overall probably a good thing. On the other hand, we’ve also eliminated a great deal of our own stockpile of both offensive and defensive weapons, which is definitely not a great thing given that Iran was not an imminent threat and there are a lot of other places in the world where we face ongoing challenges.

Sargent: Right. The entire rationale for the war was bullshit.

Brooks: Exactly. Yes. Bullshit. There we go.

Sargent: Right. Let’s recall that Trump threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization. He threatened to destroy a nation of 93 million people, which would have of course killed tens of millions of civilians. He threatened to bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges—all of this would have constituted massive war crimes. Rosa, can you explain why it’s bad to simply make these threats, never mind acting on them? The simple act of making the threats is bad. Can you explain why?

Brooks: So the idea that any world leader, much less an American president, would threaten to wipe out an entire civilization—those were obviously Trump’s words, not mine—is partly shocking because international law and U.S. law draws a very clear distinction between lawful targets in wartime and unlawful targets. And “the entire civilization” is an unlawful target. That sweeps in everything from cultural sites to every little baby sleeping in its bed in Iran. That would be a crime against humanity, would be a war crime, it would be genocide. Pick your shocking moral offense and it would qualify.

Just the shock of having the former so-called leader of the free world saying, essentially, We’re going to be kind of like the Nazis where we have no problem with that, we’re willing to wipe out an entire civilization, an entire people, to accomplish our rather unclear objectives—I don’t know if it’s possible to overstate how shocking that is.

I also think—this is a lesser concern of mine—it further undermines any ability of the U.S. to negotiate in a credible way, because we’re at a point where nobody has the slightest idea whether they should believe anything Trump says. He will go from we’re all pals now, we’ve got a great deal, to I’m wiping out your entire civilization and back again, and nobody really knows why or what is motivating him, frankly.

It’s one thing to add a level of strategic uncertainty into your negotiations to keep your adversaries on their toes, but when you become this erratic actor who might have a temper tantrum, you might be in a happy, happy, happy mode, and no one has any idea what will put you in which state or keep you in that state—we become a threat to the entire world, frankly.

Sargent: It’s not just the madman theory of how to do this stuff. It’s also the pathological liar theory. I guess that’s supposed to keep people off balance or something. Trump and the White House are now facing intense questions about this threat, as they should. Karoline Leavitt lost her cool with a reporter who pointed out that Trump threatened to destroy the Iranian people, not its government—which was absolutely correct. That’s what Trump did. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): How can the president claim that America can ever have the moral high ground if he’s threatening to destroy civilizations and not casting wars as fights against other governments?

Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Andrew, I think you should take a look at the actions of this president over the course of the past six weeks and the actions of our brave men and women in our United States military, who have essentially taken out the military of a rogue Islamic regime that has chanted “death to America” for 47 years, that has killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers over the course of the last five decades. The president absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime, and for you to even suggest otherwise is frankly insulting.

Sargent: What’s really insulting here is this garbage answer from Leavitt. Rosa, note how she simply elides the part of the question about Trump’s threat to attack the Iranian people as if that didn’t happen and pretends that Trump was only talking about the regime. It’s just disgusting. What did you make of it?

Brooks: Leavitt is the kind of young woman I hope my daughters will not become, which is to say that she is also perfectly comfortable lying through her teeth. The single nicest thing one could possibly say about Donald Trump is that he lies through his teeth and he just says whatever random, insane, offensive thing comes into his tiny little brain at any given time. The result of that is that it’s not actually clear that Trump gave a millisecond’s thought to the distinction between the people versus the regime, or that he has any understanding or interest in the fact that it matters.

The nicest thing you could say about him is maybe he didn’t actually mean it. Maybe what he meant was regime, but he certainly said entire civilization. That is what he said. The ridiculousness of Leavitt acting as though this is so offensive and so mean-spirited to raise any questions about lovely President Trump’s words is bizarre in this context. We’ve got one person who threatened a civilization and her feelings are hurt.

Sargent: Leavitt kept raging about this as well. Listen to this.

Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): The insinuation by anyone in this room that Iran somehow has the moral high ground over the United States of America is insulting, considering the atrocities that they have committed against our people and our military over the past five decades.

Sargent: So Rosa, we should take on the substance of this directly. Yes, the Iranian regime is horrible, but that doesn’t give us license to threaten and perpetrate mass atrocities ourselves. Can you talk about this basic point?

Brooks: Yes, and that’s not what the question was. The question wasn’t who’s more horrible, the Iranian regime or Donald Trump, which is—that’s a really tough one, frankly. But that wasn’t the question. The question was about U.S. leadership and U.S. moral standing in the world and in general. Iran does not have any ability to be a global leader or have any influence whatsoever or have any moral standing precisely because the Iranian regime has done terrible things, including to its own people, over many decades. It’s not clear to me why we would want to join them in that exclusive club of asshole nations.

But the world went through the twentieth century—and neither of us were born during either of these periods—but two cataclysmic world wars that left tens of millions dead, both military and civilians, and devastated huge swaths of Europe and in the case of World War II, other parts of the globe as well. Humanity had hoped that as a species we had maybe learned a little bit about why it is not a cool idea for great powers to threaten to obliterate entire civilizations, because that way lies not just madness, but that way lies reciprocal cataclysm.

There is a basic reciprocity in international affairs, which is: You keep your promises, I’ll keep my promises, more or less most of the time. You know, people cheat on the edges and so on, but you don’t obliterate my population, I won’t obliterate your population. That’s the way the world keeps itself from blowing itself up and destroying humanity itself. And Trump seems to have missed this fairly basic lesson of human history, which is that you go in that direction and all hell breaks loose.

Is that what he wants? I sometimes think, listening to people like Stephen Miller, that that is what they want. I think there is a strand of evangelical Christians who think, Awesome, let’s bring on the apocalypse, and they’re cool with tens of millions of people dying. Most of the rest of us would sort of prefer that that not happen.

Sargent: Well, there’s a lot to say about Pete Hegseth’s theology in this. Hegseth also offered his own spin, by the way, on the threat to annihilate Iranian civilization. He said Trump’s threat is what got Iran to the table to negotiate. He said, “That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said, ‘We want to cut this deal.’” Rosa, that’s just bullshit as well. Iran was negotiating with Trump before the war. There are other problems with this nonsense. Can you explain what’s wrong with that line?

Brooks: There’s so much wrong with it. It is hard to know where to start. For one thing, as you just said, it didn’t seem as though this particular threat had any real bearing on what the Iranians did. The Iranians were already good and upset and generally distressed and to some extent looking for a way out. It wasn’t even clear what the Iranians were planning to do. It’s still not clear.

One of the problems with the strategy we’ve had of let’s continue to kill every layer of Iranian leaders is that you run out of people to negotiate with and the people who are left may or may not have any authority to do much of anything. So you end up getting contradictory mixed messages, and we’ve certainly seen that from the Iranians. It’s not particularly clear what, if anything, they had been willing to agree to or offer, or what, if anything, they then did agree to offer. There’s not a lot of transparency on any of this and there’s no particular evidence that Trump’s latest craziness did this.

But from a moral perspective and from a strategic perspective, threatening to wipe out whole civilizations is both deeply, deeply immoral and offensive—regardless of whether you’re a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, whatever—deeply morally offensive to any sensible human being, but also, as a strategic matter, it’s terribly dangerous. The risks of mistaken escalation, especially when you’re dealing with an ally that has at least some degree of nuclear capabilities that we have not eliminated, just is wildly foolhardy.

Sargent: There’s no doubt about it. I want to switch gears here. Some of Trump’s biggest allies are not happy with the outcome that Trump achieved here. Fox News host Mark Levin said the Iranian regime is “still surviving.” MAGA personality Laura Loomer said this: “The negotiation is a negative for our country. We didn’t really get anything out of it and the terrorists in Iran are celebrating. I don’t know why people are acting like this is a win.” Lindsey Graham, who’s a very staunch Trump ally, was clearly not happy with how things turned out. He put out a very long tweet in which he essentially said about the Iranian proposal to end the war—which seems to be the basis for these talks—he said, I’m going to review it at the appropriate time. He certainly wasn’t willing to say that it was a positive.

Perhaps most tellingly, what Lindsey Graham also seemed to be skeptical of was what’s going to happen to all of the highly enriched uranium that Iran still has. Graham said this must all be controlled by the U.S. and then he closed with “time will tell.” Clearly Graham doesn’t seem to think that we’re going to end up in control of the nuclear situation the way he’d like. What do you make of all this? This is some pretty serious criticism from his top allies.

Brooks: This is the ... even-broken-clocks-are right-twice-a-day theory of life. Every now and then Laura Loomer is going to say something sensible. Tucker Carlson and so forth. They’re appropriately highlighting the fact that, as we’ve discussed, this isn’t a win for anybody. The U.S. is now worse off than we were before this began and Iran is now worse off than they were before this began. Which of us is more worse off than the other is a question we may not know the answer to for years to come.

Sargent: Rosa, just to close this out, I want to clarify that we’re recording this on Wednesday late afternoon. So by the time people hear this, the fragile ceasefire could already be in tatters. We don’t know from where we’re sitting. It looks pretty shaky, but it’s still kind of alive. Rosa, how do you see this playing out over time?

Brooks: There’s a very real possibility that Trump, if he can find something that he really feels like he can call a victory, declares victory and says, OK, we won, we’re going home. That clearly would be best for the world. Not a great outcome, but a better-than-the-alternative outcome.

It also remains perfectly possible that he will be so incensed that he will follow through on some of his more insane and illegal and immoral threats and that we will have an utter catastrophe in the region, which will spread around the globe and translate not only into chaos in the global economy, but terrorist attacks around the globe for decades to come. That’s still a very real and very frightening possibility.

Sargent: The big takeaway from that is that his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, which is basically a threat to kill millions, is absolutely very much alive right now. Rosa Brooks, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Brooks: My pleasure.

Of the court’s two eldest members, it is considered unlikely that Justice Clarence Thomas will step down anytime soon. The 77-year-old justice has signaled both publicly and privately that he will not retire from the court while he can still work. In 1993, The New York Times reported that Thomas, who was fresh off his bruising confirmation battle at the time, planned to serve on the court until 2034. “The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and I’m going to make their lives miserable for 43 years,” he reportedly told a clerk.

Justice Samuel Alito, on the other hand, may be closer to retirement. CNN’s Joan Biskupic reported last December that Alito was “pondering” stepping down. It is well known that the 76-year-old justice’s wife, Martha-Ann, is eager for him to retire, as she acknowledged in a surreptitiously taped conversation at a Supreme Court event last year. Alito’s planned book release later this year, as well as his recent hospital visit for an unspecified health issue last month, also drew renewed attention to his potential return to private life after a victory lap of sorts.

If Alito retires this year, it would not significantly alter the court’s overall ideological balance. Trump would be swapping out one conservative justice for another. At the same time, installing a younger justice would further cement the conservative majority’s long-term grip on the Supreme Court by preventing a vacancy from opening up under a Democratic presidency, barring structural reforms and expansion. Otherwise, the continuation of the conservatives’ 6–3 majority could seriously frustrate liberals’ plans to enact a post-Trump agenda, even with a sizable congressional majority.

At the same time, Trump’s second-term Supreme Court nominee could be unlike anyone that he previously appointed to the high court. The Republican Party remains firmly in his grip, with GOP senators confirming a wide range of unqualified and controversial Cabinet officials and agency heads over the past year. Trump’s only failed Cabinet nomination wasn’t even a rebuke to Trump: Senate Republicans simply loathed former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, his first pick to be attorney general, on a personal level.

Though much of the conservative legal establishment’s agenda is now fused with Trumpism, the president may prove to be less deferential toward the movement’s stable of nominees than during his first term. Trump’s second term so far is characterized by rewarding personal sycophants with appointments to high office, demands for personal loyalty from nominees, and an expectation that Supreme Court justices in particular should be more deferential toward him.

Who could Trump nominate? During the 2016 campaign, Trump won over legal conservatives like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a bitter primary rival, by releasing a shortlist of conservative judges and lawyers that he would appoint to the Supreme Court if elected. By 2020, there was no shortlist because Trump’s appointments had proven his fidelity to the conservative legal movement. After 2024, however, Trump’s own personal interests are likely to be at the forefront of his mind.

Beyond their conservative bona fides, the most important quality will be youth. Gone are the days when presidents would nominate 60- or 70-year-olds to the nation’s highest court. Youth is a guarantee of longevity, which in turn promises both jurisprudential impact and ideological control. Trump’s first three choices were in their late forties or early fifties when nominated, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh marking the upper bound at 53 years old. A child born today can expect them to still be handing down rulings when he or she starts college.

Some of Trump appointees to the federal appeals courts could fit that bill. Judge James Ho, who serves on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, has been a reliably conservative vote on a reliably conservative court, though his past writings defending birthright citizenship might hurt his chances. He and two other Fifth Circuit Trump appointees, Andrew Oldham and Kyle Duncan, issued a panel opinion on mail-in ballots—a perennial Trump complaint—that some court watchers read as an audition for a Supreme Court vacancy. All three men are in their mid-fifties.

Trump’s first-term appellate court picks are the most likely source of future Supreme Court nominees. All three of his first-term picks served on appeals courts, and presidents from both parties tend to prefer them in the modern era. Some potential choices include the D.C. Circuit’s Judge Neomi Rao, a staunch supporter of the unitary executive and Trump’s war on regulatory agencies, or the Sixth Circuit’s Amul Thapar, who recently wrote a disturbing opinion that claimed that noncitizens did not possess constitutional rights.

Beyond more conventional conservative nominees, Trump could choose someone more unorthodox and inflammatory for a Supreme Court vacancy. Trump nominated the 49-year-old Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to a district court judgeship in northern Texas in 2019. From that perch, the judge became a favored venue for right-wing litigants seeking a guaranteed appearance before a friendly ear. In perhaps the most famous instance, Kacsmaryk struck down the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a popular abortion drug, only to be overturned on appeal by the Supreme Court.

If Trump wanted to install someone who shared his penchant for violating judicial norms, he might be inclined to choose Judge Lawrence VanDyke, whom he appointed to the Ninth Circuit in 2020. The American Bar Association urged senators not to confirm VanDyke during the confirmation process, describing him as “not qualified” and, in unusually hostile terms, as “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice including procedural rules.”

VanDyke has spent his brief judicial career proving his critics right by insulting litigants and his colleagues with bombastic, unprofessional dissents. In a 2022 opinion on California gun restrictions, he mocked other judges on the court by writing a concurring opinion to his own panel opinion that derided how he thought they would rule on the case. In another Second Amendment case, he claimed that his colleagues couldn’t understand the value of gun rights because they are surrounded by armed security at their “upper-middle-class homes.”

The most egregious example came last month when VanDyke dissented from a case involving transgender patrons at a Korean spa in Washington state. “This case is about swinging dicks,” he wrote in the opening line of his dissent, where he denounced “woke regulators and complicit judges” for imposing “Frankenstein social experiments” on “real women and young girls.” The crude, bigoted dissent drew rebukes from more than 25 other Ninth Circuit judges, including Democratic and Republican appointees alike. “We are better than this,” read one concurring opinion in its entirety.

Perhaps the only quality that Trump prizes more than trolling his foes, however, is personal loyalty. A Supreme Court vacancy would be a unique opportunity to reward judges and legal advisers who championed him in the courts. Trump’s Justice Department appointments during his second term reflect that mindset: Nearly all of the department’s top appointees worked as Trump’s personal lawyers at one point, and were duly rewarded for it with high-profile legal jobs.

Two potential nominees would fit that bill. One is Emil Bove, the Third Circuit judge who worked in the Trump Justice Department for roughly half of 2025. Bove is notorious for his role in two of the Trump administration’s biggest legal scandals to date. Shortly after Trump took office, he played a key role in the White House’s scheme to use a Biden-era corruption probe to coerce then–New York City Mayor Eric Adams into cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. A few months later, he reportedly helped deceive a federal judge about extralegal deportations to a gulag in El Salvador. Trump rewarded him with a lifetime federal judgeship of his own for his work.

Perhaps no federal judge has done more for Trump, however, than Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida. The district court judge received her current position on the bench from Trump in 2020, then played a key role in undermining the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Trump’s alleged theft of classified material and its illegal storage at Mar-a-Lago. Among Cannon’s favorable rulings for Trump were a decision that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was illegal and an order that barred Smith’s final investigative report from being released to the public.

In a more honorable age, neither Bove nor Cannon would be considered for elevation to the nation’s highest court. As long as Trump’s interests tilt toward harming his enemies and rewarding those who do his bidding, they are likely prospects for a Supreme Court vacancy, should one arise while Republicans still control the Senate. Trump’s own recent criticism of the specific justices who ruled against him on tariffs—and his lavish praise for those who sided with him—underscores the kind of qualities he seeks in an ideal Supreme Court justice. Expect more of the same—but much younger.

The case for superintelligence that OpenAI lays out in its white paper is a curious one. It is a technology as important as electricity and the internal combustion engine that will solve all of humanity’s problems—so long as we prevent it from destroying civilization. Access to AI will be a necessity for economic participation. It may also crater the economy if policymakers don’t work together with industry to stop that from happening. The overriding message is that an all-powerful, shadowy, poorly defined superintelligence is imminent. Be excited, beware, and take OpenAI’s advice. 

The company’s policy proposals include several items you might expect to find in the platform of a softly left-wing congressional candidate, such as higher capital gains and corporate income taxes, expanded social safety nets, a public wealth fund, a four-day workweek, and transition programs for workers displaced by AI. But as OpenAI and other companies advancing large language models, or LLMS, continue to pour millions of dollars into politics, it’s hard to imagine that their armies of lobbyists will pound the pavement for social democratic programs. Some suggestions seem more self-serving. A section on “The Right to AI” calls, somewhat ominously, for treating it as “foundational for participation in the modern economy,” expanding “affordable, reliable access to foundational models” and making “a baseline level of capability broadly available, including through free or low-cost access points.” These sound like nice, charitable things to do. At the same time, suggesting that AI is an economic necessity is also a very good way for Altman’s company to grow its base of paid subscribers. 

OpenAI’s “New Deal” doesn’t seem designed to enact these wildly ambitious policy proposals so much as to dare Democrats to stand in the way of progress. With data centers facing backlash around the country, and calls for a federal moratorium, national regulations to restrict hyperscalers’ expansion plans could soon become a real possibility. OpenAI takes for granted that its dreams of superintelligence are already coming true whether you like it or not; policymakers can either follow its suggestions for taking advantage of that, and mitigate the downsides, or deal with the rather grave-sounding consequences.

While recent reporting depicts Altman as personally unpleasant, he’s hardly the only AI developer to wax apocalyptic. His more integrity-pilled opponents, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, seem to share similarly whimsical ideas about the hell their thinking machines are capable of bringing about. At one point, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, the writers of the New Yorker article about Altman, report that Sutskever wrote an email to fellow higher-ups at OpenAI saying that the nonprofit was losing sight of its mission to prevent a “dictatorship” of Artificial General Intelligence—a mysterious “threshold at which machines match human cognitive capacities,” in Farrow and Marantz’s words. Altman has in recent years referred to AGI as “magic intelligence in the sky.” Once they create such magic, Sutskever feared, it might create a dictatorship.  

You don’t have to be especially skeptical about AI’s capabilities to find this kind of talk pretty silly. It’s not uncommon to hear Altman and his competitors talk openly about their fears that their products pose an “existential risk” to humanity; i.e., that “misaligned” AI will kill off human civilization as soon as the next few years. It should also be cause for concern that people who genuinely believe these millenarian fantasies—or at least think they make for clever marketing—now exercise almost exclusive control over what seem to be very powerful technologies. Anthropic announced today that it wasn’t widely releasing its new model, Mythos, because it is too good at finding “high-severity vulnerabilities” and exhibited a “potentially dangerous capability” for circumventing the company’s safeguards. As part of that announcement, Anthropic said it would share Mythos with only a handful of “select organizations,” Business Insider reports, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, and JPMorgan Chase. Whatever Mythos is actually capable of, it should be deeply troubling that a single firm can single-handedly decide to hand something it warns is the world’s most powerful hacker over to some of the world’s biggest companies. 

Whether or not AI executives actually believe they are building a new god, threats of superintelligence and roving hackbots function as bizarro marketing for companies facing increasingly broad pushback. This week, The Financial Times’ Rana Foroohar raised the question of whether AI is “the new fracking.” The column focused largely on mounting grassroots opposition to data center build-outs, but it’s a useful analogy for lots of other reasons. In the case of fracking, a heady mix of long-term government backing; high oil prices; low interest rates; patient, deep-pocketed investors; federal bailouts; and skilled salesmen helped turn what had been an established but prohibitively expensive drilling method into one of this century’s most transformative developments to date. Fracking fueled America’s recovery from the Great Recession, kneecapped its coal industry, and achieved domestic policymakers’ long-held goal of becoming a net exporter of oil and gas. 

LLMs are another massively capital-intensive business that has struggled with profitability and could be just as groundbreaking, with similarly abundant downsides. But as OpenAI’s “New Deal” proposal seems to acknowledge, it won’t be able to break things alone; it needs help from the federal government. The policy blueprint accordingly calls for “new public-private partnership models to finance and accelerate the expansion of energy infrastructure required to power AI,” expanding on OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project, to build out AI infrastructure. 

Portions of the policy brief’s case for this kind of collaboration between government and industry, including subsidies, read like missives from the past—specifically, the Biden administration. “In normal times, the case for letting markets work on their own is strong,” the brief states. “Capitalism, imperfect as it is, remains an effective system for translating human ingenuity into shared prosperity. But industrial policy can play an important role when market forces alone aren’t sufficient—when new technologies create opportunities and risks that existing institutions aren’t equipped to manage.” 

Fittingly, the target audience for OpenAI’s “New Deal” seems to be Democrats—and potentially even former Biden staffers and Cabinet members—who also like to talk this way. If they’re gullible enough to fall for OpenAI’s progressive slop, they might as well start paying Sam Altman to build bridges too.

It isn’t anything new for corporations to claim their businesses are important for national security, or to call for a stable regulatory environment of their own choosing. Most, though, don’t claim humanity will collapse if they don’t get it. 

Iran and the United States reached a ceasefire this week. It came after Trump threatened a “whole civilization will die tonight” as negotiations stalled. Trump’s bluster aside, journalist Ishaan Tharoor says that the president cut a deal from a weak position. Iran’s blockage of the Strait of Hormuz effectively forced the U.S. into  negotiations. Tharoor argues that the blockage of the strait and how it increased gas prices and caused political problems for Trump could be a model for Iran in the future. Iran may not even want to pursue a nuclear program, Tharoor says, if it can instead use access to the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of power. Tharoor also discussed the upcoming election in Hungary, which he said will be a major test of the global far right. Vice President JD Vance campaigned in Hungary for incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a Trump ally, on the eve of the election. 

To historians, at least, the answer appeared to be that few had been looking. Whereas the study of capitalism had once been the province of some of the profession’s most celebrated practitioners (including Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, to name two), several observers have argued that things shifted in the 1980s. In the outside world, avowedly capitalist politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were on the rise and the Soviet project was collapsing; within the academy, poststructuralism, literary theory, and the so-called “cultural turn” turned would-be scholars of capitalism away from the old study of structures and firms. “At the very time when multinational corporations were reshaping the global economy and nations were embracing neoliberal policies,” the business historian Kenneth Lipartito has written, “the economic found scant space in historical writing.”

The financial crisis changed all that. Newly visible and vulnerable to critique, capitalism once again found its chroniclers. In the United States, a class of scholars began writing what has come to be called “the new history of capitalism” in now-classic works like Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, which linked slavery and empire to the present economic order. An ocean away, a French economist named Thomas Piketty marshaled centuries of data to argue that unchecked capital accumulation invariably yields inequality, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an academic doorstopper that became an unexpected bestseller. Subsequent works convincingly yoked capitalism to the origins of global warming (Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital), the erosion of democracy (Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy), and the surveillance state (Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).

Today, almost a full generation after the turbulence of 2008 and all the scholarship that emerged in its wake, a new cohort of truly massive texts is hitting shelves and straining eyes, synthesizing so much of the literature, old and new. Late last year, Beckert—one of the deans of the field—released Capitalism: A Global History, a formidable, nearly 1,100-page brick of a book, drawing on archival collections from six continents. Beckert’s tome arrived just months after Capitalism and Its Critics, a 624-page contribution from the journalist John Cassidy, narrating the history of capitalism through the lives and works of its strongest detractors. These books, in turn, joined newly released editions of classic syntheses, like Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (640 pages) and a new translation of Marx’s Capital itself (944 pages).

The latest of these grand narratives of economic history is The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World by Trevor Jackson, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley (and a trenchant contributor to the New York Review of Books—his recent pan of Abundance, in particular, is worth reading). Like Beckert and Cassidy, Jackson is a lucid and engaging writer, demonstrating a mastery of this fast-growing field. But unlike his fellow synthesists, Jackson has produced a book that is positively svelte—just over 300 pages.

What truly sets The Insatiable Machine apart from a crowded field, however, is the incisiveness of Jackson’s analysis. Wry, knowing, and with little patience for too-neat explanations or just-so bromides, Jackson darts nimbly from epoch to epoch, crisis to crisis, bringing sense and satisfaction to some five centuries of history. To Jackson, capitalism is neither destiny nor certain doom. Instead, it is “a kind of machine,” obeying “dumb, inhuman logic,” incapable of disregarding the command to expand, even at the risk of consuming the entire planet. Over half a millennium, the operation of this machine has enabled an undeniable, immense increase in average living standards, yet it has done so by burning through countless lives and ways of living and trillions of tons of carbon.

“The world I live in will be destroyed within my lifetime,” Jackson writes. “The question of what kind of world will follow is entirely a question of whether we all manage to kill capitalism or it kills us first.”

There is, of course, the thorny underlying question: What is capitalism? At the macro level, it is an economic system in which, Jackson writes, “individuals can buy and sell the things that produce all other things”—that is, land, labor, machinery, etc.: what Marx and Engels famously called the “means of production.” At the individual level, capitalism is not merely the pursuit of profit but rather the reinvestment of profits in pursuit of ever greater profits. It’s about using “money in order to turn it into more money,” as the historian Steven Stoll put it in his 2017 book Ramp Hollow. In other words, capitalism is not commerce, not the kinds of exchange that have existed since time immemorial; capitalism is growth, relentless, limitless growth.

“It wasn’t always this way,” Jackson opens The Insatiable Machine. In the early 1500s, capitalism as such did not yet exist. Most of the world’s inhabitants were rural, agricultural workers; poverty was severe but stable; unfree labor was common but rarely permanent or heritable; wage-work was atypical; trade was mostly small-scale; communities functioned on “mutual indebtedness,” as “many people seldom used money at all”; the market was “a literal, physical space.” There was significant inequality within societies but relative equality among societies. Even as late as the early 1800s, Jackson notes, Britain and the Netherlands (the world’s richest countries) were just three to five times richer than the world’s poorest countries: “Today the gap is more than a hundred to one.”

Everything began to change during what schoolchildren now euphemistically call the “Age of Exploration.” European sailors ventured west and south, founding colonies and commencing the extraction of first gold and then silver via various forms of free and unfree labor. All of this new metal started circulating globally, which led to a worldwide monetary system based on Spanish silver, the consequent standardization of currency, an increase in global trade, and recurrent cycles of inflation and deflation. As prices rose, many began abandoning traditional subsistence lifestyles and tentatively entering “the market,” bartering away their labor on rest days to pocket some “extra cash.” A new class of merchants benefited immensely, winning money and influence in the New World mining economy and seizing power in increasingly autonomous New World colonies.

By this point—the early seventeenth century—the merchants were capitalists, but neither the era nor the state was yet capitalist, Jackson argues. He compares the situation to the modern U.S., in which there are certainly communists and anarchists but not communism or anarchism.

The money that emerged from colonial mines was a precondition for the global spread of capitalism (and also for wars of conquest), but it was banks, corporations, and the stock market that “solidified and expanded capitalism.” Such innovations originated in the Netherlands, a state unusual within Europe for its highly capitalized farms and the big cities that the export of agriculture enabled, and matured in England, which carried primitive capitalist institutions to its swelling sac of colonies.

New forms of labor emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the burgeoning European capitalist class enclosed farmlands that had once been held in common, displaced agricultural laborers decamped for the cities or for the New World, where many began working for the promise of land. When these laborers proved insufficient to facilitate the desired degree of colonial expansion, the capitalists began relying on slavery—which transformed into a racialized, fixed, and heritable system. This development escalated the seizure of Indigenous lands and led to the creation of massive, monoculture plantations, further alienating people from traditional models of farming.

Slavery soon became “the engine that powered the entire Atlantic capitalist system,” and not without contestation, Jackson argues. Indeed, the first New World slave revolt was launched by Muslims from Senegambia brought to sugar plantations on Hispaniola, “which alerts us to the fact that Muslims were in the New World not only before English Protestantism but before the existence of Protestantism itself.” Such uprisings terrified the capitalists. Late in the 1600s, as colonial officials and plantation owners began to fear that white settlers and indentured laborers might ally with free and enslaved Africans, they created slave codes that designated Black people—and Black people alone—as chattel. “For this reason,” Jackson notes, “some scholars argue that capitalism itself invented modern racism.”

As the European imperial powers—soon joined by the fast-growing United States—claimed more and more of the globe, they took the tactic of enclosure with them, turning former common lands into “private property.” Displaced farmers cast about for other ways to support themselves, and the ranks of those doing labor in exchange for wages (a historically novel arrangement) swelled. So did the workdays. According to one estimate cited by Jackson, medieval peasants worked 150 days per year, while the average laborer in 1800 worked more than 300 days per year; workdays grew from four or six hours (outside of harvest or planting seasons) to 10 or 12 hours. One reason for this sea change—what Akira Hayami and Jan de Vries have labeled the “industrious revolution”—was coercion, with an increasingly muscular state compelling commoners to abandon ancestral fishing, forestry, and grazing rights for work in the fast-growing cities. Another was that people needed money to be able to purchase all the new consumer goods on the market.

“Wage labor was a weird thing to invent,” Jackson writes, “but it became the global norm, and it still is today.” Hence the decidedly uncomfortable system under which workers are free to quit their jobs but not free enough “to not sell their labor for wages,” the specter of poverty generally being sufficient to compel us into grinding, undemocratic acquiescence. “That strange and anxious condition of being both free and not is the distinctive experience of life under capitalism.”

Late in the eighteenth century, a great many of the new wageworkers arrived at their terminal workplace: the factory. This was the dawn of the industrial revolution, the inflection point in the history of capitalism. Instead of one skilled shoemaker making one pair of shoes per day, Jackson notes, suddenly there was “an underpaid teenager run[ning] a conveyor belt powered by fossil fuels, continually producing thousands of shoes every day.” And not just teenagers: children as young as 5 years old began working in the mines or the mills.

The factory owners, seeking the ability to easily fire troublesome workers, jettisoned older labor models like apprenticeships, indentured servitude, or bondage. Paradoxically, however, such freedom cost workers their autonomy, as artisans and farmers and proprietors of household manufactories were shoved en masse into routinized, boss-surveilled jobs. “People hated it,” Jackson writes. They resisted, most flamboyantly by breaking machines, a practice immortalized in mythic figures like Ned Ludd and Captain Swing.

The factories kept producing, and their output was truly revolutionary. By the 1830s, Jackson notes, a single spinning mill could produce enough thread in one 12-hour shift to circumnavigate the earth twice. The sheer profusion of stuff, and the speed with which it was fabricated, and the increasing distances it could travel, enabled tremendous advances in consumption and nutrition. As a result, the planet’s population has ballooned from about one billion people in 1800 to more than eight billion today—“most of them living longer, healthier, richer lives than the one billion did.”

But the industrial revolution also reoriented our species’s relationship to the earth. Human population centers encroached on more and more land and habitat and became cloaked in suffocating smoke, saturated with stinking effluent, and assaulted by black snow and “acid rain,” a term coined in Manchester in 1872. Perhaps most pivotally, the industrial revolution entailed the widespread adoption of fossil fuels, which led directly to the present climate crisis.

It cannot be said—as The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus recently did of Beckert’s new history of capitalism—that Jackson “minimizes the role of technology.” He fluidly covers the advances in coal and steam power that enabled industrialization; such advances were themselves responsive to widespread deforestation in England, which had reduced the utility of wood as a fuel source. Yet he also notes the consequences of technological innovation. “Coal did not mean the end of deforestation,” Jackson observes, “but rather its intensification.”

By the second half of the nineteenth century, he continues, capitalism had become “the dominant form of economic life on the planet.” The machine, never sated, whirred even faster. The corporations and factories grew bigger and more complex, with management and workers increasingly separated from ownership; the most powerful capitalist states (Britain, the United States, Japan) became even more so, with much of the world (especially below the equator) becoming a site of extraction of labor and raw materials. The logic of the market now demanded growth for the sake of growth, which, the essayist Edward Abbey once wrote, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Resistance likewise metastasized. The workers grew more combative, as strikes proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century (Jackson notes French mass strikes in 1890, 1899, 1900, 1904, and 1906), and states dispatched armed forces to battle the unionized workers in the streets. Anarchists bombed Wall Street and assassinated the Russian tsar, the French president, the Spanish prime minister, and U.S. President William McKinley. For decades, Jackson notes, “elites feared anarchist violence more than socialist revolution, and certainly more than they fear terrorism today.”

Still, the revolutionaries were on the march, and anti-capitalists overthrew the government of Russia in 1917, later followed by Mongolia, China, and several states in the Balkans. Similar attempts almost succeeded in Germany, Hungary, and many other countries. “Between 1917 and 1933, capitalism faced its greatest crisis and came the closest it ever has to being destroyed,” Jackson writes. Indeed, at the start of the 1920s, “it appeared very likely that some form of communism or socialism would spread throughout Europe and perhaps the world.”

The capitalists struck back. The Americans, Japanese, and several European nations sent troops to contain (and seek to bring down) the new Soviet state, and many of these countries embarked on domestic “red scares” to crush left-wing organizations and parties. Jackson echoes canonical Marxist analyses in situating the rise of Hitler in 1933 within a broader global crackdown against anti-capitalist forces. (In brief, scholars from Trotsky to Mandel have argued that the Nazis in Germany were not unique but rather were one manifestation of a worldwide offensive against revolutionary and workers’ movements that had arisen from the dislocation of World War I and the Depression. The Nazis “came for the Communists” before they came for other groups, as Martin Niemöller famously wrote, as did the fascists in Italy, the militarists in Japan, the red-baiters in the United States, and European imperialists across the colonized world.)

And then, abruptly, The Insatiable Machine ends. Because “there has never again been a serious, credible threat that global capitalism would be overthrown and replaced by another economic system,” Jackson’s history concludes there. Indeed, even his foray into the twentieth century is a very brief one: The Cold War, the modern military-industrial complex, neoliberalism, and the internet are all absent. Such framing necessarily leaves unexplored what many have taken to calling capitalism’s “late” stage, an era of permanent and ubiquitous crisis and the accelerating commodification of just about everything. This is, obviously, Jackson’s prerogative, and it’s hardly fair to critique a book by asking for it to be a different book. But The Insatiable Machine is the rare volume that could stand to be 50 or even 100 pages longer.

On November 4, 2008—the day before Queen Elizabeth visited LSE—Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election. Famously, his campaign had promised “change”—but not, of course, the kind of fundamental change that Jackson rightly describes as unimaginable for most of the last century. “I believe that our free market has been the engine of America’s great progress,” Obama declared weeks before the election. “But the American economy has worked in large part because we have guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle,” which is to say, mild governmental regulation.

To many observers, Obama’s victory seemed to mark the realization of what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama had called the “end of history”—that is, the permanent triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over its competitors. With McDonalds populating the former Soviet Union, and with the arrival of the Olympics to Beijing heralding international cooperation in and from China (that Games’s motto: “One World, One Dream”), the future of capitalism seemed bright.

Things haven’t quite worked out that way. In the United States, a rapidly shrinking share of the populace views capitalism favorably, while young people prefer socialism by a widening margin. Such trends have analogues around the world, and a loss of faith in the prevailing economic order appears to have contributed to the global rise of far-right movements. Capitalism has thus far proven unable to meaningfully slow, much less reverse, global warming, and indeed about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humans since the dawn of the industrial revolution has been produced since 2008 alone. Capitalism has long promised dynamism and innovation, but a recent report in Nature suggests that “progress is slowing in several major fields,” while the only apparent technological paradigm shift since 2008—the rise of generative AI—could constitute one-seventh of all carbon dioxide emissions by 2040 and, in any event, sure looks like a bubble. Alarmingly, much of the U.S. economy now depends on that bubble not bursting anytime soon.

“Even a cursory look at the world around us gives the clear impression that things can’t stay this way forever,” Jackson writes early in The Insatiable Machine. “An economy predicated on infinite accumulation, mass consumption, and fossil-fueled industrialization is not reconcilable with a finite planet.”

His project, therefore, is to make clear that the world wasn’t always this way, and to thereby help readers imagine a different world. Remarkably, given the bleakness of the foregoing account, Jackson appears to retain hope in the power of history: “Learning that nothing about the world around us is natural, permanent, or inevitable” is “a radical, emancipatory, imaginative act.” Capitalism is, after all, a relatively recent invention; it can yet be transformed, perhaps even unmade.

The same is true at the other end of the income distribution: The rich too are always with us. As with the poor, the question is what to do about that. A new book by the Northwestern law professor John O. McGinnis says what we should do is feel grateful. His title says it all: Why Democracy Needs the Rich.

McGinnis starts from the premise that liberals and the left expect to wipe rich people off the face of the earth. After all, didn’t Bernie Sanders say that every billionaire represented a “policy failure”? Actually, he didn’t. What he said was, “Billionaires should not exist,” as the first footnote in McGinnis’s book documents. You can call that a distinction without much difference, but bungling a quotation in your book’s second sentence does not establish credibility with your readers.

I don’t expect, nor particularly desire, to wipe rich people (nor any demographic group) off the face of the earth. But like Sanders, I recognize that the rapid proliferation of billionaires in recent years is a serious problem. Three decades ago, the United States housed a relatively manageable 129 billionaires. Today we have nearly 2,000. Since the start of the twenty-first century, billionaires increased their collective wealth ninefold, even as the bottom half of the income distribution increased its collective wealth a mere twofold. What liberals and the left desire is to reverse this upward economic distribution. Let me say that again. We need to stop distributing income and wealth upward from the middle class to the rich.

This is no pipe dream. Capitalism managed it before. During the half-century following the Great Depression, incomes grew more equal, or at worst didn’t grow more unequal, and the economy boomed. But starting in the late 1970s, that trend reversed, and ever since, incomes and wealth have grown steadily less equal. Worker productivity and wages used to rise in tandem; today they do not. (I wrote a book about all this.)

McGinnis quibbles half-heartedly with Thomas Piketty’s research on growing wealth concentration, but in the end he concedes that, yes, it’s happening. He’s more or less OK with that, because “the wealth of the richest has just grown alongside the wealth of the nation.” John D. Rockefeller, the richest American in his day, possessed wealth equivalent to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product; Elon Musk, the richest American in our day, possesses wealth equivalent to a comparable 1.6 percent of GDP. But let me remind you that GDP today is more than 30 times larger than it was in Rockefeller’s day. You might as well compare a hummingbird to Olivier Rioux. In Rockefeller’s case, it’s conceivable (though still unlikely) that the robber baron contributed to GDP an amount that approached what he extracted. In Musk’s case, that’s flat-out impossible.

McGinnis doesn’t begrudge the rich their growing influence because he thinks they’re smarter about economic growth:

Most voters have little incentive to form responsible views because their individual votes are unlikely to make a difference in an election’s outcome.… For the wealthy, predicting consequences is central to their identity. Successful people, whether forecasting market trends or anticipating regulatory impacts, spend their lives sharpening their predictive abilities.

McGinnis might have titled his book The Rich Are Just Better Than You. They “possess more knowledge about regulations.” They “have higher IQs.” They “possess the resources and networks to challenge popular opinion.” They “inspire others to participate in the American tradition of commercial enterprise and self-reliance, fostering a culture of ambition and innovation.” We haven’t witnessed this much fawning over the rich since the 1980s heyday of George Gilder and Robin Leach. And if McGinnis is to be believed, today’s rich “are likely more beneficial than ever.”

In McGinnis’s view, the rich provide a necessary counterbalance to the chattering class (journalists, intellectuals, entertainers); the administrative state; and what, in a throwback to James Burnham, he refers to as the “corporate managerial class,” a group that long ago ceased exercising power independent of Wall Street. Compared to these groups, McGinnis says, the rich have more diverse views. That will be news to Beth Reinhard of The Washington Post, who surveyed the 100 richest Americans (so designated by Forbes) and found that in 2024 more than 80 percent of their money went to Republicans. The rich, per McGinnis, also counterbalance “special interests”—by which he mostly means environmentalists who want to curb the planet-destroying tendencies of the fossil fuel economy and labor unions who want to give working-class Americans more wealth.

Perhaps the most distasteful passage in McGinnis’s book is the following wet kiss to Elon Musk:

Musk’s standing [with President Donald Trump] as a political adviser was rooted not primarily in his wealth, given that Trump has a lot of wealthy people from whom to choose advisers. Instead, it came from his unmatched reputation as an upender of the status quo.… [Musk’s] authority arises not primarily from his fortune but from his embodiment of values that many Americans hold dear: boldness, ambition, and innovation.

Oh, please. Musk gave more than $291 million to Republicans in 2024. That’s almost $100 million more than the second-biggest Republican donor, Timothy Mellon. Trump didn’t even like Musk; Musk bought his way into Trump’s (temporary) good graces. As for Musk embodying cherished American values, the man’s favorability rating was underwater even before he joined the White House. Earlier this month, Musk finished dead last in a Gallup poll on the favorability of 14 world leaders, with a 61 percent majority saying they didn’t care for him.

Is the influence on democracy of the rich uniformly terrible? Of course not. The rich fund philanthropies. The few that favor liberal politics bankroll liberal publications like this one and liberal organizations like the Center for American Progress. But there aren’t very many rich liberals, which is why (in addition to antisemitism) conservatives direct so much hatred toward George Soros. Although the economic activity that rich people generate creates wealth for others, it’s nowhere near so much as they would have you believe, especially in an epoch when the brass ring goes to the guy who scores the biggest return on the smallest payroll. The reigning champ at the moment is Matthew Gallagher, who through creative use of AI is this year generating $1.8 billion in weight-loss-drug sales with exactly two employees, himself, and his brother Elliot.

McGinnis says AI will make Americans appreciate the rich by creating even more wealth. (It goes without saying that he thinks “direct government regulation is likely to do more harm than good.”) But in a world of Matthew Gallaghers, how do the rest of us get a piece? We’ve seen this movie before. Over the past half-century, vast fortunes were created without improving the economic circumstances of the middle class or the poor. Even conservatives have given up reassuring the masses that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Among the few redeeming qualities the wealthy used to possess was that they never asked the public to love them. But in this narcissistic era, vast wealth isn’t enough; the rich also want to be adored. McGinnis is willing to oblige, but I don’t think he’ll create many converts to this cause.

Since early last year, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been methodically disassembling the ability of the Pentagon to say no to orders that are illegal or immoral. This is made worse by the fact that both Trump and Hegseth have made it clear that they regard war crimes as a necessary and proper part of the “warrior” ethos.

During his first term, Trump pardoned a pair of Army officers convicted of war crimes and ordered the promotion of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who was acquitted despite posing with the body of a teen he had killed. Gallagher’s own teammates accused him of sniping women and children in Iraq. Trump celebrated all of them, seeing nothing wrong in what they had done. This was indicative of how he would approach his second term in office.

One of the first acts of the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon was to purge the military of its top lawyers (also known as JAGs, or judge advocate generals). JAGs perform the critical function of assessing the legality of anything done within the military. One piece at The Atlantic correctly described them as the “conscience” of the military.

They also dismissed the Joint Chiefs chairman, the chief of naval operations, and Air Force vice chief. At the time, Hegseth told reporters that all these senior military officers were removed because he didn’t want them to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The clear goal was to remove anyone who might raise ethical objections to anything the military was ordered to do by the administration.

At the time, people of course understood the danger this posed and knew that this was a giant red flag. During his first term, Trump called Gallagher a “great warrior.” Gallagher’s teammates called him “toxic,” “okay with killing anything that moved,” and “freakin’ evil.” Hegseth had similar views and advocated for the pardon of service members accused or convicted of war crimes, presenting them as warriors who were unjustly treated by military bureaucracy.

Hegseth has long agitated against Rules of Engagement, calling them “stupid,” “politically correct,” and “overbearing.” He has advocated for “maximum lethality” and argued that such rules hinder American warfighters. He said that his intent was to “untie the hands of our warfighters.” In reality, ROEs are there to limit civilian casualties and prevent war crimes. During counterinsurgency, or COIN, operations, preventing civilian casualties is one of the most important goals, which demonstrates that he failed to grasp the bigger picture.

Since the initial firings, Hegseth has continued to dismiss anyone who has moral reservations or pushes back against orders they consider immoral or illegal. Admiral Alvin Holsey was the commander of U.S. Southern Command. In the interest of full disclosure, I served with Holsey from 1999 until 2002 in a helicopter strike squadron based in Mayport, Florida. Holsey was a serious, direct, no nonsense, by-the-book, straight shooter when I served with him. He abruptly retired in December 2025, only one year into his new assignment. It was reportedly over a disagreement with Hegseth over the legality and morality of airstrikes on unarmed vessels accused of being drug smugglers.

More recently, Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George after George refused to remove female and Black troops from promotion lists. Hegseth also fired Chief of the Chaplain Corps Maj. Gen. William Green, reportedly for his views on the role of chaplains, and Gen. David Hodne from the Transformation and Training Command, or T2COM. These moves are unprecedented in the middle of the largest conflict the United States has faced in 20 years.

I spoke off the record with people close to senior members of the military who remain. They expressed despair over the situation: The common refrain was that while they are tempted to quit, to do so will hurt the ability to protect American lives in the field. They also see the situation as hopeless: If they leave, they will just be replaced with someone even more eager to do the administration’s bidding regardless of legality or wisdom.

Which brings us to today: The United States launched a war with Iran that it cannot effectively finish. Iran has control of the Strait of Hormuz and is limiting who gets through to those who will pay the toll. Traffic is down by 93 percent, and Asian economies are critically dependent on oil and other goods from the Middle East. The global economy is currently in Wile E. Coyote mode: It has already run off the edge of the cliff but hasn’t started falling, much less achieved terminal velocity downward.

Trump and Hegseth never had a great plan to begin with other than “Bomb Iran, and maybe something good will happen.” They’re caught in a Chinese finger trap lined with spikes. This is causing the sort of escalation spiral that the U.S. encountered in Vietnam, where policymakers kept thinking that if they just persisted in turning up the pressure and dropping more bombs on new targets, eventually North Vietnam would bow out.

It never worked.

When the Vietnam War ended in 1973, U.S. concessions included removing almost all troops from South Vietnam permanently. North Vietnam knew that this would allow them to reconstitute their forces and finish conquering the south later, which they did in 1975. Similarly, Iran’s demands include permanent control of the Strait of Hormuz and removal of U.S. troops and bases from the region.

Now Trump is threatening to destroy Iran’s electrical system, a move whose legality rests on dual-use arguments. While militaries have a right to target “dual-use” facilities (like a bridge used by both the military and civilians) if they offer a “definite military advantage,” these attacks are war crimes if they cause disproportionate civilian harm. Legal scholars have long recognized dual-use arguments potentially create a slippery slope to causing civilian suffering and casualties bordering on war crimes.

The problem is that destroying Iran’s electrical grid is unlikely to cause it to bend the knee and open the strait. The U.S. destroyed over 80 percent of North Vietnam’s electrical generation capacity, especially during Operation Linebacker II. North Vietnam compensated by decentralizing electrical capacity and relying on generators. Ultimately, destroying that capacity did little to bring terms favorable to the U.S. While six weeks of war pales in comparison with the 10 years the U.S. spent in Vietnam, the conflict in Iran was unpopular from the start. It has only grown more so as the public pays higher prices and Trump increasingly makes apocalyptic threats.

Iran’s electrical grid is heavily decentralized, and unlikely to collapse without knocking out all the plants. Additionally, public ownership of small generators is relatively common. As a result, I do not see destruction of electrical infrastructure causing Iran to capitulate.

This will leave Trump and Hegseth with four options: Accept a humiliating ceasefire deal, destroy Iran’s water infrastructure, use tactical nuclear weapons, or launch a full ground invasion. There’s little chance Trump would accept the first because it makes him look weak. Trump’s fear of nuclear escalation as it pertains to Russia suggests he won’t use nuclear weapons. A full-blown invasion of Iran would require reinstating the draft and committing to years and years of bloody, unpopular war.

This leaves destroying water infrastructure as the last lever left available to the Trump administration to avoid a humiliating defeat if destroying the electrical grid fails to achieve the desired results. While destroying the electrical grid will result in some civilian casualties, depriving the country of water is likely to cause mass death in the millions, governmental collapse, and a refugee crisis unlike anything the world has seen in modern times. Iran is already teetering on the brink of disaster with its water supply: Destroying dams and desalination plants would almost certainly push it over the edge.

This is a long and winding story that has led to the moment where Trump and Hegseth are being pushed by their own hubris to win a war they started via means that are the only way left to do it without a land invasion. Neither of them regards anything short of nuclear or chemical weapons as a war crime, and their treatment of Eddie Gallagher demonstrates they could not care less how many civilians they kill on a whim. They systematically removed anyone from the military who might tell them “no.”  

Americans may not just be remembered for electing a felon in 2024, or a demagogue or the best friend of a child rapist. They may be remembered for electing a mass-murdering regime that telegraphed its intent for years.

Perry Bacon: So now we have this two-week ceasefire. Talk about your immediate reactions to it.

Ishaan Tharoor: Look, we began this week with this sense of looming escalation. Trump vowed, in various ways, to really punish Iran for its closure of the Strait of Hormuz. He vowed to destroy a civilization, which some people read as an implicit nuclear threat. There was this question of: Is this a game of brinkmanship that’s just incredibly deranged, or is this the prelude to a more worrying escalation?

It does seem quite clear, from the reporting we’re seeing out of the White House, that Trump is not happy with the way this conflict is going, that there is a lot of internal dissension in MAGA over what’s happened and over the seeming inefficacy of this conflict, the blowback economically we’re seeing around the world, the huge extravagant expenditure that we’ve already seen because of the war. So this is an off-ramp that Trump has got for himself.

He has, in various ways, claimed victory. He’s cast what has happened as regime change, even though there’s no actual regime change. He and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have been touting the astonishing, tremendous tactical military successes they’ve had over the Iranian regime. But none of that seems to have really moved the needle the way in which they thought it would going into this five weeks ago. And now we have this two-week pause where there’s going to be some kind of process of negotiations led by a curious interlocutor.

I don’t think before this conflict we would have thought about Pakistan as a natural intermediary in this situation. But it’s really stepped up in a curious way, and it’s an interesting story there. These negotiations, led presumably by the Pakistanis, are going to take place. We don’t know how well they’re going to go. There are already ... big gaps, even in the readouts that we got from the Iranians and from Trump and the White House. There are significant gaps in what we’re talking about here. The Iranians have, in their supposed 10-point plan that has been given to Trump—I’ve not seen the actual document, but in reports about it—a suggestion that the Iranians want to reserve the right to enrich uranium for a nuclear program.

Trump has already made resoundingly clear that he does not want any enrichment possible in Iran. I don’t know how possible that will be. There are a whole bunch of other points on which they’re going to disagree. The Iranians want to see a full withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the Middle East. They want to see reparations for the war damage the U.S. and Israel have caused. They want to see a whole bunch of other things that I can’t imagine Trump necessarily giving, although what will probably be in discussion—if there are meaningful discussions—will be sanctions relief for the Iranians.

What is not on the table is regime change. What is not on the table is a sense that this war was a prelude to a major reconfiguration when it comes to the sort of security order in the Middle East, or the political dispensation in Tehran. They’ve killed an older Khomeini and a younger one has replaced him. The Revolutionary Guards are as entrenched and consolidated as they have been.

You can find a lot of Iranian dissidents and supporters of Iran’s democracy movement abroad tearing their hair out over what’s happened, because they’ve seen their country really pummeled. They’ve seen civilians get killed; they’ve seen universities get shut down. The famous synagogue in Tehran has been destroyed or badly damaged. UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Isfahan and other places have been damaged. The Iranians have received what’s happened not as an attack on the regime, but as an attack on Iran. Then you have Trump going off on his desire to destroy Iran as a civilization, which is just completely unhinged rhetoric. We get numb to the things that he says, but we can’t be numb to that. So yeah, that’s a kind of long-winded opening here.

Bacon:. Talk about Israel’s role in this. Where does Israel go from here?

Tharoor: Israel is right now pummeling Lebanon, still. This is another one of the gaps in the ... readouts that we got. The Iranians said that a truce with Hezbollah and over Lebanon was part of the agreement. That’s clearly not something the Israelis have agreed to, and while they apparently have agreed to a ceasefire with Iran, they have not agreed to a ceasefire when it comes to their very widespread actions in Lebanon. There’s still a prospect of an invasion of southern Lebanon to dislodge Hezbollah, and you’ve seen really horrifying scenes today in the southern suburbs of Beirut—apartment buildings destroyed, civilians killed. Real damage. There’s a lot to unpack there, but for the Israelis—we’re going to be spending some time picking through the winners and losers of these past five weeks for the Israelis and the Americans, and we have the reporting that suggests the Israelis really goaded Trump into this action, or laid the kindling for this to explode.

They have wanted to do what they’re doing for a long time, especially Prime Minister Netanyahu. We’re seeing that, as far as they’re concerned ... they are “mowing the grass,” in they’re very chilling euphemism that’s always deployed. They see security threats, terror threats, in these various parts of the Middle East around them, and they feel they have the agency and the capacity to just cut them down once in a while. They’re fully aware that those threats are going to grow back up again. They don’t really care about political solutions, but they have security tools to give themselves a sense of protection. That means bombing these places, including heavily populated civilian areas in Syria, in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in Iran. That’s what the Israelis are doing.

I don’t think they’re necessarily happy with the way in which the ceasefire has been brokered—not necessarily with them at the table—but I don’t think you get the Israelis and the Iranians at the table together. There is a sense that there is a divergence between where the White House is now and where Israel is right now, and you’re not necessarily going to get much more enthusiasm from the White House to keep on the kind of tempo that has been in place since this conflict began.

Bacon: What’s the divergence?

Tharoor: The divergence is that Trump desperately wants an off-ramp.

Bacon: I see.

Tharoor: And Netanyahu is fine to just carry on his decapitation strikes. Their intelligence services are all over Iran. They’re going to keep on picking off these various ranks of the regime. Or at least they could. And they also see in the Middle East a range of Iran-linked proxy groups who need to be dealt with.

They have frustrations with what’s in Iraq, frustrations with the Houthis in Yemen, they obviously see themselves locked in an existential conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon—although Hezbollah has been severely degraded since October 7, 2023. We’ll see as these negotiations go along how meaningful they are, what concessions the U.S. makes to Iran—those are going to be points of friction with the Israelis as well. Because the question is: What will the Americans concede to Iran?

Right now we have a status quo where the Iranians could rebuild quite easily. It’s not hard for them to amass more cheap drones. It’s not hard for them to assemble the stockpiles of ballistic missiles that were such a problem for Netanyahu and many politicians in Washington, and that we’ve seen deployed in the last five weeks.

The most crucial thing we’ve learned from this conflict—not just us, but the Iranian regime [as well]—is that for all these years, this talk about their nuclear capacity, their potential threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon, has structured everyone’s strategic thinking about Iran. And for the Iranians, they’ve always denied that they wanted to have one. There was a fatwa put out by Khomeini saying we’re not interested in nuclear weapons. But the prospect of being able to move towards one was always an element of their deterrence.

Now they have discovered—thanks to Trump and thanks to Israel provoking them into doing this through the war—that there’s another deterrent they have. They never exercised it before and they can do it, which is Hormuz. And that deterrent is probably more enticing for them than the prospect of rebuilding a nuclear program and actually weaponizing whatever nuclear capacity they have, because it’s logistically easier. There’s not this whole regime of inspections you have to worry about. You can just say, OK, we’re going to shut down the Strait, and they’ve done it. Now, we’ll see.

They seem to be saying that they’re only going to reopen the Strait—or allow the Strait to be reopened—in coordination with their military. There’s a suggestion that they’re going to try to set up a kind of toll booth. So Iran, sitting in the cold light of day—yes, Iran has been battered, there’s been a lot of civilian suffering that we don’t understand the full scale of. But now you can argue that they are actually strategically in a stronger position than they were going into this conflict.

Bacon: From Trump’s perspective ... I guess they’re going to start claiming regime change in the sense that they killed off the leaders before. Are we going to be debating what the meaning of regime change is, and they’re going to have a definition that you and I don’t agree with? Or are they conceding that the regime did not change?

Tharoor: I think they’re trying to save face. As far as we can tell, there’s no meaningful regime change in Iran. I think the regime change that Trump was hoping for was the thing that everyone’s pointed to in Venezuela, where they’ve removed Maduro, and they’ve brought in Delcy Rodríguez who is a total Maduro apparatchik but has functioned essentially as a kind of client of the U.S.

They genuinely believed that they could find a version of this within the Iranian regime. And that’s not been something that they’ve been able to figure out, and it’s not something that they will be able to figure out, as far as I can tell.

There’s a lot of confusion coming out of the White House about what their actual vision of this was—probably because it wasn’t a very clear vision. They don’t think that strategically. Now ... they’ll try to focus the messaging of victory around the military tactical successes, of which there were plenty, given the sheer superiority of the U.S. arsenal and capabilities.

But especially if these negotiations don’t go well—which they very well may not, these things collapse in a number of days, and then we may be back to where we were before—I don’t think they can, with a straight face, tell anybody there’s been regime change. Beyond their most ardent supporters, who would believe that?

Bacon: You alluded, I think, to—I take it you read The New York Times’s [Maggie] Haberman and Jonathan Swan [piece] about how the war started. You alluded to that a little bit.

Tharoor: Yeah, I don’t have a complete memory of what the piece said—one reads so much in the past 48 hours. But yeah, Netanyahu shows up, Barnea shows up. These are people who understand the U.S. system very well, who have—

Bacon: Let me follow up with one thing about that. In the piece, that idea that the Strait would be blocked—according to the story, JD Vance, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and Marco Rubio all said that would happen, and Trump ignored them.

I’m curious if you buy that. It feels like they’ve been surprised by Iran closing the Strait, but on some level the story hints that everybody knew except for Trump. I don’t know if you buy it or not. I’m curious what you think.

Tharoor: It seems like a story where there are a bunch of people leaking who are trying to cover their ass that are genuinely pissed off about this. But frankly, it was a pretty obvious outcome. I don’t think it takes great foresight to see that this would happen.

I wrote a piece last week on the parallels with the Suez Crisis in 1956, when the British and French, in conjunction with the Israelis, invade Egypt—let’s not do the whole history—but they invade Egypt in a maneuver that the U.S. was deeply opposed to, as well as the Soviet Union. That triggers the Egyptians to shut down the Suez Canal, which then sparked a whole set of crises for the Brits.

There were intelligence agents, officials around the world who were saying, We were telling the British that this is what would happen if you did this, and they went ahead and did it anyway. So a key component of these moments in history that are marked by overreach or hubris is that a lot of us knew it was going to go badly while it was happening, and they still went ahead anyway.

Bacon: Do you think this ceasefire will be lasting? What’s your sense of that? We have no idea? It depends on where things are?

Tharoor: I’m very bad at speculation. When I was asked on Monday, What do you think is going to happen now? I thought things were going to get worse. I really did expect Trump to go ahead and start attacking Iranian power plants.

There’s such a political gap between the two sides, and you don’t really feel like on either side the forces of pragmatism are winning out. It’s complicated. Of course the Iranians aren’t stupid, but they are right now being led by some of the most hardline personalities in this regime. And on the U.S. side, you’re being led by the instincts of President Trump and a very narrow, very small circle of people who have made a bunch of mistakes already so far.

But I was wrong. I didn’t see the ceasefire happening the way it has. I did not see Pakistan emerging as the credible intermediary that it has. That’s quite impressive to me, because you talk to a lot of folks in the Gulf—Arab officials and so on—I don’t think many of them took Pakistan that seriously as a major player. That has to do with all sorts of internal Pakistan-Gulf tensions and all that, but I didn’t see that happening.

Now, there are so many things that could go wrong. You may not have any movement on the massive gulf that already exists right now between the two sides on key issues like enrichment, the status of U.S. forces in the region, or what have you. But you also may have some pragmatism where they focus very narrowly on a couple of things, like the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and some version of sanctions relief for the Iranians. And that could be a good pragmatic win given the hideousness of the context. I wouldn’t want to be overly cynical, but there are many more reasons to be skeptical about this than there are to be optimistic.

Bacon: When I talked to you last time, you were very confident that Trump was looking for a way out, and that you think that’s probably driving this—that there wasn’t a clear path, but ... Trump was not happy with where things were going, and that’s going to create incentives for some path out.

Tharoor: I think he didn’t want to get embroiled in a months-long conflict. He does everything seat-of-his-pants. Big flashy event, and then wants to move on. He randomly bombs a couple of places in Nigeria. He shoots down boats in the middle of the Caribbean. He does this kind of Hollywood-style rendition of the president of Venezuela.

Enmeshing a big chunk of his second term in an incredibly costly, strategically confused conflict in the Middle East, after all the years he spent campaigning against enmeshing yourself in conflicts in the Middle East did not seem like something that Trump wanted to do. Even as much as we can question his state of mind right now and his faculties in general. But no, it seems to me that he obviously wants a way out.

This is an unpopular war in the U.S. The polling is out there showing that. Pew had a poll they published yesterday: Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling Iran, 70 percent of Americans are worried about gas prices. Those are things that register for Trump, presumably.

I don’t think he cares enough about political change in Iran to want to stay the course and commit U.S. forces and money the way you would have to if you really cared about an Iraq-style transformation—which is what some people want to see. I’m sure many in Israel would like to see the U.S. fully supplant the regime and install some kind of friendlier democratic government. But that is not right now on the table at all. And there are a lot of people who understand the situation in Iran better than I do who are quite confident that regime change is not going to happen now.

Bacon: Last question. The president of Spain has been saying a lot of things I agree with—

Tharoor: Prime minister.

Bacon: Prime minister, right, I’m sorry. Is the Spanish population more antiwar than France or Britain or Switzerland? What’s driving that? How did he become the person saying stuff that a lot of people agree with?

Tharoor: You and I, at our time at The Washington Post, talked a lot about what effective center-left politics now look like in the West. Especially in a moment when the centers in general are collapsing. Traditional center-left parties are failing, traditional center-right parties are being cannibalized by the far right, what have you. There are variations of that across Europe, and you can map that onto the U.S. as well.

But what you have in Spain is a curiously successful center-left experiment. A government that has done a lot of interesting things politically—on immigration, on climate policy. In terms of economies growing in Europe, it’s one of the most robust right now, which is very interesting given where Spain was in the previous decade. And then it has very consistently, for quite some time, been more critical of Israel in particular and of U.S. policy in the Middle East than other countries. Partially because it has less skin in the game.

Partially because of its own political views of the center left in Spain. I interviewed Prime Minister Sánchez a while ago; I’ve interviewed Spanish Foreign Minister Albares many times. They’re probably the first major Western European country to recognize Palestine as a state. They’ve called what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide. They don’t feel the obligation to toe a certain Western transatlantic line with the U.S. when it comes to Iran and so forth. It’s led them to piss off Trump. But we find that countries that stand up to Trump often fare better than countries that kind of meekly try to go along or gently persuade him in different directions—like the Brits or the French or the Germans.

Sánchez is a very interesting character, and there is clearly a significant groundswell of sympathy in Spain for the Palestinian cause. I wouldn’t say it’s a unanimous thing—Spain is also an equally polarized society. You have a very ascendant and somewhat scary far-right party in Vox, which is there. Just this weekend you had a major soccer game hosted in Barcelona between Spain and Egypt, and the entire stadium was chanting anti-Islamic things. Let’s not overly romanticize where Spain is.

They have a lot of issues of racism and bigotry and their own skepticism of Muslim immigrants. But the Sánchez government in particular, and a lot of the politics that shape the center left there, is quite robust, quite resilient, and they have figured out a way to be quite interestingly defiant toward Trump at a time when some of their counterparts are not.

And a year from now, you could have a far-right government in France; you could have a far-right government in Britain—not a year from now, but later.

Bacon: Yeah, very similar.

Tharoor: The Spanish—there’s a similar kind of tussle there too, but they’re really sticking to their guns.

Bacon: Final question. JD Vance—in that Times article, other articles—I understand the Lindsey Graham neocon foreign policy. What is JD Vance proposing? He’s opposed to certain things, but he was for the Venezuelan invasion, apparently. What is MAGA foreign policy? What do you think this is going to look like?

Tharoor: I’m not the best person to ask. JD Vance is—I’m curious what you think, but he’s just such an opportunist, and he’s willing to bend himself into whatever shape he needs to cling on to his position and consolidate it. But he has the—

Bacon: Maybe Tucker Carlson, then? When I watched Tucker Carlson—he talked to the Economist editor—I was like, OK, this is something different. I understand the neocon foreign policy—maybe Tucker Carlson is a bad example—but what is this other foreign policy that’s conservative but not neocon?

Tharoor: There is a world around Vance that is more intellectually coherent on this. I’m thinking about the American Conservative guys, some other folks there. There are many in the conservative restrainer community who see Vance as their guy. He has appealed to them because in various moments he has communicated that this is his vision as well, that he doesn’t want the U.S. to be fighting these wars. He’s against the legacy that the U.S. has set up in the Middle East. He thinks the U.S. should be retrenching itself closer to home. That is the most coherent foreign policy that he has articulated over time.

What he has to do right now to keep his job and then also position himself for 2028 is a different matter, and he’s bending himself in all sorts of ways to make it make sense. I don’t know what the actual vision is. I would love to hear your take on it. But I don’t get the sense that any of these guys in Trump’s orbit want to be holding the pot for whatever this past few weeks have been in Iran—I don’t think they want this to be on their legacy whatsoever, and they want to get out of it as quickly as possible.

Bacon: The Times article, it was very much covering their asses. Pretty much everybody but Hegseth said, I had objections in private. But my sense is Rubio’s foreign policy vision is closer to Reagan or Bush. Maybe he wouldn’t call himself a neocon, but: a much more strong national security, the U.S. needs to show strength at all times, that kind of thing.

I don’t have a good sense that if you implemented the Tucker Carlson vision in policy, that would be a break from [that]. That’s not even what George H.W. Bush was doing, because that’s a different era, on some level. So I was thinking out loud about what this looks like if they’re in government, and somebody like Tucker Carlson is secretary of state.

Tharoor: The thing that seemed to me more striking is what Vance is doing right now, which is he’s shown up in Hungary.

Perry Bacon: Hungary, yes.

Tharoor: Ahead of Orbán’s election. He’s basically made it clear that it’s a matter of the interest of the Trump administration—I would not say it’s the U.S. interest, but they think it’s in the U.S. interest—to support this particular guy who is the black sheep of Europe, who the preeminent illiberal right-wing nationalist in Europe, who for the first time in a long time faces potential electoral defeat this weekend. A defeat that many in Europe are hoping will happen because it’ll be a significant moment.

Hungary doesn’t matter as a country—I hate to say that, I hope there aren’t many Hungarians I’m offending in this conversation—

Bacon: In a geopolitical sense, they’re not as relevant—

Tharoor: They’re not relevant. They will never leave the EU because they would be screwed without being in the EU. Yet Orbán spends all his time attacking the EU as an institution. But it is fascinating the extent to which Orbán occupies this kind of conceptual space in the American right-wing imagination.

He is the template for them, because he’s the first example of political and cultural victory. They love what he did to these universities there. ... There’s a model that we’ve seen in Turkey to a certain extent, in India as well, of illiberal takeover of media companies via proxies and cronies. He did that in Hungary. You can argue we’re seeing that here in the U.S. to a certain extent too.

Bacon: Yes.

Tharoor: So he’s this lodestar, this coordinate ... that is fixed for them in their imagination for where the West should be going. And if he loses, that’s a big deal. It’s a big deal because it shows that there’s an exhaustion to this kind of politics. It shows that he had all the advantages—he’s gerrymandered his system to death, he has gotten judges on his side, he has a skewed media environment.

A defeat for him will be a major blow to a far-right international [order] that exists out there, and that Vance very much has positioned himself within. That to me this seems like the Vance foreign policy. It’s allying with Orbán, it’s lifting up someone like Bukele in El Salvador, and saying—

Bacon: As you were talking, I was thinking: can you imagine JD Vance in 2029, campaigning for Farage in Britain? That would be the ultimate example of that.

Tharoor: We’re in this kind of age where these guys are in conversation with each other, where they’re borrowing messaging and politics from each other. The Milei-to-Trump symbiosis is quite interesting as well. There are all sorts of examples, and I don’t think you have a similar version of that on the left. The left is ... a kind of establishment. The center left is still the Western establishment.

Bacon: Tony Blair and Bill Clinton from a long time ago were borrowing, but that was like—

Tharoor: But it’s not the same thing, and there’s a different kind of conversation there. Maybe that’ll change. Vance—everything he’s done foreign-policy-wise has been less about grand-strategy foreign policy, and more about a culture war.

He goes to Munich and he completely dumps on the entire European project. That is also the Tucker Carlson foreign policy. It’s culture war. That allows for a meeting of the minds with the Kremlin, that allows for a shift in how we think about competition with China, and it allows for—

Bacon: A bit of a retreat from the Middle East.

Tharoor: I’m sorry?

Bacon: It allows for some retreat from the Middle East, to some extent.

Tharoor: In theory, you’d think so. Certainly Tucker Carlson now, where he has gone on Israel—that kind of foreign policy would be very different than what we have right now, and probably quite popular, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. At least that’s what the polling suggests.

But it is going to be very interesting if the White House can get out of this conflict now, try to put lipstick on the pig and say, This is what we did and this is great, and put it behind them. They’re not going to feel much of an economic shock here in the U.S. The war has already provoked all sorts of heartache and headache for people around the world who have nothing to do with the U.S. or Iran. A lot of Asia, especially the poorer countries in Asia, has been struggling.

You’ve seen restaurants close down, hotels closed down, airlines scale back flights—real chaos and logistical struggles for hundreds of millions of people because of this war. But the U.S. hasn’t felt that. If they pull out now, the U.S. may be insulated from the worst of it. But we were drifting towards a second Covid, and Trump realized that they can’t do that.

Bacon: Thanks for joining me. Tell people where they can find you on social media and maybe find your writing as well.

Tharoor: I’m still in this liminal space ... I was part of the cull at The Washington Post. I had this newsletter called Worldview at the Post that I no longer write, but I am hopefully finding new spaces for that.

I will be intermittently trying to post stuff here on Substack, but for now I’ve written five pieces already at The New Yorker. Please look me up there. I will eventually get my act together and put something up on Substack so you can follow me here, and I will try to be more present so I can build up my old following again and interact with wonderful folks like you. So I look forward to it.

Bacon: Do you use Twitter? Bluesky?

Tharoor: Yes, I’m very much on Twitter for my sins. IshaanTharoor on Twitter, IshaanTharoor on Bluesky, IshaanTharoor on Instagram, and all the rest. You can find me there.

Bacon: Great to see you. Thanks for joining me. See you soon.

Tharoor: Anytime, man. Thank you.

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.

“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which 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, a region inside France.

The Trump administration had taken issue with the pope’s critique of its militaristic proclivities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top Pentagon officials were particularly aggrieved by portions of Leo’s January 9 speech in which the pope argued that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” and that “war is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading.”

The pope’s address was dissected line by line and interpreted as a hostile message toward the administration, reported Letters from Leo Substack writer Christopher Hale.

It was difficult not to interpret Leo’s comments as an immediate commentary on Donald Trump’s second administration, which had at that point bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, fiercely advocated for the dissolution of NATO, and threatened America’s allies, including claiming that the U.S. would seize control of Canada and Greenland.

But the blatant intimidation tactic is the first of its kind ever made by American officials to the Catholic Church. There are no public records of any previous meetings between Vatican and U.S. officials at the Pentagon, let alone an instance in which the world power suggested that it could force the Bishop of Rome into captivity.

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 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.”

Tensions had not been mended by February, when the Holy See rejected the White House’s invitation to host Pope Leo—the religious order’s first U.S.-born pontiff—for America’s 250th anniversary in July. Instead, the Catholic leader has arranged to visit a very different locale on July 4: Lampedusa, a tiny island between Tunisia and Sicily where North African immigrants wash ashore by the thousands.

“Robert Francis Prevost is too deliberate a man to have chosen that date by accident,” commented Hale.

The White House has dismissed the entire account, writing in a statement to reporter Barbara Starr that “the Free Press’s characterization of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.”

“The meeting between Pentagon and Vatican officials was a respectful and reasonable discussion,” the Defense Department official continued. “We have nothing but the highest regard and welcome continued dialogue with the Holy See.”

This story has been updated.

The Health and Human Services secretary, best known for having a brain worm and allegedly contributing to 83 Samoan deaths by spreading anti-vaccine propaganda there, announced his new podcast Wednesday with a 90-second video on his government X account.

“Many of us have come to the conclusion that the government actually lies to us,” Kennedy says in the video, presumably forgetting the fact that he works for the government. “This podcast is about telling the truth, especially when it’s uncomfortable.”

Kennedy goes on to say his podcast will involve him speaking to medical experts and innovators in order to tell said truth. He also gets slightly spiritual with things: “I’m going to ask the questions, and lift the taboos, and expose the hypocrisy and the conflicts and the corruption. We’re going to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and we’re going to name the names of the forces that obstruct the paths to public health. This isn’t going to be about politics. It’s about our families, it’s about our children, and it’s about confronting the spiritual malaise and embracing the truth.”

RFK Jr. has spasmodic dysphonia, which makes his voice difficult to listen to at the best of times. But honestly, the podcast idea isn’t a bad one. Our wackjob health secretary debating actual medical experts about Americans’ health problems? It’s like The Joe Rogan Experience meets House!

Unfortunately, it’s hard to believe RFK when he says the podcast won’t be political. More likely, his guests will take the shape of “alternative” medical gurus looking to profit off of listeners and sow distrust in an American medical system that Donald Trump is already trying to defund.

Andrew Feinberg, a journalist with The Independent, asked Leavitt how Trump could claim the U.S. was fighting a just war after such extreme rhetoric.

“When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush said in a message to the Iraqi people that the military campaign was directed ‘against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you,’” Feinberg said. “Yesterday, the president threatened to destroy Iran’s civilization.… Not the Iranian government, but the Iranian civilization. The Iranian people. The U.S. has been a moral leader for most of its history by fighting wars against other governments, not against civilizations. How can the president claim that America can ever have the moral high ground if he’s threatening to destroy civilizations?”

Leavitt shot back, using all the jingoism she could muster: “Andrew, I think you should take a look at the actions of this president over the course of the past six weeks, and the actions of the brave men and women in the United States military.… The president absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime, and for you to even suggest otherwise is frankly insulting.”

Leavitt then called on a different reporter over Feinberg’s protestations. Feinberg could be heard saying, “With all due respect, Karoline …” a handful of times before giving up, as it became clear that Leavitt wasn’t going to let him speak again.

Leavitt received a similar question later in the conference when a reporter asked what her understanding of Trump’s “a whole civilization will die tonight” post was.

“I think it was a very, very strong threat from the president that led the Iranian regime to cave to their knees and ask for a ceasefire and agree to reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” Leavitt replied.

“It was a very strong threat that led to results. And as the secretary of war stated at the Pentagon this morning, it was not an empty threat by any means. The Pentagon had a target list that they were ready to hit go on at 8 p.m. last night, if the Iranian regime had not agreed to open the Strait, which they did. I think that’s something we should all be grateful for.”

“Does he see the United States as a moral leader in the world given that he’s—” the reporter pressed before Leavitt cut her off.

“I was asked this exact same question by your colleague … and I think again, the insinuation by anyone in this room that Iran somehow has the moral high ground over the United States of America is insulting,” Leavitt said.

In addition to Leavitt misrepresenting some facts here—the Strait of Hormuz is again closed after Israel attacked Lebanon Wednesday morning, per Iranian reporting—the fact that the White House is actually praising the president’s threat to exterminate an entire nation is as cruel as it gets. But would you expect anything less from such a bloodthirsty regime?

FT reports that the Trump administration had been privately pushing for a ceasefire for weeks to alleviate the economic strain caused by Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, and depending on Pakistan for mediation. Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir was communicating with Iranian officials, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Vice President JD Vance, and Trump himself even after the president threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization on Tuesday.

According to the five people familiar with the diplomatic back channel, Trump had been asking for a ceasefire since as early as March 21, when he first threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants.

This contradicts virtually everything the Trump administration has claimed about Iran—that Trump’s constant bombings and threats of extinction caused a wounded, demoralized Iranian regime to limp to the negotiating table, desperate for a deal with the U.S.

“They are begging to make a deal, not me. They’re begging to make a deal,” Trump said less than two weeks ago. “And anybody that saw what was happening over there would understand why they wanna make a deal.… They are begging to work out a deal.”

Peace talks between the U.S. and Iran are expected to take place in Islamabad on Friday, although the speaker of Iran’s parliament has claimed the U.S and Israel have already broken the parameters of the already fragile ceasefire.

Beyond the 10-point peace plan that Donald Trump already signaled he was open to, Iran additionally expects countries to pay $1 per barrel of oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz, reported the Financial Times Wednesday. Tehran demanded that the fee be paid in cryptocurrency, and that importers notify Iranian authorities about the content of their ships ahead of their arrival.

“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told FT.

The email requirement is a preventative measure to thwart the influx of weapons into the country, according to Hosseini.

“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” said Hosseini. “Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush.”

But Iran is no stranger to cryptocurrency. The country has built a $10 billion internal crypto economy in recent years, relying on the digital assets as a means to circumvent international sanctions, according to a Yahoo! Finance report published last month.

The price of Brent crude, a global oil benchmark, fell to $96 dollars per barrel in the wake of the fragile ceasefire arrangement, a staggering drop from its high of nearly $112 on Tuesday.

Iran’s 10-point peace plan includes various demands for an immediate end to the regional violence, including proposals for a permanent end to the war, guarantees that Iran and its allies would not be attacked again, an end to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a halt to all regional attacks.

The multipoint deal also seeks the lifting of all U.S. and international sanctions on Iran, and the imposition of a new $2 million toll per ship through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil tradeway situated between Iran and Oman.

Trump claimed Wednesday that he planned to turn the Hormuz toll into a “joint venture” that the U.S. would jointly benefit from. It is not clear if Iran is open to that possibility.

Meanwhile, a senior Iranian official told Reuters that the strait could be reopened as soon as Thursday or Friday—so long as it is “limited” and “under ‌Iran’s ⁠control.”