Politics | The Atlantic

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

2026-04-20T07:00:00-04:00

At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.

Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.

No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.

In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.

[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.

So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and a comedian on board. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.

[Alexandra Petri: The 10 things the Bezoses are almost certainly grateful for each morning]

Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”

“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.

That’s how the weekend started. Here’s how it ended: My wife broke her wrist slipping on wet grass, and both children and I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. This is not a joke. One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two. Suffice it to say we have never been back to Campfire, nor have we ever been invited.

At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.

Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.

Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?

Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth.

[Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post]

Though we didn’t know it at the time, Bezos’s first marriage would be over a few weeks later. My defining impression of his wife that weekend was sadness, even though Bezos made a big show of performing the role of family man. In hindsight, it is that performance that sticks with me. The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.

[Adam Serwer: How America chose not to hold the powerful to account]

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The very powerful men who think introspection is dumb]

When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.

Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The conservative attack on empathy]

I finally met Bezos on the last day of Campfire, at lunch, after my wife had broken her wrist. I went over to thank him for having us, and he asked how our Campfire experience had been. I told him that it was great, but that unfortunately my wife had broken her wrist that morning when she slipped on the wet grass while kicking a ball with our 6-year-old son.

The night before, we’d all stood by the pool at the beach club watching a cadre of synchronized swimmers execute a flawless water routine. I had spoken with a famous novelist, who said, “I just don’t understand why I’m here.” A famous rock star was about to start an acoustic set. The famous chef had made paella. Somewhere deep under my skin, a brutal pox was beginning to form.

The next morning, my wife fell, and I found myself in a black SUV with a team of private-security contractors, who whisked us to the back entrance of a Santa Barbara emergency room, where she was seen and treated right away. We made it back in time to watch the Supreme Court justice Zoom in from Washington, D.C.

How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.

But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.

A few hours later, on the private plane home, a famous movie producer offered my wife a blanket. My children’s faces were covered in spots. Under my fingernails, red welts were beginning to rise.

The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.

“I’m finished,” yells Daniel Plainview, perched happily on the polished floor of his own celestial kingdom. Though he has just committed a crime, he has never felt so free.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Everything Is Free and Nothing Matters.”

The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

Last week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas. Others were upset that the influencer said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” even as he reiterated his reticence to back a progressive politician such as Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance.

But a very different part of the podcast caught my attention, because it illustrates the problem with the wrangling over Piker: It revolves around his contentious opinions about a narrow subject—Jews and Israel—while giving short shrift to his broader worldview and his tendency to be wrong on the facts. The issue is not whether to engage with figures like Piker; it’s how to do so in a way that’s genuinely informative.

[Read: The limits of the Democrats’ big tent]

The Pod Save America appearance offers a case in point. While discussing his personal opposition to Israel’s founding, Piker marshals an unexpected ally: Albert Einstein. “My assessment on Zionism as an ideology is not that different from Albert Einstein’s assessment of Zionism,” he tells the co-host Jon Favreau. The Jewish physicist, Piker said, “was actually asked to be the first president of Israel.” But Einstein, in Piker’s account, assailed the Israeli project from the start: He saw “the violence that the early Zionist brigades were engaging in” before “the IDF existed, before Israel existed,” and “wrote about what Zionism was turning into, and he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing.”

Most listeners probably took little notice of this historical riff. Favreau does not remark on it. But for me, it was a flashing-neon sign. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Einstein’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism, poring over the relevant documents in three languages on two continents. And just about every bit of Piker’s potted portrayal is either misleading or false.

Far from an opponent of the Zionist endeavor, Einstein assisted it for decades. In 1921, he raised money across America for the Hebrew University alongside Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization. In 1923, he delivered a guest lecture at the school’s campus in Jerusalem. Weizmann, meanwhile, was tapped to be the first president of Israel, in 1948; Einstein, who had not been in the running, congratulated him. “Long before the emergency of Hitler, I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong,” Einstein wrote to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947, in an attempt to persuade him to support the movement.

In 1951, the physicist hosted David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. When Weizmann died the next year, Ben-Gurion offered his position to Einstein, who declined, writing that he was “deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.” (The notoriously absent-minded professor explained, “I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.”) Shortly before his death, Einstein told an interviewer that he had “great hopes for the future of the Jewish state.” He even planned to deliver a speech marking the seventh anniversary of Israel’s founding in 1955—but died days before he could deliver it. He bequeathed his valuable papers and the rights to his name and likeness to Hebrew University.

None of this is to say that Einstein was an uncritical booster of the Zionist project. On the contrary, he was a sharp public antagonist of the Israeli right. This ideological orientation was likely another reason Einstein turned down the ceremonial role of the country’s presidency, which is meant to be nonpartisan. He was also a deeply reluctant nationalist. Before Israel was founded, Einstein advocated for a shared state for Jews and Arabs, writing in 1946 that “what we can and should ask” is for “secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.” But once Israel was established, Einstein strongly supported its continued existence, while insisting that its ultimate success depended on the pursuit of peace and fair treatment of the land’s Arab inhabitants. “International policies for the Middle East should be dominated by efforts to secure peace for Israel and its neighbors,” he wrote in the draft of his deathbed speech.

In other words, Einstein wasn’t an unapologetic Israel-right-or-wrong advocate or an ardent anti-Zionist, but something more interesting: a left-wing supporter of Jewish statehood who believed in Israel’s necessity but also in the fundamental rights of the region’s Palestinian citizens. This complex combination of commitments puts him in accord with many, if not most, Americans and American Jews today, according to survey data. In contemporary terms, one might call Einstein a liberal Zionist—the same category of people Piker has previously called “liberal Nazis.”

But listeners to Piker on Pod Save America will have learned none of this. The streamer’s cavalier characterization of the views of American Jews, living and dead, and his failure to genuinely reckon with what they think, help explain why some feel that Piker fosters anti-Jewish animus. But one need not reach a conclusion on the anti-Semitism question to arrive at the simpler determination that he speaks confidently about things that he does not know much about. And this phenomenon is not unique to Piker. It’s characteristic of the new-media landscape, which now includes smashmouth streamers and podcasters of all political persuasions who talk about everything but are experts in nothing, and whose incentives run toward incendiary virality rather than accuracy. Often, this means that these talkers leave listeners less informed than when they came in, as is the case here.

Such pitfalls should not stop journalists and activists from interviewing these influential actors; doing so is part of the job and essential for democratic dialogue. The question is not whether such people should be engaged, but how. Interviewers should educate themselves about an influencer’s past arguments and be prepared to dig into the details, as CNN’s Elle Reeve did when she exposed the far-right podcaster Candace Owens’s conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s killing. Tucker Carlson has broadcast elaborate Hitler apologetics and other anti-Semitic ideas; his interlocutors should be familiar with their refutations, and be able to raise them when confronting him.

Hosts could also bring on experts to complicate the simplistic narratives marketed by the streaming set: One imagines a medical researcher might have some thoughts about Piker’s recent claim that Cuba has come up with a treatment for Alzheimer’s that he alleges has been suppressed. Other interviewers might have someone else in the studio who is tasked with interrogating the claims of guests in real time. After all, even Joe Rogan has his producer serve as an on-air fact-checker; the people interviewing Rogan should too.

Other questions are worth posing to influencers such as Piker by those who are evaluating them as political partners. On Pod Save America, most of the run time was devoted to Piker holding forth about Jews and Zionism. This was less the fault of the show and more a response to the public discourse, which has obsessed over Piker’s every utterance on these subjects. But for the average voter considering the streamer as a potential ally, and wondering what the world would look like if he had more power, the tired anti-Semitism arguments obscure far more fundamental issues.

For instance, Piker has repeatedly exhibited a soft spot for left-coded expansionist authoritarian regimes. When he was asked recently if “there is a country that has done socialism in a way that you’d like,” he did not cite the Nordic states favored by the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders. He said, “China is probably the closest,” while acknowledging “plenty of issues within the Chinese system” that he did not detail before launching into praise of the country’s high-speed rail. Piker has likened China’s subjugation of Tibet to the North’s crushing of the South in the American Civil War, and argued that the takeover helped civilize the territory. (He has also compared Taiwan to the Confederacy.) He once referred to China’s mass-detention facilities for Uyghur Muslims as “concentration camps,” only to quickly revise that to “reeducation camps” and claim that they “are all closed now.” (They are not, and the detentions also continue throughout the formal justice system.)

[Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps]

Piker’s apologias for left-wing autocrats are not restricted to contemporary ones. Last month, he told his viewers that “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world.” And at the Yale Political Union this month, he declared that “the fall of the U.S.S.R. was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” The tens of millions of victims of the Soviet Union went unmentioned.

Talking with Piker about a political coalition to save American democracy without discussing his affinity for China’s rulers is like teaming up with Carlson without interrogating his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin—or with Donald Trump without examining his outlook toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, only the debate over the latter tends to happen, such that Israel crowds out all other considerations, including extremely consequential beliefs that can end up going unchallenged. Favreau, the Pod Save America co-host, perceptively alludes to this very problem in his exchange with Piker. “Tucker Carlson’s a good example,” Favreau observes. “He’ll do, like, a very thoughtful critique of Israel and then suddenly, like, launch into a conspiracy.” The thing is, Carlson isn’t the only one whose Israel rhetoric attracts outsize attention that conveniently enables the rest of his ideology to evade scrutiny.

Many pundits and reporters are understandably unfamiliar with the oeuvre of some of the country’s biggest influencers. The content of these creators is spread out over incalculable hours of streaming video and is not easily searchable. But any productive conversation with or about these personalities requires an accurate understanding of their worldviews.

Perhaps liberal listeners align with Piker’s perspective on regimes such as China and the Soviet Union and consider his approach compatible with their fight against Trumpism. Perhaps they do not. But to make that call, they need to know what he actually believes. And that’s a conversation worth having.

California’s Blue Armageddon

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

On a chilly Saturday late last month, I met Eric Swalwell at a Little League diamond near Capitol Hill, where the Bay Area congressman and his wife, Brittany, would be watching their 8-year-old son. Swalwell, who was running to succeed Gavin Newsom as the next governor of California, had been gradually rising above a Lilliputian cast of candidates and had acquired a strong scent of momentum in the race.

“Impeccable timing for you,” he’d texted me on my drive over. He attached a just-published Washington Post article reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel was seeking to release files relating to a decade-old investigation into Swalwell that had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. If true, the Post story presented a publicity godsend to Swalwell’s campaign, further elevating his status as a nemesis of the vindictive president.

The family-guy tableau of the Little League game felt consistent with the wholesome image that the campaign had been straining to project of late, for reasons that would become clear soon enough. Our interview occurred on the same weekend that Swalwell released a video of him and Brittany holding hands on a boardwalk stroll, while she called him a “really great dad” and a “really good husband.”

As we sat together in the bleachers, Swalwell introduced me to Brittany, dropped the names of his better-known endorsers, and referred to Nancy Pelosi as his “work mom.” He also mentioned Adam Schiff, his former House colleague, whose trajectory into statewide office Swalwell had watched closely. Like Schiff, Swalwell had become a ubiquitous antagonist of Donald Trump—about as good of a credential as any for leading the de facto capital of Blue America.

“I am the only candidate whose name the president knows,” Swalwell told me.

[Read: Donald Trump’s gift to Adam Schiff]

A few weeks later, a lot more people know Eric Swalwell’s name, which has now been stained immeasurably. He is leaving Congress; his campaign is over, probably his political career too; and the California governor’s race is even messier than the colossal fiasco it had been before.

Swalwell’s collapse has been sudden and swift, if not surprising. Recurrent talk of bad behavior toward women had trailed him around Washington for years, and proliferated as he approached front-runner status. Late last week, the rumors detonated: Multiple women, one of them a former staffer, accused him of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, unwanted advances, and explicit Snapchat messages. Swalwell admitted to “mistakes in judgment” but denied the allegations and vowed to “fight” them. In short order, he has been met with multiple investigations, and instant pariah status. (I reached out to him after the accusations came out but did not hear back.)

The fact that Swalwell was, until recently, the Democrats’ leading candidate for governor is itself illustrative of the race writ large. Or, as far as the people still running, writ small. The glaring lack of candidate talent, political skill, and personal appeal—let alone star power—has been the defining quality of the race. Bigger names, such as Kamala Harris and Senator Alex Padilla, opted not to run. Newsom is term-limited. Jerry Brown is 88. George Clooney lives in France.

Beyond the perverse pull of watching such ineptitude on display, the main allure of this campaign is that it could produce the ultimate man-bites-dog political result: the election of a Trump-aligned Republican governor in this bluest of states, concurrent with a national election that could produce the bluest of waves. Such a monumental upset would not occur because the two GOP candidates—Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and the British-bred commentator and strategist Steve Hilton—remind anyone of Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or any of the other larger-than-life Republicans in the party’s rich (if not recent) California tradition. Rather, a Republican win would represent an act of Democratic self-immolation, spectacular even by Team Donkey standards.

Here’s how the Democratic-lockout scenario could play out. California elections are winnowed through a so-called jungle primary, in which the top two finishers—regardless of party—advance to the general election in November. The current field has been crowded and stagnant for months, with eight major Democratic candidates (now seven). Until Swalwell dropped out, he, the billionaire investor Tom Steyer, and former Representative Katie Porter had each been polling in the low-to-mid teens. They were followed by a parade of single-digit laggards, including San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and former California Attorney General and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. Hilton and Bianco, meanwhile, were polling in the mid-to-high teens through the first week of April. If no Democrat exceeds the others before the June 2 primary, the Republicans could finish first and second, guaranteeing a GOP victory in November.

A big part of the Democrats’ problem is that the party’s top tier, such as it is, consists of deeply flawed candidates, each encumbered with distinct personality impairments.

Steyer ran for president in 2020, burned through a ton of cash, went nowhere, and is now attempting to spend his way to Sacramento. He has already saturated the state’s airwaves with more than $130 million in ads, which may or may not be enough to buy him a modicum of personal appeal. His one viral moment of the campaign so far was not pretty: A local TV reporter asked him how he would grade Newsom’s two terms, and Steyer became flustered before muttering forth with the worst possible explanation: “I haven’t followed it closely enough to give him a grade.” The Steyer campaign declined to make him available for an interview.

Porter, an economic-populist gadfly in the fashion of Elizabeth Warren, became a social-media sensation during her years in the House. She wielded her signature whiteboard at congressional oversight committee hearings while making mush of CEOs and Trump-administration officials. Not all of her viral moments have been flattering, however. There was an infamous video last fall of Porter berating a news reporter while terminating a local television interview, and another from 2021 of her cursing out a staff member during a Zoom call (“get out of my fucking shot!”). Porter expressed regret over the videos, saying that she “could have been better in those moments.” A Porter spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests to interview the candidate.

Then there is—was—Swalwell, who at this point has graduated to his own special classification of toxicity. With his exit, the Democrats’ flailing field might be narrowed slightly, and perhaps improved by subtraction, but very much remains a bottleneck of B-listers.

At the end of March, I headed out to Los Angeles to better understand this predicament. My arrival coincided with a scheduled primary debate at the University of Southern California—which, naturally, would become a steaming debacle in its own right.

Not long after the debate was supposed to start, I found myself in a musty warehouse event space in Boyle Heights, just east of the Los Angeles River. Republican Chad Bianco’s campaign had decided to go ahead with a watch party, even though a slight wrench had been flung into the evening: The debate had been abruptly canceled the night before.

[Read: How Tom Steyer built the biggest political machine you’ve never heard of]

I’d attended many debate watch parties in my career, but never one with no debate to watch. Not only that, the candidate we were supposed to be watching was present at the party.

“It’s very disheartening, very disheartening,” Bianco told me as he mingled among roughly 60 guests. Bianco described the whiplash of his last 24 hours: After being canceled, the debate had been briefly resurrected, canceled again, and nearly resuscitated another time before finally being euthanized for good. He parked himself in a corner to talk with a few reporters. His wife, Denise, stood next to him.

“How are you supposed to do a watch party if there’s nothing to watch?” I asked Denise, as Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” blared in the background.

“We’re celebrating!” she exclaimed.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked. “What are we watching?”

“We are watching Chad,” she said.

Chad looks like the sheriff he is: short-cropped hair, studded belt buckle, six-pointed-star badge, and an excellent mustache, which I complimented him on. “I know Steve wasn’t looking tough enough, so he grew a beard,” he said, referring to Hilton, his Republican rival. “He dresses like me now too. It’s kind of weird.”

“Are you guys friends?” I asked.

“No, I will never be friends with him,” Bianco told me. “He’s unethical and dishonest.” Bianco did not elaborate.

The non-debate debate at least provided a tidy distillation of this muddled campaign. The hosts—the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, KABC-TV Los Angeles, and Univision—had invited the five top-polling candidates and also a sixth, Mahan, even though he had been polling lower than many of the uninvited also-rans. This did not go over well among said uninvited also-rans. Villaraigosa and others pointed out that the Latino, Black, and Asian American candidates had all been excluded. Various activists, groups, and state lawmakers piled on. USC finally decided that the controversy was distracting “from the issues that matter to voters,” and the complainants declared victory. “We fought. We won! We stood up against an unfair candidate debate set-up,” Becerra wrote on X.

Another grievance about the debate was that Mike Murphy, the co-director of the Dornsife Center, is publicly supporting Mahan. Murphy told me that he is on leave from USC and had nothing to do with the event. The organizers, he explained, had faced a simple challenge: “How do you pare it down so it’s not a stupid circus?” Clumsily, in this case.

My basic approach to spending 72 hours in this stupid circus was to scramble around and visit with as many candidates and campaign-adjacent characters as I could. That included Murphy, a longtime Republican media strategist and raconteur, one of my all-time favorite campaign-adjacent characters. Murphy moved to Los Angeles in 2003, went full Never Trump, and has dabbled in screenwriting, podcasting, and TV punditry, as well as the odd Democratic campaign—i.e., Mahan’s. He invited me to a divey Chinese joint in the Palms neighborhood, Hu’s Szechwan, where he says he likes to keep office hours, like an old-school mayor in a back booth of a red-sauce Italian joint.

When I asked him to assess the candidates, Murphy wanted to make the point that they are all, figuratively, diminutive. But he was also aware that language sensitivities have heightened since, say, the 1980s, when pundits dismissed the Michael Dukakis–led field of Democratic presidential candidates as “the Seven Dwarfs.”

“I want to do a little-person joke without losing my career,” Murphy told me. “This thing is a Wizard of Oz wrap party,” he went on, not able to help himself.

He pivoted to safer rhetorical ground, noting that it’s near-impossible for candidates with little statewide name recognition to get traction in California, which is larger in size than Germany. “If you’re not famous or you don’t have a lot of money,” he said, “you’re a margin of error.”

Murphy believes that the Blue Armageddon result—both Republicans in the runoff—will not come to pass, a view that plenty of California politicos share. Their theory is that the Democrats idling in the margin-of-error lane will eventually start dropping out and rally around whoever the leading non-Republican is. But other than Swalwell, none of the remaining candidates has quit yet, and all of them make a similar argument: Voters are still not “tuned in” to the race, and those who are skew heavily to the undecided.

One candidate making that case is Murphy’s pick, Mahan, who in most polls sits in the low-to-mid-single digits. I met the boyish-looking, Harvard-educated mayor of San Jose at a café in downtown L.A. as he snacked his way through a plastic container of blueberries. Mahan, 43, entered the race late, at the end of January, after growing “incredibly frustrated with what the field was offering,” he told me. He has been trying to position himself as a results-oriented pragmatist who is not afraid to defy the party establishment, progressive groups, or Newsom himself.

Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty.

“What I’m suggesting—no, not suggesting—what I’m arguing with conviction is that we have to demand that our government do better,” Mahan said. He has become a chic choice for Silicon Valley types, good-government centrists, and the national media—California’s straight analogue to Pete Buttigieg. Like Mayor Pete, Mahan exudes high-minded, data-driven sophistication, with that special dash of “aw shucks” they teach at Harvard.

[Read: Katie Porter is tired too]

“A Democrat who talks about math,” Mahan told me. “Imagine that!”

Okay, let’s talk about math. As in, what happens if the weeks go by and Mahan does not see any significant addition or multiplication in his polling? Would he drop out then to help his party? Mahan maintains that he likes his chances. Democrats will eventually consolidate, he said. Around him.

“I plan to be the one,” he said.

Funnily enough, that’s what a lot of the math-challenged candidates say. This includes Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor, whom I met at his office in a Wilshire Boulevard tower, a clear view of the Hollywood sign out his picture window.

Villaraigosa is undeniably credentialed; in addition to running the nation’s second-largest city for two terms, he was speaker of the California Assembly in the 1990s. But he has not held any office since 2013. In the governor’s race—his second campaign for the job—he has consistently polled in the single digits and struggled to gain traction.

“Why do you want to do this?” I asked him.

Villaraigosa launched into his origin story (“Mark, this state’s given me more than I could have ever hoped for”), his litany of when-I-was-mayor selling points (“more housing, more schools, more community colleges”), and his explanation for why a 73-year-old politician with a heavily antiquated aura could become the next governor.

People are hungry, he said, for a leader who can bring this most diverse, dynamic, and populous state in the country together. California, after all, has only ever had one nonwhite governor—in the 19th century.

“I was everybody’s mayor,” said Villaraigosa, who seems especially fond of that trope of politicians claiming honorary status in certain identity groups (such as when the writer Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “the first Black president”).

“Jewish Journal called me the first Jewish mayor,” Villaraigosa boasted.

As best I can tell, this referred to a 2017 Jewish Journal article in which Villaraigosa identified himself as being “the Jewish mayor,” in addition to “the Muslim mayor” and “the Korean mayor.”

“I get introduced in the African American communities a lot of times as the second Black mayor,” he also told me.

I started to ask Villaraigosa whether he could be considered an Asian or gay mayor of Los Angeles, but he shot me a look, so I dropped it.

“You know the point I’m making,” he said. “I was a uniter.”

Unfortunately for Villaraigora, few California voters seem to be uniting around the first Jewish and second Black mayor of Los Angeles.

From Villaraigosa’s lair, I headed to the patio of a fancy-pants hotel in Pasadena for the next stop of my tour de farce: a meeting with Steve Hilton before he had to head off to a fundraiser.

“I want to have a pee,” he announced after he walked in and introduced himself. Lots of traffic en route, very relatable. I was supportive.

Hilton returned a minute later, and seemed immediately amused by his circumstance: a Brit on a big adventure across the pond, a Republican somehow atop the governor’s race in California. “I’ve been leading or second in most of the polls,” Hilton told me. “There was one where I was fourth,” he added, giggling, “which is obviously a fake poll.”

On this day, Hilton was cheerfully annoyed by the canceled USC debate, which he blamed on the “inevitable whining” of what he called “the LPDs.”

“The low-polling Democrats were jumping up and down, ‘Racism, racism!’” said Hilton. “My line has been, they weren’t excluded because of race; they’re excluded because they weren’t doing better in the race.” He was clearly pleased with his cleverness.

Hilton is a different breed of American candidate. But he’s spent much of his life around politics, mostly in England. He is an Oxford-educated provocateur who was a top aide to conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. He moved to the United States in 2012; his wife, Rachel Whetstone, a British communications executive, has held top jobs at a Mount Rushmore of Silicon Valley firms (Google, Netflix, Facebook, Uber). Still, Hilton has never held or even run for office.

I wondered aloud whether there had ever been a governor of a U.S. state with a British accent. “I don’t think so,” Hilton replied, though he invoked Schwarzenegger, who very much had an Austrian accent. Hilton also noted, for the record, that both of his parents are from Hungary. Therefore, he sometimes jokes that since the last Republican governor in California was from Austria, electing Hilton would be like California’s version of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“So, I say, ‘You’ve had the Austrian, now the Hungarian.’”

“That’s a great message!” I assured Hilton.

Hilton calls himself “a pragmatic kind of person” and insists that his “whole campaign is positive and practical.” His main theme is that California is an object lesson in how Democratic excess can ruin an otherwise glorious state. “You’ve had 16 years of one-party rule,” he said. “Are you happy with the way things are? The answer is going to be no.”

This could be a solid strategy, except for one thing: Donald Trump remains the dominant figure in American politics, including in California, where he is especially loathed by the general electorate. If Democrats can avoid the two-Republicans outcome and Hilton winds up facing a Democrat in November, his opponent will be relentless in trying to tie him to Trump. Hilton sometimes shifts into the language of the Fox News host he used to be, for example, promising to go “FULL DOGE” on California if given the chance. I kept asking him about the president and how MAGA Hilton considers himself to be. He kept ducking. “The whole Trump thing is just a ridiculous distraction from fixing California,” Hilton said. “I truly am not ideological.”

[Read: The front-runner]

Hilton’s dilemma is that if he is too dismissive of the president pre-June, California Republicans and right-leaning independents—which includes a considerable pro-Trump contingent—could prefer Bianco, a much more unabashedly MAGA figure, with notes of extremism. Bianco was once a member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right anti-government group whose ranks were heavily represented at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (After his affiliation became public in 2021, Bianco said that he had left the group years before.) More recently—March—he took the bizarre step of seizing 650,000 ballots from the state’s 2025 election in Riverside County, saying that he was going to “physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported.” California’s attorney general called Bianco’s gambit “unprecedented in both scope and scale,” and the state’s Supreme Court eventually ordered Bianco to shut it down.

The real goal of Bianco’s “investigation” was likely to flutter his eyelashes at a certain connoisseur of bogus election fraud, the one sitting in the White House. But to no avail. Trump gave Hilton his “COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT” on Truth Social last week, calling him a “truly fine man.” Hilton dutifully went on X and said he was “deeply honored.”

He was, in all likelihood, deeply ambivalent.

Against his party’s interest, Trump had given Republican voters a reason to rally behind one candidate, and thus create an opening for a Democrat to advance to November. But although Hilton jumped into the lead in most polls taken afterward, Bianco remains close to the front of the pack. California Republicans held their convention last weekend, and neither candidate had enough support to earn the party’s endorsement.

Hilton still looked to be enjoying the stupid circus. If nothing else, he struck me as a rare sanguine Republican on a ballot anywhere in America this year.

In the days since Swalwell’s demise, no clear consensus has arisen about who will benefit and who will not. If there’s one area of agreement, it’s that the race remains an underwhelming hodgepodge of half-weights, has-beens, and, oh yes, a billionaire.

Steyer, largely on the strength of his limitless ad budget, seems to have inherited at least some of the emerging Swalwell momentum. He’s picked up a few endorsements (the California Teachers Association, for example), drawn some big crowds at campaign events this week, and, for what it’s worth, replaced Swalwell as the darling of the prediction markets. Trump even attacked “SLEAZEBAG Tom Steyer” on Wednesday, which in 2026 is probably the best attention that a Democrat, even a free-spending billionaire, can buy.

It does not seem obvious, however, that more publicity will make voters’ hearts grow fonder of a self-funded hedge-fund magnate whose last vanity campaign, for president, spent $345 million and won zero delegates. Meanwhile, at least one poll conducted after Swalwell’s exit showed a continued logjam at the top: Hilton at 17 percent, with Bianco and Steyer tied at 14 percent. Beyond that, the survey’s most significant development was probably Becerra climbing to 10 percent (tied with Porter).

The job of California governor has changed significantly during the Trump years, becoming more national than ever. Trump’s repeated incursions into the state—sending the National Guard into Los Angeles, denying federal funding, even endorsing calls for Newsom’s arrest—are likely to persist in some form. California voters will want their governor to be a “fighter-protector,” Swalwell had told me, in better days for him. “They’re asking, Who’s going to step in and fill the role?”

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

The last California governor’s race I wrote about was the 2010 campaign to succeed Schwarzenegger. I remember asking Jerry Brown, the eventual winner, how he would rate Schwarzenegger’s performance. Brown surprised me with his answer, crediting his predecessor with “making the job of governor bigger.” Reagan, Brown said, had also “added size” to the position. His point—I think—was that, in such a boundless and targeted state, the personality and perceived stature of the person in charge seemed to count for more than they would elsewhere. That’s only become more true in Trump’s second term.

On Friday, I asked Newsom himself what advice he would give the next governor in dealing with the president. “You know, it’s interpersonal with Trump, that’s how it starts,” Newsom told me in a Zoom interview. He said he would encourage his successor to fly to Washington, try to build some rapport; Newsom guessed that Trump would be receptive, in part to spite the departed governor.

“So you take advantage of that, the fresh air,” Newsom said, adding that it won’t last. “You’re dealing with an invasive species.” Inevitably, the president will try to bully the next governor if he senses he can. “His superpower, from my perspective, is exploiting weakness,” Newsom said.

I took a shot at getting Newsom to assess the race, and whether he believed any of the candidates was better suited than the rest to repelling the invasive species. But this he was reluctant to do. “I don’t want to get into the merits or demerits of people as individuals,” he said. “I think all of them are remarkably qualified in their own unique ways”—except for Hilton and Bianco (the latter of whom he called “the guy who tried to take all those ballots”). The governor referred to the wannabe Democrats as “an extraordinarily well-versed group” and also “just an interesting field.”

Newsom insisted that he’s not getting involved, or favoring anyone just yet. Nor does he seem to believe that the pileup of Democrats—and the prospect that it could result in a Republican governor—constitutes an emergency just yet.

I asked Newsom if he would endorse a Democrat before the primary.

“Only in a break-the-glass scenario,” he said, not elaborating on what that was, or whether it was getting close.

*Illustration sources: Anjali Sharif-Paul / MediaNews Group / The Sun / Getty; Jeff Gentner / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News / Getty.

The FBI Director Is MIA

2026-04-17T18:20:00-04:00

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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.

It turned out that the answer was still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was quickly resolved. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” one FBI official told me.

But Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

In response to a detailed list of 19 questions, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement that under Donald Trump and Patel, “crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years and many high profile criminals have been put behind bars. Director Patel remains a critical player on the Administration’s law and order team.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told me in a statement, “Patel has accomplished more in 14 months than the previous administration did in four years. Anonymously sourced hit pieces do not constitute journalism.”

The FBI responded with a statement, attributed to Patel: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.”

[Read: Trump’s purge may be just beginning]

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety. An FBI director is expected to be available and focused on his job—especially when the nation is at war with a state sponsor of terrorism. Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” one official said.

Patel arrived at the FBI in early 2025 as a deeply polarizing figure. He had risen from being a public defender in Miami to a congressional aide and, ultimately, a national-security official during the first Trump administration. During Patel’s confirmation hearing to be FBI director, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, expressed optimism that Trump’s nominee would implement much-needed reforms. “He’s the right change agent for the FBI,” the senator said, adding that the bureau was in need of “a big shake-up.”

Under questioning from skeptical Democrats, Patel vowed that “there will be no retributive actions” and that he was not aware of any plans to punish FBI staff who had been part of investigations into Trump. Democrats were not the only ones who were leery of Patel, who had a record of embracing far-fetched conspiracy theories—including the notion that the FBI and its informants had helped instigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to sabotage the MAGA movement. Several Republicans wavered on whether to back him. But a pressure campaign by the White House and its allies ultimately prevailed, and Patel was confirmed by a vote of 51 to 49.

Inside the FBI, which had been wounded by a number of scandals, many hoped that Patel could give the bureau a fresh start. But even many of those who had been enthusiastic about his arrival have since been disappointed. Officials said that Patel has been an irregular presence at FBI headquarters and in field offices, and that he has compounded the agency’s existing bureaucratic bottlenecks. Several current and former officials told me that Patel is often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations. On several occasions, an official told me, Patel’s delays resulted in normally unflappable agents “losing their shit.”

[Read: ‘It’s a five-alarm fire’]

Patel has also earned a reputation for acting impulsively during high-stakes investigations. He announced triumphantly on social media, for instance, that the FBI had “detained a person of interest” in the Brown University shooting in December. That person was soon released while agents continued to hunt for the killer.

Still, Patel has his fans. The president has been pleased by Patel’s efforts to purge agents who worked on January 6 cases and other probes into Trump. The president has also indicated that he is relatively unbothered by grumblings about Patel from within the FBI, according to White House and other administration officials. That’s not surprising: Patel views many of the bureau’s veterans as anti-Trump “deep state” agents who have worked against him and his followers. But Patel has, on occasion, earned the president’s ire. Trump has complained that the FBI director has seemed unprepared for TV appearances and that some high-profile investigations that he directed Patel to pursue have not moved quickly enough. These include inquiries into former Biden-administration officials and other political opponents.

Patel’s spotty attendance at the office and the eagerness with which he’s embraced the perks and travel that come with the job have also been sources of concern at the White House. Some in the West Wing have followed the headlines about Patel’s use of the FBI jet for personal matters—as well as the whispers about his love of partying—and said that they fear that Trump would react badly were he to focus on those storylines.

DOJ’s ethics handbook states that “an employee is prohibited from habitually using alcohol or other intoxicants to excess.” The department’s inspector general has warned that off-duty alcohol consumption can not only impair employees’ judgment; it can also make them vulnerable to exploitation or coercion by foreign adversaries.

Patel’s drinking is no secret. While on official travel to Italy in February, he was filmed chugging beer with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team following their gold-medal victory. The incident prompted the president—who does not drink and whose brother died following a long struggle with alcoholism—to call the FBI director to convey his unhappiness, according to two officials familiar with the call. But officials told me that Patel’s alcohol use goes far beyond the occasional beer. FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Many of the people who spoke with me said that they have been afraid to reveal their concerns about Patel publicly or through traditional whistleblower channels, because he has been aggressive in cracking down on anyone he deems insufficiently loyal. At Patel’s direction, FBI employees are polygraphed in an effort to identify leakers. One former official told me that bureau employees have been asked in these sessions for opinions about Patel’s perceived “enemies,” as well as whether they have ever said anything disparaging about the director or the president.

Patel has held on to his job in part because of his commitment to using the federal government to target political or personal adversaries of the president. In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, Patel designated a list of government officials past and present that he alleged were corrupt or disloyal. In an interview that year on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel said that he planned to “come after” members of the media for their 2020-election coverage with criminal or civil charges. Patel has led a purge of people who he believes are anti-Trump “conspirators” or “enemies” within the FBI. This has included firing people, opening internal investigations, and pressuring agents to quit when they pushed back—or were perceived to have pushed back—against Patel’s demands or questioned their legality.

Some at the FBI are concerned that Patel’s behavior has left the country more vulnerable. One former senior intelligence official told me that there is a lack of experience at FBI headquarters and that the turnover rate is high in field offices, because of both voluntary departures and Patel-ordered purges. The result is an FBI workforce being asked to accomplish more with fewer resources, and with less direction from the top. “The instinctive level of muscle memory or discernment that is necessary to identify and counter a terror attack is missing,” the former official said. A current official described people inside the bureau feeling besieged and disillusioned—or even angry.

[Read: ‘The trust has been absolutely destroyed’]

Days before the United States launched its war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that was devoted, in part, to Iran. The director said in testimony before Congress that the agents had been let go because their work investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents had placed them in violation of the bureau’s ethics rules. But multiple officials told me that they were concerned that the firings had been rushed and would leave the U.S. shorthanded at a crucial moment.

Patel has publicly proclaimed that the FBI needs to demonstrate that it is “fierce,” and officials I spoke with said that he is fixated on that image in private as well. He recently expressed frustration with the look of FBI merchandise, complaining that it isn’t intimidating enough. Officials have grown accustomed to such behavior, and they have learned to roll their eyes at it. But they said that the absurdity masks real concerns about what Patel’s leadership has meant for an institution that the country relies on for national security and the safety of its citizens. “Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public,” one official told me, “but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

Jonathan Lemire, Isabel Ruehl, and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.

Trump Voters Are Over It

2026-04-16T13:57:37-04:00

Tomas Montoya has sold festival foods—funnel cakes, burgers, hot dogs—across the American Southwest for years. But lately, business has been rough. Costs are up, so he’s increased his prices. Employees are begging for hours he can’t give them. In Arizona, where he lives, Montoya pays $6 a gallon to fill up his food trucks with diesel. This summer, he may have to skip the California leg of his festival route because fuel is even more expensive there.

“It’s Trump,” Montoya told us outside a popular Hispanic grocery store in Casa Grande, Arizona, much of which sits in one of the most evenly divided House districts in the country. Montoya voted for President Trump in 2024, but now, well, frustrated doesn’t begin to cover how he’s feeling. The president is bragging about the economy, even though everyone Montoya knows is hurting; he promised to stop wars, but started one in Iran. “When Trump opens his mouth, three-quarters of what he says is stories, lies,” Montoya said. He’s planning to vote in the midterm elections this fall. But he may not choose a Republican.

You can’t flip a funnel cake in this part of Arizona without spattering someone who sounds just like Montoya—anxious, and a little regretful about how they voted two Novembers ago. These days, a shocking number of the president’s supporters have turned against him. Some of Trump’s fanboys in the libertarian-leaning manosphere have spent the past year baffled by his actions on the Epstein files, immigration, and now Iran. And in the past week, religious conservatives have been criticizing their once-unassailable leader after he posted a photo on social media of himself as Jesus and attacked the pope, calling the first American pontiff “WEAK on Crime.” Some Republican operatives in battleground states told us that they’d rather Trump not campaign too hard for their candidate; others have seen their small-dollar donations plummet.

[Read: The manosphere turns on Trump ]

Midterm elections are typically rough for an incumbent president’s party. But this year threatens to be brutal. Trump’s approval is lower right now than it was at this point ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats won back the House in a historic blue wave. Almost every new poll is a red flag for Republicans: Independents, young voters, and Latinos—groups that were crucial to Trump’s win in 2024—aren’t in the bag anymore. Even non-college-educated white Americans, once the president’s strongest group, have turned on him, according to a CNN polling average. Democratic-leaning voters are 17 points more likely than GOP-aligned voters to say they’re “extremely motivated” to vote in November.

Many Trump voters, in other words, have had it. At this point, it seems safe to declare that the historic coalition that powered the president’s second reelection is finished—kaput. The question is whether, with seven months to go until the midterms, any semblance of it can be revived.

Casa Grande, a pit stop between Tucson and Phoenix where agricultural fields give way to new subdivisions, is on the northwestern edge of Arizona’s swingy Sixth Congressional District. In 2024, Trump won here by less than a point, after losing the district by less than a point four years earlier. The area is currently represented by Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who narrowly won his two terms in Congress and who outperformed Trump by a slim margin in 2024. Ciscomani is up for reelection again this year, but what we heard from some of his constituents may not give him much reason to be optimistic about his prospects.

Shoppers outside the market bemoaned the rising price of everything: gas, meat, store-made chicharrones ($9.29 for a big bag). And they were ready to punish Trump’s party for it. Traci Calvo, a 61-year-old Democrat living on a fixed income, said she’s poorer today than she was in 2024, when she voted for Trump, believing he would bring down prices. High gas prices mean that she is staying home more often—skipping Bible studies at her church, volunteering less, and even missing exercise classes. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran was her breaking point with the president. “I think that he just wants war,” she said. “He’s made it plain that he’s adversarial with everybody.” She doesn’t plan on voting for Ciscomani, or any other Republican for that matter, in November.

The mood among voters was just as grim some 60 miles southeast in Oro Valley, a northern suburb of Tucson known for its scenic mountain views—and home to many conservative voters whom Ciscomani and statewide Republicans rely on. Sitting inside of her car after a shopping spree at a dollar store, Zuriel Reyes told us she feels “shitty” about having voted for Trump in 2024, her first-ever election. “I don’t really trust our government anymore,” the 19-year-old said, taking a bite from a Slim Jim. She’s signed up to go into the Army next year and feels like the president is “putting all our lives in jeopardy with this weird war game that he’s playing.”

[Read: Public anger is rising]

The conflict with Iran has disappointed plenty of others who once supported the president, including some who are much more firmly planted in MAGA world. On Easter Sunday, Trump’s threat to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran drew ire from many onetime Trump devotees, such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, who subsequently declared on her SiriusXM radio show that she was “sick of this shit.”

Earlier this week, when Trump posted the AI image of himself dressed in flowing robes, surrounded by a heavenly glow while healing a sick man, he alienated the one group of Americans that has rarely left his side: Christian conservatives. The picture, declared the Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham, was “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy.” Joel Webbon, a far-right pastor who believes that women should be stripped of their right to vote, concluded that Trump is “currently demon possessed.” Riley Gaines, an anti-trans activist who has appeared at Trump rallies and whom the president has previously called a “tremendous athlete,” wrote that “God shall not be mocked.”

Trump deleted the post and said that the image was “me as a doctor.” But he also doubled down, as he tends to do, when asked to respond to his critics. “I didn’t listen to Riley Gaines,” he told one reporter. “I’m not a big fan of Riley, actually.”

Perhaps the storm cloud of negativity hanging over the president explains why his planned appearance in Arizona tomorrow will be so short. From touchdown to wheels up, Trump is scheduled to spend just two hours in Phoenix, we learned, a remarkably quick visit compared with his previous hours-long rallies featuring never-ending parades of MAGA loyalists. (He is also scheduled to appear at an event in Las Vegas today.) Some Republican operatives who expect to soon face highly competitive races want the president in and out of Arizona as quickly as possible. “When Trump comes out for a rally, he dominates the news the day before, the day of, and the day after,” one GOP consultant told us. “It’s a reminder for voters of why they’re angry.” (Though it’s better that Trump visits now, this person added, than in, say, October.) Despite this, all but one of Arizona’s Republican members of Congress, David Schweikert, will attend the event hosted by the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA.

The White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Trump will highlight economic accomplishments in Nevada and Arizona. The president has been clear about “temporary disruptions” as a result of the war in Iran, Desai said in a written statement, “but tens of millions of Americans benefitting this tax season from the President’s signature provisions in the Working Families Tax Cuts—no tax on tips, overtime, or Social Security—reflect how the Administration hasn’t lost focus on delivering on our affordability agenda at home.” Ciscomani is scheduled to speak at the Phoenix rally. “Juan is focused on delivering results for Southern Arizona and getting things done. It’s why he was independently ranked the most effective member of Congress from Arizona,” his spokesperson, Daniel Scarpinato, told us in a statement.

Trump—or, more accurately, the conditions Trump has helped create—also seems to have affected GOP fundraising. Some donors are giving half the amount that they would normally contribute to Republican candidates and blaming economic instability for the decrease, one Georgia county GOP chair told us. Two Republican consultants from another battleground state told us that small-dollar donations to their candidates plummeted in early March, days after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes across Iran. In races that could be decided by very thin margins, these donations could mean the difference between sending out a final round of mailers to low-propensity voters or not. “If this is a two-week stretch, not a huge deal,” one of the consultants, who requested anonymity to discuss internal campaign dynamics, said. “If we’re still bombing Iran in November? I mean …”

[Read: It’s not just Iran. Trump is flailing on multiple fronts.]

The ifs are plentiful. Theoretically, if the war in Iran winds down quickly, if gas prices drop, and if food becomes more affordable, some Americans may feel reassured enough to rally behind Republicans once more. It’s not as though many of Trump’s critics are eager to vote for Democrats. “Trump could drop a nuke and I’d still vote Republican,” Kelly said recently. Gaines, after learning that the president doesn’t actually like her, wrote on X that “I love the President” and that she will “continue to support him and the America First agenda.”

But the president and his party may find salvaging the broader Trump coalition difficult. In Casa Grande, Montoya told us he’d give Trump three weeks to end the war and fix the economy. In the meantime, he’s eating leftovers more often, putting fewer miles on his food trucks, and setting the air-conditioning higher than he’d like as Arizona temperatures climb. Montoya will also, he added, be researching his options for November.

History Is Running Backwards

2026-04-16T07:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega

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Maybe you’ve seen photos of Tehran in the 1970s, just before the Islamic Revolution: images of young women going to work in miniskirts, of couples making out in parks while wearing bell-bottoms, of people at pools in bikinis. It looks like Paris or Milan or Los Angeles. But in 1979 the revolution happened, and now Tehran looks like something from an earlier century.

Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that—going backwards in time. The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.

Many of us thought that the world would get more democratic as it modernized, but for the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen. Donald Trump, acting like some 16th-century European prince, has made the presidency his own personal fiefdom. Vladimir Putin borrows ideas from reactionary thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin—an Eastern Orthodox, anti-liberal philosopher who rejects the Enlightenment—to justify his imperial conquest of Ukraine.

If you go on social media, you can see photos of tradwives baking cookies for their husband and five kids. The secretary of health and human services and his followers don’t trust those newfangled inventions, vaccines. In 1999, it seemed that world affairs would be dominated by multilateral groups such as the European Union and the World Trade Organization—but now we are back to 19th-century-style great-power rivalries between China and the United States, between Russia and Europe. Trump’s new National Security Strategy has even revived the Monroe Doctrine.

We used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading—toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness, and liberal democracy. Progress was supposed to lead to the expansion of individual choice in sphere after sphere. Science and reason would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.

Turns out that was yesterday’s vision of the future. Billions of people around the world looked at where history was heading and yelled: Stop! They see that future as too spiritually empty, too lonely, too technological, too polluted, too confusing, too incoherent. Whatever their specific complaint, they are driven by a sense of loss, a desire to go back to a simpler, happier, and more sustainable time. Part of the brilliance of the phrase Make America Great Again is that it taps into that sense of nostalgia and loss.

Periods of great disruption inevitably produce yearning for an earlier golden age, and ours is no different. You can tell what kind of reactionary a person is by asking them what era they want to go back to. For some MAGA dudes, it’s the Roman empire, when men were men. For some theocrats, it’s the Middle Ages, when men were monks. In the U.S., many on the right want to go back to the social mores of the 1950s: men in the workplace, women at home; white people on top; epic levels of church attendance; and wholesome fare such as Oklahoma! and Leave It to Beaver onstage and on television. Meanwhile, many on the left want to go back to that decade’s union- and manufacturing-led economy, or to the utopian socialism of the 19th century. Our politics is drenched in nostalgia.

Those of us who believe in progress and the values of the Enlightenment tend to be condescending toward these reactionary impulses. We assume that the reactionaries are unsophisticated, intransigent, parochial—afraid of the freedom that modernity brings. It’s futile to think you can turn back the clock, we say.

But civilizations turn back the clock all the time. The Italian Renaissance can be seen as a concerted artistic and intellectual effort to return to classical Greek and Roman times. In Lost Enlightenment, the historian S. Frederick Starr recounts how, during the Middle Ages, Central Asia went from being the most scientifically and economically advanced region of the globe to falling behind Europe. During the Ming dynasty, China stopped exploration and de-emphasized scientific progress.

The 18th-century French Enlightenment cult of reason produced the 19th-century Romantic cult of passion as a counterreaction. The 19th-century explosion of industrialization produced the neo-Gothic reaction, led by people such as John Ruskin, who celebrated pre-machine living.

For much of the 20th century, faith in progress was the guiding ideology of modernity. Think of all those world’s fairs and theme parks, the giddiness about the wonders of Tomorrowland. That faith in progress was not only a technological one—flying cars!—but a spiritual and moral one. Many, including me, derived meaning from the belief that we were contributing to social progress.

Today, however, billions of people have lost that faith in progress as a source of meaning and are flocking to its opposite. In the 21st century, traditionalism has emerged as a catalytic school of thought. Reactionaries are propelling events, shifting culture and history in their direction. If we want to understand where all of this is taking us, we need to understand what’s driving them and where they get their beliefs. And to contend successfully with the traditionalists’ effects on our politics and culture, we also need to recognize that elements of their worldview are correct. But which parts are correct, and which are completely off the rails?

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Derek Thompson on why the age of American progress ended]

If you go spelunking into the mind of a traditionalist of a more intellectual sort, you will usually find Oswald Spengler somewhere deep inside. The first volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published in 1918, just as the First World War was winding down. He argued that each culture has its own unique soul, comprising its habits, customs, and myths. Like any living organism, each culture grows, matures, ages, and dies. In their youthful phases, they display great creativity, a flowering of the arts, an effusion of strong personalities. As they transition to maturity and eventually senescence, they urbanize and bureaucratize, elites lose moral authority, and creativity withers.

Spengler argued that Western culture emerged around the end of the tenth century. He called it “Faustian.” It was individualistic, expansionary, acquisitive, insatiable in its striving. Once a culture slips into its decline phase, it becomes imperialistic and materialistic, and technologists drive what happens. The political system slides into what Spengler called “Caesarism”—rule by despots. Urbanization and industrial growth create masses of atomized people susceptible to demagoguery. Financial power is concentrated in impersonal institutions, weakening the old elites. Large-scale bureaucracy leads to a centralization of power. When crises hit, people want decisive authority. If you believe that our society is in decline, Spengler’s sweeping theories describe and explain what is happening today.

If Spengler was part of the cultural-determinist wing of the interwar reactionary movement, René Guénon was part of the mystical wing. Both men believed the West was in decline, but for different reasons. While the historian Mark Sedgwick was researching his superb book Traditionalism, Dugin told him that what Karl Marx is to communism, Guénon is to traditionalism. Guénon was born in central France in 1886. Throughout his life, he studied various forms of spiritual knowledge—gnosticism, Islam, Taoism, Hinduism. He was not a political writer but a metaphysical one who believed that different religions are living links to the same underlying cosmic truth. He also believed that Western civilization had turned away from this spiritual truth and was living through what Hindu thinkers call the Kali Yuga, the age of corruption and moral decline.

Reading traditionalist writers, you find that each comes up with a different term for the spiritual deadness they associate with modern civilization. Spengler used the word Kulturverfall. For Guénon, that word was quantity. In his 1945 book, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, he argued that in this phase of “progressive ‘materialization,’ ” only things that can be counted are considered real.

In the modern age, Guénon continued, science dominates. Modern scientists think they are taking a cold, objective look at reality, but they are pitifully naive, stuck at the level of what scientific materialism and measurement will allow. A modern scientist, in the Guénon view, is oblivious to spiritual reality—which, to the traditionalist, is the primary reality—and so adopts a worldview that denies the existence of the metaphysical realm. The modern scientist is like someone who investigates the workings of an orchestra without the ability to hear music or even the awareness that music exists. All he can describe is bows scraping against strings and air flowing through wind instruments. His theories make a hash of what he is observing, leaving his readers in a flat, soulless realm of disjointed facts.

[From the February 2025 issue: Anne Applebaum on RFK Jr. and the end of Enlightenment rationality]

The modern person senses a vacuum where his spiritual life should be. He covers the hole in his soul with ceaseless agitation, unending change, and ever-increasing speed. “The dominant impression today,” Guénon wrote more than 80 years ago, is “an impression of instability extending to all domains.” His commitment to traditionalist spirituality brought him eventually to Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam. He converted, moved to Cairo, married an Egyptian woman, and died there in 1951.

Guénon had a profound influence on Julius Evola, an Italian writer who had a brief moment of celebrity in the American press in 2017, after the media revealed that the Trump adviser Steve Bannon had referenced Evola during a conference at the Vatican. The white nationalist Richard Spencer called Evola “one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century.”

Evola was born in Rome, fought as an artillery officer in World War I, and then became an artist in the Dada movement. He agreed with Guénon that we are living in an age of corruption that has turned its back on spiritual truth. In 1934, he published a manifesto called Revolt Against the Modern World. Evola broke with Guénon, however, by embracing politics after World War II and becoming the chief ideologue of the Italian far right. His views were anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal, antidemocratic. He was pro-monarchy and pro-hierarchy, and supported a racial caste system. He was post-liberal before being post-liberal was cool.

Benito Mussolini was a big fan, but Evola criticized fascism for accepting too much of the modern world. What is necessary, Evola argued, is a “race of masters,” who will lead a “revolt from the depths.” Any attempt to make a better world with spiritually stunted people will fail—because spiritually stunted people chase shallow, hedonistic values, and a noble society can be built only by those whose lives are oriented toward spiritual excellence.

Evola was political where Guénon was not, bluntly racist where Guénon was not. Gábor Vona, a prominent hard-right politician in Hungary, called Evola “one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century” in the foreword to a 2012 selection of Evola’s writing titled A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth. Today many of us look at Europe’s far-right parties and see pseudo–storm troopers. But those parties see themselves as a spiritual vanguard trying to preserve the highest registers of the soul.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Art Media / Print Collector / Getty.

Understanding contemporary traditionalism requires understanding its intellectual underpinnings in the thinking of these forefathers. All traditionalists tell a story about a time when people were rooted in stable homes and a way of life that got destroyed by a historic rupture that ushered in the soulless modern era—whether they call that era Faustian Civilization (Spengler), the Age of Quantity (Guénon), the Kali Yuga (Guénon and Evola), or something else.

Today’s traditionalists do not agree on when history took a wrong turn. But they all tell some sort of decline story. “It’s an empirical fact that basically everything in our day to day lives has gotten worse over the years,” the right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh has written. “The quality of everything—food, clothing, entertainment, air travel, roads, traffic, infrastructure, housing, etc—has declined in observable ways.”

R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, one of the most influential Catholic traditionalist magazines in America. Reno’s story of decline doesn’t really start until just after World War II. During the first half of the 20th century, he argues, Westerners lived amid rivers of blood—wars, revolutions, genocides. After the Nazis were defeated, many people across the West concluded that the savagery had been unleashed by strong attachments to nations, ideologies, homeland, race. To head off future world wars, people across a range of sectors felt it necessary to create a culture that would prevent the strong beliefs and loyalties that might lead to fanaticism and war. A representative example is the philosopher Karl Popper, a champion of the scientific method, who wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, which celebrates minds and nations that are not closed around core truths but are instead perpetually open to new possibilities. Forms of critical thinking were elevated to undermine grand philosophies. Moral relativism—the idea that it’s up to each person to find their own values and truth—prevailed. Children were raised in permissive environments to foster greater pluralism. As Reno puts it in Return of the Strong Gods, postwar thinkers came to a fundamental conclusion: “Whatever is strong—strong loves and strong truths—leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”

This cult of openness, Reno observes, was bipartisan. Liberals believed in lifestyle freedom and conservatives believed in economic freedom, but they both believed in the primacy of individual choice. You do you; I’ll do me.

But all of this openness didn’t lead to a nirvana of free individuals. It led, the traditionalists believe, to a society in which social bonds were attenuated. It led to a nihilistic society in which people could find no grand purpose. It led to a consumerist society in which people shopped to fill their spiritual void. It led, in Reno’s words, to “dissolution, disintegration, and deconsolidation.”

“Unable to identify our shared loves,” Reno writes, “we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica.” Civic life collapses.

Though today traditionalism mostly lives on the right, it sometimes emanates from the far left. The British writer Paul Kingsnorth, for instance, was a radical-left environmentalist before becoming an Orthodox Christian traditionalist. The two positions are not so different—both reject technocratic modernity. Kingsnorth has his own term for the spiritual deadness of modern life: “the Machine,” which, in his telling, comprises all of capitalist, technocratic society. In his book Against the Machine, he describes a visit to a grocery store: “I saw the sheer unnaturalness of this way of obtaining food, and the unnaturalness, too, of our wandering these straight lined, strip-lit plastic aisles inside this giant metal box instead of gathering mushrooms from a forest floor.” Kingsnorth’s writing has a strong Small Is Beautiful hippie vibe, but he goes beyond that. “The degree of control and monitoring which we endure in ‘developed’ societies, which has been accelerating for decades and which has reached warp speed in the 2020s, is creating a kind of digital holding camp in which we all find ourselves trapped.” He sees the ideology of the Machine as a “liberation of individual desire” that effaces our communal civilizational bonds and turns our world into “a blank slate to be written on afresh when the old limits of nature and culture are washed away. This is our faith: that breaking boundaries leads to happiness.”

The Machine is not only a system outside of us but a state of mind within us, one built around rationalism, economics, scientism, optimization, and efficiency. Its impulse is to use pure reason to achieve power, control, and domination. We like to think the Nazis were fanatics who operated outside of reason. Not so, Kingsnorth argues. They were consummate embodiments of the rationalist project, using social science to engineer what they took to be the optimal society.

The rationalist Machine seeks to merge your mind with the AI bots that are turning you into something less than fully human. Kingsnorth quotes a famous line from Wendell Berry: “The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

What do the traditionalists offer as a replacement for contemporary culture?

First, they offer roots. The master trend of modernity is freedom. You get to do what you want. You can go to college far away, move from city to city, surf through different cultures and lifestyle options.

This, traditionalists charge, leads to an aimless, ephemeral life. “The modern person belongs everywhere and nowhere at once,” Alan Noble, a literature professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, writes in You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. Such a person is perpetually sampling experiences but is not rooted. When the so-called abundance progressives argue that America has a housing crisis, the traditionalists counter that what America really has is a home crisis. Cultural change and mass immigration mean that people can’t even feel at home in their own country.

Traditionalists, by contrast, offer stable attachments. For the traditionalist, the primary unit of modern social life is not the sovereign, free-choosing individual; it is the social covenant that connects people. We are not born into a void. We are born into particular families, particular neighborhoods, particular tribes, particular faiths. Your life is connected via a great chain of bonds to your ancestors, whom you honor, and to future generations, whom you serve. In the traditionalist imagining, people are planted in the spot of earth where the bones of their ancestors lie, the place where they can be intimately known and deeply loved, where stories and skills get passed down by elders, and where they know the hills and trees so well that their contours are carved into the heart. Living up to your covenantal obligations constitutes the essence of moral life. Traditionalists are willing to accept limits on their freedom if it enables them to live within a local network of strong attachments that give life meaning.

Second, traditionalists offer enchantment. Moderns, they believe, live within what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of rationalism and bureaucracy, which is denuded of any enchantment. The goals of science and capitalism are pragmatic, materialistic, and instrumental. In a disenchanted world, religion withers, and so do the humanities, the poetic, and the spiritual. To borrow from R. R. Reno, why read Middlemarch when you can learn about marriage from a behavioral economist armed with studies, correlations, and standard deviations?

Traditionalists generally believe in a transcendent realm of the spirit that exists above and prior to the world we experience through our senses. This transcendent level of reality is independent of you—it is ordained by God, contained within the mysteries of nature, expressed through myth and song more than through analytical thinking. “Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order,” Kingsnorth writes. “This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based on the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”

Third, traditionalists offer moral order. Good and evil are not matters of personal choice. Natural law is woven by God into the fabric of the universe. Traditionalists get worked up when they find themselves in a culture that can no longer define what a woman is, because they believe that categories like gender are elemental to natural law.

The fourth thing that traditionalists offer their flock is protection against the cultural depredations of modernity. Modern progressives decry the evils of colonialism. But to the traditionalist, progressives are themselves colonialists: Their educators determine what ideologies will be pumped into your kid’s brain, their psychologists redefine how you should raise your family, their thought police determine what words can come out of your mouth. To the traditionalist, professional experts—social workers, university administrators, therapists, DEI officers, and the media—are the storm troopers of elite domination. In response to all of this, traditionalists seek to help people recapture control of their own culture.

The people I’m quoting in this essay are mostly intellectuals, but their loyalty is with the working class because they share (or at least think they share) the same beliefs. “Lower-middle-class culture, now as in the past, is organized around family, church, and neighborhood,” the historian Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven. “It values the community’s continuity more highly than individual advancement, solidarity more highly than social mobility.” The working class doesn’t require seminars to teach it traditionalism; it grasps the concept intuitively.

The culture war between the modernists and the traditionalists is not just between classes within nations, but between civilizations. Every few years, the World Values Survey studies various cultures around the globe. Protestant Europe and the English-speaking world, including the United States, stand out for their tremendous emphasis on individual autonomy, self-expression, and secular social values. Most of the rest of the world places higher value on traditional family arrangements, the importance of religion, and respect for authority. We moderns may think we own the future, but the traditionalists like their chances. If this is a global culture war, it’s the whole world against us.

The reason I’ve dwelled at such length on the tenets and features of traditionalism is that I want my description to be accurate enough that traditionalists will see themselves in it, and to be detailed enough that even progressive, Enlightenment-loving moderns might understand the appeal of traditionalist ideas.

I confess that I feel a modicum of sympathy for some of the traditionalist arguments. One of my favorite insights from psychology is that a successful, well-adjusted life consists of daring explorations from a secure base. The traditionalists are right to say that one of the central problems in America and the West today is that many people have lost that secure base—a stable home and community, solid emotional connections, financial security, a coherent culture, and an understanding that our lives are contained within a shared moral order.

My problem with the traditionalists is that I don’t agree with them about what a flourishing life looks like. Traditionalists strike me as the kind of people who would score extremely low on the personality trait called “openness to experience.” They focus overwhelmingly on the secure base and seem to have no interest in daring adventures. They seem to want to lead stationary lives.

That’s fine. Different strokes for different folks. But the traditionalists distort history when they write it as if all people have always wanted stationary lives and our goal as a society should be to make stationary lives the norm.

All traditionalists, from Spengler to Kingsnorth, tell a story about a historic rupture that destroyed the ancestral culture and gave rise to the rootless, soulless modern era. But no such historic rupture ever happened. Nor has there been a moment when humans were forever content to stay within the safety of their village. History has always been lived within the tension between the desire for security and the desire for learning, exploration, movement, and growth. The early hominids of the species Homo erectus may have loved their small African communities 1.9 million years ago—but they still ventured forth to places as far as China and Indonesia. The early Polynesians may have loved their home islands—but they still felt the urge to explore and settle an array of tiny islands in an expanse of ocean spanning millions of square miles. (And they did this in a time without modern navigation devices, when one slight steering error could set you astray in the enormous, empty Pacific.)

Human beings have a need for both security and exploration, for both belonging and autonomy, for both stability and innovation. Our lives are propelled by these contradictions, which can never be resolved.

Traditionalists are trying to live the monist dream—the dream that we can build a society in which all the pieces fit neatly together. But the many and diverse values that humans cherish will never fit neatly together. In every culture, groups argue over which values should have priority in present circumstances. There’s never been a tranquil resting spot, and there never will be.

[From the November 2025 issue: David Brooks on how America needs a mass movement—now]

Some traditionalists talk as if early or medieval Christendom is the static utopia they yearn for. Once upon a time, people lived close to the soil and were enveloped by faith—until those dehumanizing forces of democracy, capitalism, science, and technology ruined everything. But Judaism and Christianity are not separate from democracy, capitalism, science, and the rest of modernity. In fact, they provided many of the rules and ideas that are the basis of post-Enlightenment modernity: all humans are morally equal; respect individual conscience; history moves in a linear direction; every person has their own calling, as well as inalienable rights. Jesus was hardly a supporter of stasis. He was a Jewish radical who turned all the power structures of his society upside down.

Let me offer my own historical narrative and talk about where it overlaps with the traditionalist one and where it diverges. The story I tell is a long procession of stumbles. Some eras are more communal and some eras are more individualistic; some are more religious and some are more secular. But in the West, these cultural shifts have mostly been led by people trying to move humanity forward, in response to the needs of the moment. The stumbling process can be ugly—wars, atrocities, communism. But generally we have stumbled forward. At Harvard, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker spent a decade or so collecting an Everest of data showing that life since the Enlightenment has been getting more peaceful, more affluent, more comfortable, happier, and more learned—as well as simply longer. And our progress is not just material; it’s moral. Things that our society used to tolerate—torture, slavery, cruelty—have been deemed unacceptable by both law and custom. The late political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote in The Moral Sense that “the most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise—and occasionally the application—of the view that all people, and not just one’s own kind, are entitled to fair treatment.”

I look across the past 70 years—years the traditionalists say are filled with moral rot—and I see an astounding widening of the circle of concern. Segregation and racism have been reduced. Billions of women have a greater chance to gain power and professional success equal to men’s. Colonialism has been repudiated. We’ve seen the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world. America has expanded opportunity beyond white, Protestant men. We’ve even passed laws to reduce cruelty to animals.

But even in the historical story I tell, every moment of great cultural or social advance has had a cost. Over these past 70 years of progress, our culture has moved in the direction of autonomy, individualism, and choice. This has generated creativity and freedom, but it has weakened the bonds between people and the elemental commitments that precede choice—to family, neighborhood, faith, and nation. As part of this general tendency toward individualism, we have privatized morality, telling people to come up with their own values.

Freedom is great, but not if you don’t know what ultimate end you are seeking. Our modern, individualistic culture has fallen for the belief that individuals are capable of devising their own morality. No historical evidence supports this belief.

As we’ve advanced scientifically and technologically, we’ve forgotten something that the traditionalists understand: People absorb their moral values, their sense of purpose, and their way of life from within a tradition. The most important text of the Western moral tradition is the Bible. Even figures who were not great or conventional religious believers—such as Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Lincoln—knew their Bible. The second-most-important tradition of moral wisdom is the body of work we call humanism—the great novels, paintings, poems, dramas, histories, and philosophical tracts by thinkers and artists from all over the globe.

[David Brooks: A humanist manifesto]

In our rush toward autonomy, we have failed to pass down these sources of moral wisdom from one generation to the next. The ethos of individualism has led us to cut ourselves off from our own traditions: We’re so focused on the individual self that we fail to appreciate the millennia-long conversations within which each self swims. This rejection of tradition has been driven partly by ideology. In 1987, a group of progressive students from Stanford chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture has got to go!” They were part of a multigenerational effort led by people who thought that because Western civilization had produced colonialism, the whole collective wisdom of the Western tradition should be thrown in the trash. But I think the bigger cause was simple shortsightedness. Several generations of parents, educators, and students decided that the most important subjects to study are those that can help you make money. They didn’t recognize the value of the humanities.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Sources: Artgen / Alamy; Richard Drury / Getty.

The loss of civilizational and moral knowledge that this has entailed has had practical consequences: sloppy thinking by people who have never been taught how to weigh evidence, reach conclusions, or recognize the flaws in their own reasoning; the astonishing decline in literacy; loneliness; the sense of purposelessness that marks so many lives; people who don’t understand themselves or one another. How sick does a civilization have to be to not pass down its own sources of wisdom and meaning to its children?

[From the September 2023 issue: David Brooks on why Americans are so awful to one another]

Because we have neglected our own humanistic traditions, a growing gap has opened between our scientific, technological, and economic progress on the one hand, and our social, emotional, and spiritual decay on the other. Fixing this problem doesn’t require that we go back and live in monasteries and nunneries. Nor do we have to confine ourselves to, say, the 1930s canon of Western Civ, or the 1950s version of what constitutes high culture.

I agree with the traditionalists that tradition is important, but I don’t think of it as something we need to go back to. Rather, I see it as something that each generation pushes forward. And for this, we need a humanistic renaissance. In schools, universities, and culture at large, we need to focus more explicitly on the big questions of life: What is my purpose? How should the next generation live? What role should beauty play in my life? How do I build a friendship? What do I owe my spouse, my community, my nation? We need to use the best that has been thought and said by all of the great civilizations of the Earth, but especially by Western civilization, which is our own particular home, our core resource while we try to stumble toward a better future.

Though Christopher Lasch considered himself to be on the political left, he is sometimes embraced by the traditionalists for his celebration of rootedness, community, and the traditional family, and for his critique of the meritocratic elite. “The populist tradition offers no panacea for all the ills that afflict the modern world,” he wrote. “It asks the right questions, but it does not provide a ready-made set of answers.” The traditionalists have no panaceas either, but they also ask the right questions. They remind us how important it is to embed ourselves and our children within the great humanist conversation that extends back thousands of years. What we should take from the traditionalists is the idea that restoring our society’s connection to its humanistic legacy and long-standing sources of meaning can actually help us better realize the promises of progress.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “History Is Running Backwards.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

It’s Not Just Iran. Trump Is Flailing on Multiple Fronts.

2026-04-15T14:24:36-04:00

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You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.

Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.

Donald Trump has long ruled by fear. He demands complete fealty from fellow Republicans; he pushes around world leaders. He’s a political escape artist. But this time, he has boxed himself in without an obvious way out. The war in Iran was a conflict of his choosing, but it has not gone at all how he expected. Trump believed that it would resemble the military blitz that effortlessly snatched Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, that it would be a surgical strike lasting days or maybe just a couple of weeks. Instead, the conflict is approaching the 50-day mark. Iran is battered but emboldened, and now has greater control of the vital strait—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—than it did before the war, wielding it like an economic vise to squeeze the rest of the globe. Trump has demanded it be reopened, even threatening to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization if the regime did not comply. But Tehran didn’t quake in terror. Trump’s usual intimidation tactics aren’t working.

The Venezuela raid in the year’s first days altered the course of Trump’s presidency. By the closing months of 2025, the momentum of his first six months in office had dissipated and his party had suffered a series of electoral losses. He looked to some like an early lame duck. But the Caracas military operation, White House aides felt, righted the ship. Trump, though never restrained, was transformed into pure id, acting on impulse and goaded on by advisers who saw an opportunity to further expand executive power. And he fell further in love with the might of the U.S. military, telling advisers that it was an unstoppable force. Greenland. Iran. Cuba. His legacy, he believed, would be redrawing the world’s maps.

[Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences]

The U.S. military has smashed much of Iran’s defenses and damaged its missile arsenal. The joint operation with Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader and many of his top lieutenants. But Iran didn’t surrender. Trump had overestimated the capacity of the Iranian people to rise up, and he had not understood the extraordinary pain that the hard-line theocratic regime was willing to accept to maintain its grip on power. Thirteen American troops have been killed. Tehran maintained the ability to strike at its Gulf neighbors and damage their energy facilities. And even though much of its navy was destroyed, it was able to seize control of the strait by wielding the threat of mines, fast-attack boats, and armed drones. Giant oil tankers avoided the danger, and prices around the world began to rise.

This is when Trump ran into the limits of his power. He was outraged that such a makeshift force would intimidate the shipping companies, demanding that they “show some guts” and force the passage. But companies balked. He urged European nations to step in, noting that they benefit more from the oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz than the United States does. But Europe refused, having not been consulted before the war began and declining to bend to Trump’s wishes just weeks after he strained transatlantic ties by demanding that the U.S. be given Greenland. They were finally standing up to the president who boasted to my colleagues that “I run the country and the world.”

Back home, some Republicans were also finally saying no. A few loud, isolationist voices—Tucker Carlson, Steven Bannon, Megyn Kelly—declared that a new war in the Middle East broke Trump’s “America First” promises. And while most Republicans begrudgingly went along with the bombing campaign in Iran, many made clear that they would draw the line on a ground invasion. The Pentagon has readied potential assaults; military leaders are still awaiting Trump’s orders. Polls showed that Americans, who never approved of the war, were deeply opposed to a ground attack. Instead, Trump went on social media the morning of Easter Sunday and unleashed an unhinged threat, demanding that Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” before adding “Praise be to Allah.” Muslim leaders denounced the post as blasphemous. Two days later, he went further, threatening that “a whole civilization will die.”

[Read: Trump made a deal that gives him nothing he wanted]

Even some of Trump’s advisers were deeply dismayed, a few of them told me. Members of Trump’s inner circle had counseled him to avoid issuing deadlines; he had now set several, and looked weaker each time one passed. His post was threatening actions that would amount to war crimes—and a genocide. The president was flailing, several people close to him told me. His usual maneuvers had not worked, so he believed that his only play was to escalate. But it wasn’t strategically employing unpredictable behavior to get his way; it was desperation. He looked erratic. Republican allies and world leaders lobbied him to back off his threat, and as the deadline approached, his team seized on a cease-fire offer dangled by Pakistani negotiators. But the talks this past weekend in Islamabad did not yield a deal, prompting Trump to order the blockade. The plan was to apply pressure on Iran to open the strait and on Europe to aid the U.S. So far, neither result has been achieved.

In private moments, most Republicans have been saying for months that holding the House is likely beyond their reach. The GOP’s margin is slim, and the party out of power tends to do well in midterm elections. But at least, Republicans thought, the Senate was safe. That’s no longer the case. Democrats are looking at the map and see possible pickups in North Carolina, Maine, and even Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska. Republicans’ poll numbers are falling while prices—particularly of gas—are rising. Trump has yet to make a real case for the necessity of the Iran conflict. And even if the war were to end soon, the economic pain is forecast to last for months, well into campaign season. Before the war erupted, the White House had planned for Trump to hammer home an economic message. But now the president is distracted—and he doesn’t have good economic news to share anyway.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, continues to project confidence about both Iran and the midterms, telling me in a statement that “conflicts like this are ultimately judged by the outcome, which will be a good one for the American people, and there’s a lot of game left to play before November.”

Last summer, the West Wing’s plans to tout the economy were interrupted by questions surrounding Trump’s ties to the dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein scandal has been one of the few areas in which Republicans have felt comfortable breaking with Trump, who wants the matter closed. But once again, the financier was thrust back into the headlines—this time by the first lady. Melania Trump caught many senior White House aides off guard last Thursday with her sudden statement denying ties to Epstein, a few of them told me; the president himself admitted he didn’t know what his wife was going to say. It’s led to speculation that the first lady was trying to get ahead of some sort of damaging Epstein-related story; so far, nothing has materialized. But her call for Congress to give Epstein’s victims a public hearing ensures that the story won’t die any time soon.

Hungary has added to the president’s losing streak. On Sunday, just days after Vice President Vance made a campaign appearance in Budapest with Orbán, the ruling party was routed at the polls. Orbán had been a model for many on the right; he had wielded state power to seize influence over Hungary’s media, universities, and other institutions, aligning with Vladimir Putin to undermine the European Union and NATO. Trump had invested much in Orbán’s reelection: Secretary of State Marco Rubio also made a Budapest appearance, while the president repeatedly endorsed Orbán and suggested that more U.S. funding would be on the way to Hungary if the prime minister won. The voters of Hungary had other ideas.

[Read: There’s a message for MAGA in Viktor Orbán’s defeat]

And then the president picked a fight with the pope. Pope Leo XIV has been judicious in speaking out about political matters but has been unsparing for months with his criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. When the Iran conflict broke out, the pope (as pontiffs tend to do) spoke out against war. Popes and presidents don’t always see eye to eye, but most commanders in chief opt against attacking the vicar of Christ for fear of alienating the tens of millions of Catholics in the United States—or, perhaps, to avoid any potential for divine retribution.

But Trump, of course, is not most presidents. He does not take criticism from anyone, and those close to him believe that he felt threatened by another powerful American voice on the global stage. So there the president was on Sunday, just a week after offending Muslims, slamming the pope as being “Weak on Crime” and “catering to the Radical Left.” To make it worse, Trump posted an AI image depicting himself as Jesus healing a sick man. The uproar was swift, even from some in Trump’s party accustomed to silently suffering his outrages. Trump buckled, taking down the post before improbably claiming that the image depicted him as a doctor, not as the son of God. But then, unbowed, he chided the pope again on social media late last night.

The pope, for his part, has said this week that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration. He is far from alone.

Jared Kushner’s Mysterious Role in the Trump Administration

2026-04-15T09:46:20-04:00

In 2021, shortly after he left his role as a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner let it be known that he had loved his job but disliked the scrutiny and disclosure that came with being a top U.S. government official. He set up a private-equity firm and took a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He proclaimed that he was embracing private life. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in a 2024 interview. If President Trump “calls you on November whatever and says, ‘I’d like you to come back to D.C.,’ you say, ‘Thanks, but I’m good’?” the interviewer, Dan Primack of Axios, pressed. “Yes,” Kushner responded.

But Kushner did come back. Two days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran this past February, he was in Geneva in a negotiation of the highest possible stakes. Over the weekend, he traveled with Vice President Vance to Islamabad to participate in failed peace talks with Iran. Without title or remit or any kind of official designation—only “presidential son-in-law”—Kushner has in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration sat down with world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky, along with Saudis and multiple other actors from the Middle East.

[Vivian Salama: The end of diplomacy]

Yet Kushner also did not come back. While carrying out public business for his father-in-law, he has continued to pursue his private interests and declined to disclose any information about them. There’s a carve-out designation in ethics laws known as the “special government employee,” which allows businesspeople to perform work for the government. Elon Musk was a special government employee, and so was Corey Lewandowski. But Kushner has not been designated one. He is both outside and inside government—a “volunteer,” the White House calls him. And he is vaulting over strictures that were put in place to defend the mechanisms of government from becoming tools of foreign or private interests.

Nobody’s pointed out any instances, Kushner told 60 Minutes last fall, where he’s “pursued any policies or done anything that have not been in the interest of America.” But it’s impossible to know, from the available shreds of information, where Kushner’s economic interests lie. He tried, for example, to raise $5 billion for his firm, Affinity Partners, in Davos, The New York Times reported, where he was also part of the official U.S. delegation presenting a plan for Gaza’s future. When I asked Affinity about this, it sent over a statement from its chief legal officer, Ian Brekke: “Affinity had early conversations with its anchor investor and does not intend to take in any additional capital while Jared is volunteering for the government. An SEC-registered investment firm, Affinity has abided by all laws and regulations and will continue to do so. Jared Kushner has complied with all applicable laws and requirements, and any suggestion otherwise is false. Jared has always operated in the best interests of the United States.”

In a wave of post-Watergate reforms, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978, and soon set up the Office of Government Ethics to uphold the principle that the “American people could see the financial holdings of the most senior officials in the executive branch, and use this information to ensure those officials were free from conflicts of interest.”

But Kushner isn’t filing any ethics disclosures. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that he “is acting in his capacity as a private citizen; therefore, he is not subject to disclosure requirements.” She added, “Mr. Kushner has been generous in lending his valuable expertise when asked. He does so in his capacity as a private citizen, and the entire administration appreciates his willingness to step away from his family and livelihood in order to help address these complex problems.”

Kushner may not have a title, but there is no question that he is a senior person in Trump’s hierarchy and is acting as a senior official would. He has traveled the globe with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—who founded a cryptocurrency business with his two sons and the Trumps just weeks before the 2024 election, and who officially became a government employee last summer and filed a disclosure form that showed he still held shares in that crypto outfit, World Liberty Financial. (In February, the White House counsel told The Wall Street Journal that Witkoff had divested from World Liberty.)

This is leagues more transparent than Jared Kushner has been.

“Kushner’s role is no different than Witkoff’s,” Donald Sherman, the president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “So they should have to explain why he is being held to a different ethics standard than someone who has the same job.”

Ethics disclosures are highly imperfect. They are crowded with names of limited-liability companies that shroud officials’ business associates; different rules apply for publicly traded holdings and privately traded holdings; adult children are exempted from disclosure; the forms can run to excessive lengths. One Trump official filed an 1,878-page disclosure form, nearly nine times as long as the president’s 234-page form.

Yet Kushner has not filed even an imperfect form. He has dismissed the concept of conflicts as it applies to him and Witkoff. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner told 60 Minutes after he and Witkoff negotiated the Gaza cease-fire. “If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal we were able to get done, that freed these hostages, would not have occurred.”

[Listen: How crypto is used for political corruption]

Kushner has a reputation for being a serious negotiator. And he has a direct line to the president. But his political dealings are ineluctably intertwined with his businesses. Kushner is related by marriage to the president, one who smiles on those who do business with his family, and the 2021 Saudi investment in Affinity Partners was made despite the Saudi fund’s own finding that the company’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Kushner has defended the deal, saying that the Saudi fund “is one of the most prestigious investors in the world.”

Trump is now on his fourth ethics chief. He has fired most of the presidentially appointed inspectors general and replaced them with loyalists, and the Department of Justice, which would ordinarily prosecute criminal conflicts of interest, is pliant to his will. Amid this wreckage in the ethics landscape, insisting on disclosure for Kushner may seem quaint, or at least not the top priority.

But the Framers of the Constitution believed that the threat of corruption—which they associated with European royalty—was as great as the threat of war. They believed that it was human nature to respond to financial interest, so their solution was to put in place structures to limit temptation and remove incentives to commit corrupt acts. It’s why they wrote into the Constitution the emoluments clause, which prohibits a president from taking a gift from a foreign leader without congressional approval.

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” George Washington wrote in his 1796 farewell address, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Centuries into our democratic experiment, this is still true.

An Oligarchy of Old People

2026-04-13T08:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Gerontocracy has always thrived in undemocratic places—Communist people’s republics, Gulf monarchies—where only death could pry power from the ruling elders. American gerontocracy is exceptional for being freely elected. Donald Trump will soon be an octogenarian, and is president in part because the preceding octogenarian, Joe Biden, did not want to admit his senescence. The median senator is 65, and the oldest, 92-year-old Chuck Grassley, has not ruled out running for reelection in 2028. The typical general-election voter is a spry 52, but in primary elections, which decide the majority of political contests, that number rises to 59. Half of all the money donated to political campaigns comes from Americans age 66 and older.

Although political gerontocracy has operated overtly, the rising economic power of the elderly has escaped much notice. Over the past 40 or so years, American wealth has grown ever more concentrated among the oldest generations. In 1989, Americans over age 55 held 56 percent of it; today they hold 74 percent. During that same period, the share of wealth held by Americans under 40 has shrunk by nearly half, from 12 to 6.6 percent. The color of money is now gray.

Much of this shift is the result of demographic change: 18 percent of Americans are senior citizens today, up from 13 percent in 1990. But even at the household level, Americans over 55 have accrued wealth more rapidly than those who are younger. Among those 75 and older, the numbers are particularly striking. In 1983, their household net worth was only slightly above the national average; by 2022, it was 55 percent higher.

For nearly a century, some of the central debates in American politics have been over inequalities—between rich and poor, male and female, Black and white. When the Baby Boomers were children, older Americans were widely viewed as vulnerable. “Fifty percent of the elderly exist below minimum standards of decency, and this is a figure much higher than that for any other age group,” Michael Harrington wrote in his 1962 book The Other America, often credited with inspiring the War on Poverty. “This is no country for old men.”

Three years later, in 1965, Medicare was created. A major expansion of Social Security followed in 1972. These changes were remarkably effective: The share of elderly people living in poverty dropped by more than one-third within a decade. But because these programs are broad-based entitlements, they have transferred huge sums to the prosperous, too. The portfolios of that latter group, meanwhile, have been swelled by a rising stock market and rising home values, outcomes that may not be entirely replicable for younger generations. As a result of all of these factors, intergenerational inequality between old and young has not merely reversed. It has accelerated.

Most current Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries will receive more from the program over their lifetime than they paid in taxes, and the extra money will necessarily come from the pockets of younger generations. The two programs now pay out more than $2 trillion a year, more than one-third of all federal expenditures. Their sustainability was a subject of major debate during the Obama years, when the national debt was much lower than it is today and interest rates on that debt were close to zero. Financially, the matter is more urgent now. The trust funds for Social Security benefits and Medicare’s hospital insurance are projected to become insolvent in roughly seven years.

[Lyman Stone: The Boomers ruined everything]

Yet even noticing the looming threats has become taboo for the two major political parties. One of Trump’s shrewdest political realizations was that entitlement reform—once a priority for fiscal conservatives—was a losing issue. Instead, he has pledged not to touch entitlement spending and lavished seniors with even more government money. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a special $6,000 tax deduction for seniors, which will cost taxpayers $91 billion over the next four years. The same bill cuts $1 trillion in spending on Medicaid, which is expected to leave some 5 million working-age Americans uninsured.

This bodes poorly for intergenerational peace. Respect for elders is being replaced by resentment of elders. A majority of young Americans no longer believe in the American dream. Many Millennials and Gen Zers expressly blame the Boomers for that, accusing them of hoarding wealth, jobs, and power. Many of these accusations are inchoate, but they are not entirely baseless.

The best rebuttal to the gerontocratic critique is that young Americans do not appreciate how good they have it. Although people of working age possess a smaller share of the national wealth, they are richer in absolute terms than Boomers were at their age. The median 35-year-old Millennial earns 38 percent more in post-tax, inflation-adjusted income than the typical Boomer did at the same age, according to research by the economist Kevin Corinth. Gen Zers have only begun their careers, but so far they are earning more than their Millennial predecessors. This trend shows up in wealth statistics, too. When Boomers were between the ages of 25 and 43, they had a median net worth of $58,000 (in 2022 dollars); Millennials at the same stage of life had a net worth of $85,000. So why are young Americans so depressed about their economic future?

[From the May 2023 issue: Jean M. Twenge on the myth of the broke Millennial]

The pathologies of the housing market are one reason. The typical home today costs five times the median annual income, up from 3.5 times the median annual income in 1984. Boomers got lucky: When they were young, they could afford to buy houses that then appreciated fantastically in value. But that luck was arguably manufactured by Washington, which engineered the rise of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages and created tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes.

These government subsidies still exist today. But even with them, younger Americans cannot buy houses at the same rate that Boomers did. In a paper titled “Giving Up,” the economists Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo predicted that Millennials will enter retirement with much lower homeownership rates than the generations before them—74 percent compared with 84 percent for Boomers. Some 15 percent of Millennials, they noted, had already given up on homeownership by age 30. These Millennials, they found, work less, spend more on credit, and are more likely to buy cryptocurrency or make other risky investments. Feeling locked out of owning a house casts a malaise—one made worse by the anxiety that the welfare state they currently support will become stingier when they eventually need it.

Older generations used the levers of government to create this situation. In high-cost cities, the building of new homes and apartment complexes is often derailed in local planning and zoning-board meetings. In 2019, the political scientists Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, and David Glick published a study examining who attended such meetings in the Boston area. The attendees, they found, were likely to be longtime homeowners who oppose new development. Preventing construction kept the value of their assets high—at the expense of younger, prospective homeowners.

Homeowner preferences hard-coded into state constitutions decades ago now further sustain the gerontocracy. In 1978, Californians voted by referendum for Proposition 13, which severely limited the property taxes that existing homeowners would have to pay—so long as they remained in place. In one study, the law was estimated to have caused a 15 percent increase in California housing prices all by itself. As longtime homeowners profited, the lost tax revenue forced reductions in school spending.

California is not unique, and housing is not the only means by which the older generations have effectively pulled up the ladder behind them. Preferences for the elderly over the young are a fixture of public budgets nationwide. Across all government programs—federal, state, and local—$2 are now spent on seniors for every $1 spent on children.

According to Tim Vlandas, an Oxford political economist, advanced democracies around the world are reaching the point of “gerontonomia”—his term for a stagnating political economy set up to prioritize elderly citizens. These citizens punish their elected governments for inflation, which lessens the value of savings and pension payments. They are much more tolerant of unemployment, because they no longer work; slow growth, because their wealth has already accumulated; and high public debt, because their descendants will pay it. The result, Vlandas argues, is lower wage growth for those still working, and also worse outcomes for their children, as a result of lower social investment over the course of their lives.

Graying democracies everywhere have made generous pension commitments that they are struggling to maintain. In the United Kingdom, the “triple lock,” a rule that in most years mandates that state pension payments increase more than inflation, seems politically impossible to change. In France, people protested for months against Emmanuel Macron in 2023 over the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64.

Yet these challenges are especially acute in America. Because Social Security still has a trust fund to draw on, voters may not realize that benefits already exceed contributions. But this fund, which stood at $2.9 trillion in 2021, is on pace to dwindle to zero by about 2033. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown will hasten the arrival of exhaustion day by cutting the number of tax-paying workers who support retirees’ benefits. Once that trust fund is gone—absent a tax increase on current workers or some other change—beneficiaries would suffer an immediate 23 percent cut in payments. A similar process would leave the Medicare Part A program, which covers hospital stays for the elderly, insolvent at about the same time.

The national debt will by then be gargantuan. Previously unthinkable ideas—such as means-tested Social Security benefits, confiscatory wealth taxes, even health-care rationing—might be contemplated. The bill coming due for the senior welfare state might not trouble this president, but it could well be the defining problem for the next one.

Some people would like to start the fight over how to resolve it now. Among them are radical thinkers who contend that in order to defeat economic gerontocracy, Americans must first defang the elderly ruling class. In his forthcoming book, Gerontocracy in America, the 54-year-old Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn calls for destroying this “tyranny of the minority,” set up by “old people with enormous private power who hold society in chains.” Power, he argues, needs to be seized back, leaving “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property.”

Moyn wants to create mandatory retirement ages, perhaps starting as low as 65, for elected officials and people with some desirable private-sector jobs. Then he would come for the money, increasing taxes on both income and accumulated assets to dilute the share of elderly wealth. Most astonishingly, he proposes diluting older Americans’ political power too, by literally valuing the votes of young people more, on the theory that the latter will suffer the consequences of political decisions for much longer. (This proposed social engineering is both harsh and vanishingly improbable. The modern legal principle of “one person, one vote” exists for good reason.)

Still, Moyn’s ideas underscore the need for an equitable post-Boomer settlement, one that will be easier to find if we start the search sooner rather than later. In the 20th century, the United States realized it was too rich and too decent a country to allow its elderly citizens to live in penury. And it made an enduring commitment to address that problem, one that has unequivocally succeeded: There has never been a better time to be a senior citizen in America. And yet the U.S. has made no comparable commitment to working families, who are stymied not only by expensive housing but also by child-care and higher-education bills. Child poverty in America persists at levels alarmingly higher than in other advanced democracies.

Initiatives such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society established what current workers in a decent country owed to retirees. A new social contract can be struck that would deliver at least some optimism for today’s workers. Curing gerontonomia would require redirecting some public funds from programs aimed at the elderly, such as Social Security, to family benefits, education, and infrastructure. But an intergenerational recalibration can come about in gentler ways than Moyn’s: The wealthiest Social Security recipients, for instance, could forgo some of their scheduled benefits, which could instead be contributed annually to “baby bond” accounts for America’s children, a source of capital to be used in adulthood.

And not every solution rests with the welfare state. Cutting through housing restrictions would generate enormous social benefit, if America’s elderly ruling class were to allow such a feat. Today’s gerontocrats will eventually die. But their legacy will be a mess to sort out.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “A Fine Country for Old Men.”

Hungary Just Ousted the Unoustable

2026-04-12T17:53:00-04:00

This story was updated on Sunday, April 12, at 7:15 p.m. ET.

Friends danced on one another’s shoulders. Fathers embraced their children. A teenage girl wept. Beer flowed. After 16 years, Hungarians had voted their strongman leader, Viktor Orbán, out of office. “I knew it was possible,” Balázs Nagy, a warehouse worker, told me this evening in Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. “Hungarians are stubborn, and we don’t give up on each other.” To his wife, Szilvi, the evening’s results had reaffirmed a truth less geographic than metaphoric. “We’re in the heart of Europe, and that’s where we belong,” she said.

The couple stood in a throng of people waiting for Péter Magyar, who led the opposition to victory. Three hours after the polls closed in national elections, they watched as he marched through the crowd holding a Hungarian flag. “Fellow Hungarians, countrymen: We have done it,” he said. “Together we have replaced the Orbán system. Together we have liberated Hungary.”

He spoke opposite the river from the grand neo-Gothic Parliament. Power is about to change hands in that body, so decisively that Magyar’s new government will be able to undo elements of the “illiberal state” that made Orbán a model for populists all over the world. In losing control of his country, Orbán became an exemplar of a rare political breed: an autocrat ousted in an election.

The prime minister’s loss is a crushing defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, who modeled their agenda in part on Orbán’s governance and staffed their movement with activists trained at his think tanks. As Trump alienated traditional U.S. partners, Washington looked to the like-minded leader in Budapest to represent its interests inside the European Union. The bond was so meaningful to Vance personally that he traveled to Budapest last week to campaign alongside Orbán as if they were running mates.

But voters rejected Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in favor of Magyar’s new faction, Tisza. In the process, they set a new national record for turnout. Magyar is a onetime Orbán loyalist who turned on the prime minister two years ago and managed to do what past opposition leaders couldn’t—overcome the incumbent’s enormous advantages. Since 2010, Orbán has rewritten election rules and removed independent checks on his power. He has suffocated civil society while extending his control over the media. And he has presided over patronage networks that have enriched his friends and family while impoverishing his society. State contracts helped turn the prime minister’s childhood friend, once a gas retrofitter, into a billionaire, but salaries for everyday Hungarians have languished at less than half the EU average. “It’s not livable,” Bendegúz Neszádeli, an 18-year-old who had just voted for the first time, told me. He held up a bracelet, braided with the Hungarian tricolor, that’s handed out to maiden voters. “It feels like there’s a future again.”

The European Parliament calls Hungary an “electoral autocracy”—voting still takes place, but under fundamentally undemocratic conditions. That makes elections harder to contest but, as Hungarian voters proved, not impossible to win. Today, an election toppled a government whose advantages included support from the governments in both the United States and Russia. Echoing a chant in the crowd, Magyar declared in his victory speech, “Russians, go home.”

Efforts by foreign governments to prop up Orbán gave his defeat implications that extend well beyond this small country of fewer than 10 million people. The prime minister has been a scourge to international institutions and a source of inspiration to far-right politicians throughout the West. He was demonizing immigrants and dictating talking points to friendly media before Donald Trump came down the golden escalator. Trump desperately tried to keep Orbán in power, issuing multiple endorsements and dangling the prospect of economic assistance in the days before the vote. Among Hungarians, however, sympathies had shifted dramatically. To note just one example: A Fidesz mayor who was recently elected with more than 70 percent of the vote in a small village in Hungary’s Southern Great Plain region declared his support for the opposition on Facebook this morning, writing, “I vote for European values and against Russian influence.”

[Read: J.D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]

The election campaign was fierce, characterized by competing claims of foreign influence. Orbán tried to paint the opposition as a puppet of Brussels, and an accomplice to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s war aims. He acknowledged economic misfortune but argued that his opponent would disrupt what little stability the country still enjoys. “The message was, ‘We could live even worse,’” András Bíró-Nagy, a political analyst, told me. Magyar, meanwhile, vowed to recoup funds frozen by EU institutions over rule-of-law violations, impose a wealth tax, and imprison Fidesz officials he accused of pilfering public coffers. “We will not be a country of no consequences,” Magyar told his supporters as he claimed victory.

The threat of civil unrest hung over the final days of voting. Orbán’s aides argued that Tisza agents were preparing to commit acts of violence—warnings that Tisza representatives decried as a pretext for a government crackdown. Consistently, independent polls showed the opposition with a sizable lead, but Western diplomats in Budapest cautioned me not to underestimate Orbán’s ability to mobilize voters at the last moment, or to manufacture circumstances justifying a state of emergency. They said Magyar would need a blowout, which is exactly what he got.

His party is set to command the two-thirds legislative majority necessary to amend the constitution, as well as to reconstitute influential bodies such as the Constitutional Court and to change so-called cardinal laws governing areas including media regulation and family policy. In his victory speech, Magyar said his party would have a “mandate to build a functioning and humane home.” As Magyar’s supporters waited for him, Orbán appeared on-screen to thank his voters and concede, but his words were drowned out by boos at the opposition’s gathering. I caught only snippets—the prime minister acknowledging the pain of defeat and pledging to start anew.

[Read: Viktor ]Orbán could actually lose

After Magyar’s speech, the riverbank became the scene of a spontaneous dance party. Fireworks burst into the air. A police officer who had traveled 70 miles with her family to listen to Magyar told me that Hungarians had used the last chance available to them to remove Orbán, whom she called a “dictator.” She regretted only that her mother, who died recently, hadn’t lived long enough “to see this ghost of Orbán go away.”

Budapest is filled with monuments to the country’s turbulent past. I waited for the results of the election tonight in Batthyány Square, named for the country’s first prime minister. A statue shows Lajos Batthyány holding up the April Laws—including self-government, freedom of the press, and equality before the law—that inspired the failed uprising against the Habsburg monarchy in 1848–49. Batthyány was executed by firing squad.

It’s April again in Hungary, but where armed struggle once failed, democratic elections have now succeeded.

Erika Nina Suárez contributed reporting.

The Conciliator

2026-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

When I first met Gretchen Whitmer last fall, she seemed to want to talk about anything except Donald Trump. She avoided using his name, referring to him, only sparingly, as “the president.” She came closest to criticizing him when she lamented that “this constant tariff chaos is really hurting our economy.”

Our interview took place, at her team’s request, in a Marriott conference room in Ypsilanti. It lasted precisely 22 minutes. And the Michigan governor, who is formidable in person, with sharply arched eyebrows and dark hair streaked with gray, did not seem thrilled to be doing it. She smiled tightly and spoke with caution while, across from us, an anxious-looking staffer counted down our remaining time together. Whitmer was careful, in fact, to highlight her own carefulness. At a National Governors Association dinner that she had attended with Trump last year, “there was a lot of conversation that I did not agree with,” Whitmer told me. “But I just sat there and bit my tongue because I’m not going to win that debate in that moment, and it’s not going to serve Michigan well.”

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Had Whitmer gone soft on Trump? For more than half a decade, she’s been “Big Gretch,” the Bell’s-drinking, fuchsia-lipstick-wearing, sometimes-performative badass from up north. She became governor during the peak of the anti-Trump resistance. Then her clash with the president during the pandemic sent her rocket into orbit. When Trump dismissed her as “the woman in Michigan,” she put the insult on a T-shirt and wore it on television; Etsy artisans hawked prayer candles with her face on them. In 2020, Joe Biden almost chose her as his running mate. After his disastrous 2024 bid, many Democrats hoped that Whitmer, not Kamala Harris, would swoop in to replace him. Now Whitmer is on the list of potential presidential contenders for 2028.

But if Democratic voters are looking for someone to confront Trump directly, Whitmer might not be their candidate. In his second term, she has instead looked for ways to collaborate with him; one of her visits to the White House last year resulted in a much-mocked photo of the governor hiding her face behind folders in the Oval Office. Contrast this approach with the likes of J. B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, who have spent the past year waging insult warfare against the president. Even Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whose state looks a lot more like Whitmer’s in political makeup, has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration, including calling J. D. Vance “profoundly and pathetically weak.”

Whitmer, in other words, seems to have given up the fight. Which made me wonder: Was this a tactical move—Let Gavin lose his mind on social media, while I win back the Midwest—or was it something else? The governor, after all, was the target of a pretty terrifying kidnapping plot in 2020. Had a fear of violence caused her to change course?

Whitmer didn’t cop to either of these explanations in any of our three relatively brief conversations over the past few months. She maintains that her underlying governing philosophy hasn’t changed: “I’ll take all the heat in the world if I can deliver for Michigan,” she said when we discussed the Oval Office photo.

Some Democrats approve of Whitmer’s new strategy. Others, though, think the governor has lost some of the pugnacity that once defined her. They view Whitmer as “almost groveling” and “pulling her punches” with Trump, a former senior staffer for Whitmer told me. (This person and a few others I spoke with were granted anonymity to talk candidly about the governor, who, for some of them, remains a close colleague.) During a meeting that Whitmer attended with the state Democratic caucus last spring, one lawmaker praised her for being Big Gretch and a strong fighter against Trump. But Whitmer batted down the compliment, calling the nickname a “persona” that others have put on her, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.

Many of Whitmer’s supporters in Michigan have been feeling confused, one of these people told me. “They’re just like, ‘What happened to Big Gretch?’”

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Gretchen Whitmer enters the Clique, a diner in Detroit, in January.

Every Whitmer supporter—and even most of her critics—will tell you that the governor’s single greatest strength as a politician is that she sounds like a regular person. Whitmer, who is 54, is authentic Michigan, down to the nasal vowels; she’s never lived anywhere else. She seems to enjoy making fun of herself. In her book, True Gretch, the governor freely admits that she partied too hard as a teenager and once vomited on her high-school principal. She writes about pulling out her dental flipper to make her colleagues laugh. These days, Instagram provides the best glimpse of Whitmer’s personality. One recent video shows the governor’s endearing struggle with a family recipe for popovers. “Why is it so thick?” she asks, frowning into the blender. “Oh, the milk’s not in there!”

It took a while for me to see this side of Whitmer. While reporting this story, I watched her speak at political events and a book talk. Eventually, I was able to see her interact with regular Michiganders at a diner in downtown Detroit in January, though the crowd there wasn’t particularly organic; ahead of the visit, Whitmer’s team had asked several local party leaders and activists to attend. Still, I got a small taste of a bigger truth: Big Gretch is a good time.

Weaving among tables, Whitmer took selfies and clutched hands. “If I could carry a tune, I’d sing to ya!” she told a man at the counter celebrating his birthday. She posed for a photo with a group of waitresses and somehow ended up with a toddler in her arms. “You’re so cute!” she squealed. At one point, Whitmer joined three women in a booth, ordered a stack of silver-dollar pancakes, and then insisted that a staffer take one. “Eat it, Henry!” she chanted. “Eat it! Eat it!” Later, Whitmer told me with a sly smile that she’d read The Atlantic’s recent profile of Newsom. “I enjoyed that one of your colleagues described Gavin as handsome ‘in a faintly sinister way,’” she said.

A Detroit rapper popularized the nickname Big Gretch, which the governor’s team insists that she “loves,” during the early months of the pandemic. But Whitmer’s reputation as a political force in Michigan goes back decades. Her parents, Richard and Sherry Whitmer, served, respectively, as the Republican head of the state’s Commerce Department and the Democratic assistant attorney general. Whitmer studied communications at Michigan State University in the hope of becoming a sports broadcaster. But after interning for a Democratic lawmaker in Lansing, she followed the same path as her parents: law school, then politics.

She spent six years in the Michigan state House, and another nine in the state Senate, four of them as minority leader. Back then, Democrats were used to being outnumbered, which meant that they were used to having to shout to be heard. And Whitmer was louder than anyone else. When a fellow Democrat was barred from speaking after using the word vagina on the house floor, Whitmer helped stage a performance of The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the state capitol. Once, during a debate, she chided her Republican colleagues until they told her that she was out of order. “Go ahead and gavel me!” she replied. “Her stuff got quoted more than anybody else,” Randy Richardville, a former Republican majority leader, told me. She was funny and direct. “I used to tell my people to stop watching her, stop listening, stop paying so much attention,” he said.

Many Americans first encountered Whitmer in 2013, when she revealed in a speech on the floor of the Michigan Senate that she had been raped in college. Republicans had been pushing for legislation to require women to buy a separate insurance policy to pay for abortions, including in the case of rape or incest. “I think you need to see the face of the women who you are impacting with this vote today,” Whitmer told her colleagues. The legislation passed anyway. But women from all over the state called to thank Whitmer for her honesty.

Even though Whitmer was viewed as liberal, she seemed to genuinely like her Republican colleagues. Richardville recalled a time when Whitmer was particularly angry about some piece of GOP legislation and was harsh with him on the Senate floor. Afterward, the two still met in his office for a drink. “We were kind of like those cartoons—the dog and chicken or whoever they are. They punch in and punch out at five,” Richardville said. Years later, when state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, said that Whitmer was “on the batshit-crazy spectrum,” she sent him a birthday cake decorated with the words Happy 65th BAT Day!

Whitmer announced that she was running for governor a few months after Trump’s election in 2016. Her slogan, “Fix the damn roads,” was folksy and charming, and in November 2018, a generally excellent year for Democrats, she was elected by almost 10 points. After her first year in office, she delivered the Democrats’ response to the president’s State of the Union address, in which she called out Trump’s bad behavior. “Bullying people on Twitter doesn’t fix bridges; it burns them,” Whitmer said. One month later, the coronavirus came to Michigan.

Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux

Whitmer blocks her face as President Trump answers questions from reporters in the Oval Office last April.

Like other governors, Whitmer ordered residents to stay at home and schools to close as the virus spread. She felt comfortable criticizing Trump’s leadership from the start. “The federal government did not take this seriously early enough,” she said in a mid–March 2020 interview on MSNBC. In response, Trump urged Whitmer to “work harder.” A few days later, Whitmer doubled down on CNN. “I don’t want to be in a sparring match with the federal government,” she said. “But we are behind the eight ball because they didn’t do proper planning.” Soon, the president was on Fox News blasting Whitmer for complaining. He told reporters that he’d instructed Mike Pence, who was coordinating the federal and state pandemic response, not to call “the woman in Michigan.” On Twitter, Trump dubbed the governor “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer.”

The situation in Michigan felt especially volatile. Whitmer extended the state’s stay-at-home order through April and initially issued restrictions that many Michiganders found ridiculous, including closing golf courses and outdoor garden centers. That month, 3,000 protesters descended on Lansing. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” the president tweeted in support. Subsequent protests featured armed men loitering outside Whitmer’s office in the state capitol building. The governor faced personal scrutiny, too. After boating restrictions were lifted, her husband, Marc Mallory, tried to use their relationship to get his boat in the water before other people could. A year later, Whitmer was caught violating social-distancing rules with friends at a Lansing bar.

She apologized for some of those missteps. More important to liberals, she didn’t cower in the face of Trump’s attacks. “You said you stand with Michigan—prove it,” she tweeted at the president in March 2020, challenging him to send more masks and ventilators. She appeared on The Daily Show in the T-shirt printed with Trump’s quote, tweaked for a sharper effect: That Woman From Michigan. At the time, Democrats were desperate for heroes, and Whitmer quickly became one. “Big Gretch” merchandise began to appear in tchotchke shops alongside Nevertheless, she persisted mugs and Ruth Bader Ginsburg yoga mats. At one point during the pandemic, Robert De Niro called in to a Whitmer-administration finance meeting to show his support for the governor.

All of this attention seemed like it might add up to something, and by summer 2020, Whitmer was being vetted for vice president. She wasn’t sure about it at first, people familiar with her thinking at the time told me; she struggled to imagine herself as a creature of Washington, D.C. She got along well with Biden, though, and by the time he asked her to fly to Delaware for an in-person chat, she was ready to say yes. Biden didn’t ask. The moment called for a Black running mate, the former senior staffer for Whitmer told me, so he had to choose Kamala Harris. “But I think he wanted it to be Whitmer,” this person said. Asked to confirm, a former adviser to both Biden and Harris said that the assessment carried “some weight.”

Whitmer campaigned happily for the ticket, but behind the scenes she was dealing with a nightmare. Earlier in the summer, the head of her security detail had sat her down in the sunroom of the governor’s residence and offered an urgent update: A group of men tied to a militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen, outraged over her COVID restrictions, was plotting to kidnap and possibly kill her. For the next several weeks, federal and state officials monitored the group as it staked out Whitmer’s multiple residences. Publicly, the governor said nothing. Finally, in early October 2020, the agents had collected enough evidence to arrest the men and foil the plot.

On October 8, Whitmer delivered a steely televised address, calling the men “sick and depraved.” In an article for this magazine, she unloaded on Trump, writing that “his violent rhetoric puts leaders across the country in danger.” During an interview on Meet the Press, she had a small sign reading 86 45, an apparent reference to removing Trump from office, visible in the background of her shot. (When Michigan Republicans accused the governor of calling for Trump’s assassination, a press aide for Whitmer said in a statement, “It’s pretty clear nobody in the Trump campaign has ever worked a food service job.”)

The situation shook Whitmer and her family. Her husband had received so many threats at his dental practice that he was forced to retire early. Her then-teenage daughters, Sydney and Sherry, refused to return to the family’s summer cottage in Elk Rapids, one of the locations staked out by the plotters. In Lansing, $1 million in security upgrades, including a perimeter fence, were installed around the governor’s mansion.

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer’s teleprompter at the Detroit Auto Show

As Michigan emerged from the pandemic, Whitmer was winning again. She was reelected by a huge margin in the 2022 midterms, during which voters also approved a measure to make abortion a constitutional right and state Democrats got their first governing trifecta in nearly 40 years. With their new power, they repealed right-to-work legislation and made breakfast and lunch free for all public-school students, among other accomplishments. The national buzz around Whitmer was growing louder, and Whitmer didn’t shut it down. She filmed a viral social-media campaign that featured a Barbie doll named Lil Gretch zooming around Lansing in a pink convertible, wrote True Gretch, and launched a political-action committee to recruit and train candidates. “People frickin’ loved her,” one Democratic state lawmaker recalled.

But around the same time, some people in Michigan began to detect a change in the governor. Local journalists and state lawmakers who’d been accustomed to watching Whitmer banter with reporters and field unscreened questions from constituents noticed that she’d become less spontaneous and less accessible. Her already tight inner circle became tighter. Her team began giving news outlets notice of the governor’s schedule hours in advance, instead of days. “They never emerged from the lockdown, and they act like it,” partly because of the kidnapping threat, Chad Livengood, the politics editor of The Detroit News, told me. (A Whitmer spokesperson said that the governor maintains “very deep engagement” with state legislators, and that her office “implemented new security protocols” for the safety of Whitmer, her staff, and reporters.)

Livengood, who has covered Whitmer since she was in the state Senate, said that these days, the governor seems “so focused on trying to follow talking points and advisers that some of that old, jocular Gretchen Whitmer talk and haggling has kind of stopped.” One well-known cable-news host also told me that Whitmer’s aides have “a lot more desire to manage” her television appearances compared with other politicians’, which feels “out of whack” with Whitmer’s interpersonal skills.

It would be understandable if the threats had made the governor more circumspect; many Michiganders were—and remain—angry about the way that she handled COVID. “There’s a heightened awareness now that I didn’t have before,” Whitmer writes in her memoir. In one of our interviews, she elaborated. “I think I’m still processing it,” she told me. “I’ve had to have my guard up for so long in such a personal and serious way, that, you know, I’m trying to just let my guard down and be me.” Some of Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers are in prison; other accused conspirators were acquitted. One of them has filed paperwork to run for governor. “It’s a strange place to be in,” she said.

Whitmer’s new reticence also coincided with a quickly deteriorating political environment for Democrats. By 2024, they were struggling to make progress on many of Whitmer’s stated priorities, including paid family leave and government-transparency reforms. Some state lawmakers blamed themselves. Others were frustrated with Whitmer. “There was no vision,” Mark Brewer, a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, told me. “Someone had to lead, and she didn’t.”

To some observers, Whitmer seemed to have made the calculation that, because little was happening in the Michigan legislature, she might as well pivot to national politics. Lots of Democrats hoped it meant that the governor was angling to replace Biden on the 2024 ticket. But Whitmer never wavered in her support for the 81-year-old incumbent—even after his calamitous June debate against Trump. (Although Whitmer did not endorse Harris for 24 hours after Biden dropped out of the race, the governor insists that she was not thinking of challenging her. “I wanted to take a beat and get the lay of the land,” she told me. “It had to be” Harris, she added, because “Joe Biden took so long to make a different decision.”)

The election was devastating for Whitmer, bringing both a Republican resurgence in Michigan that ended her party’s trifecta and a sweeping Trump victory. During speaking engagements, the governor likes to tell crowds that she dealt with the disappointment by watching all eight seasons of the TV show Dexter—“A serial killer to lift your spirits!”—before getting back to work.

This also appears to be the moment when Whitmer decided to try something new with Trump. The kidnapping plot might have given her a heightened sense of awareness and changed her relationship with the press. But now came the strategic recalibration. “When I was ready to reengage, after a brief break, I had done the analysis,” she told me. “This president just got reelected. My own state helped put him in the White House again. I’ve got two years. What am I going to do with these two years?”

Sarah Rice / Redux

Whitmer takes the stage at a Detroit campaign event for Kamala Harris in September 2024.

Whitmer made her intentions clear right away. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, she wrote the president a letter congratulating him and praising his recent words of support for the auto industry. She also included her personal cellphone number and invited Trump to call her if he needed anything. In her State of the State address the next month, Whitmer offered a new declaration of purpose: “I am not looking for fights,” she told Michiganders. “My north star has always been collaboration.”

Whitmer began to set up White House meetings with Trump—she’s had three so far, compared with only one during his entire first term in office. They have discussed an array of Michigan-centric issues—emergency aid after an ice storm, a proposed semiconductor plant, a request for new fighter jets at Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard base. Which brings us to the moment that has probably played like a Chaplin-esque silent projection inside the governor’s brain for the past 12 months: One afternoon in April, Whitmer went to the White House with Matt Hall, the new Republican speaker of the Michigan House. She and Hall were expecting a private meeting with the president, but instead, a White House staffer ushered them into an Oval Office full of reporters. They spent the next hour positioned beside Trump as he signed executive orders related to his 2020-election lies. When a camera turned to Whitmer, she covered her face with a pair of blue folders.

Basically everyone knew it had been a setup. “She got sucked into some bullshit,” Tommy Stallworth, a Democratic former state lawmaker and a senior adviser to Whitmer, told me. (Hall defended Trump, telling me that the president had decided to merge events to save time.) But for some Democrats, the photo became an instant symbol of the party’s feckless response to Trump—and another crack in the Big Gretch persona. Unlike in Zohran Mamdani’s later visit to the White House, when the New York City mayor-elect seemed to charm Trump with his confidence, Whitmer looked helpless. The folder moment showed that Whitmer “is not the badass with these great political instincts that you’ve been led to believe,” one prominent national Democratic Party strategist told me. “I love Gretchen Whitmer,” Brewer said. “But oh my God.” (Months later, in an article dubbing Whitmer “Trump’s favorite Democrat,” Politico reported that the governor autographed a copy of the photo for Trump the next time she visited. She also brought him a mocked-up newspaper celebrating how potential federal investments could deliver a “historic jobs boom” for Michigan, as well as a flag and a bullet from Selfridge.)

To the extent that Whitmer has criticized the president in his second term, she’s kept her comments soft and a little vague. “There is room for her to be a louder voice, particularly because so many folks have gotten accustomed to hearing from her,” former Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes told me. At the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year, for example, Whitmer defended the Trump-maligned United States–Mexico–Canada trade agreement without mentioning the president directly: “We cannot and we should not—as some have said—we cannot and should not abandon it.” Whitmer did not issue a statement in the days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. When I asked the governor why, she said, “I do not need to put out an official Gretchen Whitmer statement on every single thing that happens, because all I’d be doing is putting out press statements every day.” Two weeks later, after Customs and Border Protection agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, Whitmer quickly released an official statement saying that “the violence must stop” without referring to Pretti directly.

Even though the governor has taken some action when state residents have been threatened by ICE, she has at times been slow to do so, including in a case in which state Republicans were eager to help, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Whitmer seems to have concluded that she can do more with her remaining time in office through conciliation than through confrontation. The past year shows “that you can’t be too cautious with Trump, and you have to choose your battles very carefully,” Julie Brixie, a Democratic state lawmaker in Michigan, told me. “Governor Whitmer has done a great job of that.” Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, a friend of Whitmer’s, told me that states are more at risk in Trump’s second administration, which is why she figures that the approach Whitmer and her team “took in the first term cannot be the approach that they take in the second.”

In some ways, Whitmer’s new posture is working. After her Oval Office visits, the president agreed to provide some emergency aid to Michigan, and to supply new planes for Selfridge. Notably, the National Guard has not yet been unleashed on Detroit. And even though ICE agents have conducted immigration-enforcement operations in the state, they haven’t made it a special target. Whitmer believes that she has set an example for other leaders, including Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to visit the White House and work with the president.

At least some of Whitmer’s constituents seem to appreciate this. Whitmer’s visit to the diner in Detroit took place a few days after Good was killed. As Whitmer greeted a group of elderly patrons, she alluded vaguely to the violence in Minnesota. “Crazy things happening out there,” she said, before adding, “We’ve gotta keep that from happening in Michigan.” One woman nodded and replied, “That’s why you gotta keep the channel of communication open.”

It’s not clear how long this strategy will succeed. Trump could change his mind at any moment about the new fighter jets for Selfridge, which aren’t set to arrive until 2028. Whitmer’s much-desired semiconductor plant fell through, thanks to tariffs and a shift in federal policy. “I don’t think it’s worked,” Brewer said of Whitmer’s closeness with Trump. “He’s given us a few trinkets.”

Last May, the president even dangled the possibility of pardoning some of the men involved in the kidnapping plot. When the governor learned this, she told me, she called Trump, who seemed to believe that the men had been treated unfairly. “I said, ‘No, Mr. President, they had trials, and this is very serious,’” Whitmer told him, before following up with a letter urging Trump not to go through with the pardons. So far, Trump has stood down. But “nothing is written in stone,” Whitmer acknowledged. (When I reached out to the White House for a response to this and a number of other questions, an official said in an email that Whitmer and Trump “have a friendly relationship and are willing to work together to get things done for the people of Michigan, whom the President loves!”)

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer at the Clique, in Detroit, in January

If Whitmer runs, her work-with-Trump strategy could double as a 2028 campaign platform. She wouldn’t say so directly, but some of her allies did. “Every social-media liberal believes that silence means complicity,” John Anzalone, Whitmer’s pollster and a Democratic strategist, told me. “Silence is sometimes just really fucking smart.”

Whitmer, who has less than a year left as governor, told me that a presidential campaign isn’t something that she’s “gearing up for.” And many Michigan Democrats think she isn’t interested, perhaps partly because of the 2020 threats against her. It’s also conceivable that, by trying to be as inoffensive as possible, Whitmer is positioning herself as the ideal vice-presidential candidate.

But the governor doesn’t seem to have ruled out a run of her own. A nonprofit group supporting her has raised millions of dollars and hired some of her former aides. While I was reporting this story, the governor attended a fundraiser and a book talk in Florida and a PAC event in Wisconsin. She launched a Substack where she plans to expound on the path forward for Democrats. And like several other would-be presidential candidates, she spoke at this year’s Munich Security Conference, though she kept her comments Michigan-focused and, somewhat perplexingly, seemed unprepared to answer foreign-policy questions.

The affirmative case for a Whitmer campaign goes like this: Right now, Democrats might want leaders who thirst for combat, but their appetites will change. Other Democratic governors have won the “mess-with-Trump primary,” the consultant James Carville told me, but in two years, the president will be “the last person that the country’s gonna want to hear about.” By 2028, voters will want candidates who, like Whitmer, have prioritized action over ideology. In this second age of Trump, Democrats “need to prove that you can make democracy work, that you have delivered for people,” the Democratic political adviser Jennifer Palmieri told me. After Whitmer met with Trump in spring 2025, her approval rating soared—and popularity in Michigan isn’t a bad barometer for someone potentially seeking national office.

The problem with this theory is that, right now at least, Democrats are not looking for careful politicians. A large majority of Democratic voters believe that their leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against Trump and his policies, according to one 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center. In a crowded 2028 primary, Whitmer “will be starting from behind, and leaning very heavily on her record, and I don’t know if that’s enough when people are just so rabidly anti-Trump,” the Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told me. Even though many Democratic donors were excited about Whitmer’s potential as a candidate in 2024, there is no longer much enthusiasm, one prominent donor-adviser told me: “There is no badass energy to Gretchen Whitmer anymore.”

Whitmer seems at least a little concerned about this perception. Toward the end of our final conversation, at the diner, I asked the governor whether she was still comfortable embracing the nickname she’d earned during the pandemic. She seemed exasperated. She spoke for a while, repeating what she’d told me earlier about advocating for her state, and noted that none of her predecessors had managed to get a Selfridge deal. Then she turned back to my question. “I am Big Gretch. Big Gretch is me,” she said. “I’m always going to show up for the people of Michigan—even when it comes at the cost of myself.”

Viktor Orbán Could Actually Lose

2026-04-10T12:15:57-04:00

Viktor Orbán is the closest thing in Europe to a prime minister for life. He has served four consecutive terms since 2010, perpetuating his power with the ruthlessness of a royal. But ruthlessness may not guarantee him reelection. That became clear to me recently in Székesfehérvár, a small city in central Hungary where Orbán was born.

Székesfehérvár lacks Budapest’s grand boulevards and baroque extravagance, but the city is not without luster. Hungary’s first king, Stephen I, built a basilica in Székesfehérvár that served as the coronation site for later monarchs. Rain was lashing the city when I visited one evening last month. It was dark and cold. But close to 1,000 people had gathered in the town square, all of them waiting for Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán loyalist who broke with the prime minister two years ago and is now trying to unseat him in elections on Sunday. Most polls have shown Magyar’s party, Tisza, with a comfortable lead over Orbán’s Fidesz Party. But it’s not a given that popular support will translate into a victory at the polls.

Such is the state of Hungary’s democracy. Gerrymandered districts give lopsided influence to the rural countryside, traditionally fertile territory for Fidesz. Deceptive campaigning is rampant, in the form of billboards that dot Hungary’s highways, deepfakes that dominate the internet, and pro-government messaging that fills newspapers and television channels owned by the prime minister’s allies. Orbán enjoys the support of foreign governments, in both the United States and Russia. Donald Trump’s endorsements have been as forceful as any he has issued in this year’s domestic midterm elections, a sign of his personal stake in a regime revered by the MAGA movement. His vice president, J. D. Vance, traveled to Budapest this week to underline the political alliance and advance conspiracy theories about “bureaucrats in Brussels” meddling in the election, words that could have come from the lips of Kremlin spin doctors.

It may not be obvious why an election in Hungary, a landlocked European country with a population roughly the size of Michigan’s, has commanded so much international attention. It’s not a nuclear power, a global media hub, or a center of innovation. Its language is a beast to learn. But Sunday’s vote may well be one of the most important elections in the history of postcommunist Europe. It will test the longevity of a regime that has deviated from principles of democracy and the rule of law that were vindicated by the peaceful revolutions of 1989 and later secured by the European Union, which incorporated Hungary as part of its eastward expansion in 2004. The bloc doesn’t have a mechanism to expel a wayward member, but Western diplomats told me that brazen electoral theft would inaugurate a perilous new era. Some suggested that the prime minister, who oversees entrenched patronage networks that reach into the minutiae of municipal jobs, has too much at stake to accept defeat. Each side has accused the other of planning violence if the results don’t go their way.

Successive setbacks have predisposed Hungarians to pessimism, even self-pity. Consider what has befallen them in the 11 centuries since Hungarian tribes moved into the Carpathian Basin in 896. They were abandoned during the Mongol invasion in 1241 and then subdued by the Ottoman empire in 1526. Their aspirations for independence from the Habsburgs were crushed in 1849, and their territory was amputated by the peace agreements that ended the First World War. They suffered under communism when the Iron Curtain split Europe, spilling their blood in a failed uprising against the Soviets in 1956. “We are the most forsaken of all people on the face of the earth,” Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet, lamented.

It would be natural for people in Székesfehérvár to feel that way today. Their manufacturing-led, export-oriented economy is a textbook expression of the model that made Hungary a postcommunist success story. Now it represents the defects that have made Hungary one of the poorest countries in the European Union, and opened Orbán up to his most serious challenge in 16 years. Hungarians have an expression for accepting a disagreeable situation: lenyeli a békát, literally “swallowing the frog.” The people I met in Székesfehérvár were no longer swallowing the frog.

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

Two men wait at a bus stop in Budapest on April 9, beside a government poster of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán reading Fogjunk össze a háború ellen! (“Let’s unite against the war!”).

A pack of university students were standing on a retaining wall to get a better view of the stage. The red, white, and green of the Hungarian tricolor, projected onto buildings that surround the square, danced across their faces. One of the students, Márton Szépvölgyi, climbed down to speak with me. He has been thinking of leaving Hungary for a master’s degree in physics. But if Magyar wins this month, he told me, he’ll stay. “I’m hopeful,” he said. Szépvölgyi mocked the prime minister, who is 62, for seeming unsteady when boos erupted at one of his recent rallies. “He’s crashing out like Ceaușescu,” Szépvölgyi said with a snicker, referencing the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s shock when an audience turned on him in December 1989, a decisive moment in the collapse of the country’s Communist dictatorship.

When Magyar took the stage, he used the same sardonic tone as the student, calling it “awkward” to watch the prime minister reckoning with the limits of his power. “He realizes for the first time that it’s over, that the Hungarian people will dismiss him,” the 45-year-old candidate, whose gelled hair and Tisza-branded windbreaker project an easygoing polish, said. His party’s full name is the Respect and Freedom Party, but it’s known by a portmanteau of the first syllables of those Hungarian words. Tisza is also one of the country’s most important rivers. It often floods the Great Hungarian Plain, a phenomenon invoked by the chant repeated at Magyar’s rallies: “The Tisza is rising!”

[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]

Magyar spoke from a podium bearing the words NOW OR NEVER!, but with a strike-through leaving only the word NOW. Urgency is a theme of his campaign. “This is the very last chance to take back our country,” he told his supporters. Another theme is independence, drawing on Hungary’s historic struggle for self-rule and allowing Magyar to recast the support Orbán has received from the United States and Russia as a liability. “Hungarian history is not written in Moscow or Washington,” he said. His stump speech includes a direct appeal to young people like Szépvölgyi who are contemplating leaving Hungary. The share of emigrants from ages 20 to 24 has doubled during Orbán’s time in office. Magyar urged the crowd to make the outcome of Sunday’s election personal, saying, “Tell your grandparents you want to stay.”

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

Márton Szépvölgyi on Budapest’s Margaret Island, on April 9

Szépvölgyi told me that his grandmother wants Orbán to win. But maybe she could be convinced otherwise. Toward the back of the crowd, an elderly woman, herself a grandmother, told me that she had lost faith in the ruling party. Fidesz, founded as an anti-communist youth movement, still positions itself as the guardian of Hungary’s independence, secured in the peaceful revolutions that swept Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. “They talk about 1989, but they turned 180 degrees,” she said. “Everything broke down.”

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

People stand with Hungarian flags during a Fidesz rally in Pécel, Hungary, on March 28.

Orbán has many traits in common with Trump. But on the campaign trail, he doesn’t completely deny reality. Székesfehérvár is an hour’s drive from Pécel, a suburb of Budapest where I saw the prime minister rally his supporters. He seemed to acknowledge that life has not been easy in Hungary, thanking voters for remaining loyal to him over the past 16 years and asking them to cheer for one another. “Go Hungary” is his refrain. “Go Hungarians.”

The prime minister’s delivery was limp, but I could hear hints of rhetorical gifts. He managed to articulate the core claim of his campaign, that he’s a bulwark against Hungary being dragged into the war in Ukraine, in a way that sounded halfway plausible. As bad as things were, Orbán seemed to suggest, they could get much worse. So don’t take a risk with a government willing to advance European plans to send more money to Kyiv. “Your whole monthly salary will be spent on utilities,” he said.

[Read: The hardest job in Europe]

Throughout Russia’s war, Orbán has maintained friendly relations with President Vladimir Putin. Recently leaked audio revealed that Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, strategized with his Russian counterpart about advancing Kremlin interests inside the European Union. The U.S. government once aspired to impede Hungary’s drift into Russian arms. But the Trump administration has reversed those efforts, giving Budapest relief from U.S. sanctions for buying Russian oil and glorifying Orbán’s government for dissenting against a supposedly woke EU bureaucracy. “We have not only a national but also a Christian government,” Orbán told his supporters in Pécel. In the crowd, I met Adam Hajdu, who is studying to be a police officer, and his grandmother, Klara, both wearing red Make America Great Again caps. They told me that Trump and Orbán both love God and want peace.

Orbán has a knack for conjuring enemies just in time for election season. In 2014, he cast blame on “multinationals, bankers, and bureaucrats in Brussels” for trying to thwart his economic nationalism. In 2018, he cast George Soros, the Budapest-born Holocaust survivor and liberal financier, as a menace to Hungarian sovereignty. In 2022, he repositioned Ukraine, the victim of Russia’s invasion, as a danger to peace in Hungary. Now he is rerunning a version of that campaign, and his supporters seem convinced by it. A retired postman in Pécel told me that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is nothing more than an actor, swindling the rest of Europe.

Piero Cruciatti / AFP / Getty

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2024

The cynicism of this strategy is astonishing. It was Orbán’s bold call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, in 1989, that first gave him political star power. He was a shaggy-haired, anti-communist youth activist, with humble origins as the son of an agricultural engineer and a teacher, when he delivered a speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister who was executed in 1958 for having led the failed uprising two years earlier. At Heroes’ Square in Budapest, Orbán aligned himself with those “fighting for the establishment of liberal democracy.”

When democracy came in 1990—in the form of Hungary’s first free, multiparty elections—Orbán won a seat in Parliament as a representative of Fidesz, an acronym for the Alliance of Young Democrats. Eight years later, he became prime minister, at the age of 35. By that time, he had already redefined his party’s anti-communism, originally identified with Western-style liberalism, as patriotism and national conservatism, a pragmatic move aimed at finding a niche in a fractured right-wing landscape. He was narrowly ousted by a center-left coalition in 2002, a defeat his biographers say he blamed on the media. In the opposition, he plotted total domination, remarking, “We have only to win once, but then properly.” Comments like that fuel criticism of Orbán as an autocrat. Some of his supporters don’t entirely disagree. “He has a firm hand,” a retired teacher at Orbán’s rally in Pécel told me. “He’s almost an autocrat, but not quite.”

When Orbán reclaimed power in 2010, it was with the two-thirds parliamentary majority necessary to rewrite the constitution, which he did, audaciously, in the face of criticism from the European Union and the United Nations. Early changes curbed the power of the judiciary, weakened independent watchdogs, and rewrote election rules to favor the ruling party. A new media law threatened outlets with fines for coverage considered disreputable. By bringing public broadcasters more firmly under government control while clearing the way for loyalists to take over private news organizations, Fidesz now exercises authority over an estimated 80 percent of the country’s media. He continues to reshape the constitution for maximum advantage in the culture wars. Enumerating his government’s accomplishments at his rally in Pécel, he pointed to a constitutional amendment approved last year mandating that all Hungarians are officially counted as either male or female.

These changes form the basis of the “illiberal state” that Orbán first proclaimed in 2014, scorning the values meant to bind EU member states, including fidelity to the rule of law and respect for individual rights. For successful models, Orbán pointed beyond the bloc to Russia, Turkey, and China. It took Brussels another eight years to respond with financial penalties. In 2022, EU institutions began to freeze billions of euros in funds over rule-of-law violations.

[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump]

The consequences have been catastrophic. The economy stagnated for three straight years, starting in 2023. Price shocks from Russia’s war in Ukraine were widespread in Europe, but the loss of EU funds compounded the government’s problems, according to Zoltán Török, head of research at Raiffeisen Bank Hungary, a subsidiary of an Austrian bank. “Hungary is an outlier,” Török told me. “And this is purely derived from the political decisions of the prime minister.”

Bloomberg / Getty

Péter Magyar, leader of the Tisza Party, holds a Hungarian flag during a rally ahead of a general election in Budapest, on March 15.

Janos Kummer / Getty

Magyar delivers a speech at a demonstration during commemorations of the 178th anniversary of the 1948–49 Hungarian Revolution, on March 15, in Budapest.

A different kind of deception about the country’s finances helped lead Magyar into public life, originally as a Fidesz apparatchik. He was a young lawyer in 2006 when a leaked recording caught Hungary’s then–prime minister, from the country’s Socialist Party, admitting that his government had misled the public about the economy. Thousands took to the streets, and police responded by using rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons to disperse the protests, in a show of force that carried echoes of 1956.

Magyar, who comes from a well-connected conservative family, helped create a legal-defense group for the protesters. He also lined up behind Orbán, who leveraged the popular anger to make a political comeback in 2010. Magyar held diplomatic roles in Brussels, where his wife advised a Fidesz member of the European Parliament. She became Hungary’s justice minister in 2019, but her political career cratered in 2024 when she took the fall for a widening scandal over a government pardon in a child-molestation case. By then, the couple had divorced, and Magyar soon released audio of his ex-wife, which he secretly recorded, discussing government meddling in politically sensitive prosecutions. The ploy provoked personal blowback, including allegations of domestic abuse, which Magyar denied. But the revelations brought widespread protests. He used the occasion to announce his leadership of Tisza.

Previous election-year efforts to unseat Orbán have fallen well short—first a loose alliance of left-liberal parties, then a far-right party that tacked to the center to broaden its appeal, and finally a broad coalition that united behind a small-city mayor. None achieved consensus or message discipline. But Magyar has some intrinsic advantages, both as a former Fidesz insider and as a front man for a new party. “People believe him when he talks about Fidesz corruption because he participated in it,” an EU ambassador told me. He also understands how Orbán campaigns; repeatedly, Magyar has prepared his supporters for smear campaigns and false-flag operations designed to strengthen the prime minister’s hand. To fend off attacks, he has found candidates without political baggage to run in the country’s 106 constituencies. His recruits include an opera singer and a zoo director. They have maintained low profiles, keeping the focus on Magyar, who has become a “messianic figure,” as one of his associates put it to me. The associate acknowledged that meteoric expectations may create problems should he get the chance to govern.

Magyar has promised to right the economy and rid the country of graft, studiously avoiding incendiary cultural issues. On immigration, he is said to hew to Orbán’s hard-line views. His foreign-policy adviser, who has a Ph.D. in international relations from Tufts, has told interlocutors that a Tisza government would restore Hungary’s stature in Brussels and reorient its relationship with Moscow. “We’re not a friend of Russia,” the adviser, Anita Orbán (no relation), told the ambassador of a NATO country. At the same time, she outlined a pragmatic approach to the war in Ukraine, reflecting Hungary’s unique energy needs as a landlocked country.

Robert Nemeti / Anadolu / Getty

Tens of thousands of supporters gather at Heroes’ Square as Magyar addresses the crowd.

People who have interacted with Magyar describe him as headstrong and aggressive. But Orbán’s opponents aren’t being picky. Numerous other parties didn’t merely throw their support behind him; they withdrew from the election altogether to avoid dividing the opposition vote. That was a difficult decision for a liberal party called Momentum, according to its parliamentary-group leader, Dávid Bedő. But it’s working. “In previous elections Orbán always controlled the narrative,” he told me. “Now Magyar is in control because he knows how the system works.”

Bedő, who is 33, has been traveling to traditional Fidesz strongholds and recording interviews with locals, which he posts on social media. Some of the clips show onetime Orbán loyalists venting dissatisfaction with the government. Bedő’s surveys, while unscientific, have convinced him that Orbán can’t win an honest election. He predicted that the prime minister will leave office one way or another. If the election doesn’t ratify a change, “people are going to revolt,” Bedő said. “We can’t take it anymore.”

I heard similar sentiments from right-wing opponents of Orbán. Gábor Vona, who challenged the prime minister unsuccessfully in 2018, told me, “We are one step away from a civil war.”

Erika Nina Suárez

Jelenik Tibor, 77, at a Fidesz rally. Of Orbán, he said, “He has a firm hand; he’s almost an autocrat, but not quite.”

Erika Nina Suárez

A woman wears a hat reading Make Europe Great Again during a Fidesz rally in Pécel, Hungary, on March 28.

Western embassies in Budapest are preparing satellite phones and other emergency precautions in the event of mass unrest. Ambassadors who spoke with me did so on the condition of anonymity to avoid the appearance of meddling in domestic politics. Several said it was ironic, however, that Trump issued a public endorsement of Orbán around the same time that Hungary’s foreign minister warned EU ambassadors in a meeting not to get involved in the election. The message, they said, was that interference was acceptable only if it favored the government. Vance reinforced the point when he traveled to Budapest and declared his intention to “send a signal” to European officials to stay out of the election. In remarks to students the next day, he recalled asking the prime minister over lunch, “What can I do to help?”

[Read: J. D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]

Among foreign diplomats as well as former Hungarian government officials, I encountered different views about the lengths to which Orbán would go to stay in power. A recent documentary alleged a Fidesz-operated scheme to buy the votes of the country’s poorest citizens, especially its large Roma minority. Informal patronage networks are also instrumental. In small towns, municipal jobs or spots in government-run child care may depend on support for Fidesz. Outright manipulation of the vote count may be more difficult. Tisza officials told me they’re positioning multiple observers at each of Hungary’s 10,000 polling stations. But some voters I met speculated that Orbán might take last-minute measures to obstruct the election if he expected to lose. Last weekend, he claimed that explosives had been found near the pipeline that carries Russian gas into Hungary through Serbia—assertions the opposition condemned as a pretext to delegitimize the vote.

Foreign diplomats told me they’re placing their trust in international observers from the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe. In past elections, the organization’s monitors have characterized voting in Hungary as free but unfair, citing Fidesz’s structural advantages. The diplomats told me that they don’t expect the U.S. government, the organization’s largest donor, to hold Hungary to account if voting is marred by irregularities. If anything, they said, Trump might encourage his ally in Budapest to declare victory prematurely, just as he did in 2020, before calling his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Zoltán Kovács, Orbán’s spokesperson, dismissed these concerns. When I met him in his office, his television was tuned to CNN. A chyron was relaying Trump’s latest statement about the situation in Iran (Trump: Go get your own oil). Kovács, who is more reflective in person than his bulldog persona online, told me that Hungary’s election system is secure. “Rigged elections are impossible,” he maintained. He allowed that Fidesz is nervous about the final stage of the campaign. “Trying to believe we control reality is a false pretension,” he told me.

Janos Kummer / Getty

Vice President J. D. Vance and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attend an election campaign rally on April 7, in Budapest.

Vance’s visit added to the surreal quality of the campaign. The vice president stumped with Orbán five days before the election as if they were running mates. While Trump was on Truth Social threatening to wipe out Iranian civilization, his vice president was onstage in Budapest praising the Hungarian prime minister as a partner in the defense of Western civilization.

[Read: The first post-reality political campaign]

After the U.S. and Iran reached a fragile cease-fire, raising hopes for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a return to normal oil prices, the vice president delivered a debrief on the negotiations. His audience included students at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a government-linked educational institution financed in part by shares in a company that processes Russian oil. Vance mocked European countries for their dependence on foreign fossil fuels, asking, “Why have the Europeans made themselves completely dependent on unreliable sources of energy?”

His interlocutor, the director general of the MCC, didn’t inform him that Hungary is one of the few European countries that didn’t reduce its reliance on Russian oil after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and that Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil is in fact a foundation of the prime minister’s reelection campaign. A student seated next to me laughed intermittently during Vance’s remarks. When the vice president concluded, I turned and asked her what she had found funny. “He doesn’t know much about Hungary,” she said.

On a rainy evening in Budapest, I met Renátó Fehér, a Hungarian poet. He was in good spirits. Previously, Hungarians opposed to the government were indignant but apathetic. “Now we are enthusiastic in our outrage,” he said. The change reflects an energetic opposition party, but also an ability to see clearly what the prime minister represents. In Fehér’s telling, Orbán melds Russian-style tactics with the ideology of the American far right. He is, Fehér said, “truly a man of the future.” That’s why Fehér calls Orbán’s politics not illiberal, the word used by the prime minister, but post-fascist. The term was coined by Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a Romanian-born Hungarian philosopher who died in 2023. Post-fascism doesn’t involve paramilitaries or do away with elections outright. It operates by stripping certain groups, such as immigrants and sexual minorities, of full citizenship. In place of theories of a master race, its rationale is based on perceived cultural incompatibility or civilizational defense. It is not utopian but cynical and bureaucratic.

In 2014, after Orbán announced his plans for what he called an “illiberal state,” Tamás gave an interview in which he implored the public to read between the lines. “He told us that he will not be removed by elections,” Tamás said at the time, predicting that “those who are against him must be prepared for the grimmest struggle.” Yet for all of Orbán’s aspirations to amass unchecked power, Hungary’s democracy is not yet extinguished. The prime minister must still answer to voters, and their preferences may override all of the advantages he has allowed his party. Sunday will put that possibility to the test. The election could mark the conclusion of this chapter in Hungary’s democratic struggle, or else the start of a grim new one.

Karoly Szilagyi contributed reporting.

The State That Could Decide Trump’s Gerrymandering War

2026-04-09T07:00:00-04:00

Updated on April 10 at 6:55 p.m. ET

Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia.

This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.”

The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, as Republicans added seats in North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.

With new opportunities to gain an edge dwindling, the two parties are waging an expensive campaign in Virginia that could prove decisive. The congressional map that Democrats have proposed is, in its ways, even more audacious than those enacted in either Texas or California. They’re asking voters to temporarily set aside a bipartisan redistricting system they approved just six years ago. Under their proposal, Democrats would be favored to win all but one of Virginia’s 11 House seats—a huge shift from the current districts, which are currently split between six Democrats and five Republicans. The boldness of Virginia’s plan stands out all the more in light of the reticence of neighboring Maryland, a stronger Democratic bastion where the senate president rebuffed a push from national leaders and Governor Wes Moore to draw a map that could have given Democrats the lone remaining House seat they don’t currently hold.

Just how far Democrats would reach in Virginia was the subject of weeks of internal debate within the party. Some had pushed for a slightly more restrained proposal that would have given Democrats the upper hand in nine of the 11 House seats. But advocates of a maximalist approach prevailed, and now Virginia voters will decide in an April 21 referendum whether to use the new maps this fall. The party has unified behind the 10–1 proposal—even if some Democrats seem to be bringing a touch of shame to their campaign.

“Nobody wants to do this. I don’t want to do this,” Michelle Maldonado, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, told me after delivering a pep talk to campaign volunteers near her home in Manassas. But, like Deeds, she cited as a rationale Trump’s demand for Republicans to carve into Democratic seats wherever they had the power to do so. “We can’t sit back and wait.”

Democrats confronted the same ethical qualms last fall in California, another state where voters had previously acted to remove politics from redistricting. But that campaign took place in a far bluer state at a time when anger among rank-and-file Democrats over the GOP’s Texas gerrymander was raw and fresh. Five months later, the Republican redistricting campaigns have stalled in states such as Indiana and Kansas, where GOP lawmakers rejected pressure from Trump to redraw their maps. The Florida legislature will meet later this month to consider gerrymandering proposals, but there too, many Republicans have become skittish.

[Read: The state that handed Trump his biggest defeat yet]

The GOP’s struggles are welcome news for Democrats nationally, but they have complicated the “Yes” campaign in Virginia, where polls are close and some left-leaning voters are questioning whether their party really needed to gerrymander so audaciously. Deeds, who was the Democrats’ nominee for governor in 2009, is one of Virginia’s longest-serving state legislators. He said he’s tried to explain the stakes to Democratic critics, with mixed success. “Sometimes I’ve been able to convince them otherwise,” Deeds told me. But other skeptics of the plan, he acknowledged, haven’t budged. “Ultimately,” Deeds said, “if this isn’t successful, I think it will be because of people like that.”

Perhaps the biggest risk for Virginia Democrats is that their cutthroat approach to redistricting will wake up a state Republican Party that they thoroughly trounced in November. Abigail Spanberger won the governorship by 15 points and the largest raw-vote margin in state history. But Republicans have been heartened by strong early-voting turnout in conservative areas, along with a landslide victory in a legislative election last month. (The result was a rare overperformance by Republicans in a special election during Trump’s second term, which Democrats have been dominating across the country.)

Democrats “have overreached,” Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader who is helping lead the opposition to the amendment, told me. “There’s no doubt that gives us an advantage.” Representative Ben Cline, a fourth-term Republican whose conservative district would become a Democratic-leaning battleground in the proposed map, has launched another group to defeat the referendum. “Virginia had a Republican governor less than three months ago, but Democrats now want to take 91 percent of the House seats. That’s insane,” he told me.

A narrow majority of likely Virginia voters favored the redistricting amendment in a poll released last week by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School. But the same survey found that Republicans and other opponents of the measure were more enthusiastic about voting. “People understand the hypocrisy and are really angry,” Cantor said. Turnout for an April election “is a tough thing,” he added. “But when you’re angry, I think you win the turnout.”

Democratic ads have featured Spanberger and former President Obama urging voters to fight back against Republican efforts “to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years.” But opponents have tried to muddy the debate by reminding voters of Obama’s long history of campaigning against gerrymandering. Civil-rights leaders accused a dark-money group of engaging in a racist misinformation campaign by sending mailers to Black voters invoking the civil-rights movement and implying that Obama opposes the redistricting amendment. “It’s despicable,” Maldonado said. (The chair of the committee that sent the mailers, a Republican former state legislator who is Black, has defended the tactic.)

With tens of millions of dollars already spent on TV ads, Democrats have dwarfed Republicans in fundraising so far. But turnout has been robust across Virginia, even exceeding the early vote in the fall governor’s race. At the early-voting site in Waynesboro, a small city west of Charlottesville near Shenandoah National Park, cars pulled into the parking lot every couple of minutes on a recent Thursday afternoon. The area is a conservative part of Cline’s district, and most people I interviewed were voting no. Voters expressed more than the usual amount of disgust with both parties. “They’ve all let the power go to their head,” George Trent, a 56-year-old Trump voter who opposed the amendment, told me. J. Strickland, a 71-year-old independent who leans Republican and “reluctantly” backed Trump in 2024, told me he voted no because if the amendment passed, “Democrats would control the entire state.” Strickland, who did not want his first name used while talking about politics, said the whole gerrymandering war made a strong case for term limits in Congress. “This two-party system is crazy,” Strickland said. “Both parties are fighting against themselves.”

As they did in California, Democrats are trying to reassure voters about the redistricting amendment by emphasizing that it’s temporary. The new maps would be used through 2030, after which the state would return to a system in which a bipartisan commission draws House districts after the decennial census. Supporters have also noted that unlike Republican gerrymandering efforts that have won approval only from state legislatures, California and Virginia have each put their redistricting proposals before the voters, as state law required in both cases.

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’ ]

Opponents of the Virginia amendment doubt the claims that these new maps are only a short-term response. Republicans have made no such promises about their own mid-decade redistricting plans, and because of population trends, blue states are likely to lose seats to GOP-controlled states after the 2030 census, putting more pressure on Democrats to maximize their advantage where they can. A Supreme Court ruling rolling back the Voting Rights Act, which could happen later this spring, would allow Republicans in southern states to draw themselves even more seats in the next few years.

If gerrymandering is a tough sell in Virginia, Democrats are also offering voters a simpler rationale for supporting the amendment. This, they tell them, is your chance to fight back against Trump, to “level the playing field” against the president’s many attempts to accumulate power for himself and for his party. The various messages from the “Yes” campaign have a choose-your-own-outrage feel to them. In addition to running commercials with Obama and Spanberger, the “Yes” campaign has released ads featuring military veterans warning about Trump’s threat to democracy. Another ad warns about the prospect of a national abortion ban if Republicans accrue even more power.

At the University of Virginia, “Yes” campaigners were using their own Trump-related controversy as motivation: the ouster last summer of UVA’s president, James Ryan, who resigned under pressure from the Justice Department in a dispute over DEI policies. During a press conference last week, Semony Shah, the president of UVA’s University Democrats, cast the referendum as an opportunity for students to stop what she called “federal overreach” into the university. “These are things that frustrate students, because their voices weren’t accounted for. Their voices weren’t heard,” Shah told me afterward. “This,” she said, “is your way to make your voice heard.”

Democrats acknowledged the strong start that Republican areas of the state have had in early voting, but they told me turnout was picking up among their target constituencies. The campaign is planning a surge of rallies and canvassing events this weekend, timed for the expansion of early voting to dozens more satellite locations across Virginia. At the canvass launch in Manassas, Maldonado warned volunteers that they might encounter concerned and even angry voters who were “worried that this is a power grab by Democrats.” The door-knockers themselves seemed more confident, suggesting that the party’s pearl-clutching over gerrymandering was not as widespread as politicians like Deeds and Maldonado feared. Dylan Salgado, a 24-year-old digital fundraiser from Loudoun County, told me he’s been canvassing regularly since early voting started. I asked him if he had encountered Democrats who planned to vote against the amendment out of a principled opposition to gerrymandering. “I haven’t found someone who’s said that yet,” Salgado replied, “which makes me think we have it in the bag.”

This article originally misspelled Dylan Salgado’s last name.

1979 Is the Year That Explains Donald Trump

2026-04-09T05:00:00-04:00

It sure feels like 1979 again. Iran is fighting the West. The price of gas has been rising for weeks. Moscow is aiming to take advantage of a distracted White House. The party in control of Washington is anxiously looking at the polls. Flared pants and jumpsuits are back! So are cigarettes. Steven Spielberg is riding high after doing a movie about humans encountering aliens. (Not to be outdone, actual space missions are back too.) U2 put out new music. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates are good.

And if we do seem to have returned to that moment in time, then, well, Donald Trump would seem to be ready for whatever comes next, because the guy has lived his whole life like it’s the 1980s.

He embraces the big-bigger-biggest ethos of the decade, with its gold-plated style and “greed is good” mantra. His views have been shaped by the brash era in which excess was the norm and ostentatious displays of wealth and power were celebrated in pop culture and in Trump’s Manhattan. (The pink-marbled lobby of his Trump Tower skyscraper looks just as it did when it opened in 1983.) It was also a moment when New York City was defined by extreme wealth stratification and racial unrest, a time of high crime and corruption. To this day, Trump’s touchstones almost seem preserved in amber from that decade: Sylvester Stallone, George Steinbrenner, Hulk Hogan, the musical Cats. This was an era of over-the-top displays of patriotism and even jingoism; the phrase Let’s make America great again was in. (It’s true—Ronald Reagan got there first.) This was when Trump became a celebrity, when he still had youth on his side. In his mind, at least, he hasn’t left.

Smith Collection / Gado / Getty

Trump’s favorite era may also be shaping his approach to the war with Iran. Back then was when Trump revealed himself to be an Iran hawk, one who believed that President Jimmy Carter’s failed efforts to rescue hostages at the U.S. embassy broadcast a sign of American weakness to the globe. In a series of remarks over the decade when he became a public figure, Trump said he’d punish Iran, and he began to float his now-familiar refrain of take the oil. Indeed, those 1980s discussions of foreign policy and Iran were when the media began speculating that Trump might someday run for president. The lessons he learned decades ago have informed his bombastic approach to this war, which has included the killing of Iran’s leader, the degradation of its military, and a threat Tuesday to wipe out the nation’s “whole civilization.” A fragile cease-fire is now in place. Republicans hope that this Iran crisis won’t wound the White House like the one that did 47 years ago.

Carter’s presidency was largely doomed when, amid the Iranian Revolution of 1979, militants seized the American embassy in Tehran. Weeks later, Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamist cleric, emerged as the new theocratic state’s supreme leader and fueled extreme anti-American sentiment. A military rescue effort failed, and the standoff gripped the United States throughout a presidential-election year. Carter later received some credit for having prevented the situation from growing worse, but at the time, he seemed weak and powerless. In October 1980, a young Trump, then just 34 years old, gave an interview that is believed to be the first time he publicly weighed in on foreign policy.

“That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror, and I don’t think they’d do it with other countries,” Trump said during an interview on NBC with the gossip columnist Rona Barrett. When Barrett asked whether he’d advocate for sending in troops to free the hostages and seize Iran’s resources, Trump answered in the affirmative, saying, “I think right now we’d be an oil-rich nation, and I believe that we should have done it.”

[From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’]

Sounds familiar. As best we can tell, this is also the first time that Trump publicly mused about taking another nation’s oil. It wouldn’t be the last. Reagan won in a landslide a month later, though he never got around to taking any oil. As a parting kiss-off to Carter, the hostages were released on the day of the Republican’s inauguration.

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and a professor at Rice University, told us that “it almost became orthodoxy in the party in 1980 to say, If I were president, I would not have been weak like Carter. I would have bombed Iran back to the Stone Age.” But Brinkley warned that Trump may have overcompensated. In his effort to project toughness and strength, he’s unleashing bellicose rhetoric that won’t intimidate the Iranian theocracy (after all, their leaders talk that way too) and that, ultimately, will leave him with few good options. “It looks like he wants to live on that 1980 threat. It’s like the ‘madman theory’ of foreign policy,” Brinkley said. “You’ve got to make Iran believe they have to cut a deal.”

White House Photo Office / PhotoQuest / Getty

US President Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004) shakes hands with real estate developer Donald Trump in a reception line in the White House's Blue Room, Washington DC. November 3, 1987.

By the late 1980s, Trump was a celebrity real-estate developer, a best-selling author, and a tabloid fixture. But what he said then effectively previews how he is governing now; indeed, for a politician who has few consistent ideologies (except on tariffs; he has always loved tariffs), it’s striking how Trump’s views on Iran haven’t really changed. A New York Times write-up of an October 1987 speech in New Hampshire relayed that the businessman had suggested that the U.S. “should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” A couple of months later, Trump complained to Phil Donahue (we told you this was a very 1980s tale) that American allies were not doing enough to protect access to oil in the Persian Gulf. The following year, Trump told The Guardian that if he were ever to run for president, he’d be “harsh” on Iran, declaring that “one bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.” Nearly 40 years later, the Pentagon has prepared a plan for a ground invasion to do just this. It’s awaiting Trump’s approval if the cease-fire falters.

Tehran is proving to be just as tricky for Trump as it was for Carter. Besotted with the military successes of his bombing campaign in Iran last summer and the operation to seize Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela in January, Trump believed that a joint operation with Israel would be over in a matter of days, weeks at most. He broke his promise to not start a new Middle East war. Yet despite the obliteration of scores of military targets, the regime in Tehran has proved resilient and able to strike its Gulf neighbors. It seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Energy prices have jumped; Trump’s poll numbers have sunk. And despite U.S. claims of total air superiority, Iran shot down a fighter jet last week, sparking a frantic search-and-rescue operation.

That mission was shaped by Operation Eagle Claw, the failed 1980 military effort to rescue Americans held during the Iranian hostage crisis. The plan then was complex, involving landing cargo aircraft and helicopters in a remote-desert staging site, inserting U.S. forces into Iran, and preparing them to move on Tehran for a coordinated hostage rescue. But the mission failed at what was supposed to be the staging ground, exposing the military’s inability to work across services and carry out complicated operations.

The result was a fundamental yearslong overhaul of the U.S. armed forces. The Pentagon began embracing “joint operations,” and the U.S. established the Special Operations Command, which is dedicated to such missions. The Pentagon also reassessed how it thought about what transport aircraft could do. During Operation Eagle Claw, C-130s were a crucial tactical asset; one landed on a makeshift desert airstrip and eventually evacuated injured service members from that failed mission. Nearly 46 years to the day, C-130s were part of the rescue mission in Iran, again tasked with making a quick landing inside the country and then evacuating.

[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran]

But that rescue, carried out in the morning hours of Easter Sunday, was followed by an incendiary social-media post from the president in which he wrote, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!” adding, “Praise be to Allah.” Trump upped the pressure on Iran on Tuesday, writing that “the whole civilization will die tonight” if the strait was not opened. Hours later, Trump backed off the unhinged threat, and a two-week cease-fire materialized. The fragile truce, however, seemed to only strengthen Iran’s claim over the strait; if that becomes permanent, it will be difficult to view the war as anything other than a strategic defeat for the United States.

Trump and his aides, though, would hear none of it. They insisted that the war has been won, that Iran’s regime has been changed, and that, as the president put it this morning on social media, we could soon see “the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” How was that possible? Trump’s aides pointed us to the madman theory, saying that the president’s unpredictability, combined with his genocidal threat to wipe out Iran, had forced the agreement. “That’s The Art of the Deal, baby,” one White House aide crowed to us.

That book, of course, was published in 1987.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Nancy A. Youssef contributed reporting.

J. D. Vance Is Definitely Against Foreign Election Interference

2026-04-07T17:58:00-04:00

U.S. presidential campaigns usually get started at the Iowa State Fair or some other exalted arena of Americana. J. D. Vance chose Budapest. The vice president visited Hungary’s capital today to align himself in the most visible way possible with the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is fighting to hold on to power in parliamentary elections scheduled for Sunday.

The U.S. government’s support for Orbán had already been clear. Donald Trump had issued a “Complete and Total Endorsement” on social media. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the most credible threat to Vance’s claim on the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, had traveled to Budapest in February and declared, “Your success is our success.” Vance, not to be outdone, didn’t cloak his endorsement in diplomatic rituals. “I’m here to help him in this campaign cycle,” the vice president said at Orbán’s side. For the prime minister, it was almost too good to be true. He raised his hand to his face as if to stop himself from blushing.

Hungary is of relatively little material value to the United States. It’s a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people that accounts for about a quarter of 1 percent of U.S. trade. It contributes negligibly to NATO, ostensibly the measure that the Trump administration uses to determine the worth of its European partners. But Hungary matters to Vance because it matters to the MAGA intelligentsia—the think-tank bosses, Substack scribblers, and X influencers who help mold the agenda of the modern Republican Party. Many of the gatekeepers of GOP values view Hungary as a model. In their mind, Orbán shows how to cast aside conservative niceties and seize the institutions of the state to advance a particular vision of the good life, one that claims Christianity as its basis while punishing adversaries including leftists, immigrants, and sexual minorities. And so the Hungarian election has become the first stop of the 2028 presidential contest.

[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]

The trip, which took place five days before voting begins in Hungary, couldn’t have come at a better time for Vance, whose self-image as an anti-interventionist is at odds with Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran. In Budapest, he allowed himself some distance from the president’s threats to bomb Iranian civilization out of existence. He was squarely in his comfort zone, conjuring fears of “woke” indoctrination and leading Hungarians in a call-and-response chant opposing multinational institutions and affirming their belief in sovereignty.

Vance’s appearance alongside Orbán in the final days of the Hungarian campaign broke with precedent. American presidents and vice presidents have seldom intervened so overtly in foreign elections. Barack Obama warned against Brexit during a visit to Britain several months before the 2016 referendum, saying that leaving the European Union would place the country at the “back of the queue” for trade talks. But his comments didn’t elevate a particular party or candidate. Bill Clinton visited Israel in 1996 and spoke warmly of Shimon Peres, who was competing at the time against Benjamin Netanyahu. But he didn’t issue an endorsement. There is a long history of covert U.S. influence in foreign elections, especially in Latin America. But part of the reason the activity remained covert was to provide occupants of the White House with plausible deniability.

Vance evidently had no such compunctions. His intervention was made all the more unusual by his accusation that the EU, which has underwritten Hungary’s economic development over the past two decades, was interfering in the vote. “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,” Vance said during a joint press conference with Orbán. “The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” he said, seeking to reframe financial penalties exacted by the bloc for infringements on the rule of law as attempts at election meddling. “And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy.”

Vance’s willingness to cosign conspiracy theories concocted by Orbán reinforced a new convergence. Orbán’s party, Fidesz, enjoys the support of Washington and Moscow, whereas many of the prime minister’s counterparts in the EU, where he has thwarted efforts to send aid to Ukraine, are arrayed on the other side. They haven’t issued endorsements, but they’re quietly hoping that Europe’s enfant terrible is repudiated in favor of Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán loyalist who defected two years ago and now heads a new party, Tisza, which is leading in most polls.

American flags raised in Budapest for Vance’s visit added to the city’s echinate landscape, which is studded with neo-Gothic spires and steeples. At the airport, Vance was greeted on the red carpet by Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, who’d been caught in a recently leaked recording vowing to help Russia navigate EU sanctions. From there, the vice president traveled to a former Catholic monastery that now houses the prime minister’s office.

[Read: America’s future is Hungary]

Vance and Orbán spoke before a press backdrop proclaiming THE DAY OF HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP. Vance breezed through areas of bilateral engagement, including energy, manufacturing, and technology. These were less important, he said, than what he termed “moral cooperation” that ensures that people can have children, and that those children won’t be indoctrinated at school. In his telling, both governments are committed to “the defense of the idea that we are founded on a certain Christian civilization and Christian values that animate everything from freedom of speech to rule of law to respect for minority rights and protection of the vulnerable.”

Vance called Hungary a model for the rest of the EU, but here are some things that the vice president did not say about his host country’s treatment of the vulnerable. In 2023, Orbán’s government approved a pardon for a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse. A government report publicized by Orbán’s opponent found that more than one in five children in state-run care institutions have been abused. Hungary’s maternal mortality rate is more than twice the EU average. Further comparisons are not kind to Hungary, which used to be about 30 percent richer than its neighbor Romania, according to one measure; now Romania is ahead. Those dreaded EU bureaucrats? They’ve financed nearly all of Hungary’s public-development projects. The source for that statistic is not a woke university; it’s the U.S. State Department. Meanwhile, public contracts go disproportionately to allies of the prime minister.

The culture of clientelism in Hungary is part of the reason some Western officials I spoke with doubt that Orbán can lose, despite polls showing his party trailing the opposition. Large segments of the society have been made dependent on Fidesz for their well-being. Vance also discounted the possibility of a loss. “Of course,” he told reporters when asked whether the Trump administration would work with the opposition if it commands a majority in the election. But he seemed to think there was faint chance of that. “Viktor Orbán’s gonna win,” he said, turning to the prime minister and asking, “Viktor, is that right?”

“That’s the plan,” Orbán replied.

From the prime minister’s office, Vance shuttled to a sports arena on the other side of the city to greet the Fidesz faithful. A retired airport bookkeeper was waiting in line. “He came to Europe just for us,” Marietta Sebestyén gushed. The only better guest, she told me, would have been Trump. Her wish was briefly fulfilled when Vance began his address by calling Trump from the stage and putting him on speakerphone. “Mr. President, you are on with about 5,000 Hungarian patriots,” Vance said. “And I think they love you even more than they love Viktor Orbán.” Trump was flattered. “I can’t believe that,” he said, before offering a succinct account of Orbán’s success. “You have a man that kept your country strong, and he kept your country good,” Trump said. “And you don’t have problems with all of the problems that so many other countries have.”

Trump had a question for the audience: “How did J. D. do? Did he give a good speech, everybody?” Except that the vice president hadn’t spoken yet. That came next, and featured him whipping up fear of an indistinct they. They dismiss the idea of the nation. They reject motherhood. They reject Christianity. They condemn children to mutilation. “They hate one man above all others, and his name is Viktor Orbán,” Vance said. “And if they hate him, it means he’s on your side.”

Halfway through his speech, Vance tried to clarify his views on the continent that he was visiting: “The European press asks constantly, Do Trump and Vance—do they have something against Europe? Let me be clear, we love Europe.” He continued, “We love its people. We love its culture. We love its beautiful architecture. And we love the amazing history of this continent. But because we love this culture and these peoples, we reject the faceless bureaucrats who would drive your energy costs through the roof and open your country to millions of unvetted foreigners in the name of progress.”

[Read: The hardest job in Europe]

Applause ensued. European officials have characterized this as an abuser’s logic: I hit you because I love you. Former Trump-administration officials have explained it differently to me, saying that the animus toward Europe is largely an extension of domestic antagonisms. Trump and Vance associate mainstream European leaders with their adversaries in the Democratic Party, and treat them accordingly.

But if Vance sees political opportunity in appealing to Hungarian nationalism, so does Péter Magyar. On social media, he issued a brief statement in response to Vance’s visit, saying, in part, “No foreign country may interfere in Hungarian elections. This is our country.”

The $97 Million Utah Warehouse ICE Bought for $145 Million

2026-04-07T07:00:00-04:00

The empty warehouse on the outskirts of Salt Lake City had a lot of potential but no buyers. Built in 2022, it was one of the largest warehouses in the area, with 833,000 square feet of space—14 football fields under one roof. The surrounding industrial zone had been promoted by the state as “Utah’s Inland Port,” a logistics hub smack-dab in the middle of a desert but only a few minutes to the freeway and the international airport.

Demand for big warehouses had softened, however, and the property remained vacant, a white elephant by the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Then, suddenly, on March 11, the Department of Homeland Security snapped it up for $145.4 million—paying nearly 50 percent more than the property’s 2025 assessed value to a private investment fund controlled by a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Bank.

The deal went through six days after President Trump announced his decision to remove Kristi Noem as DHS secretary. Noem and her team had been racing to buy up industrial properties as part of a $38 billion overhaul of the ICE detention system in an effort to supercharge Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. DHS officials described the acquisitions as a crucial step to meeting the White House’s goal of 1 million deportations a year, after ICE carried out fewer than half that many during Trump’s first year back in office. The warehouses would be reconfigured and remodeled into megajails, with capacity for up to 10,000 detainees each.

Noem’s replacement, former Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, took control of the department on March 24 and ordered a pause on conversion plans for the warehouse in Salt Lake City as well as for 10 others scattered across the country, seeking to defuse backlash from local jurisdictions. Many local leaders say that they were blindsided by DHS’s acquisitions and don’t want giant immigration jails in their communities. Some have made clear that they are willing to fight the government’s plans. Lauren Bis, a spokesperson for DHS, characterized the pause as a logical part of Mullin’s transition process, which requires “reviewing agency policies and proposals” and making sure that the department works with community leaders. “We want to be good partners,” Bis told me.

There are also legal challenges. The administration is facing lawsuits across its new portfolio of industrial properties, including in Michigan and New Jersey. In Maryland, a federal judge halted renovation work at a warehouse that ICE purchased in January. In Social Circle, Georgia, where ICE bought a 1-million-square-foot building in a county that Trump won by more than 70 percent, angry local officials have refused to connect the site to water and sewer lines. ICE has already canceled plans for new detention centers in New Hampshire and Mississippi because of opposition from Republican leaders.

Officials at DHS and ICE told me that the administration has been taken aback by opposition from Republicans, whom they expected to be more supportive of the president’s deportation push. It didn’t help that the government conducted its warehouse-shopping spree around the same time that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis—and right at the moment when Americans were seeing daily images of chaos and violent clashes between protesters and immigration agents. The warehouses triggered fears about how immigrants would be treated and possible impacts on nearby communities, along with broader worries that the warehouses could be used to hold U.S. citizens. As one ICE official told me, “People’s heads started going wild with this.”

The warehouse purchases in Utah and other states are now part of an internal investigation at DHS into acquisitions and contracts made by Noem and Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser and alleged lover in an extramarital affair that both have denied. Complaints about Lewandowski’s role in DHS contracts intensified last summer after he implemented a policy requiring Noem’s approval on any expenditure of more than $100,000. The measure, depicted as an extension of DOGE-style cost cutting, came as the administration got a virtual blank check from Congress—$170 billion for immigration enforcement in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

DHS officials and contractors told me that the $100,000 requirement created a bureaucratic bottleneck and fueled suspicions that Lewandowski was exploiting his position for personal profit. Lewandowski, who worked as an unpaid “special government employee,” denies those allegations and has claimed that Noem’s added scrutiny helped save billions for taxpayers.

[Read: The first couple of a dysfunctional DHS]

But a bargain-hunting ethos was noticeably absent in DHS’s warehouse acquisitions. The department paid an average of 11 to 13 percent above market value for the first 10 properties it purchased for ICE, according to a report by the commercial-real-estate firm CoStar. The firm published its report prior to the $145 million deal for the Utah building, which tax assessors valued last year at $97 million. It was DHS’s costliest purchase yet, and none of the other DHS acquisitions reviewed by CoStar had a gap that wide between purchase price and comparable properties.

I called commercial-real-estate brokers and appraisers in Salt Lake City to ask whether the transaction seemed like an outlier. Sales of similar warehouse properties in the area suggested that it was: A building with about 1 million square feet built in the same area in 2022 had been acquired by Walmart last March for $112 million, CoStar records show, below its assessed value of $119 million. Another 1-million-square-foot property built in 2023 sold last year for $122 million, roughly the same as its assessed value, even though it sits on a 75-acre plot—larger than the parcel bought by DHS. That property, purchased by an investor, already had a tenant, which generally increases the sale price, according to two brokers and an appraiser I spoke with, who did not want to be quoted by name, because the DHS warehouse purchase is so contentious in Salt Lake City. They cautioned that many industrial properties sell for more than their assessed value, and that owner-occupants—which DHS will be—tend to be willing to pay more than investors. But the sale price, which works out to more than $174 a square foot, is far higher than the going market rate. “It’s just crazy,” one broker told me. Another quipped, “This is not something I would want to stand before a judge and have to defend.”

The DHS and ICE officials I asked about the purchase told me that they had little insight into the transaction, but they described the Utah site as a key addition to their broader makeover of the immigration detention system. The Utah warehouse would give the government a large detention facility in the Rocky Mountain region, which would allow ICE to send detainees there from Colorado, Idaho, and other western states, officials with knowledge of the plans told me. Most immigration detention sites are in the South—especially Texas and Louisiana—and the goal of the ICE overhaul is to have fewer locations but with a more even distribution across the country. ICE officials said last year that they want to build a “hub and spoke” system modeled after e-commerce retailers such as Amazon. The process has been guided more by logistical considerations than by worries about political backlash, according to officials familiar with the plans at DHS and ICE.

One person with knowledge of the Utah purchase told me that the warehouse had been appraised prior to the sale at roughly $130 million—more than 30 percent above its tax assessment. The seller had added office space and made about $10 million in improvements to the site, and the rest of the amount went to closing costs and fees, the person said. DHS was a motivated buyer and eager to close the deal quickly. DHS public-affairs officials did not respond to my questions about the appraisal and the company that conducted it.

Spenser Heaps

As a reliably red state in the American West, Utah may look like a perfect place for an ICE megajail. But the politics of immigration enforcement are fraught there too, local officials and real-estate brokers told me. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (which provided much of the original scrubland for the Inland Port) is welcoming of immigrants and has helped settle generations of refugees and international converts to the Mormon faith. Like other affluent cities in Rocky Mountain states, Salt Lake City is a blue island in a sparsely populated red sea.

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, a Democrat, has said that the city’s opposition is currently focused on ICE’s potential utility consumption and strain on local services. City officials said yesterday that the government hasn’t told them what it projects its needs will be but that a facility constructed to hold goods would need “significant” upgrades, including new sewage lines and pumping capacity, to hold large numbers of people. One city official I spoke with, who was not authorized to discuss preliminary negotiations with ICE, told me that a detention center for 7,500 to 10,000 people has a projected water use of 1 to 2 million gallons a day. The city’s entire daily consumption is about 40 million gallons, the official said, and the broader Salt Lake area is bracing for worsening drought after a winter of meager snowfall. The state of Utah opened a new prison with space for about 3,000 inmates not far from the ICE-warehouse site, the official said, and the facility consumes about 450,000 gallons daily.

Brigham Daniels, a land-use expert at the University of Utah, told me that local jurisdictions are not obligated to accommodate the federal government’s water-use plans if scarce resources are threatened. But, he said, the government could find alternative methods for supplying large volumes of water to the site by purchasing water rights from the state or from a different jurisdiction. The city would be on shakier legal ground if it refused to allow that water to reach the warehouse. “It’s one thing to say, We don’t have that water for you,” Daniels said. “It’s another thing to say, We won’t deliver it.”

The city has also raised concerns about the potential threat to the Great Salt Lake, which already competes for water against farms, lawns, and golf courses. The dry bed at the edges of the shrinking lake periodically swirls up into clouds of toxic dust laced with heavy metals. The Trump administration included $1 billion in the president’s budget request to Congress this week to improve management of the lake and route more water into the basin. “This is an Environmental hazard that must be worked on, IMMEDIATELY—It is of tremendous interest to me,” the president wrote on social media in February. Daniels said that the ICE warehouse would not necessarily be in a zero-sum competition with the lake, because most water that is used indoors can be treated and safely discharged.

[Read: Kristi Noem is gone. Now mass deportations can really begin.]

The urgent need that drove Noem and Lewandowski to acquire the warehouses has faded somewhat lately. In the two months since the “border czar” Tom Homan announced a more “targeted” approach to ICE enforcement, with a clearer focus on criminals, the average daily number of detainees in ICE custody has declined from 70,000 to about 60,000, two ICE officials told me. Even so, expanding the detention system remains a priority for the department. Homan has repeatedly said that ICE needs capacity for at least 100,000 detainees if it’s going to achieve Trump’s 1-million-deportations goal.

During his confirmation hearing, Mullin was asked whether he would commit to making sure that ICE had local support before it opened a large detention center in a community. Mullin said that he wanted to “build relationships and work in that manner.” He has also said that he wants a quieter, less confrontational approach than the one Noem and Lewandowski promoted. But the money for mass deportation has already been appropriated by Congress. ICE is in the process of doubling the number of immigration officers on U.S. streets, and recent federal-court rulings have backed the administration’s push to hold far more immigrants in custody while they fight deportation. Trump’s removal campaign may be regrouping and seeking a lower profile to allow the ICE workforce to catch its breath. But the administration now owns more than 7.5 million square feet of new detention space, and it has all the money it needs to fill it.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.

The MAGA Intellectual Who Prophesied a Queen Melania

2026-04-06T07:00:00-04:00

One evening last fall, J. D. Vance threw open the doors of his home, a Queen Anne–style mansion on the campus of the U.S. Naval Observatory, to Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. Over drinks in Vance’s study, the vice president asked Orbán for an update on life in Europe. Specifically, he wanted to know how quickly Christian faith was vanishing from the continent.

The get-together, described to me by someone who was present, was informal. Only close aides were included, among them Orbán’s political director and Vance’s national security adviser. And then there was Gladden Pappin, a Harvard-trained, U.S.-born political theorist with round, dark-framed glasses and graying hair.

Few people have ever heard of Pappin. Until I began examining the U.S.-Hungary relationship—trying to understand why President Trump and the people around him are backing Orbán’s reelection this month as if he were a swing-state Senate candidate—I hadn’t either. So what was he doing alongside Orbán at the vice president’s residence?

The answer lies in the ties binding Orbán’s government to one of the most radical parts of Trump’s movement. Pappin belongs to a clutch of so-called post-liberal intellectuals who are small in number but whose power is magnified by their like-mindedness with Vance. Silicon Valley gave Vance the resources to run for the Senate in 2022; but this group gave him the relevance, and the ideas, to be Trump’s running mate in 2024 and his heir apparent in 2028.

Pappin, like Vance, is Catholic, which infuses his critique of liberalism. In essays and other public comments, he has objected to limits on state power that enhance individual liberty and questioned the separation of Church and state. Privately, he has advanced fantastical ideas. He once predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress, at which point the pope would anoint Melania Trump, who is Catholic, to rule the United States as queen.

I heard this story from multiple people but dismissed it, at first, as implausible. Then I reached Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and previously a political-science professor. Polet told me that he was present when Pappin said this, over drinks one evening at a 2018 meeting of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which aims to nurture conservative ideas on college campuses. Although often puckish and provocative, Pappin, in Polet’s telling, became animated about this prediction, rebuffing the suggestion that it was merely something that he’d like to happen, and insisting, “This is what will happen.” The notion is derived, tenuously, from Catholic political doctrine dating to the fifth century that emphasizes the preeminence of papal authority over secular powers, according to Polet, who recalled another conference attendee calling the comment “batshit crazy” but at least consistent with a wholesale rejection of liberalism.

In response to questions about the prophecy, Pappin told me in an email that he meant it ironically, writing, “Satire is dead and Trump Derangement Syndrome killed it.” But the comment, intended ironically or not, seems to fit Pappin’s worldview. In an email from the same year, which I reviewed, he wrote “guilty as charged” about a philosophy of “quixotic monarchism,” appearing to wryly affirm his faith in a Christian monarch in place of liberal democracy. Pappin maintained to me that he was merely “poking fun” at “stereotypes of conservative Catholics.” When I asked him whether he believes in democracy, he said, “Western democracies need to return to their roots in Christian civilization in order to pull back from hyperliberal progressivism.” In a 2022 essay, he called the presidency a “quasi-monarchical office.”

Pappin followed these interests to Hungary, where government-funded think tanks catering to foreign intellectuals have sprouted along the Danube like spring poplars. American conservatives journey to Budapest and return gushing about how Orbán has curbed migration and consolidated power, ruling for the past 16 years. Pappin is unusual not only in deciding to stay, but also in effectively going to work for the Hungarian government. Since 2023, he has been the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a state-owned company whose mandate is analogous to that of the policy-planning staff of the U.S. State Department. He writes memos for Orbán and travels the world forging connections with foreign governments and think tanks: west to the United States, where he sits on the Hungarian side of bilateral meetings with American officials; east to China, where he enthuses about opportunities for cooperation with the authoritarian, one-party state.

Back home in Budapest, fellow academics and foreign diplomats marvel at the doyen of Hungarian foreign policy who doesn’t speak Hungarian. But Pappin’s value is clear, and the government can hardly believe its luck—a flesh-and-blood member of the MAGA intelligentsia on its payroll. That’s part of the reason the stakes are so high in Hungary this election season, high enough that Vance will appear alongside Orbán during the final stretch of the campaign this week.

The centralization of state power by a leader who sees Christianity as inseparable from government legitimacy, once a pipe dream of people like Pappin, is now a model advanced by senior figures in the American government. Trump’s biggest boosters frequently liken him to Jesus. Vance insisted last year on the importance of a “Christian moral order,” and as a Senate candidate in 2021, he compared contemporary U.S. politics to a “late republican period,” referring to the era before Caesar’s dictatorship. He urged his ideological allies “to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Hungary shows what getting wild looks like. Orbán has restricted individual rights, curtailed media freedom, manipulated election rules, and undermined judicial independence. Meanwhile, his country has become one of the poorest and most corrupt in the European Union; it’s routine, for example, for people in Hungary to bring their own toilet paper to the hospital. The European Parliament accuses Orbán of running an “electoral autocracy.” Trump calls him “truly strong and powerful.” His victory would validate global Trumpism. A loss might put Pappin out of a job.

Pappin is a French name, and Gladden is the maiden name of Pappin’s mother. His father, a citizen of the Osage Nation, converted to Catholicism. Pappin was born in St. Louis and raised in Little Rock, where his family was friends with the Clintons. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate, attracting attention for his flamboyant attire and flamboyant intolerance. “The Gadfly” is the title of a 2003 article in The Harvard Crimson that notes his cashmere argyle sweaters and “more faculty than undergrad” sense of fashion, as well as the furious reaction he generated when he wrote a letter to the editor describing homosexuality as “not merely immoral but perverted and unnatural.” Pappin said he found “pleasure in fulfilling the stereotypical image people have of me.”

For graduate school, he returned to Harvard, where he studied theorists including Plato and Machiavelli. A more modern point of reference was the French thinker Pierre Manent, an influential euroskeptic. Classmates said that Pappin resented liberal elites but also recoiled from egalitarianism, instead craving the coronation of elites in his own image—ones sharing his commitments to Catholicism, monarchism, and medievalism. One of his classmates told me, “He did not strike me, or any of us, as someone who was likely to play a pivotal role in world affairs, but I guess our imaginations were too limited.” In both the United States and Hungary, some of the people who spoke with me insisted on anonymity because they feared reprisal, whether from Orbán’s government or Trump’s.

[Read: Rod Dreher thinks the Enlightenment was a mistake]

Pappin finished his Ph.D. in 2012 and soon took up a position at the University of Notre Dame, home to Patrick Deneen, a political scientist who is today perhaps the most prominent of the post-liberals. To the extent that there’s an intellectual foundation for Trumpism, Pappin whacked some of its first nails into place. In 2016, he used the pseudonym Manlius Capitolinus—a consul of the Roman republic who was executed after being accused of aspiring to monarchic rule—to write for a pro-Trump hothouse called the Journal of American Greatness. One of his fellow authors, Michael Anton, was made famous by an essay called “The Flight 93 Election,” which argued that voting for Trump in 2016 would be equivalent to charging the cockpit of the hijacked 9/11 flight, because the alternative was certain death. Anton would ultimately serve as the director of policy planning in the State Department for most of last year.

Others gained more attention for publicly defending Trump, but Pappin was crucial behind the scenes. That’s how Kevin Vallier, a philosophy professor at the University of Toledo, explained it to me. In his 2023 book, All the Kingdoms of the World, Vallier argues that Pappin marshaled other so-called integralists—proponents of subordinating the political order to the authority of the Catholic Church—to line up behind Trump. In private communications over the messaging platform Slack, Pappin was the one who “introduced strategy into the discussion,” Vallier told me. “He made the case that the integralists should be trying to acquire power rather than just talking about ideas.” In response to a question about his early advocacy for Trump, Pappin told me, “President Trump singularly changed the course of American history and I have always encouraged my peers to support him, as well as to develop a new governing approach for conservatives.”

During Trump’s first term, Pappin co-founded a quarterly journal called American Affairs and sought to acquaint readers with a post-liberal future. In a 2019 essay that associates recommended to me as a précis of his political philosophy, Pappin wrote that the brand of modern conservatism aimed at limiting state power and enshrining the free market had “reached a terminus.” By that time, he was an assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas, and eventually gained tenure in 2021.

That year, Trump’s time in office reached its own terminus. Pappin’s wife is Hungarian, and he has said in interviews that he and their two children have Hungarian citizenship as a result. He visited the country in December 2020, right after Trump’s defeat. He would soon return.

The political scientist László Lengyel has argued that Hungary’s history gave rise to different species of successful Hungarians: The petty bourgeois he labeled Homo kádáricus because they thrived when János Kádár relaxed Marxist orthodoxy in the 1960s, compared with Homo sovieticus under the hard-line Stalinist leadership that preceded the failed 1956 revolution.

Now it’s possible to talk about Homo orbánicus, the species of people who have found favor during Orbán’s reign. Some of them are childhood friends of the prime minister. One is his son-in-law, among the wealthiest people in the country. Others are leaders of think tanks and institutes with close ties to the government. Since Trump came onto the scene, some Americans have joined them. Orbán was the only E.U. head of government to endorse Trump in 2016, and out of their rapport grew dense institutional networks spanning the Atlantic.

Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, might be considered a high-profile example of Homo orbánicus. His organization licenses the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, brand to the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights, which has hosted an annual CPAC Hungary since 2022. As is customary, Schlapp himself attended this year’s gathering, in March, and returned to the United States repeating Orbán’s talking points. He told me that the prime minister would be reelected because of popular anger about interrupted Russian oil supplies that typically flow through Ukraine.

[Read: In Hungary, the first post-reality political campaign]

Another English-speaking member of this species is John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. O’Sullivan is the founder and president of the Danube Institute, which receives funding from Orbán’s government and stays relentlessly on message. Last year, the institute put on an event called “Is Transgenderism Dying?” With nearly two weeks to go before the election on April 12, the institute hosted a summit featuring a video address by the deputy U.S. secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and in-person remarks from one of his advisers. Weeks earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had traveled to Budapest and told Orbán, “Your success is our success.” The Danube Institute event reinforced that message by giving U.S. diplomats pride of place in the program. “It’s very comforting to know that we have allies like you,” an institute employee told the Americans at the conference’s conclusion.

More powerful still is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, known as MCC. The chairman of the board of trustees is the prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation). Pappin landed an MCC fellowship in 2021, the same year that Vance announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. Vance had recently converted to Catholicism and, during the course of his campaign, he appeared at events alongside luminaries of the post-liberal movement. At one, hosted by the Franciscan University of Steubenville just weeks before the November 2022 election, Pappin was a speaker. In his remarks, he gestured toward Hungary’s generous benefits for families but mostly mocked liberalism. “You can travel in a little bubble of global consumer liberalism wherever you go, and that’s what makes people happy,” he said, in an apparent attempt at humor. When I asked Pappin if he has a positive vision of post-liberalism, he told me in an email, “I advocate for Western nations to return to their true sources of strength—strong families, strong borders, strong industry—as a basis for thriving in today’s intense global competition.”

Academics who moved in similar circles around this time, attending conferences of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, said that Pappin and others drew Vance into dialogue online. “There was an active recruitment effort to find people of influence,” James M. Patterson, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Tennessee, told me. Vance’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Orbán’s government had a dismal relationship with the Biden administration, and during that period, it needed all the American help it could get. This included installing an American as head of an important foreign-policy institution. Pappin was just the American for the job.

The Hungarian Institute of International Affairs currently operates from an Art Nouveau palace with extravagant stone carvings in the diplomatic quarter of Budapest. The Russian embassy is just a few doors down; the embassies of Turkey, France, and Spain are nearby. Pappin’s arrival as president, in 2023, followed a reorganization of the institute, which was carved out of the foreign ministry and brought under the control of the prime minister’s office. Employees were shocked: Who was this American with a gold Rolex, who didn’t speak Hungarian, coming in to direct their research? At the time, officials at the American embassy were also perplexed, a former institute employee told me, recalling their question, “‘Is he just a figurehead or a real decision maker?’” When it became clear that Pappin was a decision maker, many senior figures at the institute left. “He provided a personal network to the government, and this network was more important than the analysis,” the former employee said.

Zoltán Kovács, a spokesperson for Orbán, told me that Pappin was brought in to refresh the methodology and ideology of the institute, praising the American’s shrewd assessments of Hungary’s opportunities as a small nation in a multipolar world. Pappin told me that he has tripled the size of the institute, whose staff now includes more than 60 people. He traveled widely in his role. In 2023, he posted a black-and-white photo of himself in China on Facebook with the caption “Shanghai noir?” He documented a visit to Doha, where Orbán met with the emir of Qatar. “Our delegation brought Hungary’s message of cooperation on energy security, and our urgent desire for peace in Ukraine,” Pappin wrote.

He seemed most comfortable as a contrarian, and his dissent from geopolitical orthodoxy made him a natural face of Hungary’s overtures to China. Hungary was the first EU country to sign onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and it has become a major destination for Chinese investment, especially in electric-vehicle manufacturing and battery production. “We view China not as a threat but as an opportunity,” Pappin said in an interview distributed by China’s state news agency. “The real risk is de-risking.” That approach has put Hungary at odds with other Western nations, including the United States, that have sought to reduce their dependency on Beijing. As recently as last year, Pappin has continued to take high-level meetings there, including with a senior Chinese foreign-policy adviser. Pappin told me, “Like the United States under the Trump administration, Hungary relates to each country according to its own national interest, and we discuss with counterparts all over the world—as I have done in the more than thirty countries I have visited in Asia, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa.”

His most important destination has been the United States, where he always receives a warm welcome from Vance. In 2024, Pappin visited Vance’s Senate office. A year later, the meeting took place in a more august environment. “Thanks for the West Wing welcome yesterday,” Pappin wrote on Facebook last February.

This month, voters in Hungary will deliver their verdict on Orbán, and on his investments in Trumpism. Pappin is a personification of all the work poured into the relationship, which has given Hungary, a country of fewer than 10 million people, outsize significance in the MAGA mindset.

Last fall, Pappin flew on Orbán’s plane when the prime minister visited Washington, D.C., according to images posted on social media. He accompanied the prime minister to the small gathering at Vance’s residence. Not many foreign leaders get to have drinks in the vice president’s study. It helps to have Pappin around.

Orbán has notched gains from the relationship. Last fall’s visit was a success; Hungary won relief from U.S. sanctions on its purchase of Russian oil. But fuel prices are still elevated, as is the cost of food and housing. Purchasing power has fallen in recent years, and business confidence is weak. Orbán’s opponent, Péter Magyar, is running mostly on kitchen-table issues, capitalizing on dissatisfaction with the economy. Trumpism can’t help much there.

[Read: The hardest job in Europe ]

The president's decision to wage war against Iran, meanwhile, is doing Orbán no favors. It’s destabilizing energy markets and undermining the prime minister’s argument to voters that he and his ally in the White House are trying to settle conflicts while other Western leaders clamor for war. Some of his supporters are still buying it. A family wearing red Make America Great Again caps at a recent Orbán rally in a suburb of Budapest told me that the leaders are similar because they’re both Christian and they both want peace. Addressing the crowd, Orbán made only a passing reference to the war, saying that conflict in the Middle East underscored the need for a steady hand. In a podcast interview with a Hungarian rapper, Dopeman, the prime minister said that he had been in Washington earlier this year as Trump was preparing military options against Iran. The president solicited his input, Orbán said, though he declined to divulge the substance of his counsel.

Pappin has said very little about the self-proclaimed “president of peace” dropping bombs on Iran. The Hungarian foreign-policy chieftain has turned his focus inward, using social media to lash out at journalists and malign Magyar as a “lunatic.” The attacks feel forced; he doesn’t seem like a natural keyboard warrior. In an essay he wrote in 2011 for a Harvard political-theory workshop, which was shared with me, Pappin remarks on the distancing effect of the digital world: “The virtual presents reality to us as a show, and we always stand slightly aloof.”

The observation recalls an insight from Hannah Arendt in her essay on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and its brutal repression by the Red Army. Arendt wrote of the “stability of the totalitarian mind in the midst of the fictitious world provided for it.” Perhaps in the school of MAGA, or in its satellite campus in Budapest, it’s possible to anticipate Trump dissolving Congress and Melania ruling as queen. Perhaps it’s possible to look past China’s use of surveillance, forced labor, and torture. Perhaps it’s possible to believe that Orbán presides over a gleaming model of post-liberalism, instead of a poor and repressive country resembling the socialist regimes that Europeans toppled in the last century. But then reality intervenes.

She Testified About Being Raped. Then ICE Showed Up.

2026-04-06T07:00:00-04:00

Twice a week, a 67-year-old retiree in New Jersey volunteers as an advocate for victims of domestic and sexual violence, often visiting hospitals and police stations as women complete rape kits and answer questions. One afternoon last May, she sat for hours in family court with a 35-year-old mother of two who was trying to secure a permanent restraining order against her ex-boyfriend.

The woman took the stand to tell her version of what had happened, which she had already told police: She and her then-boyfriend had argued. She had started pulling her clothes out of the closet to leave when he grabbed her from behind. Then he placed her in a chokehold and raped her. Eventually she lost consciousness. (That is not the ex-boyfriend’s account of events; his lawyer denied the allegations.) The hearing finally ended at about 5 o’clock. The woman said goodbye to her lawyer and headed downstairs with the advocate.

The two stepped outside into the rain—and the woman who had testified was tackled to the ground. “I thought she was being kidnapped,” the advocate told me. She ran to the law-enforcement officers in the lobby to ask for help. “The police were just standing there like they were having a coffee klatch,” she said. “And I was like, Guys, are you kidding me? Why are you not doing something? This woman is being assaulted. And they said, We can’t do a thing. They’re ICE.”

The advocate remembers wondering: Should I jump in there? What should I do? “I’m strong for a woman my age, but I’m not someone who can fight off two people,” she said. After about 15 minutes, the federal agents—neither of whom were wearing uniforms or identification, both women told me—put the struggling, screaming mother into an unmarked car and drove away.

When President Trump returned to office and launched what he has claimed will be the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, his administration revoked ICE guidance instructing officers to avoid detaining people at sensitive locations, such as courthouses. As the administration tries to deport 1 million people a year, ICE officers are now staking out immigration courts, and many immigrants are skipping routine court appointments out of fear. Although ICE still advises officers to “generally avoid” enforcement at family courts, it has become riskier for victims who are not citizens to report crimes or seek protections, including restraining orders. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson defended the shift toward courthouse arrests as “common sense,” saying in an email that arresting immigrants there is safer for officers and “conserves valuable law enforcement resources because they already know where a target will be.”

Beyond arrests at courthouses, other noncitizen victims seeking help from the legal system have found themselves being targeted for deportation. News reports have described a mother and her child taken into ICE custody in Austin in January after police responded to a domestic-disturbance call; a woman in Houston last April who called 911 to report domestic abuse by her ex-husband only to have the police contact ICE; and a mother of eight in Sacramento detained in September after reporting her case specialist—an ICE contractor—for sexual harassment. Many victims who are not citizens fear that if they interact with law enforcement in any way, they are putting themselves at further risk of being detained or deported, more than a dozen attorneys and advocates told me. A year into Trump’s first term, the ACLU and the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project surveyed 232 law-enforcement officers, and nearly 70 percent reported that investigating domestic-violence cases had become more difficult since Trump took office. That has become true again over the past year, experts told me, and the challenges are growing.

The lawyers I spoke with described a climate of fear for victims lacking citizenship—fear that calling police will get ICE involved, fear of being detained at a courthouse, fear of an abuser’s threats to have her deported if she reports him. Law-enforcement veterans told me that fear undercuts efforts by local police to reduce crime. During ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago last fall, calls to 911 fell by more than 21 percent in Little Village, home to the city’s largest Mexican American population, the Chicago Tribune reported. “This is making all of us less safe,” Morgan Weibel, the legal-services director at Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit serving immigrant survivors of gender-based violence, told me. “If people can’t confidently pick up the phone and call 911 when they or someone else is in danger, it erodes safety for everyone.”

The volunteer advocate in New Jersey spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to comply with confidentiality rules designed to protect the victims she helps. She said she hasn’t witnessed any other ICE arrests in the past year—but she’s more cautious now, more vigilant. Part of her job is to encourage survivors, who may feel scared or helpless, to not give up seeking the help they need. Now she feels an additional obligation, especially when she is dispatched to courthouses. She needs to make sure that people are aware that “ICE could be waiting for them.”

For decades, bipartisan efforts tried to make it easier and less intimidating for victims who are not citizens to report sexual violence and seek protection from their abusers. In 2000, Congress passed a law that built on the Violence Against Women Act by creating new types of visas for victims of certain serious crimes, including domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, and false imprisonment, with the goal of removing immigration status as a barrier to cooperating with police and prosecutors. Although only 10,000 of these visas are available every year, applicants waiting for approval could be given “deferred action” immigration status, making them eligible to legally work in the U.S.

Proponents of these visas—of which the U visa is the most common—say that they have helped victims come forward and helped prosecutors convict more offenders. From 2017 to 2023, immigrants were 5 percentage points more likely than those born in the U.S. to report being a victim of a sex crime, according to an analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey by the Cato Institute. But research also shows that reporting falls at moments of increased immigration enforcement. During President Obama’s first term, when there was a historic spike in detentions and deportations, the likelihood that a Hispanic victim reported an incident to the police dropped 30 percent—and the likelihood that a Hispanic person was victimized increased by 16 percent, according to a recent study accepted for publication by the American Economic Review.

In 2021, the Biden administration built on existing protections by enacting policies directing ICE officers to check whether someone they were arresting was a crime victim, and to exercise leniency if they were. In January 2025, Trump officials reversed those guidelines. The DHS spokesperson said that the visa programs for victims had turned into “loopholes for illegal aliens seeking to stay in the United States.” The spokesperson added that the number of applications for the visas doubled from 2021 to 2024, which they attributed to “rampant fraud, abuse, and exploitation.” A Biden-era inspector-general report found that the U-visa program was susceptible to fraud, and last July, federal prosecutors indicted three police chiefs and two others in Louisiana for a nearly decade-long alleged conspiracy to commit fraud that the prosecutors say involved filing false police reports in exchange for thousands of dollars. Experts counter that although some fraud exists within any immigration program, these visas are among the only immigration benefits for which the consent of police, a prosecutor, or a judge is a prerequisite. And the rise in applications, they say, can be attributed to an increase in awareness about the program among both undocumented communities and the police.

An undocumented immigrant always faced some risk in coming forward, “but the risk was really pretty minor,” Gina Amato Lough, who leads Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and has worked with immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other crimes for nearly two decades, told me. That isn’t the case anymore. The risk level started to change under the first Trump administration, and drastically escalated in the second, she said. For the first time in her 18 years doing this work, she is seeing a growing number of victims get detained and deported even when they have a U visa or deferred-action status, or are in the process of applying for either.

[Read: Hundreds of thousands of anonymous deportees]

Victims have become more reluctant to pursue these visas, advocates told me, and lawyers are changing their guidance, adding layers of caution and caveats. From the spring to the summer of 2025, the number of U-visa petitions the government received dropped by more than 60 percent, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The number of such applicants receiving a visa, meanwhile, dropped by more than 25 percent.

Several attorneys emphasized to me that some of their clients are still successfully navigating the system. A woman in Atlanta, who is in her 20s, told me she had been afraid to leave an abusive marriage to a citizen out of fear that she could be deported. But last year, she called a hotline, was connected with lawyers, and applied for lawful status through a provision that allows certain noncitizens to apply without their abusive family member’s knowledge. “I really want to stress that there is support out there,” she said. “A lot of people don’t even know.”

Although jurisdictions have different policies about working with federal immigration enforcement, the targeted operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis panicked immigrants across the country. All of this emboldens criminal offenders, Giovanni Veliz, a retired Minneapolis police commander, told me. “They say, Hey, we can go target these Spanish-speaking victims, because they’re not going to call the police,” said Veliz, who served as the Minneapolis Police Department’s U-visa coordinator. He worries that heavy ICE enforcement in the city earlier this year jeopardized the department’s efforts to build trust within the community. “That relationship investment that we’ve had for years and years has been fractured,” he said.

Illustration by Owen Gent

Leslye Orloff, an adjunct law professor at American University and one of the architects of the legislation behind U visas, told me that she has been urging lawyers she knows “not to collapse, not to freeze because their client is an immigrant.” She cited her experience as an attorney for undocumented domestic-violence victims in the 1980s—before the Violence Against Women Act or U visa existed. Sometimes, she said, she would get a family-court judge to order an abuser not to call immigration authorities on a victim, then jail the abuser for criminal contempt for violating that order. “There are things that you can do to be creative to address the concerns of today,” she said, “but you can’t do any of them if victim advocates and attorneys are paralyzed.”

As ICE officers arrested the woman in New Jersey last May, her hand was injured, becoming so swollen that she later told me it looked broken. The officers took her to the hospital—the same one where she’d completed a rape kit six months earlier, she said. Five days later, she was moved to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center—where, during her detention, an officer pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a detainee. She shared a sleeping space with more than 70 women, she said, and learned that many of them had stories similar to her own.

The woman agreed to speak with me on the condition that I withhold her name and country of origin, fearing retribution. To verify what she and others told me, I reviewed court, police, medical, and immigration records.

[Read: How the Cruz family decided to self-deport]

She begged an immigration judge last summer to allow her to stay in the United States, explaining that she had been brought to this country against her will as a 13-year-old and has lived a life filled with trauma, including domestic and sexual violence. “I owe all my life lessons to this amazing country of America,” she wrote in a letter to the court. She was once a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, which gave her protection against deportation, but at the time of her arrest, she did not have lawful status. Her arrest record includes prostitution, aggravated assault, and drug possession with intent to distribute—all charges that were dismissed. Two charges on her record—a disorderly-conduct charge and a local-ordinance violation for endangering the welfare of a child—resulted in fines and no jail time. (She’s had many cases of “wrong place, wrong time, wrong relationships,” she told me.) She has two children, a 15-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, who she said live with their respective fathers, and she told the judge that she does not want to be separated from them. “My immigration status has always been a weapon to people that care to take advantage of me, so do me the favor of either releasing me back to New Jersey with my children, or sending me back to my birth country,” she wrote to the judge. “I do not wish to be taken advantage of anymore.”

Her immigration attorney, Carolyn Hines, argued that she should be released because her detention minutes after her testimony violated her constitutional due-process rights and failed to comply with federal statutory law. Officers “likely acted on information obtained from the very individual who had abused” her, Hines said in a court filing—a type of source that ICE prohibits officers from solely relying on when targeting someone for arrest. The DHS spokesperson denied that claim. (The attorney for her ex-boyfriend declined to comment.)

All of the woman’s pleas were denied. Seeing no likely path to legal immigration status, she agreed to what the government calls a “voluntary departure” to her home country in South America. Asked about the woman’s case, the DHS spokesperson called her a “criminal illegal alien” and listed crimes she has been accused of.

The lawyer for her ex-boyfriend, who is a U.S. citizen, accused the woman of fabricating allegations against his client “to protect herself from immigration enforcement,” presumably by getting a U visa. But in the six months between reporting the alleged assault to police and the date of her detention, she never applied for such a visa. The lawyer also pointed me to a pending assault charge on the woman’s record: Her ex-boyfriend had filed a police report against her, accusing her of biting his arm—an act she told police was in self-defense as he put her in the chokehold. And in securing a temporary restraining order against her, the ex-boyfriend made other accusations, saying that she had repeatedly made him feel unsafe, including by cursing and throwing things. (The criminal charges, against both the ex-boyfriend and the woman, have not been resolved.) In designing U visas, lawmakers sought to ensure that charges an alleged perpetrator may file against their victim do not disqualify the victim from protections from deportation.

The woman and I first spoke in January, when she was still in detention. I asked what her hopes had been for the future—before the arrest, before Louisiana, before everything else. She said she had wanted to go back to school and get the training she needed to become a victim advocate, like the advocates helping her. “And I still want to do that,” she said.

We spoke again last month, after she had returned to her home country, and she told me she was trying to take it one day at a time. “I can breathe; it’s fresh air, and I’m able to take things slow,” she said. “I don’t feel like I’m on a hamster wheel. I feel like instead of existing, I can live.” She’s getting ready to apply for a U visa to return to the U.S. and, she hopes, reunite with her children. For now, she is rebuilding her life in a country she had not seen in nearly two dozen years.

Hegseth’s War on America’s Military

2026-04-02T22:05:00-04:00

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.) When two Army helicopters buzzed a political rally and then flew to MAGA favorite Kid Rock’s house, Hegseth short-circuited the Army’s suspension of the pilots and squashed an investigation into their actions. Following the best American civil-military traditions, George and other senior military leaders have been remarkably disciplined in keeping their thoughts out of the public eye.

Of course, the tone at the Pentagon was set by the commander in chief. Last June, Trump spoke at Fort Bragg, where he tried to turn his appearance into a political rally. Again, George (and Driscoll) said nothing, at least in public, about this shocking violation of civil-military norms. Trump, after all, is the commander in chief, and his behavior can be curtailed only by the Senate or the American people.

Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

These dismissals are not defensible even as the product of some high-minded strategic reform. Rather, as Pentagon officials told The New York Times, they are the “product of Mr. Hegseth’s long-running grievances with the Army, battles over personnel and his troubled relationship” with Driscoll. Hegseth’s beef with Driscoll may be a product of insecurity: When Hegseth was stepping on rakes in the aftermath of Signalgate, Driscoll was an obvious choice to replace him. The Army secretary also took on important tasks that Hegseth either would not—or could not—do. Last fall, Driscoll, not Hegseth, was part of a high-level Pentagon delegation that traveled to Geneva in an attempt to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Perhaps that was just as well. Hegseth—now scathingly called “Dumb McNamara” by some Pentagon staff—has busied himself with culture-war nonsense rather than substantive defense and security issues. But Hegseth apparently need not worry: Driscoll, according to reporting from my colleagues Ashley Parker and Sarah Fitzpatrick, is now rumored to be one of the next senior appointees facing likely dismissal. (Hegseth may not know much about strategy or leadership, but he knows how to fight a war of attrition.)

The petty vendettas of a passed-over major mattered less until the war in Iran, a conflict that may be escalating beyond American control and is now sinking both Trump’s popularity and the global economy. Pentagon pissing matches are the stuff of legend, and George is not the first general to get an unwanted retirement invitation from an irate civilian leader. But America is now engaged in its biggest conflict in decades, with thousands of troops headed into possible combat on the shores of a country the size of Alaska with more than three times the population of North Korea—and with a president whose only formal speech on the war so far consisted of 19 minutes of jumbled thoughts. The American people deserve to know why so many of their top officers are being tossed out of their jobs.

Pete Hegseth has never shown a willingness to explain himself to the public, nor has he demonstrated the character required to take that kind of responsibility. But now that Randy George, along with other senior officers Hegseth has fired or pushed to resign, are about to be civilians, maybe they can step forward and tell their fellow citizens what on earth is going on in Hegseth’s Pentagon.

Trump’s Purge May Be Just Beginning

2026-04-02T19:53:00-04:00

After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others leaving the administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said that the timing is uncertain and that President Trump has not yet made up his mind. But what was once an unofficial motto of the second Trump term—“no scalps”—no longer applies.

Trump had been reluctant to get rid of any of his top lieutenants, viewing firings as a concession to the Democrats and the media. Even in the past few months, there had been an edict that no Cabinet officials would be removed prior to the midterms, though a series of dismissals were planned for after Election Day. But the president’s declining support since he launched the Iran war has changed the political calculus. The odds of confirming replacements, advisers know, are only growing longer. One person close to the White House told us that Trump was buoyed by the reaction to his decision to remove Noem and that it made him more likely to move ahead with Bondi. (Still, an administration official cautioned that after Noem’s ouster, optics were a concern; officials worried that getting rid of Bondi would be viewed as jettisoning only the most “attractive” women, while keeping the men.)

During her 14 months on the job, Bondi tried so hard to do everything right. She titillated the MAGA base by appearing on Fox News and promising that the Jeffrey Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” awaiting her review for release. She relinquished all pretense of leading an independent Justice Department, going after Trump’s political foes and enemies, even when other prosecutors might not have brought charges. And to the president and his allies, she continued to project the perky, kind, warm Florida persona that had once earned her the girlish nickname “Pambi.”

Bondi did everything right—or, at least, everything Trump asked her to do—but in the end, it was not enough. For Trump, and for his succession of attorneys general, it is almost never enough. In some ways, Bondi’s official service to Trump seemed preordained to end the way it did, with a singular moment of crystalline humiliation, after weeks of low-grade indignities. The case of Jeff Sessions, her distant, first-term predecessor, is instructive here. In early 2016, Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump’s seemingly long-shot presidential campaign, and was rewarded with the nation’s top law-enforcement job when Trump became president. But after Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump viciously turned on his onetime loyalist, publicly and privately excoriating his attorney general until finally pushing him out in the middle of his first term.

“No one can succeed in this job,” someone close to the White House mused to us. “Why would anyone want this job?” Only someone with “unbridled ambition,” the person concluded, would aspire to be Trump’s attorney general of the United States.

Bondi was not Sessions. She would not recuse herself; she would not draw lines; she would not do anything other than loyally serve the president. Her relationship with Trump went back more than a decade and was far deeper than his relationship with Sessions. In 2013, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to a political group supporting her Florida attorney-general campaign. (Shortly after, Bondi, in her capacity as the state’s attorney general, declined to take action against Trump University, despite multiple complaints—launching the first of several controversies in which the two would find themselves embroiled.) She remained in his orbit thereafter, speaking at both his 2016 and 2020 conventions.

Bondi’s trouble as U.S. attorney general, however, started early, during the first full month of Trump’s second term. It was then that she—under pressure from Trump’s base to release the Epstein files—summoned a group of conservative influencers to the White House, handing them thick white binders labeled, in red, The Epstein Files: Phase 1. Those close to Bondi acknowledged that her comments on television that month suggesting that Epstein’s alleged client list was “sitting on her desk” marked her ownership of the entire debacle and her failure to adequately protect the president and those close to him who were friendly with Epstein. There was no client list, the binders contained no new revelations, and “Bondi must go” murmuring began in earnest.

[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]

The stunt further thrust the topic of Epstein—which Trump hoped to avoid—into the news. But that wasn’t what ultimately cost Bondi her job. Rather, it was Trump’s perception that she was a weak attorney general, unable to sufficiently prosecute his perceived enemies. Multiple people familiar with the president’s thinking said that the failed efforts to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, among others, were a particular source of anger. Bondi was perceived by the president as lacking “smarts and guts,” as one person told us.

The Department of Justice declined to answer specific questions but pointed us to Bondi’s post on X saying that she would “continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration.” Bondi characterized her tenure as “highly successful” and declared it “easily the most consequential first year of the Department of Justice in American history.” Multiple lobbying firms were trying to hire Bondi this afternoon, as they fielded calls from corporations and other clients with matters before DOJ.

Some Trump allies (and many of his critics) believe that he asked Bondi for the nearly impossible—to win convictions for seemingly unwinnable cases—and then blamed her when she earnestly attempted yet still fell short. But other members of the Cabinet and the administration have expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us.

Those sympathetic to Bondi say that she was ordered to perform legal miracles with a deeply weakened Justice Department. The president’s demand for absolute loyalty among the department’s rank and file resulted in a profound loss of institutional expertise and a sharply reduced talent pool. Multiple prominent Republican attorneys told us that they’d considered joining the second Trump DOJ. But the requirement to take what they viewed as an oath of loyalty to the president—not the Constitution—was a step too far. “The president has a view that he is ultimately the head of the Justice Department, and the attorney general’s job is to carry out his orders,” one person close to the White House told us.

Officials in other departments told us that they regarded the Justice Department’s errors as harmful to the administration’s credibility with judges; they’d blown up what should have been easy wins for the president. “This has been festering across the administration for a while,” a second person close to the administration told us. “It’s the Epstein stuff, partly. It’s also the critiques of the indictments, like Comey. It’s a general sense of WTF—she’s not logging a lot of wins, not clocking a lot of good media.”

Bondi also enthusiastically enabled one of the president’s most fervently held beliefs: that the 2020 election had been “rigged.” Bondi directed multiple U.S. attorneys to pursue wide-ranging probes into election “interference” and “irregularities,” and her department has pursued lawsuits in 30 jurisdictions to obtain unredacted voter information that Trump’s legal critics believe are an effort to prevent significant numbers of Americans from voting in future elections. In perhaps a last-minute attempt to save her job, Bondi announced on X on Tuesday that she was elevating yet another U.S. attorney to “play a key role in ensuring the integrity of American elections.”

[Read: ‘The trust has been absolutely destroyed’]

When Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee in February, she came prepared with well-honed, pre-written insults for the Democratic lawmakers, in the hope that her fiery attacks would appeal to the only audience that mattered: Trump. But even that approach backfired; she was widely mocked for a non sequitur—“The Dow is over 50,000 right now!”—as well as for her pages of scripted invective. (It turns out that in Trump’s eyes, burns are cool, burn books less so.)

Now the defining image of Bondi’s tenure may be her testimony on Capitol Hill, specifically the image of her refusing to look at Epstein victims seated in the rows behind her, even when asked to multiple times by members of Congress. Weeks later—almost exactly a year after the initial Epstein flare-up—the buzz at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, where Bondi is a frequent presence, was that Trump was looking to get rid of her and hoping to have a replacement confirmed by the November midterms. Multiple people at the Justice Department and close to the White House familiar with Bondi’s tribulations told us that she has come close to being fired multiple times previously, including in the past few months. One thing that extended Bondi’s tenure, several people said, was her warm personal relationship with Trump and with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who both genuinely like her. “Pam and I have been friends for more than 15 years, and I think she’s one of the finest people I know,” Wiles told us in a brief phone call.

In response to our questions, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in an email that “Trump has the most talented cabinet and team in American history. Patriots like Kash Patel, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Dan Driscoll are tirelessly implementing the President’s agenda and achieving tremendous results for the American people.”

Despite the attorney-general role being among the most thankless in the Trump administration, there is no shortage of people eager to replace Bondi. Sensing the attorney general’s weakness, Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Jeanine Pirro, a television judge who is now Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, have been jockeying for the job, both directly to Trump and to his allies at Mar-a-Lago. So, too, have EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

Yet the two people close to the White House, as well as a top White House official, told us that Todd Blanche, the Bondi deputy who has now been elevated to acting attorney general, has long coveted the top job and will attempt to transform his interim role into something more permanent. “I think Todd will distinguish himself,” the White House official said, speaking anonymously to share internal thinking. “It’s sort of a trial for him.”

Tales of Bondi’s demise had been brewing since almost the beginning, and we asked the White House official: Why now? Why today? They responded that there was no particular “rhyme or reason” but that Bondi and Trump had “been talking back and forth for some time.”

“Ultimately, he was talked out,” this person explained, “and she was talked out.”

Isabel Ruehl, Jonathan Lemire, and Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

Trump’s Cozy Transportation Secretary

2026-04-02T10:52:00-04:00

Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been fighting for more than a decade to roll back Obama-era restrictions on the hours that long-haul truckers can work. Since 2014, their Wisconsin-based business-supply company, Uline, has spent $870,000 on lobbyists registered to push for a reversal of policies that Elizabeth Uihlein has said cause “increased inefficiencies and expense.” As the fourth-biggest disclosed donor to conservative and Republican groups in the 2024 election cycle, their views carried some weight.

After incremental erosion of the restrictions during President Trump’s first term, the latest victory came last summer, when Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced two pilot programs to allow truck drivers greater flexibility in the hours they work. “We’re getting Washington out of your trucks and your business,” Duffy said when he announced the change in June.

But Duffy was also working on a side project. Four months later, he transferred $1 million from the dormant campaign committee that had funded his congressional races in Wisconsin to a new group, called Northwoods Future PAC. The next month, Richard Uihlein became the only other donor to Northwoods, giving $1 million, according to public filings. As of the end of last year, Northwoods Future PAC had spent nearly $1.2 million on mailers and television ads to promote Duffy’s son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, who is running for the congressional seat previously held by the Cabinet secretary. The ads cast Alfonso, a 26-year-old who recently moved to the Duffy family home after working on a podcast in Florida, as a “working-class fighter” who would crusade against insider political machinations. “Time and time again, Washington politicians get rich,” one Northwoods ad for Alfonso begins, “while Wisconsin gets ignored.”

The donation is just one example of how Duffy has maintained an unusual relationship with representatives of the companies he regulates. In December, the secretary was listed as a “special guest” at a campaign event for Alfonso that was sponsored by transportation lobbyists, including those for Delta Air Lines and BNSF Railway, a decision that former ethics advisers to Presidents George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden told me they would not not have allowed or would have tried to reverse. Duffy has also embraced President Trump’s call to use corporate money, sometimes from companies that have transportation interests, to promote efforts by the department to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.

Duffy’s advisers deny any quid pro quo or impropriety, and say all of his actions have been cleared by ethics advisers at the Transportation Department who are not political appointees. “Regulatory decisions are guided by career safety professionals, the law, and the facts,” the Transportation Department spokesperson Nathaniel Sizemore told me. Duffy supported revisions to the “hours of service” trucking rule for years before he took his current job, and the president issued an executive order a year ago calling for the removal of “needless regulatory burdens” in the trucking industry. Uline, the company the Uihleins control, did not respond to a request for comment.

The arrangements have nonetheless raised alarm. Zach Cahalan, the executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, told me that Richard Uihlein’s involvement with Northwoods created “clear conflict of interest concerns” for Duffy. Richard Painter, who was Bush’s chief ethics lawyer and is now registered as an independent, says he tried to stop administration officials from appearing at events hosted by federal lobbyists, even though such arrangements are technically allowed under federal rules if the officials do not use their titles, solicit funds, or engage in any official business. (Duffy’s title did not appear on the event invitation, which also said he was “not soliciting” funds at the event.) “I would tell him to stay the heck away from this thing. It’s going to embarrass the president,” Painter told me about Duffy’s involvement in a lobbyist-sponsored event for his son-in-law. “It just gets too dang close to circumstantial evidence of quid pro quo.”

But the ethics practices that steered past administrations have eroded in Trump’s Washington. The shift has given lobbyists and corporate interests new opportunities to perhaps win favor with regulators by supporting their chosen causes—and it appears to have given those regulators new opportunities to take on projects that their predecessors avoided.

As recently as 2012, Obama refused donations from registered lobbyists, and his campaign announced that he would not appear at events for super PACs that supported him. During the Biden administration, two former ethics officials told me, there was a White House policy that prevented Cabinet secretaries from appearing at events hosted by lobbyists with business before their departments. During the first Trump term, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general referred for possible criminal prosecution findings about then-Secretary Elaine Chao’s use of department resources to help her family’s global shipping company. The Department of Justice, in the final weeks of Trump’s first term, declined to prosecute.

Though the Trump administration has long been less strict about ethics rules than its predecessors, despite the president campaigning on a promise to “drain the swamp,” the second term has been even more freewheeling. Trump has fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general, including the official responsible for the report on Chao. He has aggressively raised money from companies, lobbyists, and trade groups seeking his favor to fund projects such as his presidential library and a super PAC for the coming midterm elections, plus the construction of a new ballroom at the White House and a memorial arch on the Potomac River. Trump has kept careful track of the money coming in, calling his top fundraiser late at night for updates—and monitoring who is giving, who is not, and the role of lobbyists who bundle donations. The president has also urged his Cabinet secretaries to help fundraise for costly celebrations this summer for the nation’s 250th anniversary, events that depend on extensive financial partnerships between federal officials and companies that seek their favor.

[Read: Trump’s eye-popping postelection windfall]

Duffy has thrown himself and his department into those preparations. Last May, he announced the Great American Road Trip, a Department of Transportation initiative to get Americans out on the nation’s roads this summer. Shortly after, Tori Barnes, a recent lobbyist for the U.S. Travel Association who previously worked in government relations for General Motors, founded a nonprofit called The Great American Road Trip, using the same logo that Duffy had unveiled outside his department’s headquarters. The nonprofit does not disclose donations, but its website lists several “sponsors” that are regulated by Duffy, including Toyota, Boeing, Royal Caribbean, the American Bus Association, and CRH, a company that provides building materials for publicly funded roads. Weeks later, the department lent its name to a new mobile-phone app, built by General Motors, called Explore250, which suggests places to visit by car and allows users to collect digital stamps commemorating their travels.

Duffy embraced the nonprofit last month and provided a quote for the group’s news release: “Join us on this exciting adventure.” A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation said Duffy is working with the nonprofit and other public-private 250th-celebration efforts in his official capacity, as part of an administration-wide effort. Barnes told me that Duffy “has absolutely nothing to do” with the nonprofit’s fundraising efforts. She added: “That is solely my responsibility.”

Painter said he believes that government officials should avoid association with outside nonprofits or companies while in office. He objected to Biden’s decision to allow the Penn Biden Center (now Penn Washington) at the University of Pennsylvania and the Joseph R. Biden School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware to continue to use the president’s name while he served in office. “We do not endorse nonprofits or for-profits with the seal of approval of the United States government,” he said. “I don’t care how patriotic it is.”

The White House spokesperson Kush Desai, in response to this story, described Duffy as “a critical asset for President Trump and his administration,” specifically praising the secretary for “spearheading celebratory events for America’s 250th birthday.”

Duffy has taken a more direct approach to supporting his son-in-law’s campaign, a decision that has caused tension with White House advisers. Alfonso, who previously worked in construction and for Dan Bongino’s podcast, is married to Duffy’s eldest daughter, Evita.

On November 11, six days before Uihlein gave his donation to Northwoods, Duffy traveled to Wausau, Wisconsin, to appear at a meet-and-greet for Alfonso. He also was listed as a “special guest” for a December 3 fundraiser for the campaign. An invite to that event, previously reported by Politico, listed the Delta Air Lines PAC as a host, along with a group of Washington lobbyists with interests before the Department of Transportation or past ties to Duffy. They included Husein Cumber, who represents eight companies on lobbying efforts at the department; Andy Keiser, who represents BNSF Railway; and Tyler Duvall, the president of the smart-highway company Cavnue. Eight employees of the lobbying firm BGR Group, which represents Delta and is where Duffy previously worked, were also listed as hosts. (Duffy decided last year to terminate a joint venture between Delta and the Mexican carrier Aeromexico, a major setback for the companies, amid an ongoing dispute over U.S. carrier access to Mexican airports.) Duffy ultimately did not attend the event, because a White House announcement with Trump happened at the same time, two people familiar with the planning told me.

But Alfonso’s campaign has since benefited from donations from lobbyists and transportation-industry PACs. These included donations from fundraising efforts affiliated with Delta Air Lines, the National Air Transportation Association, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Travel Association, and Brightline Holdings, a privately owned passenger-train company. Other lobbyists not listed as hosts with business before the department have also since given to Alfonso’s campaign, ProPublica recently reported.

Sizemore said that career ethics officials at the Department of Transportation “reviewed and cleared” Duffy to appear at the Alfonso event hosted by lobbyists. “These processes and rules have existed for decades,” Sizemore told me. “If Secretary Duffy attends fundraising events, he does so in his personal capacity and he will continue to do so.”

[Read: Fox News vets are taking over America’s 250th birthday party]

But two ethics officials who worked for the Biden administration, who requested anonymity because of their current jobs, told me that such an arrangement would not have been permitted when Biden was president. In advance of the 2024 reelection campaign, the Biden White House set up a system for screening and approving any party or candidate fundraisers that Cabinet secretaries attended in their personal capacity. “On the hosts, we would not allow anyone to be from a regulated industry or a lobbying firm,” said a former ethics official in the Biden White House Counsel’s office, who was involved in vetting fundraisers.

A second former senior political appointee in the Department of Transportation general counsel’s office also told me that the secretary would not have been permitted to be listed as a speaker at a fundraiser hosted by industry lobbyists. “We would not have wanted to put the secretary in that position,” this person said. “We wanted there to be a clear line.”

Norm Eisen, a White House special counsel for ethics during the Obama presidency who has since helped lead legal efforts against the Trump administration in federal courts, told me that Duffy’s decision to attend a lobbyist-hosted event for his son-in-law would not have passed muster during the Obama years because, he said, “it creates the appearance of possible beholdenness to special interests.”

The lines in more recent weeks have been anything but clear, as Duffy has rolled out more public-private partnerships to celebrate the nation’s anniversary. On March 6, Duffy appeared at Union Station in Washington to announce a new Department of Transportation advertising campaign, funded largely by private industry. Several private companies had agreed to wrap their vehicles or display advertising celebrating the nation’s birthday at the request of the department and Freedom 250, a fundraising effort set up by Trump’s advisers. Acting as host, Duffy introduced executives from Brightline, Penske, and Greyhound-owner Flix. “We have public assets, public property,” Duffy told the group. “But we have so many partners from around industry and corporations that want to celebrate in this great birthday.”

The Intellectual Right Is Mad at the Mess It’s Made

2026-04-02T10:50:34-04:00

In 1961, William F. Buckley Jr. had a problem. The preeminent intellectual of the conservative movement was being outflanked to his right by the John Birch Society. Founded just three years earlier, the group had grown to tens of thousands of members, fueled by its claim that Communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. Buckley reportedly complained at the time that he was incessantly asked about the organization.

By 1962, Buckley had had enough. In what conservatives have since heralded as a principled maneuver, Buckley used the pages of his magazine, National Review, to excoriate Robert Welch, the society’s leader, as a ham-fisted operator who was unable to understand nuance, who was incapable of leading a proper right-wing movement, and who “anathematizes all who disagree with him.” Buckley’s diatribe is credited with limiting the influence of the Birchers, as they were known, in mainstream politics.

Buckley’s fight has been replicated by high-brow conservatives in other eras when they believe that the conspiratorially minded among their brethren have gone too far and risk turning off those who might otherwise be persuadable. In the 1990s, the writer Norman Podhoretz tried his best to stymie the influence of the populist paleoconservative commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom Podhoretz saw as anti-Semitic. In 2017, as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was consuming the right, the respected conservative columnist George Will wrote that conservatism had been “hijacked” by “vulgarians” and “soiled by scowling primitives.”

And today, many of the conservative cognoscenti are again fed up with the right-wing hoi polloi.

In October, Politico published racist and misogynistic group-chat logs from members of the New York Young Republicans Club. The conservative writer James Lindsay, who made his name by opposing what he viewed as overly sensitive “woke” culture, chastised his fellow right-wing scribes for not taking the revelations seriously. “The group chat exposé is the tip of a very nasty iceberg, and your denialism isn’t helping a damn thing,” Lindsay wrote on X. Later that month, the conservative commentator and conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza wrote that he was seeing more “vile” anti-Indian racism on the right than he had ever encountered in his 40-year career. In December, the right-wing writer Scott Greer complained that the right’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination “exposed the idiocy and weaknesses of the modern conservative movement,” as well as “its addiction to conspiratorial thinking.”

Richard Hanania has been one of the loudest and most consistent critics of the right from within its own ranks. He has publicly criticized the conspiratorial and racist tendencies that have become popular on the right, but he told me that these frustrations are also being discussed in private. Hanania said several high-profile conservatives have reached out to him to share their grievances about what the movement has become.

The most notable public protests have come from Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who works at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. Since 2020, Rufo has been influential chiefly because of his crusade against how he believes matters of race were being taught in public schools. His campaign against critical race theory—a 1970s academic framework that posited that racial bias is embedded in American law and society—helped turn some school boards across the country from sleepy, overlooked features of local government into political battlegrounds. Rufo is also seen as a driving force for the Trump administration’s campaign to banish diversity training across the federal government. But in February, he posted on X that “the Right’s collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it.”

[Read: Nick Fuentes’s strategy is working ]

In the post, Rufo didn’t say whom he was talking about. But he has been critical of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. Since September, Owens’s podcast has focused on a convoluted conspiracy theory about how Kirk, her fellow conservative personality, was killed—possibly by the Israeli government—as part of a plot that’s now being covered up by shadowy forces. She also has questioned the character of Kirk’s widow, Erika, in a YouTube series called “Bride of Charlie.” Fuentes is a young white supremacist and anti-Semitic streamer whose profile was elevated in the right-wing mainstream by his easygoing, sympathetic interview in October with Tucker Carlson. Lindsay and Hanania, among others, also take a dim view of Carlson, partly for his own conspiratorial views and partly for his elevation of Fuentes and another interview subject, the Nazi-apologist podcaster Darryl Cooper.

Bookish conservatives are fond of the tale of Buckley banishing the John Birch Society to the fringes. But that’s not the whole story. Buckley walked a fine line, publicly criticizing Welch while otherwise trying not to alienate the society’s rank and file, the historian Matthew Dallek argues in his 2023 book, Birchers. Buckley’s gripes were more about the group’s style and its leaders than its ideology. Birchers were widely derided for being racist and conspiratorial. But Buckley, the genteel conservative, was broadly in alignment with some of the group’s views, calling white people “the advanced race” in a 1957 editorial in National Review, supporting Jim Crow segregation, and writing a book defending the Red-baiting propagandist Senator Joseph McCarthy.

[Read: ‘We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power’ ]

Some members of the modern right-wing intelligentsia have their own awkward tension with the people they are now criticizing, having espoused comparably extreme views in the past. Greer, for example, has pseudonymously written racist and anti-Semitic articles for the white supremacist Richard Spencer’s website, Radix Journal. In the ’90s, D’Souza argued that “we have to take the possibility of natural differences seriously,” including the chance that there is a “natural hierarchy of groups: whites or Asians concentrated at the top, Hispanics in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.” Similar arguments are now being used to justify the racism he is speaking out against. He’s also continued to spread his own bigotry—in January, he shared a video of a racist caricature of a Somali person. (He did not respond to my request for comment.) HuffPost reported in 2023 that Hanania made his own pseudoscientific arguments about the inferiority of Black people. (He has since said that he regrets those views and has renounced them.) As a group, the right could be said to have seeded the same extremism that they now condemn.

When I asked right-wing writers about this, I received a range of responses. Lindsay, who has broken from the right and now describes himself as a classical liberal, was the most contrite. “I’ve reckoned with it on my end,” he told me. “I seriously lament any role that I played in contributing to this. I seriously reevaluated how and who I’ll work with.”

Greer told me that his past associations with Spencer and like-minded people were a necessary part of politics and coalition building. He said that despite working with Spencer and Radix, he’s not a white nationalist. “I didn’t write about killing people, so I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said. “I’m a right-wing, conservative American nationalist. White separatism is stupid. No one wants it.”

Hanania has apologized for his past work. When I asked him about his previous writing on the links between race and IQ, he told me that “different groups score differently on standardized tests,” but that focusing on this is not healthy or conducive to “maintaining a kind of social harmony.”

Rufo was less penitent. In 2024, Rufo co-wrote a Substack post titled “The Cat Eaters of Ohio,” which claimed to have video evidence of an African immigrant in Dayton grilling a cat. Rufo also offered a $5,000 “bounty” for anyone who could provide “hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.” Statements from local officials and subsequent reporting from Drop Site News cast doubt on Rufo’s story. On the campaign trail that year, Trump and J. D. Vance made similar claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

In 2021, Rufo encouraged his followers on X to call teachers who discuss LGBTQ matters “political predators” and accuse them of “ideological grooming”; he made a similar point the following year. When I asked Rufo about these statements, he said the “framing of this story is disingenuous, littered with factual errors, and even after I have repeatedly corrected them, they are still here.” He did not provide details.

If some of these conservatives are reluctant to revisit their own role in fostering hatreds they now condemn, their shifting views might nevertheless be significant. Again, Buckley provides a potential model. By the late 1960s, he had grown more sympathetic toward the mainstream. “I think he understood, as the ’60s moved on, that conservatives had an opportunity to win real power, and to do that, it made a lot of sense politically to moderate,” Dallek told me. “I do think that he did evolve, and he was not clamoring for a return to Jim Crow in the mid-to-late 1960s.”

Frustrations over the right’s inflammatory factions may be seeping into the intellectually inclined wings of the White House as well. A senior administration official, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal, explained the right’s tolerance of bigots as a product of politics and “foxhole sympathies.” In the past, conservative thinkers were more tolerant of the anti-Semitic and conspiratorial right because they felt that the left was more powerful and intent on demonizing their ideological adversaries. Since Trump’s return to the White House, that sense of camaraderie on the right has dissipated, and the extremists—the administration official termed their views “feverish, howling Nazism”—are now viewed by many as hurting the cause. The irony of this, of course, is that Trump has been one of the key enablers of the right’s most extreme fringes.

In their heyday, intellectuals such as Buckley and Will were the closest thing to influencers on the right, heavyweights whose written words in national publications made them prominent conservative voices. Buckley could make or break careers and help determine policy priorities.

[Read: Teenagers are pushing Himmler’s favorite myth]

Today, the most influential voices on the right are the people the intellectuals are criticizing. Owens’s show is the fourth-most-popular news podcast on Spotify and the second-most-popular conservative news show. Tucker Carlson’s podcast is first in both categories. The overtly anti-Semitic and white-nationalist politics of Fuentes have made such views more popular than they’ve been in decades. They’ve also gained purchase among young members of the right, who will shape the movement’s future. Even though relatively high-profile voices on the right have stepped up to condemn the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism, they don’t seem powerful enough to stop it.

Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech

2026-04-01T23:46:48-04:00

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics (including me) have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

A speech that should have been a clear explanation of why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began instead in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. He then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.

Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. But he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

But back to the war: What is America fighting for? Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. Instead, he simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.

Trump, however, then undercut his own point by assuring the country that Iran’s “nuclear dust” was buried under mountains of rubble, inaccessible since the great success of last June’s joint Israeli-American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranians would never be allowed to excavate any of it, he said.

So, then, perhaps the war was about regime change, which would be the surest way to stop every evil plan gestating in Tehran, including nuclear weapons and terrorist plots. Well, no, it turns out, the war is not about that either. Trump explicitly denied that the goal was to bring down the Iranian theocracy—a staggering claim given his exhortations to the Iranian people on the first night of the war that their hour of liberation was at hand. After denying that the U.S. goal was regime change, he then claimed that regime change had now already happened because so many Iranian leaders have been killed.

In addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump laid out three other goals that he said were now within reach: neutralizing Iran’s ability to project power anywhere through terrorism, destroying the Iranian navy, and eliminating Iran’s missile stocks and production capabilities. As with so many other Trump promises, the president said that he will accomplish these goals in two to three weeks. How he will do all this was left unclear, other than that he will hit Iran “extremely hard.”

[Read: Trump’s fateful choice]

Meanwhile, Tehran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said only that other nations should go in, clear the strait, and take Iran’s oil. He chided Americans for their impatience; the two world wars, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, took longer than the current war, he said. He also waved away any economic concerns. Everything will get better, he promised, telling viewers that only a year ago America was a “dead and crippled country” that he personally rescued. Oddly, Trump claimed that the United States has never been more economically prepared for a conflict—the “little journey,” as he called it—like the one he has led against Iran.

The president also said things that might come back to haunt him. He vowed not to let Israel or America’s friends in the Persian Gulf “get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,” as if Iran were not already inflicting damage on them. And he assured Americans that gas prices would come down. (They might, but not anytime soon.) He threatened, yet again, to bomb all of Iran’s electrical plants, a likely war crime if carried out with the completeness that Trump promised, should Iran refuse to … well, do whatever it is he thinks it should do. “We are unstoppable,” he said, noting that U.S. forces were in combat against “one of the most powerful countries.” (This, too, is nonsense: It takes nothing away from U.S.-military valor to admit that Iran was at best a second-tier power even before the war.) America might be unstoppable, but the American president seems to be at loose ends now that the Iranians have a chokehold on a major part of the world’s energy supply.

The only bright spots in the speech were in the things the president did not say. He did not, as many observers expected, prepare Americans for the introduction of ground forces into Iran. (If he now goes ahead with such an operation, he will have betrayed the public by misleading them about the course of the war.) And he did not eviscerate NATO and threaten to pull out of the alliance, as some expected him to do because of his ongoing anger at major European powers’ unwillingness to join a war they did not start.

If the president meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)

The president seems lost. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.

Public Anger Is Rising

2026-04-01T16:59:47-04:00

For a brief moment last week, Congress started to do something productive. The Senate, after weeks of bickering and fruitless negotiations, unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, taking a small but meaningful step toward resolving one of the many crises that have sprung up like targets in a game of whack-a-mole during President Trump’s second term. All that stood between tens of thousands of federal employees and their paychecks was a similar vote in the House.

But House Republicans would not agree. Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.

“It’s a failure of everyone,” Representative David Schweikert, a Republican who represents a politically divided district in Arizona, told us.

Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.

Back in their districts, members of Congress—particularly swing-seat Republicans—seem to be in hiding. Hardly any are holding town halls or other well-publicized events that could put them face-to-face with frustrated voters. We contacted the offices of more than a dozen House Republicans in tight reelection races this year. Only Schweikert responded. No one else would agree to interviews about what they were hearing from constituents, nor would they disclose the events they were holding to solicit public feedback. (One of those members, Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, was spotted by TMZ on a trip to Scotland with several colleagues.) A spokesperson for Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, a Republican who won her last campaign by just 799 votes, referred us to a Facebook post in which Miller-Meeks called for Congress to return to the Capitol and “resolve this impasse.” “Our office does not share the congresswoman’s schedule,” the spokesperson said, “but she will be busy and has several exciting events planned in the case that Congress remains out of session.”

Trump did alleviate one pain point for the public last week by declaring that he would go around Congress to pay TSA agents, a move that reduced the snaking lines at airport-security checkpoints across the country. Wait times had stretched to hours as missed paychecks thinned the ranks of on-duty TSA agents, causing staffing shortages.

Yet the president’s unilateral action, though welcomed by lawmakers and air travelers alike, addressed only the most visible part of a crisis that has dragged on for weeks. Thousands of DHS employees, including members of the Coast Guard and FEMA, and administrative staff, have worked without pay for more than a month—and that’s after they missed paychecks during the larger 43-day government shutdown last fall. (Because most DHS employees are deemed “essential,” relatively few of them have been furloughed, and therefore most have had to report for duty during the funding lapse.)

In Congress, the dispute over DHS funding has centered on ICE and Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. After federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, Democrats said they would not agree to fully fund DHS without reforms to the way that ICE operates. They’ve demanded that ICE agents wear body cameras and not masks, and have asked for requirements that agents seek judicial warrants before entering private homes in search of undocumented immigrants. The two parties appeared to be making progress toward an agreement early last week before Trump scuttled the talks by insisting that Republicans tie any DHS-funding deal to passage of the unrelated SAVE America Act, an elections bill that Democrats staunchly oppose.

[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill ]

Trump briefly considered a rarely used move to force Congress back into session, but on Wednesday he urged Republicans to ensure long-term DHS funding without Democratic votes. Such a process would circumvent the Senate filibuster, but it could take weeks or even months to enact. In response, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune issued a statement agreeing to the president’s demand and saying that Congress would act “in the coming days” to end the shutdown.

Schweikert’s House district in and around Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of the wealthiest and most highly educated in the nation. But its voters are livid at Congress. In interviews this week outside grocery stores, gas stations, and at the airport, many told us they were scrimping on food—cutting back on pricier meats and fruits—and others said they had changed their driving habits because of gas prices that are nearing $5 a gallon in some locations. Retirees, and those close to retirement, told us they are anxiously riding the volatility of financial markets amid the war.

Erica Squires and her sister Christina made trade-offs as they shopped for Easter goodies for their niece and nephew at Walmart. Grass filler, which they typically use to stuff Easter baskets, had just about doubled in price, they said, and basket prices were up too. They skipped both and opted to surprise the kids with a prefilled mermaid-themed gift for $15.97 and a lawn-mower bubble toy: “It was actually cheaper than making a basket,” Christina said.

The Squireses also are intentional about buying gas. They opted to fill up at the Walmart in Scottsdale, where they paid about $4.20 a gallon—less than in other parts of town. And rather than driving solo to visit their sister in a far-flung Phoenix suburb, they are now carpooling. Erica gave up shopping at a natural-grocery store because of rising prices. While they are hustling to make ends meet, the sisters told us, they don’t see Congress doing anything to make their lives better. If anything, they said, lawmakers are making it worse. Asked how they felt about Congress at this moment, Erica—a freelance digital marketer who voted for Trump in 2016 (and the libertarian Chase Oliver in 2024)—dryly replied, “Aren’t they not doing their job right now? They’re on vacation while we’re over here driving five miles to get cheaper gas.”

Others we encountered felt the same way. One young Democrat who works as a health-care administrator said his girlfriend’s luxury car has been sitting at home for the past month because it needs premium gas, which is almost $6 a gallon. He blames Congress: “It’s ridiculous.” A middle-aged woman whose truck sported a Don’t tread on me sticker matter-of-factly summed up her feelings about the country’s lawmakers: “Everything is terrible.”

At Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, officials had set up a donation site for unpaid TSA employees at its Compassion Corner, where people and businesses could donate items including nonperishable food, diapers, and gift cards of $20 or less for groceries and gas. The airport collected more than 3,700 gift cards and 1,800 food and household items, an airport spokesperson told us. The collection could open back up if a long-term funding measure for TSA does not pass.

[Read: American aviation is near collapse]

The security lines had dissipated yesterday, a day after TSA employees began receiving back pay. Passenger frustration had not. Layton Martin, a Republican from Phoenix who was flying to Salt Lake City, told us that members of Congress were playing with the livelihoods of government employees for their own political benefit. “They’re having, like, an ego party,” the 28-year-old fitness trainer said. “It seems very childish.” Martin’s rent is up $300 compared with last year, he said; his cost to fly to Salt Lake was double the normal price, and his friends can’t find jobs.

Schweikert, the Republican who represents Scottsdale in Congress, seemed just as frustrated. He told us that he views the DHS shutdown as a symptom of a larger unwillingness by Congress to tackle the nation’s structural problems. (He frequently warns that the Medicare trust fund could be insolvent in fewer than seven years, for example.) “I’m in a 50–50 district and I keep introducing bills to try to stabilize the debt, and I can’t even get a co-sponsor,” Schweikert told us. His constituents, he said, complain that their wages haven’t kept up with inflation, so they are poorer today than they were five years ago and are stressed about rising housing costs and making car payments.

Schweikert said he would have been happy to stay in Washington over the Easter break if it had looked as though a funding deal was possible, but the votes weren’t there. He placed blame on everyone—“Republicans, Democrats, leadership”—who refused to sit down and keep negotiating. “One side is using their rage at DHS to raise money and the other side—my side—is often terrified to actually have detailed, mathematically honest conversations about population and immigration.” Schweikert insisted that he is still working during the break, attending both community and political events. He’s not campaigning for reelection, however. Instead, he’s making a bid for governor. When he announced his candidacy for governor last fall, the eight-term lawmaker deemed Congress “unsavable.”

Someday in Tehran

2026-04-01T12:45:00-04:00

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Like Donald Trump, I, too, once underestimated the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the fall of 2004, as an underemployed freelance journalist drawn to heady stories about international politics, I had the bright idea of traveling to the notoriously closed country on a tourist visa. Press visas for Iran were hard to come by, and my travel was exploratory—I had no particular assignment. My profile was low, I figured. Who would care if, between the obligatory sightseeing expeditions, I rattled around Iranian cities meeting political analysts, philosophers, students, filmmakers, and the relatives of Iranian expats I knew?

The Islamic Republic was not to be messed with in this way. Its visa regime was deadly serious; so was the official paranoia about foreigners. American tourists were required to travel with a specially vetted guide. For four weeks, I strained to see past the diminutive figure of a young woman I’ll call Pardis, who pretended to be a tour guide while I pretended to be a tourist. Pardis excelled at her job, which was not only to make sure that I adhered to the terms of my visa, but also to report on all of my movements and conversations, and to obfuscate everything I saw.

One day I watched a bus disgorge a troop of uniformed Basij militiamen at an intersection in central Tehran.

“Who are they?” I asked Pardis.

“Oh,” she said. “They’re a youth group. Sometimes they help the police.”

Because Pardis stood between me and all that I was truly curious about, I studied her. She was not a dour Islamist but a fun-loving 31-year-old who had hair flowing out of her headscarf and risqué online flirtations with men overseas. She was an orphan, unlucky in love, and ambitious in her minder-ing, circumstances that rendered her marginal—an unmarried career woman living with a roommate. She was also relentlessly trivial, with a knack for diverting any potentially substantive encounter I might have with her country or anyone in it into an endless stream of repetitive inside jokes and girlish banter.

[Read: The ‘existential anxiety’ of the Islamic Republic]

We wandered through bazaars, threatening to buy each other the ugliest items we saw—a giant pair of red satin underwear, a wig, a dowdy zebra-print skirt. We flew to Shiraz on IranAir, a black-turbaned cleric across the aisle from us. Pardis took out a bottle of polish, began painting her nails, and smiled at me impishly. “In front of the mullah!” she said in her little voice. (He was absorbed in opening his airline-issue carton of apple juice.)

Pardis was not invested in anything that the Islamic Republic seemed to care about. But she was, for professional reasons, invested in exercising control over me. For my safety, she insisted, I could never be without her protective presence. But when she entered a room—even, memorably, one where I sat talking with members of her own family about their feelings about the hijab—everyone stopped talking.

Privately, she’d tell me about her love interests. Relationships between unmarried men and women were commonplace but forbidden under the Islamic Republic. Suddenly she’d freeze in fear and implore me not to tell anyone, or backtrack and claim that she was talking about a friend. Toward the end of our month together, in the shadow of a breakup, she sat smoking and brooding in my hotel room. I told her that Iranian women seemed forced to live complicated lives.

She replied with uncharacteristic bluntness: “Better to say that women here find ways to kill lots of things inside themselves.”

Pardis was not interested in politics, but I was. What had drawn me to Iran was a political and philosophical movement that seemed unique in the Muslim world. A circle of the most radical revolutionary elites—hostage takers, religious philosophers, former officials, even founders of the security forces—had fallen out of political favor in the early 1990s and spent the better part of a decade remaking themselves as proponents of incremental democratic reform. They produced an entire theoretical literature that drew on Western and Islamic sources; they mobilized young people to support their campaigns for elected office; and they tried to clean up abuses in some parts of the government they ran. The reformists were insiders who intended not to destroy the regime, but to liberalize it. They sought to make the supreme leader a benign figurehead—like the Queen of England, they sometimes said. The supreme leader had other plans.

My first visit to the country was comically unsuited to exploring any of this. By day, Pardis was obligated to fully occupy my time. Some of what we saw was splendid: palaces and gardens; museums of carpets, miniatures, and Islamic calligraphy; even madrassas and shrines. Then Ramadan set in, and all museums closed. Pardis had us driven around in circles or held me all but captive in her apartment, watching music videos on satellite television. After she dropped me at my hotel in the evenings, I went out to meetings I’d arranged on my own. She was livid when she learned of this. I needed to bring her with me, she insisted, or she’d lose her job. She threatened to sit in my hotel lobby until midnight to make sure I didn’t leave—unless, she said, I agreed to give her the names of everyone I saw.

Sure, I said. I’d give her all of the names before I left. I never intended to do this, and she never again asked me to. Maybe whoever needed to know about my movements already did. Or maybe Pardis covered for me—because she was lonely and considered me a friend, or because she feared she had told me too many of her secrets. Possibly she was simply satisfied that she had already done her job. I returned to New York in relative darkness about the reform movement and loath to write about the one thing I really knew, which was Pardis, and the story of how an otherwise indifferent person comes to hold a stake in a brutal regime—how she forces that stake on others just as it was forced on her.

During the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 to 2005, a window opened wide enough for a democratic-minded civil society to draw breath in Iran. A crop of semi-independent newspapers sprouted, along with investigative journalists who dared to write for them. Cultural and philosophical magazines published searching essays on religion and the state. Young people formed NGOs to address an array of civic needs; some ran for newly formed city and provincial councils. Student activism spilled onto the streets.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did his best to slam this window shut. His henchmen tortured journalists and student activists in prison until they made humiliating confessions on national television. State-linked thugs beat up a philosopher at his lectures and shot a political theorist point-blank on the steps of Tehran’s city hall. Even so, a real infrastructure for democratic change persisted for a time—in the form of people who had the training and experience to run newspapers and civic organizations, citizens who expected these things to be allowed, and the semblance of a political network that connected society to the ministries of the state.

Two presidential elections tested the resilience of this infrastructure. I covered the first of these, in 2005, with a proper journalist’s visa and a minder in her mid-40s who had a deep smoker’s rasp and a loud, insistent warmth. Bahar (also not her real name—for their safety, I’m using pseudonyms for the private citizens I met) belonged to a lost generation of bohemian Boomers whose class and secular social milieu had been violently displaced by the 1979 revolution. Women who had once lived and studied abroad now gathered in homes that smelled of opium smoke, where husbands were absent or idle and grown children seemed adrift. I learned only later of money troubles, past prison sentences, and ethnic- or religious-minority status that must have contributed to the sense of profound isolation in those homes, where it mingled with something louche and lively and almost careless.

Of all the handlers I was assigned to in Iran—I returned in 2006, 2008, and 2012—Bahar was the least beholden to the agency she worked for. I gave her a list of the people I intended to speak with, many of them reformist politicians, student activists, journalists, and former political prisoners. Her boss told her we’d wind up dead, like a photojournalist who had reported near Evin prison a few years before. Bahar was undeterred. The people on my list were heroes to her for standing up to the Islamic Republic, and she would not forfeit the opportunity to meet them. She told her own handlers that my modesty required us to hire a female driver, which is how we managed to get her best friend, Niki, to ferry us around in her red Peugeot.

How to fully convey the eccentricity of my little entourage? Niki had the stark, exaggerated beauty of a fashion model, though she was gaunt and faded, with a thousand-yard stare. She was also mostly bald. She’d first shaved her head in 1979 to taunt the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. By her telling, she went out bareheaded to test the hijab law, which required women to cover their hair.

Where is your scarf ? a Guardsman asked her.

I don’t need one. I have no hair, she said.

Ah, he replied. But you are still a woman.

Now Niki swathed herself in layers of flowing garments that resembled ordinary hijab less than they suggested dervish, flower child, and grim reaper all at once. She, too, wanted to meet the people on my list, and at times she entered the room with us. Bringing Pardis to any meeting had cast a pall of annoyance mixed with fear. Bringing Bahar and Niki added an antic element. They were extravagantly maternal, often starstruck, and prone to tears. One incident remains particularly salient in my memory.

The reformists had flubbed the election I’d come to witness. They ran three candidates, and many liberal-minded Iranians rejected all of them, on the grounds that the reformist project was a failure and Iranian elections were far from free. And so the populist hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—Khamenei’s favorite—surged to the presidency.

The morning the results came in, the red Peugeot was abnormally somber, Bahar and Niki absorbed in a nearly wordless grief. We were on our way to Tarbiat Modares University to see Hashem Aghajari, a reformist intellectual with a revolutionary background and a wooden leg that had replaced the one he’d lost in the Iran-Iraq War. Aghajari had been sentenced to death for a speech he gave in which he said that Muslims need not blindly follow a supreme leader, as though with “shackles around the neck.” Under popular pressure, including an international campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, the regime had commuted his sentence, but he still lived under the sword of Damocles, and I asked him whether the election results made him fearful.

“We have a saying in Farsi,” Aghajari replied. “ ‘There’s no shade darker than black.’ The worst they can do is execute me. I have prepared myself for that. If I am worried, it is not for myself. It’s for the Iranian people, for young people, today’s generation and future generations. My freedom and my life, and those of one or two people like me, don’t matter. They may take me to prison. I’m ready for that. In this society, we have no freedom to speak or to write. This is a prison, too.”

Outside Aghajari’s office, Bahar, or maybe Niki, motioned for us to sit a moment on a low brick wall in the university courtyard, where the sun beat down, and the two women wept.

“When we have people like this in our country,” Bahar said at last, “why must we have Ahmadinejad as our president?”

The author in Tehran in 2005 (Abbas / Magnum)

Reform was a conundrum like so many others under the Islamic Republic. It demanded cooperation and resistance at the same time—“pressure from below, negotiation at the top,” as one of its theorists articulated the strategy. The trouble was that Khamenei never once indicated that he would negotiate.

A compromise, practically by definition, satisfies no one. Reform was a compromise between hope and resignation. Iranian oppositionists grumbled about the movement’s timidity and its roots in the regime. The alternative, however, was confrontation, and throughout the period of my visits, Iranians were leery of it. The regime’s appetite and capacity for violence were never in doubt, and the country’s last revolution had gone very wrong. The movement behind it was broad-based, including liberals and leftists, but it was the Islamists who had emerged victorious in street battles and in politics, and who sealed their triumph through summary executions and imposed a theocratic state. This was not a distant memory. Mohsen Kadivar, a dissident cleric, once complained to me that his students railed against reform but shied away from rebellion. “If you won’t be the men of revolution,” Kadivar told me he said to them, “then be the boys of reform.”

The last great showing of this meliorist current was the Green Movement of 2009. In that year’s presidential election, liberal-minded Iranians, including many who’d boycotted the 2005 vote, turned out in electrifying force for the moderate reformist candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. On election day, some polls had barely closed when the regime called an implausible win for Ahmadinejad. Iranians I spoke with were incandescent with fury. Millions poured into the streets, and Mousavi and Karroubi eventually joined them there. The protesters didn’t demand an end to the Islamic Republic, even though many of them undoubtedly wished for it. They followed the cautious, legalistic reformist playbook and simply demanded that the system adhere to its own rules and allow them to elect the relatively moderate insider they’d voted for. They stood silently and held placards that read WHERE IS MY VOTE?

Bahar called me in New York on the day that the crowd was at its maximum in Tehran’s Azadi Square. She was enraptured; the atmosphere was like nothing she had ever known. The barriers of suspicion, private humiliation, and pain that had divided people for decades seemed to drop away in that expanse of shared silence, and the sense of common purpose was like a current passing through the crowd. To her special delight, she saw Aghajari not far from her—maneuvering, unafraid, on his wooden leg.

The Green Movement was the largest, most sustained, and most organized campaign of street protests that the Islamic Republic ever confronted. Foreign commenters sometimes mistook this for the spontaneous cri de coeur of a thwarted presidential campaign, mobilized by Twitter posts, but in fact it was a movement with a history, layers of experienced leaders, painstakingly articulated ideas, a pragmatic strategy, and a networked constituency. Precisely for this reason, the Islamic Republic set about destroying it with bullets, tear gas, batons, and torture.

Ahmadinejad’s first term had already seen the closure of virtually all of the reformist publications and NGOs and the exclusion of reformist candidates from campaigns for most public offices. Now the regime arrested enough of the movement’s leaders and activists to fill an auditorium, where they were paraded, hollow-eyed, in prison pajamas and forced to confess to outlandish conspiracies. Lesser-known young activists were remanded to a fetid metal shipping container in the desert. Many were raped and killed. By 2010, even to speak of or publish a photo of former President Khatami was forbidden; the cautious reform movement was dubbed “the sedition,” and Mousavi and Karroubi were placed under a draconian house arrest that would endure for a decade and a half.

When the Arab Spring came to Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries not long after the Green Movement was crushed, I ached for Iran. Of all the countries in the Middle East, up until 2009, Iran had perhaps the most credible infrastructure for democratic change—and one of the most obdurate autocracies.

My fifth and last visit to Iran, in 2012, felt in many ways like a bookend to the first, but with the coercion unmasked. Foreign journalists had been mostly excluded from the country since 2009, but three years later, I was part of a small group permitted to observe a parliamentary election. We were marched onto buses and driven to photo ops not of our choosing; even the top bureaucrats assigned to corral us made rueful jokes rather than pretend, per usual, that any of this was for our safety. Talking with a Green Movement activist required an assignation in a moving car after dark. Once again, I found myself studying the apparatus that stood in the way of studying anything else.

Just hours before I left the country, agents from the IRGC apprehended me for questioning because I had left my hotel at night without a minder. They interrogated me about my movements, my contacts, the time I asked my minder to take me to a butcher to confirm popular complaints about the price of chicken. “You have not behaved,” an interrogator told me—and, more ominously: “We think you’re not a journalist. We think you’re a spy.”

If they had actually believed this, they might have detained me indefinitely. But in the end I think they meant only to intimidate me. In the third hour of our interview, the interrogator seized my belongings and left the room with them. He returned in a fury and threw a folder of mine on his desk.

“Do you think we are not intelligent?” he demanded. “We’re keeping your receipts.” He waved in front of me the ones I’d collected for reimbursement for my travel expenses on my return. (I later realized that he may have thought I’d kept them to document the inflation that the government was at that moment trying to conceal from its citizens.) “And we are keeping this.” He held up one of the two extra passport-size photos I’d had taken for my visa. But I was a journalist, he conceded, and he let me go.

By that time, Iran’s democratic infrastructure had mostly been torched. But the yearning and anger it had once harnessed only grew and became more confrontational. At times, opposition still attached itself to elections—to whoever among the allowable candidates represented the most liberal edge of the possible. But it also exploded in street protests of a qualitatively new kind, such as those that erupted in 2017 and early 2018, when members of the lower classes in provincial cities openly reviled the Islamic Republic and chanted “Death to Khamenei.” For another hot minute, the world held its breath for the Islamic Republic to collapse. Instead, it killed.

To imagine that this cycle would repeat itself in 2022 was almost unbearable. Outraged by the death of a young woman in the custody of the morality police, women and teenage girls made hijab the symbolic center of their revolt. The headscarf was both a tool and a symbol of suffocation: Removing it publicly, en masse, was an act of civil disobedience without precedent under the Islamic Republic. Although the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising was violently quelled like all the rest—some 500 dead, maybe 20,000 in prison, families forbidden even to publicly mourn—it left a uniquely durable legacy, in that women began appearing uncovered in public with relative impunity. This was something new and promising. But it did not bring democracy or suggest what could.

Iran was and remains a heartbreaker. Where else is the civic spirit so enduring, and so unyieldingly denied? Time and again, the Islamic Republic proved itself implacable before even the most rudimentary of its subjects’ desires. It valued neither their lives nor any legitimacy that their consent could confer on the state. It refused them the dignity of small freedoms that might have cost the system nothing. And it would not even afford them a stake in prosperity: Over the course of the first two decades of the 21st century, a largely middle-class country was driven to penury, not only because of international sanctions, but because of the voracious corruption of the IRGC, which Khamenei allowed and encouraged as a means of hoarding power.

I’ll admit that I distanced myself from Iran. My run-in with the IRGC had made traveling there again impossible, and I questioned the value of what I could observe from afar. My network of sources outside the country had always been eclectic. Now it spanned a venomously polarized diaspora that traded accusations—of complicity with Iran’s foreign enemies, and with the ever more hated regime.

To hope for change in Iran was quixotic; to bet against it seemed cruel. Each upswell of protest presented a breathtaking display of youthful courage shadowed by near-certain tragedy. Eternally optimistic, a friend inside Iran offered me a metaphor: If it takes 100 blows of the axe to cut down a tree, he wrote to me on WhatsApp in 2022, you don’t say the first 99 were useless.

But the Islamic Republic seemed to be made of ironwood. It was not one man’s dictatorship. The revolutionaries had built institutions, both civilian and military, that perpetuated themselves. Networks of violence ran deep, through virtually every power center and organ of the system, and the regime retained a considerable base of ideological support in both the populace and the security apparatus. Time and again, asked to choose between their neighbors and their leaders, Iran’s men under arms chose the regime.

Would they really do it? Would they open fire on unarmed crowds of mostly young people, mowing them down by the thousands? This past January, the Islamic Republic made its security forces the instrument of an atrocity of world-historic proportions, killing at least 6,000 and possibly more than 30,000 protesters. Something broke inside of nearly every Iranian I knew. Or ignited: a fireball of rage and trauma. How could one live under such a regime? But what form of resistance was possible? One exiled activist told me privately that she fantasized about returning as an armed resistance fighter: “The reality is that we have reached a point, a dead end, where you almost have to be a partisan to win. Otherwise you have to accept that they will kill you and move on.”

When American and Israeli bombs began blasting their homeland, many of my old friends and contacts hitched their country’s epic hopes to Trump’s epic fury. No nonviolent effort had dislodged or even shaken the regime; here at last was hard power. The alternative was the Islamic Republic, forever. But others among my old network were aghast. The hard power in question was wielded by outsiders for who knew what purpose, against a continuously widening ambit of targets. One friend texted me to ask: If the Iranians celebrating such violent destruction of their country come to power by means of it, can they really be said to be pro-democratic? How will they treat their opponents?

Lately I’ve been wondering whether a fault line has always run through the opposition, or if what I’m seeing now is new. On one side are those who still believe that despite the outcome of the 1979 revolution, its broadest animating impulses—the rejection of monarchy and American dominion, and the assertion of Iran’s sovereignty over its resources and political fate—are sacrosanct. On the other are those who have concluded that not only the Islamic Republic, but the revolution itself, was a wrong turn. There is a potent symbolism in their embrace of the son of the deposed shah as a leader for the future, and their acceptance of American force as the means for empowering him.

The views of these camps are anathema to each other. I am trying to listen respectfully to both—though truth be told, I cannot at the time of this writing imagine a way that this war ends in Iranian liberation, or a way that the Islamic Republic, with or without the war, decides to yield. But how can I say these things, or even think them? Not when every phone call ends with a promise—that we’ll continue the conversation, someday, in Tehran.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Someday in Tehran.”