Jeffrey Goldberg | The Atlantic

The Pete Hegseth Exception

2026-03-09T07:00:00-04:00

The Uniform Code of Military Justice serves as the criminal-justice framework for America’s armed forces. It covers offenses recognized by civilian law as well as crimes and infractions unique to the military, from insubordination to cowardly conduct. The code contains 158 articles; the Manual for Courts-Martial itself runs nearly 1,000 pages. It is an obvious truth that discipline, morale, and order can be maintained in military formations only if everyone—from four-star generals to the youngest “boot” privates—is held equally accountable for their actions.

A cursory review of recent courts-martial suggests that the enforcers of military discipline don’t miss much. In December, a Marine private first class was convicted of “contempt or disrespect towards a noncommissioned or petty officer, and disrespect towards a superior commissioned officer in command.” The private was held in confinement for five days and was reduced in rank. In September, an Air Force lieutenant was convicted of engaging in conduct “unbecoming an officer” after drinking on duty and cursing superior officers. He was sentenced to 30 days of confinement and received a presumably career-ending reprimand. In November, a senior airman, a medical specialist, was found guilty of failing to “safeguard protected health information from unauthorized disclosure.” She was sentenced to one month of confinement, and received a temporary pay reduction and a reprimand. Also in September, an Army specialist was convicted of disrespecting a superior by “interrupting her when she was speaking and then walking away,” among other charges. A military judge reduced the specialist’s rank and prevented her from leaving her military facility for 14 days.

Many soldiers are punished for infractions related to the handling of their weapons—the unfortunate Louisiana National Guardsman who recently left his rifle in the bathroom of a hotel bar could face a court-martial. And members of the armed forces are also punished for mishandling information. The military is necessarily unforgiving of those who violate operational security—“loose lips sink ships,” in the age-old shorthand. That is why seemingly quotidian bits of information—the dates and times that units are moving from one base to another, for instance—are held so closely. According to the UCMJ’s Article 92, the punishments for the release of unauthorized information vary, but could include two years’ imprisonment. A unit commander, operations-security guidance states, must “protect from unauthorized disclosure any sensitive and/or critical information to which they have personal access.” In October of last year, a retired Army colonel, Kevin Charles Luke, who was at the time a civilian Department of Defense employee, was found guilty of sending a photo of a classified email to a woman he’d met online. The email contained information about an upcoming military operation. In early February, Luke was sentenced to two years in prison for his crime.

[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

It has been almost a year since the national-security scandal that came to be known, inevitably, as Signalgate erupted on my iPhone, and I’ve been thinking through its consequences. Michael Waltz, the official who invited me into a Signal chat group whose members included most of America’s national-security leadership, was removed as the president’s national security adviser. But he soon received (what is to my mind, at least) a promotion, and is now serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The Signal Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns the messaging app, saw a dramatic increase in usage following the scandal. The Atlantic itself saw an unparalleled burst of subscription growth, and I personally managed to avoid prison and extract a brand-new iPhone from my employer. President Trump suffered no negative consequences from Signalgate. In fact, he found it professionally riveting, carefully studying the way in which The Atlantic temporarily dominated the news cycle. (He also suggested to me, in an Oval Office meeting that took place as the scandal was subsiding, that he should receive more credit for The Atlantic’s success than I have granted him.)

As for Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who shared what were quite obviously military secrets in a discussion, held on a privately run messaging app, that he didn’t even know included a journalist—well, more on him later.

Allow me to recount, as efficiently as possible, the sequence of implausible events here. On March 11 of last year, I was invited to connect on Signal by a user purporting to be Waltz. Soon after, I was invited to a chat called the “Houthi PC small group.” PC refers to principals committee, which included people identified as Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.

I am suspicious by profession, and so I assumed that this was an entrapment scheme, or a foreign-intelligence-service operation, or a simulation beyond easy comprehension. But I know Waltz (please keep this fact in mind), and I have reported on national-security matters for decades, so the invitation wasn’t entirely outlandish. (A reasonable guess is that my telephone number can be found—or could be found, before Signalgate—in the contact lists of seven or eight members of the 18-person “small group.”)

The chat itself was highly realistic, and fascinating. I watched as a substantive debate was held over whether the U.S. should immediately launch strikes against Houthi-terrorist targets in Yemen. The vice president, quasi-isolationist in outlook, argued against such strikes, noting that Europe—not his favorite continent—would benefit disproportionately. A little while later, the chat participant identified as Hegseth wrote, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus,” though he added, “We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should.”

The colloquy came to a sudden end when the user “S M,” whom I took to be the Trump confidant Stephen Miller, wrote, “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.”

That was that. Hegseth wrote, “Agree,” and the dissident vice president said nothing. And then came the day of the Yemen strikes. At 11:44 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, I was at a supermarket—a Safeway in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Washington, D.C.—when the following alert came in over Signal from Hegseth: “TEAM UPDATE.” What followed was information that, had it been seen by an enemy of the United States, could have been used to kill American military and intelligence personnel. Hegseth promised that Yemen would be attacked within two hours.

I’ve seen strange things in my career, but nothing quite like this. I stayed in my car in the Safeway parking lot and waited. I took screenshots of the chat and searched X and other platforms for news of U.S. military activity. Hegseth had said in the chat that the first detonations would be felt at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. At approximately 1:55 p.m., credible news reports started appearing about an attack.

In the chat, congratulations began to pour in. Waltz posted three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose, in-over-his-head global-conflict negotiator, responded with five emoji: two praying hands, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. Later, the Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people had been killed in the attack (the number has not been confirmed independently). The Houthis are despicable terrorists, and in my opinion should be fought and defeated, but there was still something disturbing about the proliferation of emoji.

Illustration by Erik Carter. Sources: Kayla Bartkowski / Getty; Eric Lee / Bloomberg / Getty; Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty.

Proof that the chat was authentic forced me (and a growing number of advisers, sworn to secrecy) to make a choice. I was interested in exposing a security breach at the highest reaches of government; I was less interested in being accused of violating the Espionage Act. I would thus exit the chat later that same day. The Signal group would be alerted that I had left, so timing was important. That evening was the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, at which Washington journalists host senior administration officials and members of Congress and make mainly mild fun of them from the stage. I heard that Waltz might be attending. I didn’t want the FBI raiding the dinner to seize my phone, so I waited until the end of the dinner to leave the chat. I spent the next hours awaiting recognition by the federal government that I was an apostate member of the “Houthi PC small group.”

But, nothing.

As a reporter, I was relieved; as a citizen, I was appalled by the violation of the first commandment of digital hygiene: Thou Shalt Know Who Is in Thy Group Chat.

The next week rushed by as we prepared the story for publication. I decided not to include some of the key operational details shared by Hegseth, Waltz, and Ratcliffe, the CIA director. I wanted to expose their incompetence without releasing information that could hurt American troops. Early on Monday, March 24, I wrote to Waltz and Hegseth on Signal (of course) and then others by email, asking for confirmation and comment. I would learn that my requests set off a scramble in the White House. The National Security Council called an emergency meeting in the Situation Room, where the mood, as participants later described it to me, was one of incredulousness and anger. According to people who participated in the meeting, Alex Wong, who was then the principal deputy national security adviser, briefed officials, but he didn’t have much information. The White House counsel, David Warrington, asked, slowly and repeatedly, “How. Did. This. Happen?”

To their credit, White House officials quickly responded to me and confirmed the authenticity of the chat, and we published our story. These officials publicly argued that nothing secret or sensitive had been disclosed in the chat, which was nonsense, though their argument was helped by my decision to keep actual operational details out of the story. It was my word against theirs.

There were two main worries in the White House that morning. The first: Who would tell the president? It is my understanding that Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, instructed Waltz to tell Trump. (Wiles, we would later learn, disliked Waltz, who treated her poorly.) The second worry was that Hegseth, who was then flying to Hawaii aboard the Pentagon’s “Doomsday” plane, would be unable to muster a mature reaction to the story. Over the course of the day, officials spoke with him and texted him repeatedly while he was in the air, pleading with him to respond to questions by saying only that no classified information had been disclosed.

Temperament is destiny, and Hegseth responded frantically and defensively. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again,” he told reporters when he landed. He was referring to my reporting, in 2020 and in 2024, that Trump had made various contemptible comments about American troops, including that soldiers who fell in war were “suckers” and “losers,” and that Trump had also said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” (Multiple sources confirmed that Trump had made these comments, including John Kelly, a former White House chief of staff and a retired Marine general.)

Former National Security Adviser Michael Waltz stands next to Jeffrey Goldberg at the French embassy in Washington, D.C., in 2021. (X / Bernard-Henri Lévy)

Waltz also responded in a juvenile manner, telling Fox News the next day that I am “the bottom scum of journalists. And I know him in the sense that he hates the president, but I don’t text him. He wasn’t on my phone, and we’re going to figure out how this happened.” Waltz went on to say, “Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group.” (I believe this is what is known as “projection.”) And he made a comment that provided material for a week’s worth of late-night comedy. In explaining how I may have been added to the chat, he said, “Well, if you have somebody else’s contact, then somehow it … gets sucked in. It gets sucked in.” (I recently learned that Wiles ordered Waltz to turn his phone over to Elon Musk—at the time a kind of one-man Genius Bar for White House officials—who reported back to Wiles that my phone number did not get “sucked in” to Waltz’s phone.) Waltz also denied ever having met me, which is not true.

The ad hominem campaign by Waltz, Hegseth, Gabbard, the CIA, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, combined with the assertion that no classified information had been included in the chat, presented me with a dilemma. I knew, of course, that the information I’d seen on my phone would ordinarily be judged top secret by the military, and I knew that the White House lies were meant to undercut the credibility of this magazine. I simply could not understand why the administration was goading me into releasing the full message chain, which would show that I was correct in stating that the information was highly secret.

We devised a plan: My colleague Shane Harris, who covers the intelligence community, and I would speak with leaders of the relevant government agencies and ask them if they objected to the publication of the rest of the messages. This written statement, from Leavitt, illustrates the sophistication of the administration’s response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat,” she wrote. “However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic]—yes, we object to the release.”

[Read: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal]

We published a follow-up story and included the operational messages from Hegseth and Waltz. Here is the key text from Hegseth: “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. He continued:

“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”

“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME)—also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”

“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”

“1536: F-18 2nd Strike Starts—also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

“MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”

“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

“Godspeed to our Warriors.”

It would have been more accurate to have written, “We are currently clean on OPSEC, except that I’m sending this information to the editor of The Atlantic.” To honestly believe that this information was not secret would require Hegseth to achieve Olympian levels of self-deception.

As all of this was happening, I was receiving messages from various military officials expressing disdain and anger that Hegseth refused to take responsibility. None of them went public with their outrage, however.

Other people did, including a modest number of Republicans. Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters, “The information as published recently appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified.” Wicker and his Democratic counterpart, Senator Jack Reed, asked for a Pentagon investigation. I doubted that this would occur, because the administration was dismantling the inspector-general system across the federal government. But an investigation was soon said to be under way.

Only two administration figures did not seem especially alarmed or defensive during the controversy. The first was the vice president, who, we would later learn, made one final joking addition to the “Houthi PC small group” chain late on the night after my first story appeared: “This chat’s kind of dead,” he wrote. “Anything going on?”

Signalgate became fodder for memes and late-night comedy. The Trump administration had violated the first commandment of digital hygiene: Thou Shalt Know Who Is in Thy Group Chat. (Bluesky / @kampfmitkette.bsky.social)

The other was the president himself.

I was worried that the Signal story would complicate already complicated efforts by my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer to get an interview with Trump. But instead—and this was somewhat predictable to those of us who have paid close attention to Trump over the years—he not only granted them an interview, but invited me to participate. He could not resist the temptation to troll us along the way, however. Three hours before our scheduled visit to the Oval Office, he posted the following message on Truth Social:

Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic, and the person responsible for many fictional stories about me, including the made-up HOAX on “Suckers and Losers” and, SignalGate, something he was somewhat more “successful” with. Jeffrey is bringing with him Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker, not exactly pro-Trump writers, either, to put it mildly! The story they are writing, they have told my representatives, will be entitled, “The Most Consequential President of this Century.” I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be “truthful.” Are they capable of writing a fair story on “TRUMP”? The way I look at it, what can be so bad—I WON!

When we entered the Oval Office, Trump said, “This will be very, very interesting. You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”

(He was correct.)

“Thanks for announcing the interview on Truth Social,” I said.

“I wanted to put a little extra pressure on you,” he said. “But at the same time, you’ll sell about five times more magazines.”

I asked him, in the course of the interview, what he meant by “I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg.”

“Oh, you like that? I had to do that,” he said. “I had to explain to people. That’s my way of explaining to people that you’re up here, because most people would say, ‘Why are you doing that?’ I’m doing that because there is a certain respect.”

“Are you saying that Signalgate was real?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was real. And I was gonna put in something else, but I didn’t have enough time.” This led me to ask, out of sheer curiosity, “How long does it take you to write these?”

“Not long,” he answered. “I go quickly as hell. You’d be amazed. You’d be impressed. And I like doing them myself. Sometimes I dictate them out, but I like doing them myself. What I’m saying is that it became a big story. You were successful, and it became a big story.”

Me: “But you’re not saying that it was successful in the sense that it exposed an operations-security problem that you have to fix?”

Trump: “No. What I’m saying is, it was successful in that you got it out very much to the public. You were able to get something out. It became a very big story.”

I then asked him directly if there were any other possible lessons to be learned from the Signal breach.

The president answered, “I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”

[From the June 2025 issue: Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer on Donald Trump’s return to the White House]

Months went by. We heard, again and again, that the Defense Department’s inspector general would investigate, but nothing came of it. Finally, in December, the report was released. It found what had seemed obvious from the outset: that Hegseth’s use of Signal to discuss bombing Yemen could have exposed U.S. tactics and endangered troops.

“The Secretary sent information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes,” the report reads. “If this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

Rubble in Saada, Yemen, after a U.S. air strike. According to the Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry, the attacks discussed in the “Houthi PC small group” are believed to have left at least 53 people dead. (Naif Rahma / Reuters)

The report concluded, however, that because the secretary of defense possesses “original classification authority”—meaning he has the power to declassify secrets at will—he wasn’t technically in violation of any rules governing secrecy, only rules banning the use of private messaging apps for official Pentagon business.

Hegseth claimed that the report cleared him of all wrongdoing. “No classified information,” he posted on social media. “Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission. Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”

He had not always been so forgiving when it came to matters of operational security. In 2016, at the height of the furor concerning Hillary Clinton’s email server, Hegseth, then a Fox News host, said, “How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?”

The U.S. is now engaged in another bombing campaign, larger and more sustained than the strikes on the Houthis. Every day, hundreds of aviators are ordered into the airspace above Iran. Their lives depend on the operational security that the military’s culture of accountability is designed to safeguard.

The Department of Defense employs nearly 3 million people, uniformed and civilian. All are subject to rules and regulations governing many aspects of their behavior. Any one of them would have faced serious consequences for announcing, on an insecure messaging app, that the U.S. was about to send its pilots over enemy territory.

All except one.

*Lead-image sources: Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty; Andrew Harnik / AFP / Getty.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “The Unbearable Lightness of Signalgate.”

MAGA’s Foundational Lie

2026-01-06T06:00:00-05:00

At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. The gallows had been erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

“Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

[Read: Mass delusion in America]

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys—believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive. But repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew.

So, in brief: Trump has dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he has encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

[Liz Oyer: Trump is using a sacred power for depraved purposes]

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. “It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going.

This article appears in the February 2026 print edition with the headline “The Triumph of Indecency.”

The American Experiment

2025-10-08T06:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.

“A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility.”

Thomas Paine made this (true) statement in 1775, in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine, for which he served as editor. In this same manifesto, he had unkind words for the magazine’s older cousins. “The British magazines, at their commencement, were the repositories of ingenuity: They are now the retailers of tale and nonsense. From elegance they sunk to simplicity, from simplicity to folly, and from folly to voluptuousness.”

Paine, though enamored of the new American style of magazine making, resigned his post after less than a year because the owner refused to give him a raise. His premature departure allowed him time to write Common Sense, so a skinflint publisher inadvertently aided the cause of freedom.

The John Carter Brown Library, a treasury of American history on the campus of Brown University, holds the complete run of The Pennsylvania Magazine, and on a recent visit I became preoccupied with the July 1776 issue, the last one ever published. It is richly idiosyncratic. One article discusses the most effective way to prevent scurvy at sea (“one ounce and an half of the juice of oranges or lemons,” mixed with grog), and a lengthy exhortation warns women that their hairpins could kill them. “How little do our ladies imagine, when they surround their heads with wire, the most powerful of all conductors, and at the same time wear stockings, shoes, and gowns of silk, one of the most powerful repellants, that they prepare their bodies in the same manner, and according to the same principles, as electricians prepare their conductors for attracting the fire of lightning?”

Hidden near the back of the magazine we find a set of documents, collected under the rubric “Monthly Intelligence.” These documents include the newly written constitutions of Virginia, Connecticut, and New Jersey, as well as … the Declaration of Independence.

I personally might have given the Declaration more of a boost. This was the July 1776 issue, after all, and I must imagine that the decision by the united colonies to declare independence from King George III counted among the more important news events of the month. I asked Karin Wulf, the historian who leads the library, why the editors might have buried the Declaration. She speculated that they took seriously the format of their monthly book. “It’s true that we think of the Declaration of Independence as a broadside publication, not something to run up against the New Jersey state constitution,” she said. But editors, even then, were “committed to the structure and order of the magazine, and that’s where a document like this belonged.”

Entirely plausible. And yet, I would argue—noncontroversially, I hope—that the Declaration, and what it stood for, deserved better placement. And a big, clanging headline.

The Atlantic in your hands does not make the mistake of downplaying the Declaration, or the events of 1776. You will see that we are not simplistic, jingoistic, or uncritical in our approach, but we are indeed motivated by the idea that the American Revolution represents one of the most important events in the history of the planet, and its ideals continue to symbolize hope and freedom for humankind.

You have no doubt noticed that this issue commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States comes not long after the 249th anniversary. We are publishing this at the end of 2025 for a number of reasons: This month marks the launch of an Atlantic project meant to explain the meaning of the Revolution and its consequences, which we will carry through all of next year. We wanted to place ourselves, in the coming discussion, ahead of the curve (and ahead of our more voluptuous competitors). We also recognize that the American experiment is under extraordinary pressure at the moment, and we think it important to do anything we can to illuminate the challenges we face.

And one more, specific reason as well: Last year, in conversation with the great documentarian Ken Burns about his forthcoming series, The American Revolution, I realized that a companion issue of the magazine would be appreciated by our readers, and be useful to the general public—especially to people who are worried about the staying power of the American idea. The documentary, which will be broadcast on PBS in six parts beginning on November 16, is accompanied by a fascinating article written for this issue by Burns and his co-directors, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. In it, they describe the difficulties of putting on film a war fought before the advent of photography, and they suggest that the Revolution is so enveloped in myth that it would take a lifetime to make clear its stakes. (The three directors, expert documentary makers all, actually needed only 12 hours to capture the shocking complexity of the period.)

In pursuit of illumination, we have assembled in this current issue an extraordinary range of writers. Here are just a few: Rick Atkinson tells us the complicated truth of King George (there is more to him than mere madness); Annette Gordon-Reed looks at America’s unmet promise; Stacy Schiff examines the civil war within the Franklin family; Caity Weaver learns to fire a musket; John Swansburg, who led the team that edited this issue (our largest in years), revives Rip Van Winkle; George Packer makes the case for an enlightened patriotism rooted in the ideals of 1776; Fintan O’Toole asks what the Founders would make of America today; and Jake Lundberg, The Atlantic’s in-house historian and archivist, writes about Lincoln and the way in which he called upon the spirit of 1776 to remind his fellow Americans of the work still before them. “As the nation fractured, Lincoln summoned the Revolution as neither empty hypocrisy nor mindless triumph,” Lundberg writes, “but as an unfinished project whose noblest values could redeem the past and heal the present.”

The project is still unfinished, and troubled, but it remains a project worth pursuing. That is the argument of this issue.

Thank you to the British Library, which opened its doors to us, including the doors to King George III’s (suitably majestic) 65,000-volume private collection, and supported research. Thank you as well to the John Carter Brown Library, which shared artifacts from its remarkable collection of Americana.

This editor’s note appears in the November 2025 print edition.

Ken Casey: ‘I’m Not Going to Shut Up’

2025-07-03T07:55:24-04:00

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Ken Casey, the founder and front man of the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, is the physical, attitudinal, and linguistic personification of Boston. Proof of this can be found in the way he pronounces MAGA. To wit: “Magger,” as in, “This Magger guy in the audience was waving his fucking Trump hat in people’s faces, and I could just tell he wanted to enter into discourse with me.” A second proof is that “enter into discourse” is a thing Ben Affleck would say in a movie about South Boston right before punching someone in the face. The third is Casey’s articulation of what I took to be a personal code: “I’m not going to shut up, just out of spite.”

The aforementioned discourse took place at a show in Florida in March. Video of the incident has moved across the internet, and it has provoked at least some Dropkick Murphy fans—white, male, and not particularly predisposed to the Democratic Party in its current form—to abandon the band. Casey accepts this as the price for preserving his soul. “I think everything we’ve been doing for the past 30 years was a kind of warm-up for the moment we’re in,” he told me. The band is most famous for its furious, frenzied anthem “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” but it is also known, among certain high-information voters and union activists, as a last repository of working-class values. As white men have lurched to the right, the band is on a mission to convince them that they’re being played by a grifter. “Thirty years ago, the Reagan era, everyone was in lockstep with what we were saying,” he said. “Now people say our message is outdated or elite or we’re part of some machine.”

Casey and I were talking on a sunny day this spring at Fenway Park (inevitably), where he was filming a promotional video for the Red Sox’s Dropkick Murphy Bobblehead Night (July 11, in case you were wondering). Casey, who is tattooed up to the neck and carries himself like a bartender, is amused by the idea that anyone would consider him an elitist. He is, after all, a writer of both “Kiss Me, I’m Shitfaced” and “Smash Shit Up.”

“They take the fact that we don’t support Trump as us being shills for the Democrats,” he said. “They love to call us cucks, which I find ironic because there’s a good portion of MAGA that would probably step aside and let Donald Trump have their way with their significant other if he asked.”

There’s also a bit of grace to be found in the culture war, as Casey discovered at the now-famous Florida show.

“These two guys had their MAGA shirts and hats and a cardboard blowup of Trump’s head, and they’re in the front row, so they’re definitely trolling,” Casey said. “We’ve had this before, guys with MAGA hats just shoving it in people’s faces.”

Casey addressed the audience, first with an accusation: “Where the fuck are all the other punk bands?”

The answer is that the bands are scared, just like so many others. Punk bands are no exception, which is a small irony, given the oppositional iconoclasm of so much of punk, and the movement’s anti-authoritarian roots.

It’s striking that few singers, bands, and movie stars—so many of them reliably progressive when the stakes are trivial—seem willing to address the country’s perilous political moment. (Casey’s friend Bruce Springsteen is a noteworthy exception.) Intimidation works, and complicity is the norm, not the exception. “You’ve got the biggest bands running scared,” Casey said.

The latest Dropkick Murphys album, For the People, is compensation for the silence of other quarters. Only a minority of the songs on the album address the political moment directly, but those that do were written in anger. The first single, “Who’ll Stand for Us,” addresses the betrayal of working Americans: “Through crime and crusade / Our labor, it’s been stolen / We’ve been robbed of our freedom / We’ve been held down and beholden.” Fury runs like a red streak through For the People.

“The reason we speak out is we don’t care if we lose fans,” Casey said from the stage in Florida. “When history is said and done, we want it known that Dropkick Murphys stood with the people and stood with the workers. And it’s all a fucking scam, guys.”

He then addressed the Trumpists in the front row. “I want to propose, in the name of decency and fairness—I’d like to propose a friendly wager. Do you support American workers? Of course you do. Do you support American business? Obviously. I don’t know if you are aware, because we don’t go around bragging about it, but Dropkick Murphys only sells American-made merchandise.”

The wager was simple: He’d give the man in the Trump shirt $100 and a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt if his Trump shirt had been made in America. If the fan lost, he’d still get the Dropkick Murphy shirt.

Casey knows a safe bet. The shirt, of course, had been made in Nicaragua. But Casey felt no need to humiliate the Trumpist. “He’s a good sport!” Casey told the cheering crowd. “He’s taking the shirt off! We’re taking crime off the street! God bless your fucking heart!”

After the show, Casey, as is his practice, left the stage through the audience, and talked to the Trump supporters. “There was him and his son, and they were the nicest two guys. It made me think, I have to get past the shirt and the hat, because they were almost doing it for a laugh, like it was their form of silent protest. This guy said, ‘I’ve been coming to see you for 20 years. I consider you family, and I don’t let politics come between family.’ And I was like, Wow. It was a good lesson. But how many families out there in America have politics come between them, you know?”

Casey says that identity politics—and especially the exploitation of identity politics by Trump-aligned Republicans—alienate from the Democrats the sort of people he grew up with. Recently, the band performed at an anti-Trump protest at Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Afterward, Casey told me, “even people I know said, ‘Oh, you were at that rally? I always knew you were gay.’”

He continued, “This is why people in labor and the left want us to be involved in some of this protest. MAGA, they use this male-masculinity issue the way they use trans and woke to divide. They’re teaching the young males that this is the soft party.”

Although Casey personally leans Bernie philosophically, he’s realistic about the left and about the Democratic Party’s dysfunction. “If I think about all the people I know in my life that have shifted over to Trump voters—AOC ain’t bringing them back. I actually like her, but it ain’t happening.”

Who else does he like? Someone who can speak to people outside the progressive bubble. He likes Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a successful Democratic governor of a red state. “I’m not against going full-on progressive,” he said, “but if it’s not going to be that, you got to find a centrist. It can’t be mush. It’s got to be someone who can speak the language of that working-class-male group that they seem to have lost. That’s why I love the idea of a veteran, whether it’s Wes Moore or Ruben Gallego, or even Adam Kinzinger, who’s talking about running as a Democrat.”

He’d rather not have to think about electoral politics this much, he said at Fenway. But he is still shocked that so many people in his life fell for Trumpism. “My father died when I was young, and I was raised by my grandfather, who was basically like, ‘If I ever see you bullying someone, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you back down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”

“I’ve just never liked bullies,” he continued, “and I don’t understand people who do. It’s really not that hard. I wish more people would see that it’s not hard to stand up.”

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About Nuclear War

2025-06-26T06:00:00-04:00

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On October 27, 1962, the 12th day of the Cuban missile crisis, a bellicose and rattled Fidel Castro asked Nikita Khrushchev, his patron, to destroy America.

“I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous,” Castro wrote in a cable to Moscow, “and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba—a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law—then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.”

We exist today because Khrushchev rejected Castro’s demand. It was Khrushchev, of course, who brought the planet to the threshold of extinction by placing missiles in Cuba, but he had underestimated the American response to the threat. Together with his adversary, John F. Kennedy, he lurched his way toward compromise. “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s territory,” Khrushchev responded. “Naturally you understand where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a thermonuclear world war. Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find your proposal to be wrong, even though I understand your reasons.”

Castro was 36 years old during the missile crisis. He was 84 when I met him, in Havana, in late summer 2010. He was in semiretirement, though he was still Cuba’s indispensable man. I spent a week with him, discussing, among other things, the Nuclear Age and its diabolical complexities. He still embraced the cruel dogmas of Communist revolution, but he was also somewhat reflective about his mistakes. I was deeply curious about his October 27 cable, and I put this question to him: “At a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S. Does what you recommended still seem logical now?” His answer: “After I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn’t worth it.”

[Read: Jeffrey Goldberg discusses Israel and Iran with Fidel Castro]

The problem with wisdom is that it tends to come slowly, if it comes at all. As a species, we are not particularly skilled at making time-pressured, closely reasoned decisions about matters of life and death. The sociobiologist E. O. Wilson described the central problem of humanity this way: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” The main challenge of the 80 years since the Trinity atomic test has been that we do not possess the cognitive, spiritual, and emotional capabilities necessary to successfully manage nuclear weapons without the risk of catastrophic failure. Khrushchev and Castro both made terrifying mistakes of analysis and interpretation during the missile crisis. So, too, did several of Kennedy’s advisers, including General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, who argued that a naval blockade of Cuba, unaccompanied by the immediate bombing of missile sites, was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”

Today, the Global Operations Center of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees America’s nuclear forces, is housed in an Offutt Air Force Base building named for LeMay. This decision has always struck me as an indirect endorsement by America’s nuclear establishment of the bias toward action embodied by the sometimes-Strangelovian LeMay. Bias toward action is an all-purpose phrase, but I first heard it in the context of nuclear warfare many years ago from Bruce Blair, a scholar of nonproliferation and a former Air Force missile-launch officer. It means that the nuclear-decision-making scripts that presidents are meant to follow in a crisis assume that Russia (or other adversaries) will attempt to destroy American missiles while they are still in their silos. The goal of nuclear-war planners has traditionally been to send those missiles on their way before they can be neutralized—in the parlance of nuclear planning, to “launch on warning.”

Many of the men who served as president since 1945 have been shocked to learn about the impossibly telescoped time frame in which they have to decide whether to launch. The issue is not one of authority—presidents are absolute nuclear monarchs, and they can do what they wish with America’s nuclear weapons (please see Tom Nichols’s article “The President’s Weapon”). The challenge, as George W. Bush memorably put it, is that a president wouldn’t even have time to get off the “crapper” before having to make a launch decision, a decision that could be based on partial, contradictory, or even false information. Ronald Reagan, when he assumed the presidency, was said to have been shocked that he would have as little as six minutes to make a decision to launch. Barack Obama thought that it was madness to expect a president to make such a decision—the most important that would ever be made by a single person in all of human history—in a matter of minutes.

We are living through one of the more febrile periods of the nuclear era. The contours of World War III are visible in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has been aided by Iran and North Korea and opposed by Europe and, for the time being, the United States. Pakistan and India, two nuclear states, recently fought a near-war; Iran, which has for decades sought the destruction of Israel through terrorism and other means, has seen its nuclear sites come under attack by Israel and the United States, in what could be termed an act of nonproliferation by force; North Korea continues to expand its nuclear arsenal, and South Korea and Japan, as Ross Andersen details elsewhere in this issue, are considering going nuclear in response.

Humans will need luck to survive this period. We have been favored by fortune before, and not only during the Cuban missile crisis. Over the past 80 years, humanity has been saved repeatedly by individuals who possessed unusually good judgment in situations of appalling stress. Two in particular—Stanislav Petrov and John Kelly—spring to my mind regularly, for different reasons. Petrov is worth understanding because, under terrible pressure, he responded skeptically to an attack warning, quite possibly saving the planet. Kelly did something different, but no less difficult: He steered an unstable president away from escalation and toward negotiation.

In September 1983, Petrov was serving as the duty officer at a Soviet command center when its warning system reported that the United States had launched five missiles at Soviet targets. Relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were tense; just three weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a civilian South Korean airliner. Petrov defied established protocols governing such an alert and declared the launch warning to be false. He understood that the detection system was new and only partially tested. He also knew that Soviet doctrine held that an American attack, should it come, would be overwhelming, and not a mere five missiles. He reported to his superiors that he believed the attack warning to be a mistake, and he prevented a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers by doing so. (Later, it was determined that a Soviet satellite had mistakenly interpreted the interplay between clouds and the sun over Montana and North Dakota as missile launches.)

John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who served as White House chief of staff for part of Donald Trump’s first term, is known for his Sisyphean labors on behalf of order in an otherwise anarchic decision-making environment. Kelly, during his 17 months as chief of staff, understood that Trump was particularly dangerous on matters of national security. Trump was ignorant of world affairs, Kelly believed, and authoritarian by instinct. Kelly experienced these flaws directly in 2017, when Trump regularly insulted the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who was widely regarded as inexperienced and unstable himself. After North Korea threatened “physical action” against its enemies, Trump said, “They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

[Read: John Kelly finally lets loose on Trump]

Kelly repeatedly warned Trump that such language could cause Kim, eager to prove his bona fides to the senior generals around him, to overreact by attacking South Korea. But Trump continued, tweeting: “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” Kim later responded by firing missiles over Japan and calling Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”

According to reporting in Michael S. Schmidt’s book, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, Kelly told Trump, “You’re pushing him to prove he’s a man. If you push him into a corner, he may strike out. You don’t want to box him in.” Schmidt wrote, “The president of the United States had no appreciation for the fact that he could bring the country not just to the brink of a war at any moment—but a nuclear war that could easily escalate into the most dangerous one in world history.” Kelly realized that his warnings to Trump weren’t penetrating, so he played, instead, on Trump’s insecurities, and on his need to be a hero, or, at the very least, a salesman. “No president since North Korea became a communist dictatorship has ever tried to reach out,” Kelly told Trump, according to Schmidt. “No president has tried to reason with this guy—you’re a big dealmaker, why don’t you do that.”

Kelly’s diversion worked: Trump quickly became enamored of the idea that he would achieve a history-making rapprochement with North Korea. Kelly understood that such a deal was far-fetched, but the pursuit of a chimera would cause Trump to stop threatening nuclear war.

Trump remains an unstable leader in a world far more unstable than it was during his first term. No president has ever been anything close to a perfect steward of America’s national security and its nuclear arsenal, but Trump is less qualified than almost any previous leader to manage a nuclear crisis. (Only the late-stage, frequently inebriated Richard Nixon was arguably more dangerous.) Trump is highly reactive, sensitive to insult, and incurious. It is unfair to say that he is likely to wake up one morning and decide to use nuclear weapons—he has spoken intermittently about his loathing of such weapons, and of war more generally—but he could very easily mismanage his way, again, into an escalatory spiral.

[From the November 1947 issue: Albert Einstein on avoiding atomic war]

The successful end of the Cold War caused many people to believe that the threat of nuclear war had receded. It has historically been difficult to get people to think about the unthinkable. In an article for this magazine in 1947, Albert Einstein explained:

The public, having been warned of the horrible nature of atomic warfare, has done nothing about it, and to a large extent has dismissed the warning from its consciousness. A danger that cannot be averted had perhaps better be forgotten; or a danger against which every possible precaution has been taken also had probably better be forgotten.

We forget at our peril. We forget that 80 years after the world-changing summer of 1945, Russia and the United States alone possess enough nuclear firepower to destroy the world many times over; we forget that China is becoming a near-peer adversary of the U.S.; we forget that the history of the Nuclear Age is filled with near misses, accidents, and wild misinterpretations of reality; and we forget that most humans aren’t quite as creative, independent-minded, and perspicacious as Stanislav Petrov and John Kelly.

Most of all, we forget the rule articulated by the mathematician and cryptologist Martin Hellman: that the only way to survive Russian roulette is to stop playing.

This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “Nuclear Roulette.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sinwar’s March of Folly

2025-06-23T06:00:00-04:00

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On May 26, 1967, the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, issued the following statement about a war he planned to start: “The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.” Nasser and other Arab leaders believed that the annihilation of the Jewish state was both certain and imminent. Several days later, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmed al-Shuqayri, said, “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them.” When he was asked about the fate of native-born Jews, he said, “Whoever survives will stay in Palestine, but in my opinion no one will remain alive.”

A short while later, on June 5, the Israeli government, believing the sincerity of these threats, launched a preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground. Six days later, Israel had gained possession of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula.

One would think that Yahya Sinwar, until recently the leader of Hamas in Gaza, had absorbed the lessons of 1967. But he overestimated his own capabilities, and those of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance.” Like the leaders of Iran, he spoke violently and with great confidence. He allowed his reasoning capabilities to be overwhelmed by conspiracism and supremacist Muslim Brotherhood theology. He also made the same analytical mistake Nasser had made: He underestimated the desire of Israelis to live in their ancestral homeland, basing his conclusion on an incorrect understanding of how Israel sees itself.

In the end, the October 7 massacre Sinwar ordered did not cause the destruction of Israel but instead led to the dismantling of its enemies. Hamas is largely destroyed, and most of its leaders, including Sinwar, are dead, assassinated by Israel. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, is comprehensively weakened. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s main Arab ally, is in exile in Moscow, his country now led by Sunni Muslims hostile to Iran’s leaders. Iran’s skies are under the control of the Israeli Air Force, and its $500 billion nuclear program appears to be, at least partially, rubble and dust.

Not since Nasser has anyone in the Middle East been proved so wrong so quickly.

It is not at all clear how the latest Middle East war ends. It is not clear whether Iran and its proxies still possess the ability to hurt the United States and Israel in meaningful ways. And it is not clear if Israel will take advantage of its dramatic new security reality. But for now, there is a reasonable chance that the existential threat posed to Israel by the Iranian regime—ideologically committed to its destruction and to developing a weapon to carry out its vision—has been neutralized, perhaps for several years.

In 2001, the former president of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said, “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However,” he added, “it will only harm the Islamic world.” For three decades, Israel and its longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made the Iranian threat a singular preoccupation. But until the arrival of Donald Trump, no American president believed that the Iranian threat should be ended—to borrow from the language of the campus anti-Israel movement—by any means necessary.

Trump may yet be remembered as a hypocrite who promised a clean American exit from the Middle East but found his presidency—like those of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan before him—hopelessly trapped in Iranian quicksand. His radical intervention in the Middle East may turn out to be catastrophic, particularly if Iran manages to find a quick way to save its nuclear program. But he could also be remembered as the president who averted a second Holocaust.

What is certain is that the conventional components of the Axis of Resistance are in dismal shape. The demolition of this axis happened because Israel, after the humiliation on October 7, reconstituted its fighting and intelligence capabilities in remarkably effective (and severely uncompromising) ways, and because Sinwar and his allies fundamentally misunderstood their enemy.

The American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities happened because the country’s leaders misunderstood Trump. But to be fair to Iran’s leaders, Trump’s national-security and foreign-policy impulses have been confusing even to his own supporters. The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

I asked him to describe it. He said, “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

The official continued, “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” Trump, he said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” Another White House official explained it this way: “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.”

The Trump Doctrine, as articulated this way, doesn’t leave much room for the contemplation of potential consequences. On the matter of Iran, in particular, Democratic presidents—Obama, most notably—spent a great deal of time studying second- and third-order consequences of theoretical American actions. It is not clear that Trump even understands the meaning of second-order consequences. This is one reason he struck Iran—because he was frustrated, and because he could—and one important reason the long-term outcome is uncertain.

Sinwar’s misunderstanding of Israel was, if anything, deeper than Iran’s misunderstanding of Trump. Hamas and other Palestinian groups believe that Israelis see themselves as foreign implants, and therefore can easily be brought to defeat. Sinwar’s misplaced confidence in theories of settler colonialism and Jewish perfidy undermined his strategic effectiveness. Sinwar was so convinced of his beliefs that he even sponsored a conference in 2021 called “The Promise of the Hereafter—Post-Liberation Palestine,” in which specific plans were discussed for the building of Palestine on the ruins of Israel. “Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained in Palestine for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty,” one presentation read.

The theme of this conference, which was held in Gaza, was an echo of a statement made by Hassan Nasrallah, then the leader of Hezbollah, who said in 2000, “This Israel, with its nuclear weapons and most advanced warplanes in the region, I swear by Allah, is actually weaker than a spider’s web … Israel may appear strong from the outside, but it’s easily destroyed and defeated.” Nasrallah was assassinated by Israel nine months ago.

I asked Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem, to explain the root of this misapprehension. “The only way you can believe that Israel is Nasrallah’s spiderweb is if you believe that we don’t have substance here, that we’re not a rooted people,” he said. “The problem with Sinwar is that he believed his own propaganda. He believed that we ourselves believe that we don’t belong here. Our enemies in the Arab and Muslim worlds don’t understand that their perception of Israel and of Jews is based on a lie.”

If nothing else, the wars of the past 20 months have proved that Israel’s adversaries are not adept at analyzing political and social phenomena as they manifest in reality. Walter Russell Mead, the historian, once explained that a weakness of anti-Semites is that they have difficulty understanding the world as it actually works, and don’t comprehend cause and effect in either politics or economics. Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself saw Israel as they wished it was, not as it actually is. And in part because of this, they placed their movements in mortal danger.

A Reporter in the Death Chamber

2025-06-09T06:00:00-04:00

On June 22, 2000, Thomas Loden Jr., a 35-year-old Marine recruiter, kidnapped a 16-year-old girl named Leesa Marie Gray from the side of a road in Itawamba County, Mississippi. Loden raped and sexually battered Gray for four hours. Then he strangled her to death. When police found him, they discovered that he had carved the words I’m sorry into his chest.

Loden pleaded guilty to capital murder. I first met him 21 years after the killing, on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which is better known as Parchman Farm.

Loden told me conspiratorial tales about the murder and spoke mainly in non sequiturs. Unlike some men on death row, who either are honestly transformed or at least put on a convincing performance of penitence, Loden seemed to me to be an unreconstructed killer. But he asked me to read documents about his case, and I agreed. In the year that followed, Loden sent me handwritten letters, some 20 pages in length, that did nothing to aid the cause of exculpation.

When he told me that he was soon scheduled to be executed, I volunteered to be a media witness. I had a specific reason to do so; I wanted to experience firsthand what one of our staff writers, Elizabeth Bruenig, has chosen as her vocation. In my job, I send people to dangerous places, and I try to do so carefully. America’s death chambers are worthy of sustained journalistic coverage, but there are hazards involved—not the sort one associates with war reporting, but psychological and spiritual hazards. Witnessing clinical barbarism is not good for one’s soul, or one’s sleep.

What you will learn when you read Liz’s new cover story—among the very best and most important that The Atlantic has ever published—is that she possesses an almost-otherworldly toughness that has allowed her to witness, again and again, the unnatural act of state-sanctioned killing. I cannot do her story justice in a few lines, but I will say that she does not flinch from any of the ugliness of capital punishment, and, crucially, she does not flinch from the appalling crimes committed by so many of the men on death row.

[From the July 2025 issue: Elizabeth Bruenig on sin and redemption in America’s death chambers]

Liz’s motivations for pursuing this specific journalistic practice are several: Like many writers, she’s drawn to outsiders, victims, and life’s losers. She’s drawn to this work because she sees injustice and has a pen. And she pursues these stories because, she told me, Jesus said, “I was in prison and you visited me.”

The state of Alabama has banned Liz from its prisons; her reporting has repeatedly embarrassed its corrections department. But she is continuing her work in other states, and on the federal government’s death row.

I support her in her pursuit, but I worry. I’ve seen people die in horrible ways—in terrorist attacks and minefields and artillery strikes. Watching Thomas Loden die because the state of Mississippi injected him with lethal chemicals was a very different thing—coldly medieval and arrogant. My sympathy is with the family of Leesa Marie Gray, but Loden’s killing was a reminder that humans have a great capacity for vengeance. It was also a reminder that our continued use of the death penalty places the United States in a category that includes such countries as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and China. No democracy should be in this club.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Rehabilitation and reform in Angola penitentiary]

For understandable reasons, people turn away from the subject of capital punishment. But Liz has done a remarkable thing here—she has written a propulsive narrative about redemption and sin and invested her story with humanity and grace. I’ve told her that she should stop witnessing executions whenever she feels it is enough. But she remains committed to bearing witness, for all of us.

This editor’s note appears in the July 2025 print edition.

Canadian Ambassador: My Countrymen Are Angry and Frustrated With the U.S.

2025-05-09T12:35:14-04:00

Out of nowhere, for reasons mainly unknown (or unexplained), President Donald Trump has spent the early days of his second term insulting Canada and threatening its sovereignty, repeatedly suggesting that Canada should, and would, become an American state. He has stoked an on-again, off-again trade war, risking $900 billion in trade between the two countries. Canada is not blameless in the relationship; it spends paltry sums on its own defense, traditionally preferring to have the U.S. taxpayer absorb that burden. At a recent Atlantic event, I spoke with the Canadian ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, about Trump’s aggressively anti-Canadian posture, and about her country’s defense spending and trade policies.

Jeffrey Goldberg: My colleague Anne Applebaum recently said something that struck me: Donald Trump has achieved the impossible. He’s made Canadians angry. Are you angry at the way Canada is discussed by President Trump?

Kirsten Hillman: Well, first, thank you for having me, in my polite Canadian manner.

I think Canadians have gone through a range of emotions: surprise, disbelief, confusion, sadness. But we, I think, are angry and frustrated. Angry sometimes because we are unsettled by a behavior, in particular with respect to the tariffs, that is having serious and immediate impacts on our well-being, economically. It’s having big impacts here as well, but it’s having impacts on our well-being, and Canadians are like, “Well, can we just talk about this? Because we don’t think this makes sense for you, for us. This isn’t how good friends work together. Let’s get down and talk about it.” And we will. But I think, yes, Canadians have become very seized of this issue, very seized indeed.

Goldberg: How do you explain Trump to your colleagues in Ottawa? Do you tell them, “Oh, he means it. He literally wants to make Canada a state”? Do you take him seriously but not literally?

Hillman: One: I think that it’s clear that the president of the United States and his administration are seeking to transform, in particular, their economic relationship with the world and, therefore, very much with us. We have the single biggest trading relationship with you, of any country in the world; we’re your biggest customer. We buy more from you than China, Japan, the U.K., and France combined. It’s a huge relationship, in all ways, not just economic. And the president and his administration are seeking to change that in ways that I think are quite consequential. And that is what it is. It will change, and therefore we will change, and therefore we will move into something different than we have been in for a few generations.

In terms of taking the president seriously, Donald Trump is the president of the United States—of course we take him seriously. He’s a man with enormous influence and power over this country and the world. And so yes, we take it seriously.

Goldberg: Among the things Donald Trump told The Atlantic in a recent interview is that the U.S. is “subsidizing” Canada “to the tune of $200 billion a year.” True or untrue?

Hillman: Untrue.

Canada and the U.S. have the biggest bilateral trading relationship in the world. We sell, back and forth, in goods and services, $2.5 billion a day. In that relationship, for those who are looking at this through the perspective of balanced trade, which the president most certainly does, Canada has a trade deficit—in other words, we buy more than we sell—of manufactured goods, of electronics, certainly of services, stuff that Americans make and manufacture, the things that the president is very deeply concerned about. We buy more of that from you than you buy from us. And we are about one-tenth your size, just to put that in perspective. Another thing to put in perspective is, in manufactured products for the United States, more than half of what you manufacture in the United States, you export. So, selling your manufactured products to other countries is very important for the jobs that the president wants to create. And I think 77 percent of your economy runs on services. Again, we are a huge consumer of American services.

But a third of what we sell you is energy, and a lot of that is oil, and the Canadian oil that we sell is transported down to the Gulf Coast, where it’s refined. It is, frankly, according to many Canadian experts, sold at a discount. That product is then refined and resold at three times the price into the United States, to third-country markets, keeping your manufacturing costs down, right? So yes, we sell you more energy than you sell us—that is absolutely true. And because a third of what we sell to you is energy, overall, we have a trade deficit, but it’s about $60 billion, not $200. But if the United States wants to balance trade with Canada, the only way to really do that—we can’t buy that much more from you; we are 41 million people; there’s only so much we can buy. We will have to sell you less energy. And I don’t actually think that’s what the administration wants.

Goldberg: So, when he says we don’t need anything that you make, that is untrue?

Hillman: I believe that the U.S. benefits from the Canadian-energy relationship, from our manufacturing relationship. We sell you critical minerals. We sell you uranium. We sell you all sorts of products that, if you weren’t buying them from us, and if you don’t have them in the ground, if you don’t actually have them, then you’re going to buy them from someone else. And is it going to be Belarus or Venezuela? Why wouldn’t you buy it from us? An ally, a steadfast ally and friend and an ideologically aligned country that wants democracy and rule of law.

So what does need mean? Does it mean the United States could survive without affordable Canadian energy? Probably. Does it mean that the price of all sorts of things would go up for Americans? Yes, it does. Does it mean you might buy it from Venezuela? Probably. Is that the objective? I don’t think so.

Goldberg: Does the president understand economics?

Hillman: I think the president has a very specific vision of what he’s trying to do in America. I think there are a lot of people that don’t feel that the means by which he is seeking to do that make sense or are traditional. But he’s undaunted.

Goldberg: Can you explain the Canadian position on these tariffs?

Hillman: Tariffs are a tax on anything that’s imported into the country. And they serve a variety of purposes. They raise revenue. They disincentivize imports—they make imports more expensive—and by disincentivizing imports, they can potentially, I suppose, incentivize domestic production. All of that works in the abstract and sometimes in the concrete. But again, coming back to Canada-U.S., we are deeply integrated over generations to be as efficient and competitive as possible as neighbors and partners by using the comparative advantages of each country. So, we are a commodity country. I mean, we do lots of great stuff other than commodities, but in our relationship with the United States, largely what we do—70 percent of what we sell to you—are inputs that you put into products that you manufacture in the United States, and often sell back to us.

Goldberg: What does an angry Canadian look like?

Hillman: Well, did you watch that last hockey game?

Goldberg: What does an angry Canadian look like off the ice? We could make jokes about stereotypes, but at a certain point, you are discovering a national pride that has not been right up there on the surface, the way it is with some other countries, including the United States. Your conservative candidate lost because he was seen as too close to MAGA ideology. Would you really reorganize your economy to pull away from the United States, at a certain point? I mean, if you can’t get what you consider to be a good deal, what does the future look like?

Hillman: I think that it’s a question of mitigation. We will seek to strengthen our own economy, and we’re doing that already. We will seek to reinforce relationships that we have all over the world. We have a trade agreement with Europe. We have a trade agreement in Asia. Canadian businesses are already giving me anecdotes about selling their product into those markets.

Goldberg: You’re a two-ocean country, just like we are.

Hillman: Right. So the products that are not as competitive down here because of the tariffs, they’re going to go to these other countries. The U.S. buyers aren’t happy, but the Canadian sellers are doing what they have to do for business. But of course, we want to get to a place of sort of stability and predictability with the United States.

Goldberg: But what if you can’t?

Hillman: You know what? I think we can. This administration has changed the paradigm about the role that it wants to play and how it proceeds in trade and economic discussions or relationships. There’s no question about that. And we have to adapt. But the American people, the businesses here in America, consumers here in America, are better off with a more stable relationship with your biggest customer.

Goldberg: Has Canada made any mistakes along the way in managing its relationship with the United States?

Hillman: That’s a good question. I mean, we all make mistakes, don’t we? I’m not sure I would characterize it as a mistake. I think that what Canada and probably all of America’s allies around the world have to continually make sure we fully understand is that the U.S. is seeking to play a different kind of role, to do things differently. We have to actually act in a way that fully recognizes that, and relate to this administration from where they are, right? They want to transform the way the U.S. relates to the world. They will do that, and we will therefore have to do the same.

Goldberg: Let me ask one specific question on the subject of noneconomic relationships. Your military is very small. You have, I think, 68,000 active-duty soldiers, airmen—

Hillman: 70,000.

Goldberg: You don’t spend even 2 percent of GDP on defense, although you’re trying to move it slowly. Isn’t there a legitimate reason for Americans to say, “Canada, like many European countries, just hasn’t pulled its NATO weight.” I mean, I’m wondering if that’s something that stimulates some American resentment of Canada.

Hillman: I think that there’s no question that not just the U.S., but all of our NATO allies are eager to see Canada spend more and faster. We have tripled our spending in the last 10 years or so, but yes, we can do more and we will do more. We just had an election yesterday. I anticipate that that will be something that our new prime minister will speak to soon. So yeah, I think that that’s a fair point. But I guess the other thing that I would say—so, absolutely a fair point—where we are trying to really orient ourselves in our defense priorities, is toward things that we can do that are specific to Canada.

Goldberg: Under pressure, Canadian patriotism is becoming a thing. Do you feel differently now as a Canadian than you did six months ago?

Hillman: Not me. I represent Canada in a foreign land. And I am every single day reminded of my Canadian-ness. It’s a big part of my job to understand that and to express who we are as a nation to you here in the United States. We’re a deeply patriotic country with a strong sense of our values, who we are, and our hopes and dreams. But more to your beginning point, we’re a quieter bunch about it. We are not born of revolution. We are born of negotiation. We are born of a much more gentle birth, if you will, than the one you encountered. And I think that—

Goldberg: You were kind of ambivalent about King George III. We get it. [Laughing.] “There are good people on both sides.”

Hillman: Our founding nations are France, the U.K., but of course, our First Nations, our Native people, were there, who remain a huge part of our cultural reality and important to our cultural identity. So we’re just a different country, but we’re the less rowdy cousin at the Thanksgiving table.

Goldberg: Right.

Hillman: But not today. Not today.

Goldberg: Not today?

Hillman: Getting rowdier.

Goldberg: And my final question: When you met Donald Trump five years ago, when you first came to Washington to do this job, did you think that he was anti-Canadian? Did anything suggest that, oh, there’s trouble afoot here?

Hillman: No, in fact, I met President Trump during the NAFTA renegotiation a few times and then over the course of the COVID crisis, when we had to slow down the border. And on the contrary, I think he is very supportive of Canada-U.S., very supportive of us. I don’t think that President Trump is anti-Canada, just to be clear. I don’t think President Trump is anti-Canada at all. And Canada’s not anti–United States. We love you guys. You’re our neighbors and our friends. I mean, you were talking about the military: We fought and died together in all the wars—First World War, Second World War, Korea, Afghanistan, all over the world. So there is no greater partnership. We have almost half a million people go between our two countries every day. Not, maybe, lately. But truly, we have an enormous amount of interconnection. If you ask me why I’m confident that we will figure this out, it’s because of that. It’s because of the half a million people almost every day; it’s because of all of this. We have to—those of us who represent our people—our job is to figure it out, and we will. And I’m convinced that the president will be happy to do so, or will certainly do so.

Read The Atlantic’s Interview With Donald Trump

2025-04-28T14:19:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: Read The Atlantic’s related cover story, “‘I Run the Country and the World.’”

On Thursday, April 24, I joined my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer in the White House to interview President Donald Trump. The story behind this meeting is a strange one, told in their new Atlantic cover story, which you can read here.

Ashley and Michael had been seeking an Oval Office meeting for some time. It had been scheduled, then angrily unscheduled, then followed by an impromptu interview from the president’s cellphone, and then by an apparent pocket dial from the president one night at 1:28 a.m., and then by a promise, again, for a sit-down, this time with a specific request from Trump that I accompany Ashley and Michael. This invitation was followed by a Truth Social posting from the president that read, in part, “Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic, and the person responsible for many fictional stories about me.” Not entirely fictional in the president’s eyes, apparently, was the Signalgate controversy, which he said I was “somewhat more ‘successful’ with.”

We found the president—in an Oval Office redecorated in what I would call the Louis XIV Overripe Casino style—in an upbeat and friendly mood. Our numberless transgressions were, if not forgiven, then mainly ignored. Joining the president were his chief of staff, Susie Wiles; his communications director, Steven Cheung; the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt; and numerous other staff members.

What follows are substantial excerpts from our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity. Our main goal in the interview was to encourage the president to analyze his unprecedented political comeback, and explain the way he is now wielding power—including the question of whether he sees any limits to what a president can do. Trump’s main goal, it seemed, was to convince us that he has placed his presidency in service of the nation and of humanity. (A subsidiary goal was to ask us if we thought he should hang a chandelier in the Oval Office. The Atlantic takes no position on that matter.) He said many noteworthy things about Ukraine, about tariffs, and about the retribution-driven nature of his second term. I found our encounter fascinating and illuminating.

Welcome to the Oval Office

Donald Trump: This will be very, very interesting. You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so. How are you, folks?

Ashley Parker: Good, how are you? Thanks for having us in.

Trump: I’m good. Thank you very much.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Nice to see you. And thanks for announcing the interview on Truth Social.

Parker: Thank you for your discretion!

Trump: I wanted to put a little extra pressure on you. But at the same time, you’ll sell about five times more magazines.

Goldberg: Believe me, I understand the marketing here.

Trump: I did it for you. [He makes a sweeping gesture.] If you take a look back, Jeffrey, this is the new Oval Office—and people love it. Those paintings were all in the vaults. We have vaults downstairs. They have about 4,000 pictures, and I took some of the great presidents.

Goldberg: It really does look different.

Trump: Well, now it looks like it’s supposed to look. Before, they didn’t take care of it. There was no tender loving care.

Parker: Are you using your own money for the Oval Office?

Trump: Yeah, I do it on my own. You see up top? That came all out of Mar-a-Lago.

Parker: Really?

Trump: Yeah.

Goldberg: Wait, the gilded—?

Trump: Yeah, the gold. And that’s all 24-karat gold, which is interesting because they’ve never come up with a paint that looks like gold. They’ve never come up with a paint where you can just paint it and it looks like gold.

Michael Scherer: Is there truth to the rumor you’re going to do the ceiling?

Trump: Yeah, I’m doing that. The question is: Do I do a chandelier? Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line, beautiful. Would be nice in here. It almost calls for it, but I don’t know. We’re more focused on China, Russia.

But you know, this is all new. The George Washington was in the vaults. Most of those pictures were in the vaults. And it’s a great thing, you know. We just had the secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte. And we had the prime minister of Norway just preceding you. We have a lot of great relationships with people. People don’t talk about it much, but they all want to meet. So we’re trying to get the killing field ended, you know, in Russia.

Goldberg: Yes, we want to talk about that. But I first wanted to thank you for having us in. I think it’s better to talk than not talk. We are trying to do a cover story that I think is both fair and balanced.

Trump: That’s all I want. Fair. Fair and balanced. I’ve heard that before.

Goldberg: The animating question of our cover story is how you did it. If you look at January 2021, February 2021, people would not have bet that you would come back. And just to be fair, I wanted to ask you what you think I don’t understand about your presidency.

Trump: I really believe that what I’m doing is good for the country, good for people, good for humanity.

As you just heard, I was just with the prime minister of Norway and separately, outside, is the head of NATO. We also had the former head of NATO just a few minutes ago: Stoltenberg. Terrific guy; both terrific people. And they made a statement. They said, “If you don’t get this war ended, it will never end; it will go on forever, and people are going to be killed for a long time to come.” And, you know, they’re losing—I was saying 2,500 people a week; it’s close to 5,000 people a week, for the most part Russian and Ukrainian soldiers. And if we can stop that, that would be a great thing.

Goldberg: But let me ask you, because the portrait of Ronald Reagan is sitting right above your shoulder.

Trump: Yeah.

Goldberg: For 100 years, American presidents have innately sympathized with the smaller nations and peoples that have been bullied or oppressed by Russia. You don’t seem to have that same innate sympathy. It’s not just Ronald Reagan. It’s Jimmy Carter, JFK, and so on. Why don’t you seem to have that same feeling for these bullied, oppressed nations that every other American president has had?

Trump: I think I do. I think I’m saving that nation. I think that nation will be crushed very shortly. It’s a big war machine. Let’s face it. And if it weren’t for me—I’m the one that gave them the Javelins that knocked out the tanks. You know, that tank moment was a big moment, when the tanks got stuck in the mud, and I gave them tremendous numbers of Javelins. That’s the anti-tank busters. And they took out all those tanks when they got caught in the mud. You know, that was a big moment because, had those tanks gone in, they were 71 miles outside of Kyiv and they were going to take over Kyiv. That was the end of the war; it would’ve ended in one day.

And that was one of the reasons it went on. Now, I could also make the case that it’s too bad it went on, because a lot of people have died. A lot more people died in that war than is being reported. Not just soldiers. It’s a lot of soldiers, but it’s a lot of other people too. And, you know, I really can make the case that I’ve been very good because I’m saving that country. The prime minister of Norway—very respected guy—says that if President Trump didn’t get involved, this war would never end. I think I’m doing a great service to Ukraine. I believe that.

Goldberg: The Ukrainians don’t believe that, though.

Trump: Well, they don’t because they have pretty good publicity. Look, the war in Ukraine would’ve never happened if I were president. It would’ve never happened, and it didn’t happen for four years.

On Signalgate

Goldberg: I want to ask you about something that you just wrote in your Truth Social post. By the way, I love the line “I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg.”

Trump: Oh, you like that? I had to do that.

Goldberg: It’s a nice flair.

Trump: I had to explain to people. That’s my way of explaining to people that you’re up here, because most people would say, “Why are you doing that?” I’m doing that because there is a certain respect.

Goldberg: You wrote, after talking about “many fictional stories,” that I was “somewhat more ‘successful’” with Signalgate. I just didn’t understand what that means.

Trump: Well, I only meant that it got—

Goldberg: Are you saying that Signalgate was real?

Trump: Yeah, it was real. And I was gonna put in something else, but I didn’t have enough time.

Goldberg: How long does it take you to write these?

Trump: Not long.

Goldberg: I didn’t think so.

Trump: I go quickly as hell. You’d be amazed. You’d be impressed. And I like doing them myself. Sometimes I dictate them out, but I like doing them myself. What I’m saying is that it became a big story. You were successful, and it became a big story.

Goldberg: But you’re not saying that it was successful in the sense that it exposed an operations-security problem that you have to fix.

Trump: No. What I’m saying is, it was successful in that you got it out very much to the public.

Goldberg: Oh.

Trump: You were able to get something out. It became a very big story.

Goldberg: But is there any policy lesson from that, that you’ve derived and have talked to [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth about, and [National Security Adviser] Mike Waltz?

Trump: I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay? If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal, although it’s been used by a lot of people. But, whatever it is, whoever has it, whoever owns it, I wouldn’t want to use it.

Parker: You don’t use Signal yourself?

Trump: I don’t use it, no.

Parker: You’re a big supporter of Pete Hegseth’s, but he’s fired three top advisers in recent weeks, he rotated out his chief of staff, he installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon, he put attack plans in two different Signal chats, including one with his wife and personal attorney. Have you had a talk with him about getting things together?

Trump: Yeah, I have.

Parker: What did you say?

Trump: Pete’s gone through a hard time. I think he’s gonna get it together. I think he’s a smart guy. He is a talented guy. He’s got a lot of energy. He’s been beat up by this, very much so. But I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.

Parker: How does he explain it?

Trump: Look, you had a secretary of defense that was missing in action for a week and nobody had any idea where he was. Think of that. And whether we like it or not, Afghanistan was perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. I thought it was terrible. I was getting out. I would’ve kept Bagram Air Base. I was going to keep Bagram because it’s right next to where China makes their nuclear weapons. But you had a secretary of defense that did that, that led to that whole disaster, and, you know, I think that’s far, far worse.

Parker: But for now, you think Hegseth stays?

Trump: Yeah, he’s safe.

Parker: Does he stay longer than Mike Waltz?

Trump: Waltz is fine. I mean, he’s here. He just left this office. He’s fine. He was beat up also.

Scherer: A few weeks ago, several people on the National Security Council were dismissed. People like Laura Loomer and others have come to you with concerns about some people currently in your government. Should the American people expect that there will be more changes coming in terms of who’s working in your government?

Trump: I hope not, but you know, sometimes you learn about people later on. And people will give you recommendations. You would take recommendations about a writer, and then you find out six months later they did something that you weren’t happy with, and you probably let them go or admonish them, or let them go. And I hire, indirectly or directly, 10,000 people.

That’s a lot. You know, this office is where it all begins. It’s sort of an amazing office. Funny, I have the biggest people in the world coming into this office. They have great offices, they have great power, they have great companies or countries, and they all want to stop and they want to look: It’s the Oval Office.

You know, it’s an amazing thing. But through this office, I hire about 10,000 people. They say directly/indirectly, you know, from secretary of state and others, and appointments of Supreme Court justices—three—to much lower-level people. And during the course of all of those hirings, you know, you’re going to find out that you made a mistake.

On His Comeback

Parker: Our story is tracking the arc of a remarkable comeback. And not just the comeback. It feels like you are wielding power quite differently now. But my question has to do with January 2021—you’re in exile; you’re fighting for your political life.

Trump: I don’t think of it that way, but you’re right, I guess. There could be some truth to that.

Parker: When was the first moment when you realized you could return, when you realized that it could happen again?

Trump: So, I’m a very positive thinker. I was questioning whether or not I would want to come back, but I never thought that I wouldn’t be able to.

You had Ron DeSantis, who was a hot prospect. People were saying, “Oh, he’s gonna do great.” And you had, on the Democrat side—I guess—you had some that were hot. Who knows? I didn’t think they were hot. Biden, in my opinion, was a failed president. He let millions and millions of people into the country who shouldn’t be here. It’s a tremendous problem.

I thought that maybe I wouldn’t do it, but I thought if I did do it, I’d win. But I never considered it a comeback. A lot of people call it a comeback. Most people, I guess, call it the greatest political comeback in history. I think that’s an honor, but I don’t view it as a comeback. I just sort of view it as: I just keep trudging along.

I shouldn’t be embarrassed by that word, because it’s probably accurate. I just didn’t view it as a comeback.

Scherer: When I came to the Oval Office last week as part of the press pool, I asked you a question about the IRS going after Harvard, and you talked pretty passionately about conservatives being targeted by the IRS. You also put out the executive order—Chris Krebs, you accused him of violating the First Amendment, but you’re punishing him for his view on the 2020 election.

Trump: Right.

Scherer: There is a lot of concern in the country that your use of executive power to go after people you disagree with represents a slide toward authoritarianism. You put on Truth Social, maybe it was a joke: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Should people be concerned that the nature of the presidency is changing under you?

Trump: No. Look, in history, there’s nobody that’s been gone after like me. It may be harder for you guys to see because you’re on the other side of the ledger. But nobody’s been gone after like me. I didn’t realize it for a little while. I was told—when I fired [former FBI Director James] Comey, I was told that was a terrible, terrible mistake to fire him, that it’ll come back to haunt you. When I fired him, it was like a rock was thrown into a hornet’s nest. The whole thing went crazy in the FBI. And that’s where we found the insurance-policy statement. You remember the famous statement, “Don’t worry, he’s gonna lose. But if he doesn’t, we have an insurance policy”? The insurance policy was what they were doing.

There’s never been anybody that’s been gone after like I have. I say that in the first presidency, we accomplished a lot; you know, I’ve been given very good marks by, well, let’s say by people in the middle and on the right. On the right, definitely. But I’ve been given very good marks. And, you know, when you look at the economy, we then got hit with COVID, and when we handed back the stock market after COVID, it was higher than it was prior to COVID coming in, which is frankly pretty amazing.

But the real thing was: While I was here, I was being spied on; they spied on the initial campaign. And now that’s been proven—you know, many of these things were proven, the whole Mueller witch hunt; I mean, the bottom line on that was I had nothing to do with Russia.

Scherer: Let’s just—

Trump: Just to finish. This is a much more powerful presidency than I had the first time, but I accomplished a tremendous amount the first time. But the first time, I was fighting for survival and I was fighting to run the country. This time I’m fighting to help the world and to help the country. You know, it’s a much different presidency.

On Retribution

Goldberg: Let’s stipulate just for the purpose of the conversation that you are right about all of the things that you say happened to you. But you’re back on top now. Wouldn’t it be better to spend your time focused on China and all the other major issues, rather than vendettas against people who you think persecuted you four or eight years ago?

Trump: So, you have two types of people. You have some people that said, “You just had one of the greatest elections in the history of our country. Go do a great job, serve your time, and just make America great again.” Right? Then you have a group of people that say, “Do that. Go on and do a great job. But you can’t let people get away with what they got away with.” I am in the first group, believe it or not.

Goldberg: I’m not sure I believe it.

Trump: Yeah. But a lot of people that are in the administration aren’t. They feel that I was really badly treated. And there are things that you would say that I had to do with that I actually didn’t. Going after—and I don’t know if you say “going after”—but people that went after me, people in this administration who like or love Donald Trump and love MAGA and love all of it. I think it’s the most important political movement in the history of our country, MAGA.

Goldberg: Bigger than the founding of the Republican Party in the 1850s?

Trump: No, no, no, but it’s a big movement. There’s been few movements like it. So, it’s just been an amazing movement, and I think I have great loyalty. I have people that don’t like the way I was treated.

Goldberg: The thing that I can’t get my mind around is that you’re one of the most successful people in history, right? You’ve won the presidency twice—

Trump: Three times.

Goldberg: This is exactly the question! At this point in your career, don’t you think you can let go of this idea that you won? I mean, I don’t believe you that you won the 2020 election.

Trump: I’m not asking you to.

Goldberg: Most people don’t believe you won the 2020 election. A lot of people don’t believe you won. It goes to this point about vengeance versus moving forward.

Trump: Look, it would be easy for me not to just respond, when you say that, and I could just let you go on. But I’m a very honest person. I believe—I don’t believe; I know the election was rigged. Biden didn’t get 80 million votes. And he didn’t beat Barack Hussein Obama with the Black vote in the swing states—only in the swing states; it’s interesting. We have lots of other things. I mean, we have so much information, from the 51 agents—that was so crooked—to the laptop from hell, to all of these different things.

So it would be easier as you say that to just let you go on. But I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart, and I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact. And it was a bad four years for this country. This country has been beaten up. We had a president that truly didn’t have it. I left some very smart people from other countries today, and I have them all the time. And I think maybe one of the things I’ve been most successful with is foreign relations.

Goldberg: I think the Canadians would disagree.

Trump: Well, the Canadians. Here’s the problem I have with Canada: We’re subsidizing them to the tune of $200 billion a year. And we don’t need their gasoline; we don’t need their oil; we don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their energy of any type. We don’t need anything they have. I say it would make a great 51st state. I love other nations. I love Canada. I have great friends. Wayne Gretzky’s a friend of mine. I mean, I have great friends. I said to Wayne, “I’m gonna give you a pass, Wayne.” I don’t want to ruin his reputation in Canada. I said, “Just pretend you don’t know me.” But they’re great people.

You know, they do 95 percent of their business with us. Remember, if they’re a state, there’s no tariffs. They have lower taxes. We have to guard them militarily.

Goldberg: You seriously want them to become a state?

Trump: I think it would be great.

Goldberg: A hell of a big Democratic state.

Trump: A lot of people say that, but I’m okay with it if it has to be, because I think, you know, actually, until I came along—

Goldberg: I’m no political genius, but I know which way they’re going to vote. They have socialized medicine.

Trump: You know, until I came along, remember that the conservative was leading by 25 points.

Parker: It’s true.

Trump: Then I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I’ve thrown the election into a close call, right? I don’t even know if it’s a close call. But the conservative, they didn’t like Governor Trudeau too much, and I would call him Governor Trudeau, but he wasn’t fond of that.

On Whether He Will Try to Run in 2028

Parker: The Trump Organization is selling “Trump 2028” hats. Have you sought out a legal opinion about running a third time?

Trump: No.

Parker: I look at you and your presidency this time, and you’ve shattered so many norms, democratic norms—

Trump: That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?

Parker: That’s kind of my question.

Goldberg: That’s the biggest shattering of all.

Trump: Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter—look.

Parker: Is that a norm too far?

Trump: Oh, people are screaming all the time, no matter where I go, “2028!” They’re happy. People are very happy with this presidency. I’ve had great polls, other than Fox. Fox never gives me great polls, but even at Fox, I have great polls, but Fox never gives me good polls. Fox is in many ways a disgrace for that. But, you know, I wrote something today, I said, “Rupert Murdoch for years has been telling me he’s gonna get rid of his pollsters,” but they never have—they’ve never treated me properly, the Fox people. But I’ve had great polls, including at Fox.

Parker: “Trump 2028,” that’s not a norm you’re willing to shatter?

Trump: Well, I just will tell you this. I don’t want to really talk about it, but it’s not something that I’m looking to do. It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do. But I do have it shouted at me: “No, no, you’ve gotta run.”

On Due Process

Scherer: You’ve talked about moving American criminals to foreign prisons. You’ve criticized the courts for requiring due-process steps for deporting undocumented immigrants here in the country. Are there, in your mind, clear limits of how far you will go?

Trump: Yeah.

Scherer: Is there any reason that an American citizen would have to be concerned about their due-process rights being honored by your government? Or, and I mean, the Declaration of Independence reads: We don’t want to be subject to foreign jurisdiction—

Trump: Oh, could you open that? Pull that. [He directs Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, to pull the blue curtains shielding a recently installed copy of the Declaration of Independence.]

Trump: How’s Karoline? How’s Karoline doing? Good? Doing a good job?

Goldberg: Karoline? She’s very tough on me.

Trump: Oh, is she? Uh-oh.

Goldberg: Oh, yeah.

Trump: I didn’t know that.

Goldberg: I probably just got her a raise by saying that.

Trump: Wow.

Karoline Leavitt: I did a whole briefing on Jeffrey Goldberg.

Trump: Oh, really? Ooooh, she could be tough. She could be tough. Anyway, this is pretty cool. That was in the vaults for many years, downstairs.

Scherer: So the original question was: What are the limits? Should American citizens be concerned about being sent to foreign prisons?

Trump: I did say that.

Scherer: Yes, and the issue the courts have raised is that people who are accused of being here illegally are being deported without due process. That raises the possibility that someone would be nabbed accidentally or improperly and deported, if you don’t have due process.

Trump: Well, they’re here illegally to start off with.

Scherer: But what if there’s a mistake? You might get the wrong person, right?

Trump: Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world. But if you think about it: Clinton, Bush, and every president before me—nobody’s ever been challenged when they had so-called illegal immigrants in the country; they took them out of the country, and they took them out very easily and very successfully. With me, we’re going through a lot with this MS-13 person from, right now, from—where is he from? Where does he come from?

Steven Cheung: El Salvador.

Trump: Well, he actually comes initially from El Salvador, I guess. Yeah, I guess he comes from El Salvador. I knew he was outside of this country, way outside of this country, and then it turns out that his record is bad. They made him, like, the nicest guy in the world, a wonderful family man. And then they saw the MS-13, by mistake, on his knuckles, and they saw lots of other things.

Parker: But what about Americans who aren’t here illegally who may have committed a crime? Do you feel like they are guaranteed due process?

Trump: If a person is legally in the country? That’s a big difference between being legally in the country and illegally.

These people are illegally in the country, all of them. So we have 250,000 people that we want to bring out. They’re rough, tough people. Rough, tough. Many arrests, some from hitting women over the head with a baseball bat when they weren’t looking; some from driving a motorcycle, pulling her along the street, she hits a lamppost, is horribly hurt. If you look at the registers, some from pushing people in the subway just prior to the subway train coming, chugging along, and they get pushed into the train and either get very badly hurt or die, mostly die.

And I said “if,” “if,” in terms of foreign prison, “if it’s legal,” and I always say “if it’s legal.” Jeffrey, I said—I did talk about this—I would love it, you have people that are back and forth between sentences 28 times, people that are put back and forth into jail, they immediately go out and they whack somebody or they hurt somebody, or they do something very bad, and they go back, and they’ll have, like, 28 different sentences.

If it was legal to do—and nobody’s given me a definitive answer on that—but if it was legal to do, I would have no problem with moving them out of the country into a foreign jail, which would cost a lot less money.

Scherer: In terms of a definitive answer, you still believe the judiciary is an equal branch of government and you will abide by whatever the Supreme Court says in the end?

Trump: Oh, yeah. No, I always have. I always have, yeah. I always have. I’ve relied on that. I haven’t always agreed with the decision, but I’ve never done anything but rely on it. No, you have to do that. And with that being said, we have some judges that are very, very tough. I believe you could have a 100 percent case—in other words, a case that’s not losable—and you will lose violently. Some of these judges are really unfair.

But I do say, Jeff—I do say “if it’s legal.” I always preface it by saying that, because I think it sets a different standard.

On the Economy

Scherer: There’s talk on Wall Street of what they call a “Trump put,” meaning that there’s a bottom to how far the market will fall, because if we’re headed to a recession, you’ll change your tariff policy. If we’re headed to de-dollarization and bond interest rates are rising, you’re going to change your tariff policy to adjust for that. Is that a fair characterization, that you’re watching the markets and that you’re going to try and protect the American economy?

Trump: I don’t think so. I don’t see how I could possibly change, because I saw what was happening. I’ve been saying this for 35, 40 years: I’ve watched this country get ripped off by other nations, and I say “friend and foe.” And believe me, the friends are in many cases worse than the foe. Look, we lost trillions of dollars last year on trade with this guy [Biden], trillions of dollars. And every year, we lose trillions. Trillions, right? Hundreds of billions, but basically trillions; we went over the ledge into the T word. And I can’t imagine it’s sustainable to have a country that can lose that much money for years into the future.

And I felt somebody had to do something about it. And already, I have tariffs on cars, as you know, of 25 percent; tariffs on steel of 25 percent; tariffs on aluminum of 25 percent. I have a base tariff of 10 percent for everybody, for every country, and that’ll be changed. And a little bit of a misnomer: I have a lot of negotiations going on, but I don’t have to. I do that because I want to see how they’re feeling. But I’m like somebody that has a very valuable store and everybody wants to shop in that store. And I have to protect that store. And I set the prices.

And we’re gonna be very rich. We’re gonna make a lot of money. So I don’t think the answer is that it will affect me. It always affects you a little bit, but I don’t think—and certainly there’s no theory, like you say, that if it hits a certain number—I don’t know where it is today. How’s the stock market?

Goldberg: I don’t track it hour to hour.

Trump: Anybody know? Let’s see. Just give me the good news if it’s good.

Leavitt: It’s up. All green.

Trump: How much is it up?

Leavitt: Dow is up 419 points; NASDAQ’s up—

Trump: This is a transition period. It’s a big transition. I’m resetting the table. I’m resetting a lot of years. Not from the beginning, you know. Our country was most successful from 1850 or so to, think of this, from 1870—really, from 1870 to 1913. And it was all tariffs. And then some great genius said, “Let’s go and tax the people instead of taxing other countries.”

We were so successful that the president set up committees, blue-ribbon committees, on how to give away the money. We were making so much money. And then we went to an income-tax system after that. And by the way, they brought the tariffs back, and after the Depression started, you know, they liked to say, “Oh, tariffs caused—” I might as well get that little plug in, because the one thing they say, “Well, tariffs caused the Depression.” No, no, we went into the Depression. We were in there for a while and they said, “Maybe we could go back to tariffs and save it.” But that ship had sailed.

On Reality

Parker: Another theme of our story: You mentioned being a positive thinker. Putting the 2020 election aside, what have you learned about your ability to will reality into existence, or to shape the world around yourself? Can you tell us how that works?

Trump: Well, I think a vast majority of the Republican Party thinks I won in 2020. And I don’t think it’s necessarily what I’ve said. I think they have their own eyes and they have their own minds. They’re very smart people, actually.

Parker: The election aside, how are you able to do that? It seems like you sometimes are able to create reality, to make things true, simply by saying them.

Trump: Well, I’d like to say that that is reality. You know, I’m not creating it. But maybe you could use another subject, because probably I do create some things, but I didn’t create that; I think that is reality. I have an amazing group of people that love what I’m saying.

We don’t want crime. We don’t want people getting mugged and killed and slapped and beat up. We don’t want to be taken advantage of on trade and all these other things. We want to keep the taxes low. We want to have a nice life. And we weren’t having a nice life these last four years. People were really, really unhappy. And you saw that in the election. It’s hard to win all seven swing states. And I won them by a lot. You know, I won all seven.

I just think that I say what’s on my mind.

On Democrats

Trump: I also say things that are common sense, but it’s not that I say them because they’re common sense. It’s because that’s what I believe. It turns out to be common sense. When I hear—I watched this morning a congressman, who I don’t even know, fighting like hell to have men play in women’s sports.

And I think it’s a 95 percent—you know, they say it’s an 80–20 issue; I think it’s probably a 95 percent issue. And I don’t fight it too much. I don’t even mention it now. I save it for before an election, because I don’t want to talk them out of it. I see this Congresswoman Crockett [a Democrat from Texas], who’s so bad, and they say she’s the face of the party. If she’s what they have to offer, they don’t have a chance.

I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense. I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can’t tell you who their leader is. I can’t tell you that I see anybody on the horizon. I would tell you, if you said, “Well, who do you think it would be?”

Parker: Yeah, who?

Trump: I don’t see anybody on the horizon. Now, maybe there’s somebody—

Goldberg: Not Wes Moore, Shapiro, Beshear, any of these?

Trump: So I spoke to Shapiro the other day. I liked him. I called him about his house, which was terrible. I said, “We’re behind you 100 percent.” And we had our people look and everything. It was a hell of a fire. You know, usually you hear that stuff and you see not much damage. That was—that place was burned out. I spoke to him. I like Shapiro. I think he’s good. I don’t know that he catches on. You never know what’s going to catch on.

Parker: Gretchen Whitmer?

Trump: I think she’s very good. She was here. You know, she took a lot of heat. She was here because she wanted to have me keep open an Air Force base, a very big one up in Michigan. A very noble cause.

Scherer: When we first talked to you on the phone, I asked if you were having fun. You said you were having a lot of fun. That was a month and a half ago. Has something between then and now been much harder than you expected?

Trump: It’s much softer than it was the last time. If you look at the inauguration, the first time, I didn’t have any of the people that you saw the second time, or the third time, I guess you would call it.

Scherer: Do they call you to complain about their portfolios, their net worth, with the stock market going down?

Trump: No, nobody—nobody called. Most people say, “You’re doing the right thing.” I mean, they’re doing the right thing. It’s not sustainable what was happening with our country. We were letting other countries just rip us to pieces.

I think I’m doing the country a great service. It would be easier for me if I didn’t do it. I could have a really easy presidency. Just come in here, leave everything alone, don’t go through the tariff stuff. And I don’t find it hard. I don’t find it hard to sell. All you have to do is say, “We lost trillions of dollars last year on trade.” And, you know, other countries made trillions. You know, China made one and a half trillion dollars on trade. They built—they’re building the biggest military you’ve ever seen with that. And they’re building it with our money.

On Zelensky and Putin

Goldberg: Just to go back to the Russia question. “Vladimir, STOP!” You wrote that today on Truth Social.

Trump: Yeah, I did.

Goldberg: He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who will say, “Oh, well, Trump told me he wants to stop, so I’m going to stop.”

Trump: You may be surprised.

Goldberg: Well, if that’s the case, I’ll come back and say, “You were right. I was wrong.” But I think I’m right. He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to just stop trying to take over all of Ukraine. The question is: If he advances, if he has more military success—

Trump: Which is possible.

Goldberg: Blowing up apartment buildings—

Trump: Sure.

Goldberg: Do you ever see a situation in which you’re going to come in, not with troops, but with more weaponry, with full-blown support for Ukraine to keep its territorial integrity?

Trump: Doesn’t have to be weapons. There are many forms of weapons. Doesn’t have to be weapons with bullets. It can be weapons with sanctions. It can be weapons with banking. It can be many other weapons.

Goldberg: Is there anything that Putin could do that would cause you to say, “You know what? I’m on Zelensky’s side now.”

Trump: Not necessarily on Zelensky’s side, but on Ukraine’s side, yes. Yeah. But not necessarily on Zelensky’s side. I’ve had a hard time with Zelensky. You saw that over here when he was sitting right in that chair, when he just couldn’t get it.

Goldberg: That was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in the Oval Office.

Trump: All he had to do is be quiet, you know? He won his point. He won his point. But instead of saying “Okay” when I made the statement, I said, “Well, we’re working to get it solved. We’re trying to help.” He said, “No, no, we need security too.” I said, “Security?”

Goldberg: Well, isn’t he supposed to advocate for his country?

Trump: Yeah, he is, but somehow, let’s get the war solved first. I actually said, “I don’t even know if we’re gonna be able to end it.” You know, he was talking about security after. After. And then he made the statement, something to the effect that they fought it alone, they’ve had no help. I said, “Well, we’ve helped you with $350 billion, and Europe has helped you with far less money,” which is another thing that bothers me.

We’ll have to see what happens over the next period of pretty much a week. We’re down to final strokes. And again, this is Biden’s war. I’m not gonna get saddled—I don’t wanna be saddled with it. It’s a terrible war. Should have never happened. It would’ve never happened, as sure as you’re sitting there.

Goldberg: So that scene with President Zelensky over here, you don’t think that scared Taiwan or scared South Korea or Japan?

Trump: No. No.

Goldberg: They’re not asking, “That’s the way he treats allies?”

Trump: Well, look. Ready? We’ve been treated so badly by others. We went to South Korea and we took care of them because of the war. We took care of them and we never stopped. You know, we have 42,000 troops in South Korea. Costs us a fortune. I actually got them to pay $3 billion, and then Biden terminated it. I don’t know why. They’ve become very rich. They took shipping; they took our cars. You know, they took a lot of our businesses, a lot of our technology.

You don’t have to feel sorry for these other countries. These other countries have done very well at our expense, very well. And I want to protect this country. I want to make sure that you have a great country in another hundred years. It’s a very important time. Jeffrey, this is a very important time right now. This is one of the most important periods of time in the history of our country right now.

One Final Thing

Scherer: Did you mean to call me at 1:30 in the morning after the UFC fight? I got a call—

Trump: After what?

Scherer: After the UFC fight in Miami, I got a call from your cellphone number at 1:30 a.m.

Trump: Really? Oh, no, that’s another—that sounds like another Signal thing.

Signalgate, Trump, and The Atlantic

2025-04-28T06:00:00-04:00

This month’s cover story is written by two of our newest reporters, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer. Both came to The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they covered the White House and national politics. As one might expect, they have developed complicated and intriguing ideas about the brain of Donald Trump and the nature of Trumpism.

A simple question animates their story: How did Trump rise from political ruin in 2021 to seize the commanding heights of government and the world economy? One is not required to admire Trump to acknowledge that he has become the most consequential American political figure of the 21st century, and that we all live inside a reality he has made—and makes anew each day. As you will read, Trump himself has a capacious understanding of his power. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he told Michael and Ashley. He was referring, it seems, to anyone who’d investigated him. “And the second time,” he added, “I run the country and the world.”

[From the June 2025 issue: Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer on Donald Trump’s plan to change America forever]

Covering Trump is a challenge for White House reporters. It is true that he never stops talking, and so he provides the press with limitless fodder. But it is also true that he tries to intimidate reporters—and, crucially, the people who own news organizations—in ways that are clearly dangerous to democracy. I reported on the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and though some stories displeased them and periodically made them angry, they responded with the self-restraint one traditionally associates with the presidency. Trump, by contrast, makes his feelings known in visceral and cutting ways, with the intent to humiliate and intimidate.

Except when he doesn’t. I recently joined Michael and Ashley in the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The odd circumstances of this interview are described in their cover story (also described: the new decor of the Oval Office). What I found in this particular meeting was a Trump who was low-key, attentive, and eager to convince us that he is good at his job and good for the country. It isn’t easy to escape the tractor beam of his charisma, but somehow we managed, and we asked him what needed to be asked. But squaring Trump the Charmer with the Orcish Trump we more frequently see is difficult. Ashley and Michael describe, in sometimes amusing detail, their encounters with Trump, and I will spoil nothing more here. But at one point in the reporting process, Trump posted on the social-media platform he owns that Ashley is a “Radical Left Lunatic” (she is not) and that Michael “has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES” (also false).

It is our task at The Atlantic not to be bullied by these sorts of attacks. No one here is scared of Trump—and, in any case, we have a job to do. The president first called The Atlantic a “failing magazine” nearly five years ago, after I reported that he had slandered veterans and fallen soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” (I will note for posterity that The Atlantic was not profitable then, but is now, and has doubled its number of subscribers in the intervening years.)

Recently, Trump made this same sort of attack after I was inadvertently included in a Signal group chat with senior administration officials. The chat, which focused on upcoming military strikes against terrorists in Yemen, included the vice president, the CIA director, and much of the president’s Cabinet. The outlandish details of this episode—labeled, inevitably, Signalgate—are well known. What interests me about Signalgate as much as its inherent absurdity is the administration’s response to the controversy.

[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

In our cover story (reported as the Signal controversy was unfolding), Ashley and Michael describe in absorbing detail Trump’s belief, acquired in his four-year Joe Biden–induced exile, that no stove is too hot to touch, and also his conviction, refined after much experimentation, that normative reality does not exist.

This second notion governs Trump’s answer to anyone who challenges him. A different sort of president would have responded to the revelations of Signalgate, in which his national-security team did just about the stupidest thing imaginable, by fixing the problem directly and quickly. First, acknowledge the mistake. Then, apologize, promise to investigate, and offer a plan to keep something like this from happening again. End of story.

Not so with Signalgate, or anything else. The administration responded immediately, resuscitating its “failing magazine” line of attack. Trump said of me, “I’ve known him for a long time, and he is truly a sleazeball”; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called me a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist,” and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser (who was the one who mistakenly included me in the chat), said that I was “the bottom scum of journalists” and a “loser.” (The episode called to mind an earlier moment, when Trump described me as a “horrible, radical-left lunatic,” and one of my children noted, with some amusement, “You’re not left-wing.”) Waltz, whom I previously knew to be a smart person, also alleged that I had “sucked” my number into his phone. The name-calling matters less than the fact that Trump and his coterie argued, against all available evidence, that they had revealed no secrets and done nothing wrong.

Denial and attack have worked exceedingly well for Trump. As Michael and Ashley note in their story, Trump’s decision to foment the January 6 insurrection would normally have ended his political career, but it didn’t. Trump called the insurrection a “day of love,” and his decision, at the outset of his second term, to pardon or commute the sentences of the insurrectionists—transforming even those who assaulted police officers into victims of malignant prosecutors—only made him more powerful.

But there are limits. The limits come when people choose steadfastness over cowardice. Too many Republican senators live in fear of Trump. There are media companies that have paid obeisance to his administration (Jeff Bezos’s Post among them), and law firms and corporations and even universities. These institutions are making strange and bad choices. After we published our first story on the Signal controversy, the Trump administration accused us of lying; it said we were trafficking in falsehoods, that there was nothing sensitive or secret about the material its members had transmitted.

The administration’s knee-jerk response forced us to release the Signal chat, which showed conclusively that Waltz, Hegseth, and others were doing all sorts of things that serious national-security professionals would never do.

The point of journalism is to hold the powerful to account. By encouraging our journalists to go where the truth takes them (and by hiring stellar reporters such as Ashley and Michael), I believe that we are fulfilling The Atlantic’s mission.

Our colleague Caitlin Flanagan often says that the truth bats last. I believe she is right.

This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Signalgate, Trump, and The Atlantic.”

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

2025-03-26T08:19:08-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is the second in a series about the Trump administration’s use of Signal group chatting. Read The Atlantic’s original story here.

So, about that Signal chat.

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

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

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security. As a case in point, Goldberg received information on the attacks two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of Houthi positions. If this information—particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face. The Trump administration is arguing that the military information contained in these texts was not classified—as it typically would be—although the president has not explained how he reached this conclusion.

Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

We sent our first request for comment and feedback to national-security officials shortly after noon, and followed up in the evening after most failed to answer.

Late yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.” (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)

A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was “completely appropriate” to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted.

[Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on the group chat that broke the internet]

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

At 11:44 a.m. eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”

The text beneath this began, “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East. The Hegseth text continues:

“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The Hegseth text then continued:

“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
“1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
“MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”
“We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security.
“Godspeed to our Warriors.”

Shortly after, Vice President J. D. Vance texted the group, “I will say a prayer for victory.”

At 1:48 p.m., Waltz sent the following text, containing real-time intelligence about conditions at an attack site, apparently in Sanaa: “VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job.” Waltz was referring here to Hegseth; General Michael E. Kurilla, the commander of Central Command; and the intelligence community, or IC. The reference to “multiple positive ID” suggests that U.S. intelligence had ascertained the identities of the Houthi target, or targets, using either human or technical assets.

Six minutes later, the vice president, apparently confused by Waltz’s message, wrote, “What?”

At 2 p.m., Waltz responded: “Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

Vance responded a minute later: “Excellent.” Thirty-five minutes after that, Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wrote, “A good start,” which Waltz followed with a text containing a fist emoji, an American-flag emoji, and a fire emoji. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

Later that afternoon, Hegseth posted: “CENTCOM was/is on point.” Notably, he then told the group that attacks would be continuing. “Great job all. More strikes ongoing for hours tonight, and will provide full initial report tomorrow. But on time, on target, and good readouts so far.”

It is still unclear why a journalist was added to the text exchange. Waltz, who invited Goldberg into the Signal chat, said yesterday that he was investigating “how the heck he got into this room.”

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

2025-03-24T12:06:10-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a series about the Trump administration’s use of Signal group chatting. Read the next story in the series here.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

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The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response.

This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”

[Read: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal]

The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

One minute later, a person identified only as “MAR”—the secretary of state is Marco Antonio Rubio—wrote, “Mike Needham for State,” apparently designating the current counselor of the State Department as his representative. At that same moment, a Signal user identified as “JD Vance” wrote, “Andy baker for VP.” One minute after that, “TG” (presumably Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, or someone masquerading as her) wrote, “Joe Kent for DNI.” Nine minutes later, “Scott B”—apparently Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, or someone spoofing his identity, wrote, “Dan Katz for Treasury.” At 4:53 p.m., a user called “Pete Hegseth” wrote, “Dan Caldwell for DoD.” And at 6:34 p.m., “Brian” wrote “Brian McCormack for NSC.” One more person responded: “John Ratcliffe” wrote at 5:24 p.m. with the name of a CIA official to be included in the group. I am not publishing that name, because that person is an active intelligence officer.

The principals had apparently assembled. In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

That was the end of the Thursday text chain.

After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

The next day, things got even stranger.

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

A person identified in Signal as “Joe Kent” (Trump’s nominee to run the National Counterterrorism Center is named Joe Kent) wrote at 8:22, “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”

Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.

At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”

A few minutes later, the “Michael Waltz” account posted a lengthy note about trade figures, and the limited capabilities of European navies. “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)

The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

A screenshot from the Signal group shows debate over the president’s views ahead of the attack.

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

After reading this chain, I recognized that this conversation possessed a high degree of verisimilitude. The texts, in their word choice and arguments, sounded as if they were written by the people who purportedly sent them, or by a particularly adept AI text generator. I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.

A screenshot from the Signal group shows reactions to the strikes.

On Sunday, Waltz appeared on ABC’s This Week and contrasted the strikes with the Biden administration’s more hesitant approach. “These were not kind of pinprick, back-and-forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” he said. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”

The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real. Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, “Michael Waltz,” that I had left. No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.

Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?

Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”

William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

[Read: A conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg about his extraordinary scoop]

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared. But this argument rings hollow, they cautioned, because Signal is not an authorized venue for sharing information of such a sensitive nature, regardless of whether it has been stamped “top secret” or not.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

“Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account,” Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and the former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told Harris.

“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.

Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices. It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)

Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.

All along, members of the Signal group were aware of the need for secrecy and operations security. In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Shane Harris contributed reporting.

Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’

2024-10-22T15:38:58-04:00

Lee este artículo en español.

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In April 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search.

Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers, and members of Congress took up the cause of reform. Shortly after her remains were discovered, President Donald Trump himself invited the Guillén family to the White House. With Guillén’s mother seated beside him, Trump spent 25 minutes with the family as television cameras recorded the scene.

In the meeting, Trump maintained a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother. “I saw what happened to your daughter Vanessa, who was a spectacular person, and respected and loved by everybody, including in the military,” Trump said. Later in the conversation, he made a promise: “If I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help—I’ll help you with that,” he said. “I’ll help you out. Financially, I’ll help you.”

Natalie Khawam, the family’s attorney, responded, “I think the military will be paying—taking care of it.” Trump replied, “Good. They’ll do a military. That’s good. If you need help, I’ll help you out.” Later, a reporter covering the meeting asked Trump, “Have you offered to do that for other families before?” Trump responded, “I have. I have. Personally. I have to do it personally. I can’t do it through government.” The reporter then asked: “So you’ve written checks to help for other families before this?” Trump turned to the family, still present, and said, “I have, I have, because some families need help … Maybe you don’t need help, from a financial standpoint. I have no idea what—I just think it’s a horrific thing that happened. And if you did need help, I’m going to—I’ll be there to help you.”

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A public memorial service was held in Houston two weeks after the White House meeting. It was followed by a private funeral and burial in a local cemetery, attended by, among others, the mayor of Houston and the city’s police chief. Highways were shut down, and mourners lined the streets.

Five months later, the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, announced the results of an investigation. McCarthy cited numerous “leadership failures” at Fort Hood and relieved or suspended several officers, including the base’s commanding general. In a press conference, McCarthy said that the murder “shocked our conscience” and “forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves.”

According to a person close to Trump at the time, the president was agitated by McCarthy’s comments and raised questions about the severity of the punishments dispensed to senior officers and noncommissioned officers.

In an Oval Office meeting on December 4, 2020, officials gathered to discuss a separate national-security issue. Toward the end of the discussion, Trump asked for an update on the McCarthy investigation. Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense (Trump had fired his predecessor, Mark Esper, three weeks earlier, writing in a tweet, “Mark Esper has been terminated”), was in attendance, along with Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel. At a certain point, according to two people present at the meeting, Trump asked, “Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?”

According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.

Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”

Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.

Shortly after I emailed a series of questions to a Trump spokesperson, Alex Pfeiffer, I received an email from Khawam, who asked me to publish a statement from Mayra Guillén, Vanessa’s sister. Pfeiffer then emailed me the same statement. “I am beyond grateful for all the support President Donald Trump showed our family during a trying time,” the statement reads. “I witnessed firsthand how President Trump honors our nation’s heroes’ service. We are grateful for everything he has done and continues to do to support our troops.”

Pfeiffer told me that he did not write that statement, and emailed me a series of denials. Regarding Trump’s “fucking Mexican” comment, Pfeiffer wrote: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election.” He provided statements from Patel and a spokesman for Meadows, who denied having heard Trump make the statement. Via Pfeiffer, Meadows’s spokesman also denied that Trump had ordered Meadows not to pay for the funeral.

The statement from Patel that Pfeiffer sent me said: “As someone who was present in the room with President Trump, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice. In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”

The personal qualities displayed by Trump in his reaction to the cost of the Guillén funeral—contempt, rage, parsimony, racism—hardly surprised his inner circle. Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (“This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”)

A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, told me that Trump does not comprehend such traditional military virtues as honor and self-sacrifice. “The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes,” McCaffrey said. “It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”

I’ve been interested in Trump’s understanding of military affairs for nearly a decade. At first, it was cognitive dissonance that drew me to the subject—according to my previous understanding of American political physics, Trump’s disparagement of the military, and in particular his obsessive criticism of the war record of the late Senator John McCain, should have profoundly alienated Republican voters, if not Americans generally. And in part my interest grew from the absolute novelty of Trump’s thinking. This country had never seen, to the best of my knowledge, a national political figure who insulted veterans, wounded warriors, and the fallen with metronomic regularity.

Today—two weeks before an election that could see Trump return to the White House—I’m most interested in his evident desire to wield military power, and power over the military, in the manner of Hitler and other dictators.

Trump’s singularly corrosive approach to military tradition was in evidence as recently as August, when he described the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for heroism and selflessness in combat, as inferior to the Medal of Freedom, which is awarded to civilians for career achievement. During a campaign speech, he described Medal of Honor recipients as “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” prompting the Veterans of Foreign Wars to issue a condemnation: “These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.” Later in August, Trump caused controversy by violating federal regulations prohibiting the politicization of military cemeteries, after a campaign visit to Arlington in which he gave a smiling thumbs-up while standing behind gravestones of fallen American soldiers.

His Medal of Honor comments are of a piece with his expressed desire to receive a Purple Heart without being wounded. He has also equated business success to battlefield heroism. In the summer of 2016, Khizr Khan, the father of a 27-year-old Army captain who had been killed in Iraq, told the Democratic National Convention that Trump has “sacrificed nothing.” In response, Trump disparaged the Khan family and said, “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures.”

One former Trump-administration Cabinet secretary told me of a conversation he’d had with Trump during his time in office about the Vietnam War. Trump famously escaped the draft by claiming that his feet were afflicted with bone spurs. (“I had a doctor that gave me a letter—a very strong letter on the heels,” Trump told The New York Times in 2016.) Once, when the subject of aging Vietnam veterans came up in conversation, Trump offered this observation to the Cabinet official: “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”

In 1997, Trump told the radio host Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” This was not the only time Trump has compared his sexual exploits and political challenges to military service. Last year, at a speech before a group of New York Republicans, while discussing the fallout from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, he said, “I went onto that (debate) stage just a few days later and a general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, ‘Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened.’” I asked Trump-campaign officials to provide the name of the general who allegedly said this. Pfeiffer, the campaign spokesman, said, “This is a true story and there is no good reason to give the name of an honorable man to The Atlantic so you can smear him.”

In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”

Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”

This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I. Kelly responded by explaining a simple rule: Presidents should, as a matter of politics and policy, remember that the “good guys” in any given conflict are the countries allied with the United States. Despite Trump’s lack of historical knowledge, he has been on record as saying that he knew more than his generals about warfare. He told 60 Minutes in 2018 that he knew more about NATO than James Mattis, his secretary of defense at the time, a retired four-star Marine general who had served as a NATO official. Trump also said, on a separate occasion, that it was he, not Mattis, who had “captured” the Islamic State.

As president, Trump evinced extreme sensitivity to criticism from retired flag officers; at one point, he proposed calling back to active duty Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, two highly regarded Special Operations leaders who had become critical of Trump, so that they could be court-martialed. Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir that he and Milley talked Trump out of the plan. (Asked about criticism from McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Trump responded by calling him a “Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer” and said, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?”)

Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. According to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s recent book, Donald Trump v. the United States, Trump asked Kelly, “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Kelly answered, “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.” Trump also publicly floated the idea of “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” as part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep himself in power.

On separate occasions in 2020, Trump held private conversations in the White House with national-security officials about the George Floyd protests. “The Chinese generals would know what to do,” he said, according to former officials who described the conversations to me, referring to the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, which carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. (Pfeiffer denied that Trump said this.) Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all fucking losers!”

Trump has often expressed his esteem for the type of power wielded by such autocrats as the Chinese leader Xi Jinping; his admiration, even jealousy, of Vladimir Putin is well known. In recent days, he has signaled that, should he win reelection in November, he would like to govern in the manner of these dictators—he has said explicitly that he would like to be a dictator for a day on his first day back in the White House—and he has threatened to, among other things, unleash the military on “radical-left lunatics.” (One of his four former national security advisers, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir, “It is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping who would be happiest to see Trump back in office.”)

Military leaders have condemned Trump for possessing autocratic tendencies. At his retirement ceremony last year, Milley said, “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator … We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Over the past several years, Milley has privately told several interlocutors that he believed Trump to be a fascist. Many other leaders have also been shocked by Trump’s desire for revenge against his domestic critics. At the height of the Floyd protests, Mattis wrote, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.”

Trump’s frustration with American military leaders led him to disparage them regularly. In their book A Very Stable Genius, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, both of The Washington Post, reported that in 2017, during a meeting at the Pentagon, Trump screamed at a group of generals: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” And in his book Rage, Bob Woodward reported that Trump complained that “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

Trump’s disdain for American military officers is motivated in part by their willingness to accept low salaries. Once, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, Trump said to aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” (On another occasion, John Kelly asked Trump to guess Dunford’s annual salary. The president’s answer: $5 million. Dunford’s actual salary was less than $200,000.)

Trump has often expressed his love for the trappings of martial power, demanding of his aides that they stage the sort of armor-heavy parades foreign to American tradition. Civilian aides and generals alike pushed back. In one instance, Air Force General Paul Selva, who was then serving as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the president that he had been partially raised in Portugal, which, he explained, “was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. In America, we don’t do that. It’s not who we are.”

For Republicans in 2012, it was John McCain who served as a model of “who we are.” But by 2015, the party had shifted. In July of that year, Trump, then one of several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, made a statement that should have ended his campaign. At a forum for Christian conservatives in Iowa, Trump said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

It was an astonishing statement, and an introduction to the wider public of Trump’s uniquely corrosive view of McCain, and of his aberrant understanding of the nature of American military heroism. This wasn’t the first time Trump had insulted McCain’s war record. As early as 1999, he was insulting McCain. In an interview with Dan Rather that year, Trump asked, “Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.” (A brief primer: McCain, who had flown 22 combat missions before being shot down over Hanoi, was tortured almost continuously by his Communist captors, and turned down repeated offers to be released early, insisting that prisoners be released in the order that they’d been captured. McCain suffered physically from his injuries until his death, in 2018.) McCain partisans believe, with justification, that Trump’s loathing was prompted in part by McCain’s ability to see through Trump. “John didn’t respect him, and Trump knew that,” Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide and co-author, told me. “John McCain had a code. Trump only has grievances and impulses and appetites. In the deep recesses of his man-child soul, he knew that McCain and his achievements made him look like a mutt.”

Trump, those who have worked for him say, is unable to understand the military norm that one does not leave fellow soldiers behind on the battlefield. As president, Trump told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action. To him, they could be left behind, because they had performed poorly by getting captured.

My reporting during Trump’s term in office led me to publish on this site, in September 2020, an article about Trump’s attitudes toward McCain and other veterans, and his views about the ideal of national service itself. The story was based on interviews with multiple sources who had firsthand exposure to Trump and his views. In that piece, I detailed numerous instances of Trump insulting soldiers, flag officers and veterans alike. I wrote extensively about Trump’s reaction to McCain’s death in August 2018: The president told aides, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he was infuriated when he saw flags at the White House lowered to half-mast. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he said angrily. Only when Kelly told Trump that he would get “killed in the press” for showing such disrespect did the president relent. In the article, I also reported that Trump had disparaged President George H. W. Bush, a World War II naval aviator, for getting shot down by the Japanese. Two witnesses told me that Trump said, “I don’t get it. Getting shot down makes you a loser.” (Bush ultimately evaded capture, but eight other fliers were caught and executed by the Japanese).

The next year, White House officials demanded that the Navy keep the U.S.S. John S. McCain, which was named for McCain’s father and grandfather—both esteemed admirals—out of Trump’s sight during a visit to Japan. The Navy did not comply.

Trump’s preoccupation with McCain has not abated. In January, Trump condemned McCain—six years after his death—for having supported President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. “We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare,” Trump told an Iowa crowd. “Obamacare is a catastrophe. Nobody talks about it. You know, without John McCain, we would have had it done. John McCain for some reason couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember?” This was, it appears, a malicious reference to McCain’s wartime injuries—including injuries suffered during torture—which limited his upper-body mobility.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’]

I’ve also previously reported on Trump’s 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery. Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, accompanied him. The two men visited Section 60, the 14-acre section that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars (and the site of Trump’s Arlington controversy earlier this year). Kelly’s son Robert, a Marine officer killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, is buried in Section 60. Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” At first, Kelly believed that Trump was making a reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand nontransactional life choices. I quoted one of Kelly’s friends, a fellow retired four-star general, who said of Trump, “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.” At moments when Kelly was feeling particularly frustrated by Trump, he would leave the White House and cross the Potomac to visit his son’s grave, in part to remind himself about the nature of full-measure sacrifice.

Last year Kelly told me, in reference to Mark Milley’s 44 years in uniform, “The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.”

The specific incident I reported in the 2020 article that gained the most attention also provided the story with its headline—“Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” The story concerned a visit Trump made to France in 2018, during which the president called Americans buried in a World War I cemetery “losers.” He said, in the presence of aides, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” At another moment during this trip, he referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who had lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for dying for their country.

Trump had already been scheduled to visit one cemetery, and he did not understand why his team was scheduling a second cemetery visit, especially considering that the rain would be hard on his hair. “Why two cemeteries?” Trump asked. “What the fuck?” Kelly subsequently canceled the second visit, and attended a ceremony there himself with General Dunford and their wives.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in Belleau, France, in November 2018. (Shealah Craighead / White House)

The article sparked great controversy, and provoked an irate reaction from the Trump administration, and from Trump himself. In tweets, statements, and press conferences in the days, weeks, and years that followed, Trump labeled The Atlantic a “second-rate magazine,” a “failing magazine,” a “terrible magazine,” and a “third-rate magazine that’s not going to be in business much longer”; he also referred to me as a “con man,” among other things. Trump has continued these attacks recently, calling me a “horrible, radical-left lunatic named Goldberg” at a rally this summer.

In the days after my original article was published, both the Associated Press and, notably, Fox News, confirmed the story, causing Trump to demand that Fox fire Jennifer Griffin, its experienced and well-regarded defense reporter. A statement issued by Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, soon after publication read, “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard.”

Shortly after the story appeared, Farah asked numerous White House officials if they had heard Trump refer to veterans and war dead as suckers or losers. She reported publicly that none of the officials she asked had heard him use these terms. Eventually, Farah came out in opposition to Trump. She wrote on X last year that she’d asked the president if my story was true. “Trump told me it was false. That was a lie.”

When I spoke to Farah, who is now known as Alyssa Farah Griffin, this week, she said, “I understood that people were skeptical about the ‘suckers and losers’ story, and I was in the White House pushing back against it. But he said this to John Kelly’s face, and I fundamentally, absolutely believe that John Kelly is an honorable man who served our country and who loves and respects our troops. I’ve heard Donald Trump speak in a dehumanizing way about so many groups. After working for him in 2020 and hearing his continuous attacks on service members since that time, including my former boss General Mark Milley, I firmly and unequivocally believe General Kelly’s account.”

(Pfeiffer, the Trump spokesperson, said, in response, “Alyssa is a scorned former employee now lying in her pursuit to chase liberal adulation. President Trump would never insult our nation’s heroes.”)

Last year, I published a story in this magazine about Milley that coincided with the end of his four-year term. In it, I detailed his tumultuous relationship with Trump. Milley had resisted Trump’s autocratic urges, and also argued against his many thoughtless and impetuous national-security impulses. Shortly after that story appeared, Trump publicly suggested that Milley be executed for treason. This astonishing statement caused John Kelly to speak publicly about Trump and his relationship to the military. Kelly, who had previously called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had referred to American prisoners of war as “suckers” and described as “losers” soldiers who died while fighting for their country.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly asked. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs, are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

When we spoke this week, Kelly told me, “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country. There are many, many people who have heard him say these things. The visit to France wasn’t the first time he said this.”

Kelly and others have taken special note of the revulsion Trump feels in the presence of wounded veterans. After Trump attended a Bastille Day parade in France, he told Kelly and others that he would like to stage his own parade in Washington, but without the presence of wounded veterans. “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Milley also witnessed Trump’s disdain for the wounded. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America” at his installation ceremony in 2019. Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an improvised-explosive-device attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Avila is considered a hero up and down the ranks of the Army.

It had rained earlier on the day of the ceremony, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair almost toppled over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did then–Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.

An equally serious challenge to Milley’s sense of duty came in the form of Trump’s ignorance of the rules of war. In November 2019, Trump intervened in three different brutality cases then being adjudicated by the military. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an ISIS member. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. In a highly unusual move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him. A junior Army officer named Clint Lorance was also the recipient of Trump’s sympathy. Trump pardoned Lorance, who had been convicted of ordering the shooting of three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. And in a third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he thought was a Taliban bomb maker. “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state,” Trump said at a Florida rally.

In the Gallagher case, Trump intervened to allow Gallagher to keep his Trident insignia, one of the most coveted insignia in the entire U.S. military. The Navy’s leadership found this intervention particularly offensive because tradition held that only a commanding officer or a group of SEALs on a Trident Review Board were supposed to decide who merited being a SEAL. Milley tried to convince Trump that his intrusion was hurting Navy morale. They were flying from Washington to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to attend a “dignified transfer,” a repatriation ceremony for fallen service members, when Milley tried to explain to Trump the damage that his interventions were doing.

In my story, I reported that Milley said, “Mr. President, you have to understand that the SEALs are a tribe within a larger tribe, the Navy. And it’s up to them to figure out what to do with Gallagher. You don’t want to intervene. This is up to the tribe. They have their own rules that they follow.”

Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump said he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

Milley then summoned one of his aides, a combat-veteran SEAL officer, to the president’s Air Force One office. Milley took hold of the Trident pin on the SEAL’s chest and asked him to describe its importance. The aide explained to Trump that, by tradition, only SEALs can decide, based on assessments of competence and character, whether one of their own should lose his pin. But the president’s mind was not changed. Gallagher kept his pin.

One day, in the first year of Trump’s presidency, I had lunch with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, in his White House office. I turned the discussion, as soon as I could, to the subject of his father-in-law’s character. I mentioned one of Trump’s recent outbursts and told Kushner that, in my opinion, the president’s behavior was damaging to the country. I cited, as I tend to do, what is in my view Trump’s original sin: his mockery of John McCain’s heroism.

This is where our conversation got strange, and noteworthy. Kushner answered in a way that made it seem as though he agreed with me. “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

I found this baffling for a moment. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment. In Trump’s mind, traditional values—values including those embraced by the armed forces of the United States having to do with honor, self-sacrifice, and integrity—have no merit, no relevance, and no meaning.

A Great President, and His Opposite

2024-10-09T18:46:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Recently, I was rereading Livy’s History of Rome (I am obligated, contractually, to write sentences like this), in order to better understand the story of Cincinnatus, the soldier and statesman who desired only to look after his farm. “Put on thy robe and hear the words of the people,” a delegation of messengers said as they approached him. Cincinnatus, plowing his land, was a bit startled. “Is all well?” he asked.

Obviously not. “The people of Rome make thee dictator, and bid thee come forthwith to the city,” the messengers said, explaining that the city was under siege by an enemy tribe, the Aequi.

Quite an offer. We are all familiar with the tendency of great men to be tempted by the matchless possibilities of dictatorship. Cincinnatus put on his robes and went to Rome, where, over a 16-day period, he organized the defeat of the Aequi. But then he went home.

America’s first president did many great things, but as Tom Nichols notes in his new Atlantic cover story, the greatest thing George Washington ever did was return to Mount Vernon. Like Cincinnatus, he was called upon by the people to defend his nation. Like Cincinnatus, he won the affection and esteem of soldier and citizen alike. And like Cincinnatus, he could have made himself a leader for life, a despot, a king. If he’d been of different character or temperament, the American experiment—a great, noble, flawed, self-correcting, indispensable gift to humankind —would not have lasted to this day.

Washington was imperfect. He was a beneficiary of the sin of chattel slavery. But as a leader of a newly born democracy, he was also an avatar of self-restraint and self-mastery. As Tom writes in his cover story, Washington’s life and leadership were a guide for his successors. Through his example, he taught presidents how to rule, and how to return power to the people when it was time to go home.

“Forty-four men have succeeded Washington so far,” Tom writes. “Some became titans; others finished their terms without distinction; a few ended their service to the nation in ignominy. But each of them knew that the day would come when it would be their duty and honor to return the presidency to the people.”

All but one, of course: the ex-president trying to regain the office he lost in a free and fair election four years ago, and signaling that he will refuse to concede should he lose again.

The story of George Washington and Donald Trump is the sad tale of a country once led by a Cincinnatus but now being duped by a grifter. Yet Washington’s example is alive to us, if we choose to pay attention. Several months ago, I told Tom of my preoccupation with Washington. Tom, who writes this newsletter for us, served for many years with distinction on the faculty of the Naval War College, and he has the correct sort of reverence for the nation’s founders (which is to say, a critical sort of reverence). Tom did not initially react with fervent enthusiasm. Later—long after I had hectored him into writing this story—he explained why. “Like many Americans, I found Washington intimidating. He didn’t seem quite human. In every picture of Washington, he’s giving you this disapproving side-eye. Now I know that that was the look he was giving Gilbert Stuart, whom he didn’t like. But in any case, other presidents always seemed real to me—I grew up in Massachusetts, and we called Kennedy ‘Jack.’ Even Lincoln was real to me, but Washington just seemed unapproachable, like the obelisk built in his honor.”

Tom’s subsequent exploration of Washington’s record and character is what I suggest you read tonight, or as soon as possible. Even those who believe they understand Washington’s greatness will be surprised by the degree to which Donald Trump is so obviously his opposite—Trump, who seeks to be a dictator, who believes he is smarter than any general or statesman, who evinces no ability to learn, who possesses no humility, who divides Americans rather than unites them.

Tom writes of Washington, “Although he was a man of fierce ambition, his character was tempered by humility and bound up in his commitment to republican ideals: He led an American army only in the name of the American people and its elected representatives, and he never saw that army as his personal property. His soldiers were citizens, like him, and they were serving at his side in a common cause.”

We are a month away from an election that will decide America’s future. My suggestion, particularly for those of you who are still undecided about the path forward, is to read about the past, and understand what a great president can be.

Read the cover story here.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

Hurricane Milton, a Category 3 storm, is expected to make landfall tonight near Florida’s Tampa Bay coastline.
President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on the phone for the first time in two months. They were expected to discuss Israel’s plans to strike back against Iran.
Brazil lifted its ban on X yesterday after the company complied with the Brazilian supreme court’s orders.

The Playwright in the Age of AI

2024-09-30T07:30:00-04:00

Photographs by OK McCausland

Ayad Akhtar’s brilliant new play, McNeal, currently at the Lincoln Center Theater, is transfixing in part because it tracks without flinching the disintegration of a celebrated writer, and in part because Akhtar goes to a place that few writers have visited so effectively—the very near future, in which large language models threaten to undo our self-satisfied understanding of creativity, plagiarism, and originality. And also because Robert Downey Jr., performing onstage for the first time in more than 40 years, perfectly embodies the genius and brokenness of the title character.

I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.

In early September, Akhtar, Downey, Bartlett Sher—the Tony Award winner who directed McNeal—and I met at Downey’s home in New York for what turned out to be an amusing, occasionally frenetic, and sometimes even borderline profound discussion of the play, its origins, the flummoxing issues it raises, and, yes, Avengers: Age of Ultron. (Oppenheimer, for which Downey won an Academy Award, also came up.) We were joined intermittently by Susan Downey, Robert’s wife (and producing partner), and the person who believed that Akhtar’s play would tempt her husband to return to the stage. The conversation that follows is a condensed and edited version of our sprawling discussion, but I think it captures something about art and AI, and it certainly captures the exceptional qualities of three people, writer, director, and actor, who are operating at the pinnacle of their trade, without fear—perhaps without enough fear—of what is inescapably coming.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Did you write a play about a writer in the age of AI because you’re trying to figure out what your future might be?

Ayad Akhtar: We’ve been living in a regime of automated cognition, digital cognition, for a decade and a half. With AI, we’re now seeing a late downstream effect of that, and we think it’s something new, but it’s not. Technology has been transforming us now for quite some time. It’s transforming our neurochemistry. It’s transforming our societies, you know, and it’s making our emotionality within the social space different as well. It’s making us less capable of being bored, less willing to be bored, more willing to be distracted, less interested in reading.

In the midst of all this, what does it mean to be a writer trying to write in the way that I want to write? What would the new technologies mean for writers like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, who I adore, and for the richness of their language?

Goldberg: Both of them inform the character of McNeal.

Akhtar: There are many writers inside McNeal—older writers of a certain generation whose work speaks to what is eternal in us as humans, but who maybe don’t speak as much to what is changing around us. I was actually thinking of Wallace Stevens in the age of AI at some point—“The Auroras of Autumn.” That poem is about Stevens eyeing the end of his life by the dazzling, otherworldly light of the northern lights. It’s a poem of extraordinary beauty. In this play, that dazzling display of natural wonder is actually AI. It’s no longer the sublime of nature.

Goldberg: Were you picturing Robert as you wrote this character?

Akhtar: I write to an ideal; it’s not necessarily a person.

Robert Downey Jr.: I feel that me and ideal are synonymous.

Akhtar: Robert’s embodiment of McNeal is in some ways much richer than what I wrote.

Downey: I have a really heavy, heavy allergy to paper. I’m allergic to things written on paper.

Akhtar: As I’ve discovered!

Downey: But the writing was transcendent. The last time that happened, I was reading Oppenheimer.

Goldberg: There’s Oppenheimer in this, but there’s also Age of Ultron, right?

Downey: Actually, I was thinking about that while I was reading this. And I’ll catch you guys up in the aggregate. I’m only ever doing two things: Either I’m trying to avoid threats or I’m seeking opportunities. This one is the latter. And I was thinking, Why would I be reading this? Because, I mean, I’ve been a bit of an oddball, and I was thinking, Why is this happening to me; why is this play with me? And I’m having this reaction, and it took me right back to Paul Bettany.

So that you guys understand what’s going on, this is the second Avengers film, Age of Ultron, and Bettany was playing this AI, my personal butler. The butler had gone through these iterations, and [the writer and director] Joss Whedon decided, “Let’s have you become a sentient being, a sentient being that is created from AI.” So first Bettany is the voice, and then he became this purple creature. And then there was this day when Bettany had to do a kind of soliloquy that Joss had written for him, as we are all introduced to him, wondering, Is he a threat? Can we trust him? Is he going to destroy us? And there comes this moment when we realize that he’s just seeking to understand, and be understood. And this was the moment in the middle of this genre film when we all stopped and thought, Wait, I think we might actually be talking about something important.

Goldberg: Bart, what are you exploring here?

Bartlett Sher: I’m basically exploring the deep tragedy of the life of Jacob McNeal. That’s the central issue. AI and everything around it, these are delivery systems to that exploration.

Akhtar: Robert has this wonderful moment in the play, the way he does it, in which he’s arguing for art in this very complicated conversation with a former lover. And it gets to one of the essences of the play, which is that this is an attempt to defend art even if it’s made by an indefensible person. Because in the end, human creation is still superior, and none of us is perfect. So the larger conversation around who gets to write, the morality of writing, all of that? In a way, it’s kind of emerging from that.

Goldberg: I can’t say for sure, but I think this is the first play that’s simultaneously about AI and #MeToo.

Downey: And identity and intergenerational conflict and cancel culture and misunderstanding and subintentional contempt and unconscious bias.

Goldberg: Are there any third rails you don’t touch?

Akhtar: McNeal is the third rail. He’s a vision of the artist in opposition to society. Not a flatterer of the current values, but someone who questions them: “That’s a lie. That’s not true.”

Goldberg: The timing is excellent.

Downey: In movies, you always miss the moment, or you are preempted by something. With Oppenheimer, we happened to be coming out right around the time of certain other world events, but we couldn’t have known. With this, we are literally first to market. Theater is the shortest distance between two points. You have something urgent to say, and you don’t dawdle, and you have a space like Lincoln Center that is not interested in the bottom line, but interested in the form. And you have Ayad inspiring Bart, and then you get me, the bronze medalist. But I’m super fucking motivated, because I never get this sense of immediacy and emergence happening in real time.

Goldberg: Let’s talk for a minute about the AI creative apocalypse, or if it’s a creative apocalypse at all. I prompted Claude to write a play just like McNeal, with the same plot turns and characters as your play, and I asked it to write it in your style. What emerged was a play called The Plagiarist’s Lament. I went back and forth with Claude for a while, mainly to try to get something less hackish. But in the end, I failed. What came out was something like an Ayad play, except it was bad, not good.

Akhtar: But here’s the thing. You’re just using an off-the-shelf product, not leading-edge story technology that is now becoming increasingly common in certain circles.

Goldberg: So don’t worry about today, but tomorrow?

Akhtar: The technology’s moving quickly, so it’s a reality. And worrying? I’m not trying to predict the future. And I’m also certainly not making a claim about whether it’s good or bad. I just want to understand it, because it’s coming.

Downey: To borrow from recent experience, I think we may be at a post-Trinity, pre-Hiroshima, pre-Nagasaki moment, though some people would say that we’re just at Hiroshima.

Goldberg: Hiroshima being the first real-world use of ChatGPT?

Downey: Trinity showed us that the bomb was purpose-built, and Hiroshima was showing us that the purpose was, possibly, not entirely necessary, but that it also didn’t matter, because, historically, it had already happened.

Goldberg: Right now, I’m assuming that part of the problem I had with the LLM was that I was giving it bad prompts.

Downey: One issue is that LLMs don’t get bored. We’ll be running something and Bart will go, “I’ve seen this before. I’ve done this before.” And then he says, “How can I make this new?”

The people who move culture forward are usually the high-ADD folks that we’ve tended to think either need to be medicated or all go into one line of work. They have a low threshold for boredom. And because they have this low threshold, they say, “I don’t want to do this. Do something different.” And it’s almost just to keep themselves awake. But what a great gift for creativity.

Goldberg: The three of you represent the acting side, and directing, and writing. Who’s in the most existential danger here from AI?

Downey: Anyone but me.

Akhtar: The Screen Actors Guild has dealt with the image-likeness issue in a meaningful way.

Downey: We’ve made the most noise—we, SAG—and we’re the most dramatic about everything. I remember when I was doing Chaplin, the talk was about how significant the end of the silent era was.

Goldberg: Is this the same level of disruption?

Downey: I doubt it, but not because Claude can’t currently pin his ass with both hands. There are versions that are going to be significantly more advanced. But technologies that people have argued would impede art and culture have often assisted and enhanced. So is this time different? That’s what we’re always worrying about. I live in California, always wondering, Is that little rumble in the kitchen, is this the big one?

Sher: For me, I think directing is very plastic. It requires integrating a lot of different levels of activity. So actually finding a way to process that into a computer’s thinking, and actually having it work in three dimensions in terms of organizing and developing, seems very difficult to me. And I essentially do the work of the interpreter and synthesizer.

A machine can tell you what to do, but it can’t interact and connect and pull together the different strands.

Akhtar: There’s a leadership dimension to what Bart does. I mean, you wouldn’t want a computer doing that.

Sher: This could sound geeky, but what is the distinguishing quality of making art? It is to participate in something uniquely human, something that can’t be done any other way.

So if the Greeks are gathering on the hillside because they are building a space where they can hear their stories and participate in them, that’s a uniquely human experience.

Akhtar: I do think that there is something irreducibly human about the theater, and that probably over time, it is going to continue to demonstrate its value in a world where virtuality is increasingly the norm. The economic problem for the theater has been that it happens only here and only now. So it’s always been hard to monetize.

Goldberg: But I have two words for you: ABBA Voyage. I mean, it’s an extraordinarily popular show that uses CGI and motion capture to give the experience of liveness without ABBA actually being there. Not precisely theater, but it is scalable, seemingly live technology.

Downey: Strangely, this is the real trifecta: IP, technology, and taste. I think of this brand of music—which, you know, it’s not my bag, but I still really admired that somebody was passionate about that and then purpose-built the venue. And then they said, “We’re not going to go for ‘Oh my God, that looks so real.’ We’re actually going to go for a more two-dimensional effect that is rendered in a way in which the audience can complete it themselves.”

Akhtar: ABBA Voyage is an exception. But it’s still not live theater.

Sher: It’s also not possible without the ABBA experience that preceded it. It’s an augmentation; it’s not original.

Goldberg: In terms of writing, Ayad, I did what you suggested I do and asked Claude to critique its own writing, and it was actually pretty good at that. I felt like I was actually talking with someone. We were in a dialogue about pacing, clarity, word choice.

Sher: But it has no intuition at all, no intuition for Ayad’s mindset in the middle of this activity, and no understanding of how he’s seeing it.

Downey: It does have context, and context is critical. I think it’s going to start quickly modeling all of those things that we hold dear as subtleties that are unassailable. It’s going to see what’s missing in its sequence, and it’s going to focus all of its cloud-bursting energy on that.

Goldberg: It might be the producers or the studios who are in trouble, because the notes are delivered sequentially, logically, and without defensiveness. Do you think that these technologies can give better notes than the average executive?

Akhtar: I know producers in Hollywood who are already using these tools for their writers. And they’re using them empirically, saying, “This is what I think. Let’s see what the AI thinks.” And it turns out that the AI is actually pretty good at understanding certain forms. If you’ve got a corpus of texts—like, say, Law & Order ; you’ve got many, many seasons of that, or you’ve got many seasons of a children’s show—those are codified forms. And the AI, if it has all those texts, can understand how words are shaped in that form.

Goldberg: So you could upload a thousand Law & Order scripts and Claude could come up with the thousandth and first.

Akhtar: About a year and a half ago, when I started playing with ChatGPT, the first thing that I started to see were processes of language that reminded me of reading Shakespeare. No writer is better at presenting context than Shakespeare. What I mean by that is Shakespeare sets everything quickly in motion. It’s almost like a chess game—you’ve got pieces, and you want to get them out as quickly as possible so you have options. Shakespeare sets the options out quickly and starts creating variations. So there is a series of words or linguistic tropes for every single play, every poem cycle, every sonnet. They all have their universe of linguistic context that is being deployed and redeployed and redeployed. And it is in that play of language that you find an accretion of meaning. It was not quite as thrilling to see the chatbot do it, but it was actually very interesting to recognize the same process.

OK McCausland for The Atlantic

Goldberg: Shakespeare was his own AI.

Downey: Because he performed as a younger man, it was all uploaded into Shakespeare’s system. So he was so familiar with the template, and he had all this experience. And similarly, all of these LLMs are in this stage where they are just beginning to be taken seriously. It’s like we’re pre–bar mitzvah, but these are sharp kids.

Goldberg: Would you use ChatGPT to write an entire piece?

Sher: Soon we’ll be having conversations about whether Claude is a better artist than ChatGPT. Could you imagine people saying, “Well, I’m not going to see that play, because it was written by this machine; I want to see this one, because it’s written by Gemini instead.”

Goldberg: Unfortunately, I can easily imagine it.

Akhtar: I’m not sure that I would use an LLM to write a play, because they’re just not very good at doing that yet, as you discovered in your own play by Claude. I don’t think they’re good enough to be making the kinds of decisions that go into making a work of art.

Goldberg: But you’re teaching the tool how to get better.

Akhtar: So what? They’ve already gone to school on my body of work.

[Read: The authors whose pirated books are powering generative AI]

Goldberg: So what? So what? Six hundred years of Gutenberg, and the printing press never made decisions on its own.

Akhtar: But we’re already within this regime where power and monetized scale exist within the hands of very few. We’re doing it every day with our phones; you’re teaching the machine everything about you and your family and your desires. This is the paradigm for the 21st century. All human activity is passing through the hands of very few people and a lot of machines.

Goldberg: McNeal is about lack of control.

Akhtar: It is. I’m just making the point that we’re not really in a different regime of power with AI. It may be even more concentrated and even more consequential, but at the end of the day, to participate in the public space in the 21st century is to participate in this structure. That’s just what it is. We don’t have an alternative, because our government has not regulated this.

Goldberg: You see the LLM as a collaborator in some ways. Where will the red line be for writers, between collaboration and plagiarism?

Akhtar: From my perspective, there are any number of artists we could look at, but the one that I would probably always spend the most time looking at is Shakespeare, and it’s tough to say that he wasn’t copying. As McNeal explains at one point in the play, King Lear shares 70 percent of its words with a previous play called King Leir, which Shakespeare knew well and used to write Lear. And it’s not just Leir. There’s that great scene in Lear where Gloucester is led to this plain and told it’s a cliff over which he’s going to jump, and that subplot is taken right out of Sir Philip Sidney. It may reflect deeper processes of cognition. It may reflect, as Bart has said, how we imitate in order to learn. All of that is just part of what we do. When that gets married to a corporate-ownership model, that is a separate issue, something that will have to get worked out over time, socially and legally. Or not, if our legislators don’t have the will to do so.

Goldberg: The final soliloquy of the play—no spoilers here—is augmented by AI.

Akhtar: This has really been a fascinating collaboration. Because I wanted some part of the play to actually be meaningfully generated by ChatGPT or some large language model—Gemini, Claude. I tried them all. And I wanted to do it because it was part of what the play was about. But the LLMs had a tough time actually delivering the goods until this week. I’ve finally had some experiences now, after many months of working with them, that are bearing fruit.

I wanted the final speech to have a quality of magic to it that resembles the kind of amazement that I knew you had felt working with the model, and that I have sometimes felt when I see the language being generated. I want the audience to have that experience.

Sher: You know, I think the problem you were facing could have been with any of your collaborators. We just had this new collaborator to help with that moment.

Goldberg: You’re blowing my mind.

Akhtar: It’s not really that controversial.

Goldberg: Yes it is. It’s totally controversial.

Downey: Well, let’s find out!

Goldberg: It’s more of a leap than you guys think.

Akhtar: It’s a play about AI. It stands to reason that I was able, over the course of many months, to finally get the AI to give me something that I could use in the play.

Downey: You know what the leap was like? A colicky little baby finally gave us a big ol’ burp.

Akhtar: That’s exactly right. That’s what happened. A lot of unsatisfying work, and then, unprompted, it finally came up with a brilliant final couplet! And that’s what I’m using for the end of the play’s final speech.

Goldberg: Amazing, and threatening.

Sher: I just can’t imagine a world in which ChatGPT could take all experience and unify it with Ayad’s interest in beauty and meaning and his obsession with classical tragedy and pull all those forces together with emotion and feeling. Because no matter how many times you prompted it, you’re still going to get The Pestilential Plagiarist, or whatever it’s called.

Downey: The reason that we’re all sitting here right now is because this motherfucker, Ayad, is so searingly sophisticated, but also on occasion—more than occasionally—hot under the collar. My new favorite cable channel is called Ayad Has Fucking Had It. He’s like the most collaborative superintelligence you will ever come across, and therefore he’s letting all this slack out to everyone around him, but once in a while, if this intelligence is entirely unappreciated for hours or days at a time, he will flare. He’ll just remind us that he can break the sound barrier if he wants to. And I get chills from that. And that’s why we’re here. It’s the human thing.

Akhtar: It’s not new for humans to use tools.

Sher: Are we going to be required to upload a system of ethics into the machines as they get more and more powerful?

Downey: Too late.

Goldberg: That’s what they promise in Silicon Valley, alignment with human values.

Downey: Two years ago was the time to do something.

Akhtar: You guys are thinking big. But I just don’t know how this is going to play out. I don’t know what it is. I’m just interested in what I’m experiencing now and in working with the technology. What’s the experience I’m having now?

Goldberg: There’s a difference between a human hack and an excellent human writer. The human hack doesn’t know that they’re bad.

Downey: This is a harebrained rabbit hole where we could constantly keep thinking of more and more ramifications. Another issue here is that certain great artists do something that most people would labor an entire life or career to come close to, and the second they’re done with it, they have contempt for it, because they go, “Eh, that’s not my best.”

Akhtar: I recognize someone in that.

Downey: All I’m saying is that I just want the feeling of those sparks flying, that new neural pathway being forced. I want to push the limits. It’s that whole thing of pushing limits. When I feel good, when I can tell Bart is kicking me, when Ayad is just lighting up, and when I’m realizing that I just got a note that revolutionized the way I’m going to try to portray something, you go, “Ooh!” And even if it’s old news to someone else, for me, it’s revolutionary.

Akhtar: Another way of putting this, what Robert is saying, is that what he’s engaged in is not problem-solving, per se. It’s not that there’s an identified problem that he is trying to solve. This is how a computer is often thinking, with a gamification sort of mindset. For Robert, there’s a richness of the present for him as he’s working that is identifying possibilities, not problems.

Sher: I’ve thought a lot about this, trying to understand the issue of GPT and creativity, and I’m a lot less worried now, because I feel that the depth of the artistic process in the theater isn’t replicable.

The amalgam of human experience and emotion and feeling that passes through artists is uniquely human and not capturable. Word orders can be taken from all kinds of sources. They can be imitated; they can be replicated; they can be reproduced in different ways. But the essential activity of what we do here in this way, and what we build, has never been safer.

Downey: And if our job is to hold the mirror up to nature, this is now part of nature. It is now part of the firmament. Nature is now inclusive of this. We’re onstage and we’re reflecting this back to you. What do you see? Do you see yourself within this picture?

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Playwright in the Age of AI.”

The Unadorned Truth About Donald Trump

2024-06-27T18:17:00-04:00

Earlier this year, Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins suggested that voters, in the interest of civic hygiene and personal illumination, attend a Trump rally. This would be the way to understand the candidate, his thoughts, and his supporters, Coppins argued. He himself has attended more than 100 such gatherings since 2016, and he noted, correctly, that “nothing quite captures the Trump ethos like his campaign rallies.”

I myself have attended only a few of these rallies (though among them was Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally on the Ellipse, which should count double). But what one derives from the experience is, in the words of our colleague Tom Nichols, the visceral sense that Trump is deeply unwell.

Attendance at Trump rallies can be metaphysically taxing—and some seem to go longer than a Taylor Swift concert. So watching them from beginning to end online is occasionally a welcome substitute.

A couple of weeks ago, on C-SPAN, I watched my first Trump rally in quite some time, a gathering under a heat dome in Las Vegas. I watched not because I expected to learn something new about the candidate, but because I had been alerted by concerned friends and colleagues that Trump had attacked me by name. This hadn’t happened in quite some time, and self-interest dictated watching.

Trump is upset with me, and with The Atlantic, for a story I wrote in September of 2020, in which I reported, among other things, that he referred to American soldiers killed in action as “suckers” and “losers.” (For more on the particulars, please read this story by Adrienne LaFrance.) Trump is also upset by a profile I wrote late last year of retired General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which Milley, a decorated combat veteran, is portrayed as someone who defended the Constitution against Trump’s depredations. In response to this article, Trump suggested that Milley be executed.

At his Las Vegas rally, Trump described me as a “horrible, radical-left lunatic named Goldberg” (he hit the word Goldberg with what I perhaps, or perhaps not, overinterpreted as special feeling). He articulated, at great length, why he would never disparage American service members. (Dear reader: He disparages the military constantly.)

All of this was to be expected. What I found surprising, as I watched his entire presentation, was the ratio of gibberish to normal sentences. Which is to say, there was even more gibberish than I remembered in the typical Trump speech. The apotheosis of gibberish was his extended soliloquy on sharks and battery-powered boats. No summary could do it justice, so here is an extended cut:

“By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of sharks. I watched some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said, ‘There’s no problem with sharks. They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming,’ now, who really got decimated and other people too, a lot of shark attacks. So I said, ‘So there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, and water goes over the battery—the boat is sinking; do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ Because I will tell you he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘Nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we going to end that. We’re going to end it for boats. We’re going to end it for trucks.”

Please watch the whole thing, and as you do, imagine Trump’s words coming from the mouth of President Biden, and then imagine the Democratic Party allowing Biden to continue to run for president.

Trump overwhelms us with nonsense. This is the “banality of crazy,” as the Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas calls it. By “us,” I mean, of course, the voting public, but I especially mean the editors and headline-writers of my industry, who sometimes succumb to one of the most pernicious biases in journalism, the bias toward coherence. We feel, understandably, that it is our job to make things make sense. But what if the actual story is that politics today makes no sense?

It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts. Therefore, it is our responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize. Which is why, after the electric-shark speech, much of the coverage revolved around the high temperatures in Las Vegas, and other extraneities. The Associated Press headline on a story about the event read this way: “Trump Complains About His Teleprompters at a Scorching Las Vegas Rally.” The New York Times headlined its story thus: “In Las Vegas, Trump Appeals to Local Workers and Avoids Talk of Conviction.” CNN’s headline: “Trump Proposes Eliminating Taxes on Tips at Las Vegas Campaign Rally.”

In my house, the headline from the Las Vegas rally was the disconcerting and surprising news that I’m a “radical-left lunatic.” Outside my house, though, the public should have been informed, above everything else, that a former and possibly future president went on a ludicrous, illiterate rant about sharks and batteries, a rant that calls into question not only his fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities.

Watching the Las Vegas rally reinforced my view that, at our magazine, we can best serve our readers by highlighting aspects of Trump’s rhetoric and behavior that we would highlight about any other politician, including Joe Biden. I’ve never wanted this magazine to become part of the “resistance.” (You just have to read our coverage of Biden to understand that we are not.) I simply believe that we should tell the unadorned truth about Trump, and treat him like any other candidate for high office who is emotionally and mentally unstable. A bias toward coherence is understandable. But reality is what we must live with long after the debates and rallies are over.

Related:

In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World

2024-06-10T06:00:00-04:00

Loyal readers of this magazine know that we are preoccupied with matters of climate change, and that we worry about the future of our home planet. I appreciate (I really do) Elon Musk’s notion that humans, as a species, ought to pursue an extraplanetary solution to our environmental crisis, but I believe in exploration for exploration’s sake, not as a pathway to a time share on Mars.

So we at The Atlantic are focused intensely on, among other things, the relationship between humans and the natural world they currently inhabit. We have a long history of interest here. The great conservationist John Muir more or less invented the national-parks system in The Atlantic. John Burroughs defended Charles Darwin in our pages. Rachel Carson wrote her earliest essays, about the sea, for us. And, of course, The Atlantic published much of Thoreau’s finest and most enduring writing.

In our lead essay this month, our senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II argues that America owes a debt to other nations for its role in accelerating climate change, and that paying this debt may be the best way for the world to save itself. “For at least the immediate future, wealthy Americans will be protected from the worst of the climate crisis,” he writes. “This comfort is seductive, but ultimately illusory.”

Climate change is one reason I asked our staff writer George Packer, the author of the National Book Award–winning The Unwinding, to identify a place that could somehow stand in for America’s fundamental quandaries, hypocrisies, and powers of self-correction and improvement. Against his better judgment (he doesn’t like the heat very much), Packer found himself returning again and again to Phoenix, where, he became convinced, the future is being determined—not merely our political future, but our relationship with the natural world, on which our survival depends. Packer’s cover story possesses the grand sweep, capacious reporting, and powerful insight our readers expect from him.

Although he appreciates Phoenix and understands it in a complicated and not-unhopeful way, I think Packer would have preferred the assignment we handed our science writer Ross Andersen, who visited Greenland to investigate the technological means through which it may be possible to save otherwise-doomed glaciers. His article, “The Glacier Rescue Project,” is fascinating, and especially important in a moment when too many people believe that catastrophic sea-level rise is inevitable.

The Atlantic has large ambitions and a peripatetic staff, so when we heard that Australia’s koalas were suffering from both climate change and chlamydia, we quickly dispatched Katherine J. Wu, a staff writer (and a microbiologist), to Adelaide and beyond to bring back a report. I believe this marks the first time that marsupial chlamydia has been covered in The Atlantic. Wu’s story is a revelation, illustrating the difficulty that even wealthy nations have in protecting their most prized species during a period of climate instability.

Me, I went to Walden Pond. I visit occasionally, walking the path that starts behind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house and ends up near the pond’s big parking lot and little beach. Thoreau would be surprised by Walden Pond today: more visitors, much more noise. The noise could get worse soon. A proposed plan to radically expand a nearby airport for private jets has conservationists and preservationists worried that an appreciation of the sanctity and history of Concord is not unanimously shared. One doesn’t have to live like Thoreau to understand that wealth comes in many forms—in the wildness of the world, for instance—and that returning the planet to some sort of equilibrium is a universal interest.

This editor’s note appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Dalai Lama Is Landing in the Middle of the 2024 Election

2024-06-02T21:16:43-04:00

In early September of 2020, Joe Biden, then the Democratic nominee for president, promised to put values—values held in contempt, he argued, by the man he would go on to defeat—at the center of American foreign policy. To act on his promise, he said, he would do something Donald Trump had neglected to do. “I’ll meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” Biden said.

For American presidents, meeting the 14th Dalai Lama can bring tension and discord, because Communist Party leaders in Beijing consider Tibet to be a part of China. They consider any recognition of the Dalai Lama—a Mandela-level icon, a symbol of Tibet’s will to survive, and also (by the way) a living Buddha, a bodhisattva, to his millions of followers—a terrible insult to Chinese sensitivities. (To be fair, Chinese leaders are omnidirectionally offended, by supporters of Taiwanese independence and Hong Kong democracy; by Christians and Uyghurs and Mongols; and by anyone else who threatens their Middle Kingdom sense of imperial entitlement.)

More than three years into his term, Biden has not made good on his promise, though he has a plausible excuse: The Dalai Lama is 88 years old and in declining health, and he seldom leaves his home in exile in Dharamsala, in the Himalayan foothills of India. But the Dalai Lama’s age now provides a path for Biden to keep his promise: The bodhisattva has bad knees and has decided, after much procrastination, to come to New York this summer to investigate the possibility of replacement.

A visit by Biden to the Dalai Lama’s hospital—or an after-surgery invitation to the White House—would signal continuing American concern over the oppression of Tibet and Tibetans, as well as support for one of the most heroic and pacific humanitarian leaders of our age. Such a visit would also have the benefit of signaling to the Chinese government that a U.S. president makes decisions independent of Chinese Communist feelings. (American CEOs are particularly feeble at signaling such independence.) A call on the Dalai Lama couldn’t possibly hurt Biden’s standing among voters, especially considering the Dalai Lama’s previous lack of interest in meeting with Trump when he was president. Five years ago, when I visited the Dalai Lama at his monastery in Manali, he told me that he did not look favorably on Trump’s jingoistic “America First” rhetoric. “Everyone first,” he said, laughing. “A much better idea.”

The exact timing of his trip to the United States—his first in seven years—has not yet been decided, but it will follow another event of some significance: a visit later this month to Dharamsala by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, and a congressional delegation. Pelosi has championed the Tibetan cause for decades, and, to her credit, she is loathed by Beijing for her comprehensive criticism of China’s human-rights record. In one of Pelosi’s earliest meetings with the Dalai Lama, she was so ferocious in her criticism of China’s human-rights abuses that the Dalai Lama said, impishly, “Now let us all pray so that we could rid Nancy of her negative attitudes.” (Pelosi’s trip has not yet been announced, and her spokesperson declined to comment, citing security concerns; news of the Dalai Lama’s proposed visit this summer was confirmed to me by sources involved in planning the trip.)

The reemergence of the Dalai Lama into American politics in the months preceding the 2024 presidential election is good news for the unfortunate Tibetan cause, constantly steamrollered as it is by the raw deployment of Chinese power. In Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, fear is ever present that the Dalai Lama’s eventual demise will make even more marginal the cause of Tibetan cultural and political independence. (As is implied by his status as the 14th Dalai Lama, the discovery of a 15th Dalai Lama is likely, though he will be reincarnated, according to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as a small child, not as someone ready for international diplomacy. And the Chinese government has its own plan to identify and elevate a quisling lama.)

Two months ago, I visited Dharamsala with, among others, Arthur Brooks, the Atlantic columnist and frequent writing collaborator of the Dalai Lama’s. We both experienced a religious leader who, though hobbled by knee pain and slowed by age, was still lucid and eloquent on the great subjects of freedom and happiness. I called Arthur today to ask him what he makes of this news.

“In a contentious election year, it’s good to remind Americans of our core values as a people, and among those values are religious freedom and standing up for the dignity of all people around the world,” he said. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as we saw in Dharamsala in April, still has the ability to remind people around the world of what is good and true. For a Tibetan monk, he has an uncanny gift for bringing out the best of what it means to be a person and an American. This is an opportunity that President Biden cannot and should not miss.”

A Great Day for The Atlantic

2024-04-03T18:26:00-04:00

Pardon the interruption, but I’m breaking into our regular programming to share some good news about The Atlantic.

First, here are three new stories that are worth your time:

Excellent News

For the third consecutive year, the American Society of Magazine Editors has bestowed upon The Atlantic its top prize, the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. This is a tremendous honor. Only one other magazine has been awarded this prize three times in a row, and that was more than 25 years ago. The competition was tough. We were up against a raft of excellent magazines: The New Yorker, New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The Economist’s 1843 magazine.

It is particularly gratifying to note that this was not the only award The Atlantic won last night. Three of our staff writers won National Magazine Awards for their stellar work: Tim Alberta, one of America’s most gifted feature writers, received the top prize in profile writing, for his incisive and influential profile of Chris Licht, the now-former head of CNN. Sophie Gilbert, a critic of exceptional discernment and acuity, won the top prize in reviews and criticism, for her brilliant work on pop culture and feminism. And Jennifer Senior won the top prize in columns and essays for her beautifully elegiac story about her aunt Adele, who was institutionalized by her family as a toddler because of an intellectual disability and left to wither for decades in terrifying facilities before landing in a supportive group home in middle age. Tim and Sophie were first-time finalists for the National Magazine Award. For Jen, this was a repeat trip to the podium; she has been a finalist each of the past three years, and she won the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing two years ago, for her story on the aftermath of 9/11 (it’s worth noting that she also won the Pulitzer Prize for that story). The general view across our industry, one that I endorse, is that Jen is doing some of the best writing in the English language today.

I’m also pleased to let you know that The Atlantic won the prize for best print illustration, for the portrait of our senior editor Jenisha Watts, by Didier Viodé. Jenisha herself was a first-time finalist in feature writing. Her gorgeous and brave cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky,” is one of the best personal essays The Atlantic has ever published.

Our magazine’s special issue on Reconstruction, edited by Vann R. Newkirk II and John Swansburg, was a finalist in the single-topic-issue category, the first time The Atlantic has been so recognized. This issue was extraordinary. If you missed it, now is a good time to visit its stories (and an original play, This Ghost of Slavery, by our contributing writer Anna Deavere Smith).

All in all (and I apologize for the unseemly bragging), The Atlantic brought home more National Magazine Awards than any other publication.

Last year, when we won the prize for general excellence for the second consecutive time, I assumed we wouldn’t be able to keep up this streak. But my generally excellent colleagues keep outdoing themselves, and so the judges, though perhaps predisposed to grant this prize to a magazine with New York in its title, made what I consider to be the inevitably correct decision.

As some of you know, The Atlantic has had a run of positive news lately. The biggest development: We just recently crossed the 1-million-subscription threshold. This has never happened in our 167-year history. We are also, again, a profitable magazine company. This is important not merely because these developments allow us to pursue the most ambitious journalism possible but because we hope to show the world that it is possible to have an economically self-sustaining print-and-digital publication that is committed to producing only the best journalism. As I wrote last year, we realized that the way to differentiate The Atlantic in a crowded field is to make stories only of the highest quality and ambition. We sometimes fall short of our objective, but not for lack of trying.

Tomorrow, a return to your regular newsletter programming. For now, let me thank you, our readers and subscribers, for your loyalty and your commitment to the ideals of The Atlantic.

Read all of our National Magazine Award winners and finalists here.

Today’s News

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan today, killing at least nine people and injuring more than 900 others. It is the strongest earthquake the country has experienced in the past 25 years.
The University of Texas at Austin laid off at least 60 employees who had worked in roles related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Austin American-Statesman reported yesterday. Texas passed an anti-DEI law last summer that went into effect in January.
To replenish its forces, Ukraine lowered its conscription age from 27 to 25 for men and removed some draft exemptions.

Dispatches

Notes From the Editor in Chief: Republicans such as Rob Portman could have ended Donald Trump’s political career, Jeffrey Goldberg writes. They chose not to.
Work in Progress: Millions of Americans stopped going to church in the past 25 years, Derek Thompson writes. They seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.
The Weekly Planet: Rising temperatures could push millions of people north, Abrahm Lustgarten writes. These climate boomtowns could have lasting implications for America.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Apple TV+

If Teenage Girls Ran America

By Shirley Li

Early in the new documentary Girls State, one of the participants in the titular leadership program for high schoolers chuckles after learning the camp song. She feels silly practicing the flashy choreography and rousing lyrics when the weeklong intensive is meant for building a mock government with other civic-minded teenagers. “If the boys don’t have to do this,” she says, “I’m going to be pissed.”

As it turns out, the boys don’t—and she’s not the only one miffed about the disparity between the sibling programs run by the veterans association American Legion. Girls State, which begins streaming on Apple TV+ this Friday, is a follow-up to the acclaimed 2020 documentary Boys State … But Girls State is much more than a gender-flipped version of the previous project. Instead, the film offers a sharp study of how a supposedly empowering environment can simultaneously inspire and limit aspiring female leaders.

Read the full article.

A Study in Senate Cowardice

2024-04-03T06:00:00-04:00

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In late June of 2022, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump-administration aide, provided testimony to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This testimony was unnerving, even compared with previous revelations concerning Donald Trump’s malignant behavior that day. Hutchinson testified that the president, when told that some of his supporters were carrying weapons, said, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.” He was referring to the metal detectors meant to screen protesters joining his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House.

Hutchinson also testified that Trump became so frantic in his desire to join the march to the Capitol that at one point he tried to grab the steering wheel of his SUV. This assertion has subsequently been disputed by Secret Service agents, but what has not been disputed is an exchange, reported by Hutchinson, between White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff. In this conversation, which took place as Trump supporters were breaching the Capitol, Cipollone told Meadows, “We need to do something more—they’re literally calling for [Vice President Mike Pence] to be fucking hung.” Hutchinson reported that Meadows answered: “You heard [Trump], Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

[David A. Graham: The most damning January 6 testimony yet]

Hutchinson seemed like a credible witness, and she was obviously quite brave for testifying. This very young person—she was 25 at the time of her testimony—went against the interests of her political tribe, and her own career advancement, to make a stand for truth and for the norms of democratic behavior. Washington is not overpopulated with such people, and so the discovery of a new one is always reassuring.

As it happened, I watched the hearing while waiting to interview then-Senator Rob Portman, a grandee of the pre-Trump Republican establishment, before an audience of 2,000 or so at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The session would also feature Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who was serving at the time as President Joe Biden’s infrastructure coordinator. Portman’s appearance was considered to be a coup for the festival (for which The Atlantic was once, but was by this time no longer, a sponsor).

Republican elected officials in the age of Trump don’t often show up at these sorts of events, and I found out later that the leaders of the Aspen Institute, the convener of this festival, hoped that I would give Portman, a two-term senator from Ohio, a stress-free ride. The declared subject of our discussion was national infrastructure spending, so the chance of comity-disturbing outbursts was low. But I did believe it to be my professional responsibility to ask Portman about Hutchinson’s testimony, and, more broadly, about his current views of Donald Trump. In 2016, during Trump’s first campaign for president, Portman withdrew his support for him after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. But Portman endorsed Trump in 2020 and voted to acquit him in the second impeachment trial, and I wanted to ask him if Hutchinson’s testimony, or anything else he had heard in the 18 months since the violent attack on the Capitol, had made him regret his decision.

Portman was one of 43 Republican senators who voted against conviction. Sixty-seven votes were required to convict. If 10 additional Republican senators had joined the 50 Democrats and seven Republicans who voted for conviction, Trump would not today be the party’s presumptive nominee for president, and the country would not be one election away from a constitutional crisis and a possibly irreversible slide into authoritarianism. (Technically, a second vote after conviction would have been required to ban Trump from holding public office, but presumably this second vote would have followed naturally from the first.)

[Adam Serwer: Don’t forget that 43 Senate Republicans let Trump get away with it]

It would be unfair to blame Portman disproportionately for the devastating reality that Donald Trump, who is currently free on bail but could be a convicted felon by November, is once again a candidate for president. The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, denounced Trump for his actions on January 6, and yet still voted to acquit him. Trump’s continued political viability is as much McConnell’s fault as anyone’s.

But I was interested in pressing Portman because, unlike some of his dimmer colleagues, he clearly understood the threat Trump posed to constitutional order, and he was clearly, by virtue of his sterling reputation, in a position to influence his colleagues. Some senators in the group of 43 are true believers, men like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, in the words of Mitt Romney (as reported by the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins), never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t believe. But Portman wasn’t a know-nothing. He was one of the most accomplished and respected members of the Senate. He had been a high-ranking official in the White House of George H. W. Bush, then a hardworking member of the House of Representatives. In George W. Bush’s administration, he served as the U.S. trade representative and later as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was well known for his cerebral qualities and his mastery of the federal budget. He was also known to loathe Donald Trump. In other words, Portman knew better.

[From the November 2023 issue: McKay Coppins on what Mitt Romney saw in the Senate]

“I do want to ask you directly,” I said, when we sat onstage, “given what you know now about what happened on January 6, do you regret your vote to acquit in impeachment?”

Portman immediately expressed his unhappiness with what he took to be an outré question. “You have just surprised me,” he said, complaining that I hadn’t told him beforehand that I would ask him about Trump. (American journalists generally do not warn government officials of their questions ahead of time.) He went on to say, “You know that I spoke out in the strongest possible terms on January 6.”

Indeed he had. This is what Portman said on the Senate floor once the Capitol had been secured: “I want the American people, particularly my constituents in Ohio, to see that we will not be intimidated, that we will not be disrupted from our work, that here in the citadel of democracy, we will continue to do the work of the people. Mob rule is not going to prevail here.”

Onstage, Portman reminded me of his comments. “On the night it happened, I took to the Senate floor and gave an impassioned speech about democracy and the need to protect it. So that’s who I am.”

But this is incorrect. This is not who he is. Portman showed the people of Ohio who he is five weeks later, on February 13, when he voted to acquit Trump, the man he knew to have fomented a violent, antidemocratic insurrection meant to overturn the results of a fair election.

His argument during impeachment, and later, onstage with me, was that voting to convict an ex-president would have violated constitutional norms, and would have further politicized the impeachment process. “Do you think it would be a good idea for President Obama to be impeached by the new Republican Congress?” he asked. He went on, “Well, he’s a former president, and I think he should be out of reach. And Donald Trump was a former president. If you start that precedent, trust me, Republicans will do the same thing. They will.”

It was an interesting, and also pathetic, point to make: Portman was arguing that his Republican colleagues are so corrupt that they would impeach a president who had committed no impeachable offenses simply out of spite.

I eventually pivoted the discussion to the topic of bridges in Ohio, but Portman remained upset, rushing offstage at the end of the conversation to confront the leaders of the festival, who tried to placate him.

Initially, I found his defensive behavior odd. A senator should not be so flustered by a straightforward question about one of his most consequential and historic votes. But I surmised, from subsequent conversations with members of the Republican Senate caucus, that he, like others, felt a certain degree of shame about his continued excuse-making for the authoritarian hijacker of his beloved party.

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s leading experts on authoritarianism, wrote in 2020 that complicity, rather than dissent, is the norm for humans, and especially for status-and-relevance-seeking politicians. There are many explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.”

[From the July/August 2020 issue: Anne Applebaum on why Republican leaders continue to enable Trump]

None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The excuses ranged widely. Here are the stirring and angry words of Dan Sullivan, the junior senator from Alaska, explaining his vote to acquit: “Make no mistake: I condemn the horrific violence that engulfed the Capitol on January 6. I also condemn former President Trump’s poor judgment in calling a rally on that day, and his actions and inactions when it turned into a riot. His blatant disregard for his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was fulfilling his constitutional duty at the Capitol, infuriates me.”

Sullivan voted to acquit, he said, because he didn’t think it right to impeach a former president. Kevin Cramer, of North Dakota, argued that “the January 6 attacks on the Capitol were appalling, and President Trump’s remarks were reckless.” But Cramer went on to say that, “based on the evidence presented in the trial, he did not commit an impeachable offense.” Chuck Grassley of Iowa said, in explaining his vote, “Undoubtedly, then-President Trump displayed poor leadership in his words and actions. I do not defend those actions, and my vote should not be read as a defense of those actions.” He continued, “Just because President Trump did not meet the definition of inciting insurrection does not mean that I think he behaved well.”

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

Now contrast this run of greasy and sad excuse-making with Mitt Romney’s explanation for his vote to convict: “The president’s conduct represented an unprecedented violation of his oath of office and of the public trust. There is a thin line that separates our democratic republic from an autocracy: It is a free and fair election and the peaceful transfer of power that follows it. President Trump attempted to breach that line, again. What he attempted is what was most feared by the Founders. It is the reason they invested Congress with the power to impeach. Accordingly, I voted to convict President Trump.”

On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be raised to these seven. As for Rob Portman and his colleagues, they should hope that they will merely be forgotten.

*Lead image sources: (left to right from top) Douglas Christian / ZUMA Press / Alamy; MediaPunch / Alamy; Tasos Katopodis / Getty; Hum Images / Alamy; Danita Delimont / Alamy; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Study in Senate Cowardice.”

A Warning

2023-12-04T06:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Lee este artículo en español.

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Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?”

I did not understand how so many ostensibly patriotic voters could subsequently embrace Trump, but mainly I couldn’t understand his soul sickness: How does a person come to such a rotten, depraved thought?

That day in the White House, I mentioned to Kushner one of Trump’s more recent calumnies and told him that, in my view, his father-in-law’s incivility was damaging the country. Strangely, Kushner seemed to agree with me: “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

I was confused at first. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment.

Perverse, of course. But revelatory as well, and more than a little prophetic. Because Trump, in the intervening years, has gone lower, and lower, and lower. If there is a bottom—no sure thing—he’s getting closer. Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet “fascist.”

“For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” In a separate speech, Trump, Nichols wrote, “melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.”

Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency. As David A. Graham, one of our magazine’s chroniclers of the Trump era, wrote recently, “The former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.”

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged]

There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.

And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.

The Atlantic, as our loyal readers know, is deliberately not a partisan magazine. “Of no party or clique” is our original 1857 motto, and it is true today. Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.

This editor’s note appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Warning.”

The Questions That Most Need Asking

2023-11-13T06:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

“Reconstruction,” by Frederick Douglass, appeared in the December 1866 issue of this magazine. It was the most important article that The Atlantic published in the immediate postwar era. It was also, for its time, unusually concise, coming in at a mere 2,703 words. By contrast, The Atlantic’s 1860 endorsement of Abraham Lincoln, written by James Russell Lowell, had run to 7,331 words, and Lincoln himself was not mentioned until the 1,747th word. (The editorial did succeed, of course. And yes, I’m taking credit on behalf of The Atlantic for Lincoln’s presidency.)

Douglass published his call for a radical reimagining of the American idea at an ambiguous but promising moment. Already, the infant project of Reconstruction—of the South, of the lives of newly liberated Black Americans, of the Constitution itself—was stimulating opposition that would, by 1877, prove shattering to the cause of equality. And yet Douglass was correct, as his biographer David W. Blight writes in this issue, in understanding that “the United States had been reinvented by war and by new egalitarian impulses rooted in emancipation.” Douglass’s essay, which Blight brilliantly annotates for us, is “full of radical brimstone, cautious hope, and a thoroughly new vision of constitutional authority.”

The Reconstruction period has been a topic for The Atlantic across the centuries. This special issue, edited by our senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, working alongside our editor-at-large, Cullen Murphy, and our managing editor John Swansburg, is meant to examine the enduring consequences of Reconstruction’s tragic fall at a moment—yet another moment—when the cause of racial progress faces sustained pressure. The idea for this issue emerged from a conversation I had not long ago with Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bunch is, among other things, a stupendous builder, a conscientious American patriot, and an impresario of memory. He is also a scholar of the Freedmen’s Bureau archives, and the author of a moving article about the bureau’s work.

Our conversation at first focused on the need to complete the exploration and digitization of the imperishably important archives, but then it ranged more widely. Both of us felt that, in this period of political and social reaction, revisiting the centrality of Reconstruction, and of promises made and broken, would be an apt subject for this magazine. Bunch writes in his article:

Librarians around the nation feel the chilling effects of book bans. Some individuals who seek to occupy the highest office in the land fear the effects of an Advanced Placement class that explores African American history—a history that, as education officials in Florida have maintained, “lacks educational value”; a history that does not deserve to be remembered.

As Newkirk, who has written a fascinating article about the Fisk University choir, noted to me, “If the last seven years in this country have proven anything, it is to show just how unfinished, and fragile, the project of Reconstruction actually is.”

In the interest of memory, we asked our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum, a historian by trade, to examine The Atlantic’s mixed record on questions of Reconstruction. I would prefer to tell you that Frederick Douglass spoke singularly for this magazine on the subject, but there is also the matter of Woodrow Wilson, a frequent contributor to The Atlantic in the years before he became president. Wilson was a prime contributor to a 1901 series in this magazine focused on Reconstruction. The series, which also featured W. E. B. Du Bois (thank goodness), has too much of a “good people on both sides” air about it. As Appelbaum notes, Wilson’s critique of Reconstruction was appalling. “The negroes were exalted; the states were misgoverned and looted in their name,” Wilson wrote. This went on, he continued, until “the whites who were real citizens got control again.”

Illumination is the point of this issue. We have great scholars, including Peniel E. Joseph, whose article, “The Revolution Never Ended,” focuses on the Black Americans who continued the work of Reconstruction even after federal troops withdrew from the South, and Drew Gilpin Faust, a former president of Harvard and a noted Civil War scholar, who writes about the Secret Six, the men exposed after the war for having funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Eric Foner, in many ways the dean of Reconstruction scholarship, writes on James Longstreet, the Confederate general who accepted the Union’s victory and took up the cause of rebuilding the nation.

The playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith. (Kwaku Alston / HBO)

At the center of this issue, spread across 32 pages, you will find something surprising and glorious: an original play by Anna Deavere Smith, a contributing writer at The Atlantic as well as a playwright, a performer, and an actual genius. I don’t doubt that you will one day see the play, This Ghost of Slavery, on Broadway. When I first started talking with Smith about writing for this issue, she had predictably brilliant ideas for a long exploration of juvenile justice and its roots in the slave system, but we soon realized that an essay couldn’t contain all that she was trying to achieve. So I suggested that she write a play. We recruited our national editor, Scott Stossel, to serve as her dramaturge. Spend time with this play. It will move you. Spend time with this whole issue, in fact: It asks, and answers, the questions that most need to be asked.

This editor’s note appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Questions That Most Need Asking.”

Adam Kinzinger: Kevin McCarthy Is the Man to Blame

2023-10-31T15:54:27-04:00

Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois, is best known for his service on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. He and Liz Cheney were the only two Republicans on that committee, and completely noncoincidentally, neither one is in Congress today. The new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is more typical of the House Republican caucus: He was a leader of the election deniers.

In his new book, Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, Kinzinger details his manifold struggles: with his conscience, with his ambition, and, ultimately, with the Republicans who attempted to subvert the Constitution. A six-term congressman and an Air Force veteran, Kinzinger today is chastened but still somewhat hopeful—not hopeful about the short-term future of the Republican Party, but hopeful that pro-democracy voters are still sufficient in number to turn back the authoritarians.

I first met Kinzinger in 2014, when we were both members of the late Senator John McCain’s delegation to the Munich Security Conference. Also in that delegation were Senator Lindsey Graham and then-Representative Mike Pompeo, who later became Donald Trump’s CIA director and secretary of state.

[Peter Wehner: The man who refused to bow]

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of a conversation I had with Kinzinger earlier this month on stage at the Democracy360 conference, sponsored by the Karsh Institute at the University of Virginia. We started by talking about that now-unlikely constellation of Republicans: Kinzinger, McCain, Graham, and Pompeo.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You guys were all in the same camp, the muscular internationalist Republicans. Two of you went one way, and two of you went another way. What happened?

Adam Kinzinger: Craven politics, craven power—that’s what it is. This is something I still try to grapple with every day, when I look back on January 6. I always thought everybody had a red line. Like, okay, we can play politics to a point, but there’s a red line we'll never cross. I’ve learned that’s not the case.

I’d say [we] are all still probably for a muscular foreign policy. The difference, though, between people that went one way or another is the recognition that U.S. foreign policy also means we have to have a healthy democracy at home, and that democracy-building overseas is fine, but having a strong democracy here, where people have faith in the voting system and faith that whoever gets the most votes will win, is just as important.

I think there are unfortunately too many people that got into the Trump sphere, that it just became about power, identity, and not looking at the broader picture of your impact in this world.

Goldberg: So I want to stay on this for a while because I want you to name names.

Kinzinger: I can name names for an hour. A couple off the top of my head: One of the ones I’m most disappointed in generally is [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, because I always thought that McCarthy had some version of a political soul. And I’ve come to realize that to him it was all about just the attainment of power. Somebody like Ted Cruz never surprised me. He’s always been a charlatan. But Lindsey Graham has also been a big disappointment to me, because I’ve traveled with Lindsey, leading congressional-delegation trips around the world. I always thought he and I were eye to eye on a lot of these foreign-policy issues. And to watch him so closely adopt and closely support Donald Trump, when Trump was doing exactly what Graham was preaching against just prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene, was a pretty disappointing moment.

[Read: ‘We put sharp knives on the hands of children’]

During this speaker fiasco, I would listen to names during the roll call, people like Mike McCaul, people like Mike Gallagher, and hear them say the name Jim Jordan and know, for a fact, they have no respect for Jim Jordan. But it’s all about that determination to survive politically. I have come to learn that people fear losing their identity and losing their tribe more than they come to fear death.

Goldberg: You saw Lindsey Graham throughout this process. What were conversations like? Did you ever just say, “Lindsey, what are you doing?”

Kinzinger: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, our relationship hasn’t been that strong in the last few years, obviously. So I can’t say there were recent conversations, but it would just be like, “What’s going on? So Donald Trump did this thing. Why are you okay with that?”

People have given so much of their soul, of their values. They’ve compromised so much that at some point to stop compromising, or to recognize that this is a mistake and you need to correct course, would be an indictment against who you are and what you have done for the last four or five years. And I think Lindsey has been a victim of that. He liked the idea of being in the room with Donald Trump.

And I will tell you, I’ve met with Donald Trump a number of times; he is actually one of the most fun people to meet with, because he’s crazy, but it’s like a fun crazy. And he’s really good at drawing you in and making you feel seen at that moment, because he knows how to manipulate you. And it works perfectly with Lindsey. Lindsey says, “Now I have a seat at the table. I care about foreign policy.” But what he didn’t realize is that bargain came with selling who he was as a person.

Goldberg: If John McCain hadn’t died, would Graham have gone over?

Kinzinger: I don’t think so. I think Lindsey Graham needs a strong person to mentor him or carry him, and it was John McCain. And when John McCain passed, the next guy, the strongman that Lindsey Graham was drawn to, was Donald Trump.

Goldberg: You got to Congress when the Republican Party is still the Republican Party you imagined it to be. One question that people like you always get is: Were you kidding yourself the whole time, or did something actually change?

Kinzinger: Looking back, I can say, “Oh, yeah, there were signs from the very beginning,” but I was part of the moderate Republicans, who constantly had this optimistic view that the Republican Party was this thing of smaller government, hope, opportunity, strong national defense, that kind of stuff. And I always just saw these elements of crazy nationalism, of authoritarianism, of racism exist in the party, but it’s a battle. And I’m fighting on the good side here to try to save the party. And then when Donald Trump came, we lost that fight.

I think the moment I started to realize, like, Okay, we have lost, was January 6. Before that point, I thought, Donald Trump is going to lose; people are going to wake up. Even on January 6 I said, “People are definitely going to wake up now.”

Now, with the benefit of time and looking back, I can say, “You know what? Those strains were there.” Some of them were hidden because it was not yet socially acceptable to say things like “Let’s throw out the Constitution.” I hear a lot of people say “You’re naive, because the Republican Party’s always been this way.” And inevitably those are people on the left that have always had a bad view of the GOP. I understand the viewpoint, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think there were a lot of really good factions in the GOP.

Goldberg: Explain the psychology there. What motivates this outburst of anger on the part of the voters that led to Trump’s triumph?

Kinzinger: I think the resentment came from Fox News and the right-wing-media echo chamber. Why do I say that? So this is something I take a lot of personal blame for being part of as well, although I think I did better than most.

In 2010, we learned that fear is the best way to raise money ever. If I send you an email and it says, “Dear Jeffrey, I want to lower tax rates and we need some help, blah, blah, blah,” you may give me money. But if I send you an email and it says, “Nancy Pelosi is trying to murder you and your family,” and in essence, I convince you that I’m the only thing standing between you and the life of you or your family, you’ll part with anything, including a significant part of your fixed income from Social Security. So in 2010, we learned this. And instead of using that kind of fire in a controlled way like politicians do, sometimes we let it burn. There was always this fire going, and we stoked it too far.

Goldberg: How do you reach people who haven’t been reached, to change their minds? There’s 30, 35 percent of the voters who are hard-core.

Kinzinger: Well, if the January 6 committee didn’t do it and the people still believe the scandals, I’m not sure that 35 percent can be turned on a dime today. But here’s the two things we can do. We can convince their children. You would be amazed how many children have a different viewpoint than their parents, and how they can pull their parents off the ledge. I did that with my parents when I got elected. My dad would call, and he’s watching Fox News all the time. And I finally said, “Dad, I’m in the middle of this and I don’t have near the stress you do, and you can’t even see the difference. Right?” And he’s like, “You know what? You’re right.”

The other thing is, if only every one of those people running against Donald Trump in the primary would tell the dang truth, people would actually believe it. Donald Trump gets indicted with all these different indictments and then they ask, you know, ‘What do you think, Tim Scott?” “What do you think, Nikki Haley?” “What do you think, Vivek Ramaswamy? What are your feelings on these indictments?” But every one of those people say this is a witch hunt.

Goldberg: I appreciate the view. I’m not sure I believe you, though. The truest thing that Donald Trump ever said was that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him. It seems like he understood something elemental there.

Kinzinger: I guess I would caveat that. I don’t necessarily believe, if Nikki Haley alone came out and said it, that it would be game over for Donald Trump. I think this is a specific moment where if all these people told the base the truth, they could damage his support significantly.

Goldberg: Stay on this question of Trump and Trumpism. Who do you blame for his return?

Kinzinger: One person: Kevin McCarthy. And I’m going to tell you exactly why. So there was a period after January 6 for two or three weeks. It was quiet. And we’d meet in a room with all the Republican men and women of Congress. Kevin would stand up, all that stuff—if you’re in the room, you could sense there was this trepidation in the room about, like, “We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know where we’re going. What are we supposed to do?” Until the day Kevin McCarthy showed up with a picture of Donald Trump. And just like that, everything changed.

[David Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?]

Goldberg: You’re talking about his visit to Mar-a-Lago.

Kinzinger: His visit to Mar-a-Lago. Those of us that voted for impeachment were leading the charge against Donald Trump. People were actually coming up to us and asking us, “How do I do this?” We were talking about “How do we get the downtown PAC community to only support those that are pro-democracy?” We were going to set up our own scoring and vetting system to say This person voted against certification; this person voted for it, and only give money to the people that voted for it. And you think about the power that could have had.

Then that picture happened in Mar-a-Lago, and all of a sudden we went from considering doing a vote of no confidence against Kevin McCarthy because of his role in January 6 to a point where everybody turned against me, Liz Cheney, and the others that voted to impeach, all because of that picture.

Goldberg: So you must be at least a little bit happy about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall.

Kinzinger: I’m very happy about it. I’m very happy. I’ve got to be honest. I’m sorry. It’s not great for the country, but it’s really good.

Goldberg: You’re describing Kevin McCarthy as a person who went along with the radical pro-Trump, anti-democracy right and then he eventually got eaten by them.

Kinzinger: This dynamic to an extent has always existed. It would be people like me fighting against the Jim Jordans, but it was behind the scenes. Now it’s brought out to the open because for the first time you now see the people like me—I will call them the moderates, even though there’s really no moderates left. The moderates are finally standing up and fighting back with some of the tactics that Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan used.

Why is it that terrorists are so powerful? Because they’re willing to do something that most other people aren’t: you know, commit an act of terror if you’re a legislative terrorist, like John Boehner called Jim Jordan very accurately, and he’s willing to vacate the chair or Matt Gaetz is willing to vacate the chair. They’re powerful unless people push back. And that’s what’s happening. How does a Kevin McCarthy get to this point? A man who I thought had a red line, I always thought he was a very good politician and that he could play around the edges, but he wouldn’t cross [the line]. And in January, he cut a deal that made what happened a few weeks ago completely obvious. Everybody knew this would happen. That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are. And this is a moment where the Republican Party either will collapse in a heap of fire or they will actually fix themselves somehow through this.

The country needs a healthy Republican Party regardless of what you feel about the Republican Party, because we need a liberal and a conservative philosophy competing in the United States. That’s what a healthy democracy is.

Goldberg: Does Trumpism survive Trump?

Kinzinger: Five months ago, if we were sitting here and you said, “Does it survive past Trump?” I’d be like, absolutely. Because Trumpism has now been learned by others. But I’m starting to play with the idea that maybe enough Republicans are starting to get exhausted of Trump and maybe Trumpism doesn’t survive. Donald Trump got elected in front of a wave of people that wanted to break the system. But there is an undercurrent right now of people that are desperate to fix and heal the system. And when that right person comes along, like an Obama-type character, I think that may revolutionize the future, but I’m not sure.

Goldberg: Can you imagine yourself back in Congress as a Republican?

Kinzinger: That’s two different questions. Could I imagine myself back in the House? No. Could I imagine myself back in politics? Yes. Could I imagine myself back in politics as a Republican? Not in the current environment.

Goldberg: In other words, do you think that the fever would break to a point where the Republican Party would be a different party and have you back?

Kinzinger: I think someday; I just don’t know when that’s going to be. And it’s not now. I think if I ran as a Republican now, I wouldn’t do too well.

Goldberg: Are you still a Republican?

Adam Kinzinger: It’s an interesting question. I will not vote Republican. I voted Democratic last election. I intend to vote Democratic this election, not because I’ve changed my mind necessarily—I’ve moderated, you know, quite a bit—but because I think it is a binary choice. Do you like democracy or don’t you like democracy? And I think that the only thing we can vote on in 2024 is democracy. So I’m not giving up the title Republican yet, because I haven’t changed. They have. And I refuse to give them that satisfaction yet. But I feel like a man without a party.

Goldberg: Why do your colleagues want to stay in Congress so badly?

Kinzinger: I don’t know.

Goldberg: It doesn’t look like the greatest job.

Kinzinger: It’s not the greatest job. But, okay, when you walk into a room for five or 10 years and no matter what room you walk in, unless it’s the White House, you are the center of attention because you’re the highest-ranking person there and you’ve spent your whole life to attain this job—a lot of my colleagues spent everything to become that. Losing that freaks you out. As somebody that announced I wasn’t running again, the thing you fear the most is how do I feel the second after I put out that press release?

My co-pilot in Iraq sent me a text that said, “I’m ashamed to have ever served with you.” I had family that sent me a certified letter saying they’re ashamed to share my last name, that I was working for the devil. I used to laugh about it 10 months ago, but I’ve really allowed myself to accept what damage that’s done to me and my family. It’s not easy to go through. But I’m going to tell you, I have 0.0 percent regret for what I did, and I would do it all the exact same again.

The Patriot

2023-09-21T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

The missiles that comprise the land component of America’s nuclear triad are scattered across thousands of square miles of prairie and farmland, mainly in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. About 150 of the roughly 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles currently on alert are dispersed in a wide circle around Minot Air Force Base, in the upper reaches of North Dakota. From Minot, it would take an ICBM about 25 minutes to reach Moscow.

These nuclear weapons are under the control of the 91st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command, and it was to the 91st—the “Rough Riders”—that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid a visit in March 2021. I accompanied him on the trip. A little more than two months had passed since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and America’s nuclear arsenal was on Milley’s mind.

In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.

Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.

But his views emerged in a number of books published after Trump left office, written by authors who had spoken with Milley, and many other civilian and military officials, on background. In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”

These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, considered Trump to be a “fucking moron.” John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff in 2017 and 2018, has said that Trump is the “most flawed person” he’s ever met. James Mattis, who is also a retired Marine general and served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, has told friends and colleagues that the 45th president was “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.” It is widely known that Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, believed that the president didn’t understand his own duties, much less the oath that officers swear to the Constitution, or military ethics, or the history of America.

[From the October 2019 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on why James Mattis resigned as secretary of defense]

Twenty men have served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs since the position was created after World War II. Until Milley, none had been forced to confront the possibility that a president would try to foment or provoke a coup in order to illegally remain in office. A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic

The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” McMaster said to me.

For the actions he took in the last months of the Trump presidency, Milley, whose four-year term as chairman, and 43-year career as an Army officer, will conclude at the end of September, has been condemned by elements of the far right. Kash Patel, whom Trump installed in a senior Pentagon role in the final days of his administration, refers to Milley as “the Kraken of the swamp.” Trump himself has accused Milley of treason. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump White House official, has said that Milley deserves to be placed in “shackles and leg irons.” If a second Trump administration were to attempt this, however, the Trumpist faction would be opposed by the large group of ex-Trump-administration officials who believe that the former president continues to pose a unique threat to American democracy, and who believe that Milley is a hero for what he did to protect the country and the Constitution.

“Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” Kelly told me. “Mark had a very, very difficult reality to deal with in his first two years as chairman, and he served honorably and well. The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” Kelly, along with other former administration officials, has argued that Trump has a contemptuous view of the military, and that this contempt made it extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty.

Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told me that no Joint Chiefs chairman has ever been tested in the manner Milley was. “General Milley has done an extraordinary job under the most extraordinary of circumstances,” Gates said. “I’ve worked for eight presidents, and not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon in their angriest moments would have considered doing or saying some of the things that were said between the election and January 6.”

Gates believes that Milley, who served as his military assistant when Gates was Bush’s secretary of defense, was uniquely qualified to defend the Constitution from Trump during those final days. “General Milley expected to be fired every single day between Election Day and January 6,” he said. A less confident and assertive chairman might not have held the line against Trump’s antidemocratic plots.

When I mentioned Gates’s assessment to Milley, he demurred. “I think that any of my peers would have done the same thing. Why do I say that? First of all, I know them. Second, we all think the same way about the Constitution.”

Some of those who served in Trump’s administration say that he appointed Milley chairman because he was drawn to Milley’s warrior reputation, tanklike build, and four-star eyebrows. Senator Angus King of Maine, a political independent who is a supporter of Milley’s, told me, “Trump picked him as chief because he looks like what Trump thinks a general should look like.” But Trump misjudged him, King said. “He thought he would be loyal to him and not to the Constitution.” Trump had been led to believe that Milley would be more malleable than other generals. This misunderstanding threatened to become indelibly ingrained in Washington when Milley made what many people consider to be his most serious mistake as chairman. During the George Floyd protests in early June 2020, Milley, wearing combat fatigues, followed Trump out of the White House to Lafayette Square, which had just been cleared of demonstrators by force. Milley realized too late that Trump, who continued across the street to pose for a now-infamous photo while standing in front of a vandalized church, was manipulating him into a visual endorsement of his martial approach to the demonstrations. Though Milley left the entourage before it reached the church, the damage was significant. “We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Milley said to his security chief. “I’m fucking done with this shit.” Esper would later say that he and Milley had been duped.

For Milley, Lafayette Square was an agonizing episode; he described it later as a “road-to-Damascus moment.” The week afterward, in a commencement address to the National Defense University, he apologized to the armed forces and the country. “I should not have been there,” he said. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” His apology earned him the permanent enmity of Trump, who told him that apologies are a sign of weakness.

On June 1, 2020, Milley and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (center) accompanied Donald Trump partway to St. John’s Church after the clearing of Lafayette Square. Milley’s apology for appearing to lend military support to a political photo op earned him Trump’s enmity. (Patrick Semansky / AP)

Joseph Dunford, the Marine general who preceded Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had also faced onerous and unusual challenges. But during the first two years of the Trump presidency, Dunford had been supported by officials such as Kelly, Mattis, Tillerson, and McMaster. These men attempted, with intermittent success, to keep the president’s most dangerous impulses in check. (According to the Associated Press, Kelly and Mattis made a pact with each other that one of them would remain in the country at all times, so the president would never be left unmonitored.) By the time Milley assumed the chairman’s role, all of those officials were gone—driven out or fired.

At the top of the list of worries for these officials was the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. Early in Trump’s term, when Milley was serving as chief of staff of the Army, Trump entered a cycle of rhetorical warfare with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. At certain points, Trump raised the possibility of attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons, according to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s book, Donald Trump v. The United States. Kelly, Dunford, and others tried to convince Trump that his rhetoric—publicly mocking Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” for instance—could trigger nuclear war. “If you keep pushing this clown, he could do something with nuclear weapons,” Kelly told him, explaining that Kim, though a dictator, could be pressured by his own military elites to attack American interests in response to Trump’s provocations. When that argument failed to work, Kelly spelled out for the president that a nuclear exchange could cost the lives of millions of Koreans and Japanese, as well as those of Americans throughout the Pacific. Guam, Kelly told him, falls within range of North Korean missiles. “Guam isn’t America,” Trump responded.

[Read: Donald Trump and the threat of nuclear war]

Though the specter of a recklessly instigated nuclear confrontation abated when Joe Biden came to office, the threat was still on Milley’s mind, which is why he set out to visit Minot that day in March.

In addition to housing the 91st Missile Wing, Minot is home to the Air Force’s 5th Bomb Wing, and I watched Milley spend the morning inspecting a fleet of B‑52 bombers. Milley enjoys meeting the rank and file, and he quizzed air crews—who appeared a little unnerved at being interrogated with such exuberance by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—about their roles, needs, and responsibilities. We then flew by helicopter to a distant launch-control facility, to visit the missile officers in charge of the Minuteman IIIs. The underground bunker is staffed continuously by two launch officers, who are responsible for a flight of 10 missiles, each secured in hardened underground silos. The two officers seated at the facility’s console described to Milley their launch procedures.

The individual silos, connected to the launch-control facility by buried cable, are surrounded by chain-link fences. They are placed at some distance from one another, an arrangement that would force Russia or China to expend a large number of their own missiles to preemptively destroy America’s. The silos are also protected by electronic surveillance, and by helicopter and ground patrols. The Hueys carrying us to one of the silos landed well outside the fence, in a farmer’s field. Accompanying Milley was Admiral Charles Richard, who was then the commander of Strategic Command, or Stratcom. Stratcom is in charge of America’s nuclear force; the commander is the person who would receive orders from the president to launch nuclear weapons—by air, sea, or land—at an adversary.

It was windy and cold at the silo. Air Force officers showed us the 110-ton blast door, and then we walked to an open hatch. Richard mounted a rickety metal ladder leading down into the silo and disappeared from view. Then Milley began his descent. “Just don’t touch anything,” an Air Force noncommissioned officer said. “Sir.”

Then it was my turn. “No smoking down there,” the NCO said, helpfully. The ladder dropped 60 feet into a twilight haze, ending at a catwalk that ringed the missile itself. The Minuteman III weighs about 80,000 pounds and is about 60 feet tall. The catwalk surrounded the top of the missile, eye level with its conical warhead. Milley and I stood next to each other, staring silently at the bomb. The warhead of the typical Minuteman III has at least 20 times the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. We were close enough to touch it, and I, at least, was tempted.

Milley broke the silence. “You ever see one of these before?”

“No,” I answered.

“Me neither,” Milley said.

I couldn’t mask my surprise.

“I’m an infantryman,” he said, smiling. “We don’t have these in the infantry.”

He continued, “I’m testifying in front of Congress on nuclear posture, and I think it’s important to see these things for myself.”

Richard joined us. “This is an indispensable component of the nuclear triad,” he said, beginning a standard Strategic Command pitch. “Our goal is to communicate to potential adversaries: ‘Not today.’ ” (When I later visited Richard at Offutt Air Force Base, the headquarters of Stratcom, near Omaha, Nebraska, I saw that his office features a large sign with this same slogan, hanging above portraits of the leaders of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.)

I used this moment in the silo to discuss with Milley the stability of America’s nuclear arsenal under Trump. The former president’s ignorance of nuclear doctrine had been apparent well before his exchanges with Kim Jong Un. In a 2015 Republican-primary debate, Trump was asked, “Of the three legs of the triad … do you have a priority?” Trump’s answer: “I think—I think, for me, nuclear is just—the power, the devastation is very important to me.” After this, Senator Marco Rubio, a foreign-policy expert who was one of Trump’s Republican-primary opponents, called Trump an “erratic individual” who could not be trusted with the country’s nuclear codes. (Rubio subsequently embraced Trump, praising him for bringing “a lot of people and energy into the Republican Party.”)

I described to Milley a specific worry I’d had, illustrated most vividly by one of the more irrational public statements Trump made as president. On January 2, 2018, Trump tweeted: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

This tweet did not initiate a fatal escalatory cycle, but with it Trump created conditions that easily could have, as he did at several other moments during his presidency. Standing beside the missile in the silo, I expressed my concern about this to Milley.

“Wasn’t going to happen,” he responded.

“You’re not in the chain of command,” I noted. The chairman is an adviser to the president, not a field commander.

“True,” he answered. “The chain of command runs from the president to the secretary of defense to that guy,” he said, pointing to Richard, who had moved to the other side of the catwalk. “We’ve got excellent professionals throughout the system.” He then said, “Nancy Pelosi was worried about this. I told her she didn’t have to worry, that we have systems in place.” By this, he meant that the system is built to resist the efforts of rogue actors.

Shortly after the assault on the Capitol on January 6, Pelosi, who was then the speaker of the House, called Milley to ask if the nation’s nuclear weapons were secure. “He’s crazy,” she said of Trump. “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.” According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, who recounted this conversation in their book, Peril, Milley replied, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.” He then said, according to the authors, “I want you to know this in your heart of hearts, I can guarantee you 110 percent that the military, use of military power, whether it’s nuclear or a strike in a foreign country of any kind, we’re not going to do anything illegal or crazy.”

General Milley outside his residence on Generals’ Row at Fort Myer, alongside Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia (Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic)

Shortly after the call from Pelosi, Milley gathered the Pentagon’s top nuclear officers—one joined by telephone from Stratcom headquarters—for an emergency meeting. The flag officers in attendance included Admiral Richard; the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General John Hyten, who was Richard’s predecessor at Stratcom; and the leaders of the National Military Command Center, the highly secure Pentagon facility from which emergency-action messages—the actual instructions to launch nuclear weapons—would emanate. The center is staffed continuously, and each eight-hour shift conducts drills on nuclear procedures. In the meeting in his office, Milley told the assembled generals and admirals that, out of an abundance of caution, he wanted to go over the procedures and processes for deploying nuclear weapons. Hyten summarized the standard procedures—including ensuring the participation of the Joint Chiefs in any conversation with the president about imminent war. At the conclusion of Hyten’s presentation, according to meeting participants, Milley said, “If anything weird or crazy happens, just make sure we all know.” Milley then went to each officer in turn and asked if he understood the procedures. They all affirmed that they did. Milley told other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “All we’ve got to do is see to it that the plane lands on January 20,” when the constitutional transfer of power to the new president would be completed.

I found Milley’s confidence only somewhat reassuring. The American president is a nuclear monarch, invested with unilateral authority to release weapons that could destroy the planet many times over.

I mentioned to Milley a conversation I’d had with James Mattis when he was the secretary of defense. I had told Mattis, only half-joking, that I was happy he was a physically fit Marine. If it ever came to it, I said, he could forcibly wrest the nuclear football—the briefcase containing, among other things, the authentication codes needed to order a nuclear strike—from the president. Mattis, a wry man, smiled and said that I was failing to take into account the mission of the Secret Service.

When I mentioned to Milley my view that Trump was mentally and morally unequipped to make decisions concerning war and peace, he would say only, “The president alone decides to launch nuclear weapons, but he doesn’t launch them alone.” He then repeated the sentence.

He has also said in private settings, more colloquially, “The president can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide to push a button. One reason for this is that there’s no button to push.”

During conversations with Milley and others about the nuclear challenge, a story from the 1970s came frequently to my mind. The story concerns an Air Force officer named Harold Hering, who was dismissed from service for asking a question about a crucial flaw in America’s nuclear command-and-control system—a flaw that had no technical solution. Hering was a Vietnam veteran who, in 1973, was training to become a Minuteman crew member. One day in class, he asked, “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The Air Force concluded that launch officers did not need to know the answer to this question, and they discharged him. Hering appealed his discharge, and responded to the Air Force’s assertion as follows: “I have to say I feel I do have a need to know, because I am a human being.”

The U.S. military possesses procedures and manuals for every possible challenge. Except Hering’s.

After we climbed out of the missile silo, I asked Milley how much time the president and the secretary of defense would have to make a decision about using nuclear weapons, in the event of a reported enemy attack. Milley would not answer in specifics, but he acknowledged—as does everyone in the business of thinking about nuclear weapons—that the timeline could be acutely brief. For instance, it is generally believed that if surveillance systems detected an imminent launch from Russia, the president could have as few as five or six minutes to make a decision. “At the highest levels, folks are trained to work through decisions at a rapid clip,” Milley said. “These decisions would be very difficult to make. Sometimes the information would be very limited. But we face a lot of hard decisions on a regular basis.”

The story of Milley’s promotion to the chairmanship captures much about the disorder in Donald Trump’s mind, and in his White House.

By 2018, Trump was growing tired of General Dunford, a widely respected Marine officer. After one White House briefing by Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” Trump did not consider Dunford to be sufficiently “loyal,” and he was seeking a general who would pledge his personal fealty. Such generals don’t tend to exist in the American system—Michael Flynn, Trump’s QAnon-addled first national security adviser, is an exception—but Trump was adamant.

The president had also grown tired of James Mattis, the defense secretary. He had hired Mattis in part because he’d been told his nickname was “Mad Dog.” It wasn’t—that had been a media confection—and Mattis proved far more cerebral, and far more independent-minded, than Trump could handle. So when Mattis recommended David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, to become the next chairman, Trump rejected the choice. (In ordinary presidencies, the defense secretary chooses the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the president, by custom, accedes to the choice.)

At that point, Milley was Mattis’s choice to serve in a dual-hatted role, as NATO supreme allied commander in Europe and the head of U.S. European Command. Mattis has said he believed Milley’s bullish personality made him the perfect person to push America’s European allies to spend more on their collective defense, and to focus on the looming threat from Russia.

But a group of ex–Army officers then close to Trump had been lobbying for an Army general for the chairmanship, and Milley, the Army chief of staff, was the obvious candidate. Despite a reputation for being prolix and obstreperous in a military culture that, at its highest reaches, values discretion and rhetorical restraint, Milley was popular with many Army leaders, in part because of the reputation he’d developed in Iraq and Afghanistan as an especially effective war fighter. A son of working-class Boston, Milley is a former hockey player who speaks bluntly, sometimes brutally. “I’m Popeye the fucking sailorman,” he has told friends. “I yam what I yam.” This group of former Army officers, including Esper, who was then serving as the secretary of the Army, and David Urban, a West Point graduate who was key to Trump’s Pennsylvania election effort, believed that Trump would take to Milley, who had both an undergraduate degree from Princeton and the personality of a hockey enforcer. “Knowing Trump, I knew that he was looking for a complete carnivore, and Milley fit that bill,” Urban told me. “He checked so many boxes for Trump.”

In late 2018, Milley was called to meet the president. Before the meeting, he visited Kelly in his West Wing office, where he was told that Trump might ask him to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But, if given a choice, Kelly said, he should avoid the role. “If he asks you to go to Europe, you should go. It’s crazy here,” Kelly said. At the time of this meeting, Kelly was engaged in a series of disputes with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner (he referred to them acidly as the “Royal Couple”), and he was having little success imposing order over an administration in chaos. Each day, ex–administration officials told me, aides such as Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro—along with Trump himself—would float absurd, antidemocratic ideas. Dunford had become an expert at making himself scarce in the White House, seeking to avoid these aides and others.

Kelly escorted Milley to the Oval Office. Milley saluted Trump and sat across from the president, who was seated at the Resolute Desk.

“You’re here because I’m interviewing you for the job of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Trump said. “What do you think of that?”

Milley responded: “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” At which point, Trump turned to Kelly and said, “What’s that other job Mattis wants him to do? Something in Europe?”

Kelly answered, “That’s SACEUR, the supreme allied commander in Europe.”

Trump asked, “What does that guy do?”

“That’s the person who commands U.S. forces in Europe,” Kelly said.

“Which is the better job?” Trump asked.

Kelly answered that the chairmanship is the better job. Trump offered Milley the role. The business of the meeting done, the conversation then veered in many different directions. But at one point Trump returned to the job offer, saying to Milley, “Mattis says you’re soft on transgenders. Are you soft on transgenders?”

Milley responded, “I’m not soft on transgender or hard on transgender. I’m about standards in the U.S. military, about who is qualified to serve in the U.S. military. I don’t care who you sleep with or what you are.”

The offer stood.

It would be nearly a year before Dunford retired and Milley assumed the role. At his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.

It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)

[Read: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’]

These sorts of moments, which would grow in intensity and velocity, were disturbing to Milley. As a veteran of multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had buried 242 soldiers who’d served under his command. Milley’s family venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.

Milley was raised in a blue-collar section of Winchester, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, where nearly everyone of a certain age—including his mother—was a World War II veteran. Mary Murphy served in the women’s branch of the Naval Reserve; the man who became her husband, Alexander Milley, was a Navy corpsman who was part of the assault landings in the central Pacific at Kwajalein, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. Alexander was just out of high school when he enlisted. “My dad brought his hockey skates to the Pacific,” Milley told me. “He was pretty naive.”

Though he was born after it ended, World War II made a powerful impression on Mark Milley, in part because it had imprinted itself so permanently on his father. When I traveled to Japan with Milley this summer, he told me a story about the stress his father had experienced during his service. Milley was undergoing a bit of stress himself on this trip. He was impeccably diplomatic with his Japanese counterparts, but I got the impression that he still finds visiting the country to be slightly surreal. At one point he was given a major award in the name of the emperor. “If my father could only see this,” he said to me, and then recounted the story.

It took place at Fort Drum, in upstate New York, when Milley was taking command of the 10th Mountain Division, in 2011. His father and his father’s younger brother Tom, a Korean War veteran, came to attend his change-of-command ceremony. “My father always hated officers,” Milley recalled. “Every day from the time I was a second lieutenant to colonel, he was like, ‘When are you getting out?’ Then, all of sudden, it was ‘My son, the general.’ ”

He continued, “We have the whole thing—troops on the field, regalia, cannons, bugle—and then we have a reception back at the house. I’ve got the Japanese flag up on the wall, right over the fireplace. It’s a flag my father took from Saipan. So that night, he’s sitting there in his T-shirt and boxers; he’s having probably more than one drink, just staring at the Japanese flag. One or two in the morning, we hear this primeval-type screaming. He’s screaming at his brother, ‘Tom, you got to get up!’ And I’ll say it the way he said it: ‘Tom, the Japs are here, the Japs are here! We gotta get the kids outta here!’ So my wife elbows me and says, ‘Your father,’ and I say, ‘Yes, I figured that out,’ and I go out and my dad, he’s not in good shape by then—in his 80s, Parkinson’s, not super mobile—and yet he’s running down the hallway. I grab him by both arms. His eyes are bugging out and I say, ‘Dad, it’s okay, you’re with the 10th Mountain Division on the Canadian border.’ And his brother Tom comes out and says, ‘Goddamnit, just go to fucking bed, for Chrissakes. You won your war; we just tied ours.’ And I feel like I’m in some B movie. Anyway, he calmed down, but you see, this is what happens. One hundred percent of people who see significant combat have some form of PTSD. For years he wouldn’t go to the VA, and I finally said, ‘You hit the beach at Iwo Jima and Saipan. The VA is there for you; you might as well use it.’ And they diagnosed him, finally.”

Milley with the flag his father took from Saipan during World War II. Seeing it on Milley’s wall once plunged his father, who had PTSD, into a combat flashback. (Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic)

Milley never doubted that he would follow his parents into military service, though he had no plans to make the Army a career. At Princeton, which recruited him to play hockey, he was a political-science major, writing his senior thesis on Irish revolutionary guerrilla movements. He joined ROTC, and he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June 1980. He began his Army career as maintenance officer in a motor pool of the 82nd Airborne; this did not excite him, so he maneuvered his way onto a path that took him to the Green Berets.

His first overseas mission was to parachute into Somalia in 1984 with a five-man Special Forces A-Team to train a Somali army detachment that was fighting Soviet-backed Ethiopia. “It was basically dysentery and worms,” he recalled. “We were out there in the middle of nowhere. It was all small-unit tactics, individual skills. We were boiling water we got from cow ponds, and breakfast was an ostrich egg and flatbread.” His abiding interest in insurgencies led him to consider a career in the CIA, but he was dissuaded by a recruiter who told him working in the agency would make having any kind of family life hard. In 1985, he was sent to Fort Ord, where he “got really excited about the Army.” This was during the Reagan-era defense buildup, when the Army—now all-volunteer—was emerging from what Milley describes as its “post-Vietnam malaise.” This was a time of war-fighting innovation, which Milley would champion as he rose in rank. He would go on to take part in the invasion of Panama, and he helped coordinate the occupation of northern Haiti during the U.S. intervention there in 1994.

Clockwise from top left: Milley played high-school hockey at Belmont Hill School, in Massachusetts, in the mid-’70s. Milley getting his ROTC commission at Princeton in 1980. Milley with his mother and father, both World War II veterans, at his ROTC commissioning ceremony in 1980. Milley (left) deployed in Somalia with the Green Berets of the 5th Special Forces Group in the 1980s. (Courtesy of the Milley family)

After September 11, 2001, Milley deployed repeatedly as a brigade commander to Iraq and Afghanistan. Ross Davidson, a retired colonel who served as Milley’s operations officer in Baghdad when he commanded a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, recalled Milley’s mantra: “Move to the sound of the guns.” Davidson went on to say, with admiration, “I’ve been blown up, like, nine times with the guy.”

Davidson witnessed what is often mentioned as Milley’s most notable act of personal bravery, when he ran across a booby-trapped bridge at night to stop a pair of U.S. tanks from crossing. “We had no communication with the tanks, and the boss just ran across the bridge without thinking of his own safety to keep those tanks from blowing themselves up,” he told me. “It was something to see.”

Davidson and others who fought for Milley remember him as ceaselessly aggressive. “We’re rolling down a street and we knew we were going to get hit—the street just went deserted—and bam, smack, a round explodes to our right,” Davidson said. “Everything goes black, the windshield splinters in front of us, one of our gunners took a chunk of shrapnel. We bailed out and Milley says, ‘Oh, you want a fight? Let’s fight.’ We started hunting down bad guys. Milley sends one Humvee back with the wounded, and then we’re kicking doors down.” At another point, Davidson said, “he wanted to start a fight in this particular area north of the city, farm fields mixed with little hamlets. And so we moved to the middle of this field, just circled the wagons and waited to draw fire. He was brought up in a school of thought that says a commander who conducts command-and-control from a fixed command post is isolated in many regards. He was in the battle space almost every day.”

Once, when the commanding general of the 10th Mountain Division, Lloyd Austin—now the secretary of defense—was visiting Baghdad, Milley took him on a tour of the city. Milley, Austin, and Davidson were in a Humvee when it was hit.

“Mark has the gift of gab. I don’t remember what he was talking about, but he was talking when there was an explosion. Our second vehicle got hit. Austin’s window shattered, but we didn’t stop; we punched through,” Davidson said. “Wedged into Austin’s door was this four-inch chunk of shrapnel. If it had breached the door seam, it would have taken Austin’s head clean off. It was a ‘Holy shit, we almost got the commanding general killed’ type of situation. That wouldn’t have gone well.”

(When I mentioned this incident recently to Austin, he said, “I thought that was Mark trying to kill his boss.” That’s an elaborate way to kill the boss, I said. “You’ve got to make it look credible,” Austin answered, smiling.)

Dunford, Milley’s predecessor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the four-star commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2013 when Milley, by then a three-star general, came to serve as the international joint commander of all ground forces in the country. He describes Milley as ambitious and creative. “He was very forward-leaning, and he set the bar very high for himself and others,” Dunford told me. “He puts a lot of pressure on himself to perform. There’s just a level of ambition and aggressiveness there. It would be hard for me to imagine that someone could have accomplished as much as he did in the role. Hockey was the right sport for him.”

Clockwise from top left: In the late ’90s, Milley (seated on truck) served in the 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea, the forward line against a North Korean invasion. Returning home to Fort Ord, California, after the invasion of Panama, January 1990. Milley speaks to members of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, which he commanded, in Iraq in 2005. In 1994, Milley helped coordinate the U.S. occupation of northern Haiti. (Courtesy of the Milley family)

Soon after becoming chairman, Milley found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other. In November 2019, Trump decided to intervene in three different cases that had been working their way through the military justice system. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State prisoner. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. (Gallagher’s nickname was “Blade.”) In an extraordinary move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him in rank. Trump also pardoned a junior Army officer, Clint Lorance, convicted of second-degree murder for ordering soldiers to shoot three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. In the third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he suspected was a bomb maker for the Taliban and then covering up the killing. At a rally in Florida that month, Trump boasted, “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state.”

The president’s intervention included a decision that Gallagher should be allowed to keep his Trident insignia, which is worn by all SEALs in good standing. The pin features an anchor and an eagle holding a flintlock pistol while sitting atop a horizontal trident. It is one of the most coveted insignia in the entire U.S. military.

This particular intervention was onerous for the Navy, because by tradition only a commanding officer or a group of SEALs on a Trident Review Board are meant to decide if one of their own is unworthy of being a SEAL. Late one night, on Air Force One, Milley tried to convince Trump that his intrusion was damaging Navy morale. They were flying from Washington to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to attend a “dignified transfer,” the repatriation ceremony for fallen service members.

“Mr. President,” Milley said, “you have to understand that the SEALs are a tribe within a larger tribe, the Navy. And it’s up to them to figure out what to do with Gallagher. You don’t want to intervene. This is up to the tribe. They have their own rules that they follow.”

Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump answered that he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

At which point a frustrated Milley summoned one of his aides, a combat-veteran SEAL officer, to the president’s Air Force One office. Milley took hold of the Trident pin on the SEAL’s chest and asked him to describe its importance. The aide explained to Trump that, by tradition, only SEALs can decide, based on assessments of competence and character, whether one of their own should lose his pin. But the president’s mind was not changed. Gallagher kept his pin.

When I asked Milley about these incidents, he explained his larger views about behavior in combat. “You have accidents that occur, and innocent people get killed in warfare,” he said. “Then you have the intentional breaking of the rules of war that occurs in part because of the psychological and moral degradation that occurs to all human beings who participate in combat. It takes an awful lot of moral and physical discipline to prevent you or your unit from going down that path of degradation.

“I’ll use Gallagher as an example. He’s a tough guy, a tough, hard Navy SEAL. Saw a lot of combat. There’s a little bit of a ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ feeling in all of this. What happened to Gallagher can happen to many human beings.” Milley told me about a book given to him by a friend, Aviv Kochavi, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. The book, by an American academic named Christopher Browning, is called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

“It’s a great book,” Milley said. “It’s about these average police officers from Hamburg who get drafted, become a police battalion that follows the Wehrmacht into Poland, and wind up slaughtering Jews and committing genocide. They just devolve into barbaric acts. It’s about moral degradation.”

During Milley’s time in the Trump administration, the disagreements and misunderstandings between the Pentagon and the White House all seemed to follow the same pattern: The president—who was incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the aspirations and rules that guide the military—would continually try to politicize an apolitical institution. This conflict reached its nadir with the Lafayette Square incident in June 2020. The day when Milley appeared in uniform by the president’s side, heading into the square, has been studied endlessly. What is clear is that Milley (and Mark Esper) walked into an ambush, and Milley extracted himself as soon as he could, which was too late.

The image of a general in combat fatigues walking with a president who has a well-known affection for the Insurrection Act—the 1807 law that allows presidents to deploy the military to put down domestic riots and rebellions—caused consternation and anger across the senior-officer ranks, and among retired military leaders.

“I just about ended my friendship with Mark over Lafayette Square,” General Peter Chiarelli, the now-retired former vice chief of staff of the Army, told me. Chiarelli was once Milley’s superior, and he considered him to be among his closest friends. “I watched him in uniform, watched the whole thing play out, and I was pissed. I wrote an editorial about the proper role of the military that was very critical of Mark, and I was about to send it, and my wife said, ‘You really want to do that—end a treasured friendship—like this?’ She said I should send it to him instead, and of course she was right.” When they spoke, Milley made no excuses, but said it had not been his intention to look as if he was doing Trump’s bidding. Milley explained the events of the day to Chiarelli: He was at FBI headquarters, and had been planning to visit National Guardsmen stationed near the White House when he was summoned to the Oval Office. Once he arrived, Trump signaled to everyone present that they were heading outside. Ivanka Trump found a Bible and they were on their way.

“As a commissioned officer, I have a duty to ensure that the military stays out of politics,” Milley told me. “This was a political act, a political event. I didn’t realize it at the moment. I probably should have, but I didn’t, until the event was well on its way. I peeled off before the church, but we’re already a minute or two into this thing, and it was clear to me that it was a political event, and I was in uniform. I absolutely, positively shouldn’t have been there. The political people, the president and others, can do whatever they want. But I can’t. I’m a soldier, and fundamental to this republic is for the military to stay out of politics.”

Trump, inflamed by the sight of protesters so close to the White House, had been behaving especially erratically. “You are losers!” the president screamed at Cabinet members and other top officials at one point. “You are all fucking losers!”

According to Esper, Trump desperately wanted a violent response to the protesters, asking, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” When I raised this with Milley, he explained, somewhat obliquely, how he would manage the president’s eruptions.

“It was a rhetorical question,” Milley explained. “ ‘Can’t you just shoot them in the legs?’ ”

“He never actually ordered you to shoot anyone in the legs?” I asked.

“Right. This could be interpreted many, many different ways,” he said.

Milley and others around Trump used different methods to handle the unstable president. “You can judge my success or failure on this, but I always tried to use persuasion with the president, not undermine or go around him or slow-roll,” Milley told me. “I would present my argument to him. The president makes decisions, and if the president ordered us to do X, Y, or Z and it was legal, we would do it. If it’s not legal, it’s my job to say it’s illegal, and here’s why it’s illegal. I would emphasize cost and risk of the various courses of action. My job, then and now, is to let the president know what the course of action could be, let them know what the cost is, what the risks and benefits are. And then make a recommendation. That’s what I’ve done under both presidents.”

He went on to say, “President Trump never ordered me to tell the military to do something illegal. He never did that. I think that’s an important point.”

We were discussing the Lafayette Square incident while at Quarters Six, the chairman’s home on Generals’ Row at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Capitol. Next door to Quarters Six was the home of the Air Force chief of staff, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., who is slated to become the next chairman. Generals’ Row was built on land seized by the Union from Robert E. Lee’s plantation. It is a good place to hold a discussion about the relationship between a democracy and its standing army.

I tried to ask Milley why Lafayette Square had caught him off guard, given all that he had seen and learned already. Only a few weeks earlier, Trump had declared to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a meeting about China, that the “great U.S. military isn’t as capable as you think.” After the meeting, Milley spoke with the chiefs, who were angry and flustered by the president’s behavior. (Esper writes in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, that one member of the Joint Chiefs began studying the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which can be used to remove an unfit president.)

“Weren’t you aware that Trump—”

“I wasn’t aware that this was going to be a political event.”

I tacked. “Were you aware that this was”—I paused, searching for an artful term—“an unusual administration?”

“I’ll reserve comment on that,” Milley responded. “I think there were certainly plenty of warnings and indicators that others might say in hindsight were there. But for me, I’m a soldier, and my task is to follow lawful orders and maintain good order and discipline in the force.”

“You didn’t have situational awareness?”

“At that moment, I didn’t realize that there was a highly charged piece of political stagecraft going on, if you will. And when I did, I peeled off.” (That evening, Lieutenant General McMaster texted Milley the well-known meme of Homer Simpson disappearing into a hedge.)

The lesson, Milley said, was that he had to pay more attention. “I had to double down on ensuring that I personally—and that the uniformed military—that we all stayed clear of any political acts or anything that could be implied as being involved in politics.”

The week after Lafayette Square, Milley made his apology in the National Defense University speech—a speech that helped repair his relationship with the officer corps but destroyed his relationship with Trump.

“There are different gradients of what is bad. The really bad days are when people get killed in combat,” Milley told me. “But those 90 seconds were clearly a low point from a personal and professional standpoint for me, over the course of 43, 44 years of service. They were searing. It was a bad moment for me because it struck at the heart of the credibility of the institution.”

The chasm dividing Milley and Trump on matters of personal honor became obvious after Lafayette Square. In a statement, referring to Milley’s apology, Trump said of the chairman, “I saw at that moment he had no courage or skill.”

Milley viewed it differently. “Apologies are demonstrations of strength,” Milley told me. “There’s a whole concept of redemption in Western philosophy. It’s part and parcel of our philosophy, the Western religious tradition—the idea that human beings are fallible, that we sin and that we make mistakes and that when you do so you own the mistake, you admit it, and then you learn from that mistake and take corrective action and move on.”

For his part, General Chiarelli concluded that his friend had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quoting Peter Feaver, an academic expert on civil-military relations, Chiarelli said, “You have to judge Mark like you judge Olympic divers—by the difficulty of the dive.”

That summer, Milley visited Chiarelli in Washington State and, over breakfast, described what he thought was coming next. “It was unbelievable. This is August 2, and he laid out in specific detail what his concerns were between August and Inauguration Day. He identified one of his biggest concerns as January 6,” the day the Senate was to meet to certify the election. “It was almost like a crystal ball.”

Chiarelli said that Milley told him it was possible, based on his observations of the president and his advisers, that they would not accept an Election Day loss. Specifically, Milley worried that Trump would trigger a war—an “October surprise”—to create chaotic conditions in the lead-up to the election. Chiarelli mentioned the continuous skirmishes inside the White House between those who were seeking to attack Iran, ostensibly over its nuclear program, and those, like Milley, who could not justify a large-scale preemptive strike.

In the crucial period after his road-to-Damascus conversion, Milley set several goals for himself: keep the U.S. out of reckless, unnecessary wars overseas; maintain the military’s integrity, and his own; and prevent the administration from using the military against the American people. He told uniformed and civilian officials that the military would play no part in any attempt by Trump to illegally remain in office.

The desire on the part of Trump and his loyalists to utilize the Insurrection Act was unabating. Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser whom Milley is said to have called “Rasputin,” was vociferous on this point. Less than a week after George Floyd was murdered, Miller told Trump in an Oval Office meeting, “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter—they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.”

According to Woodward and Costa in Peril, Milley responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.” Then he turned to Trump. “Mr. President, they are not burning it down.”

I asked Milley to describe the evolution of his post–Lafayette Square outlook. “You know this term teachable moment ?” he asked. “Every month thereafter I just did something publicly to continually remind the force about our responsibilities … What I’m trying to do the entire summer, all the way up to today, is keep the military out of actual politics.”

He continued, “We stay out of domestic politics, period, full stop, not authorized, not permitted, illegal, immoral, unethical—we don’t do it.” I asked if he ever worried about pockets of insurrectionists within the military.

“We’re a very large organization—2.1 million people, active duty and reserves. Some of the people in the organization get outside the bounds of the law. We have that on occasion. We’re a highly disciplined force dedicated to the protection of the Constitution and the American people … Are there one or two out there who have other thoughts in their mind? Maybe. But the system of discipline works.”

So you had no anxiety at all?

“Of anything large-scale? Not at all. Not then, not now.”

In the weeks before the election, Milley was a dervish of activity. He spent much of his time talking with American allies and adversaries, all worried about the stability of the United States. In what would become his most discussed move, first reported by Woodward and Costa, he called Chinese General Li Zuocheng, his People’s Liberation Army counterpart, on October 30, after receiving intelligence that China believed Trump was going to order an attack. “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said, according to Peril. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise … If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history.”

Milley later told the Senate Armed Services Committee that this call, and a second one two days after the January 6 insurrection, represented an attempt to “deconflict military actions, manage crisis, and prevent war between great powers that are armed with the world’s most deadliest weapons.”

The October call was endorsed by Secretary of Defense Esper, who was just days away from being fired by Trump. Esper’s successor, Christopher Miller, had been informed of the January call. Listening in on the calls were at least 10 U.S. officials, including representatives of the State Department and the CIA. This did not prevent Trump partisans, and Trump himself, from calling Milley “treasonous” for making the calls. (When news of the calls emerged, Miller condemned Milley for them—even though he later conceded that he’d been aware of the second one.)

Milley also spoke with lawmakers and media figures in the days leading up to the election, promising that the military would play no role in its outcome. In a call on the Saturday before Election Day, Milley told news anchors including George Stephanopoulos, Lester Holt, and Norah O’Donnell that the military’s role was to protect democracy, not undermine it. “The context was ‘We know how fraught things are, and we have a sense of what might happen, and we’re not going to let Trump do it,’ ” Stephanopoulos told me. “He was saying that the military was there to serve the country, and it was clear by implication that the military was not going to be part of a coup.” It seemed, Stephanopoulos said, that Milley was “desperately trying not to politicize the military.”

When the election arrived, Milley’s fear—that the president would not accept the outcome—came to pass. A few days later, when Acting Secretary Miller arrived at the Pentagon accompanied by a coterie of fellow Trump loyalists, including Kash Patel, senior officers in the building were unnerved. Patel has stated his conviction that the Pentagon is riddled with “deep state” operatives.

A few days after Esper’s firing, Milley gave a Veterans Day speech, in the presence of Miller, to remind the armed forces—and those who would manipulate them—of their oath to the Constitution. The speech was delivered at the opening of the National Army Museum at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia.

“The motto of the United States Army for over 200 years, since 14 June 1775 … has been ‘This we will defend,’ ” Milley said. “And the ‘this’ refers to the Constitution and to protect the liberty of the American people. You see, we are unique among armies. We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, a tyrant or dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe, or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution … We will never turn our back on our duty to protect and defend the idea that is America, the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

He closed with words from Thomas Paine: “These are times that try men’s souls. And the summer soldier and the sunshine Patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country. But he who stands by it deserves the love of man and woman. For tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”

When Miller followed Milley, his remarks betrayed a certain level of obliviousness; Milley’s speech had sounded like a warning shot directed squarely at hard-core Trumpists like him. “Chairman, thanks for setting the bar very high for the new guy to come in and make a few words,” Miller said. “I think all I would say to your statements is ‘Amen.’ Well done.”

I asked Milley later if he’d had Miller in mind when he gave that speech.

“Not at all,” he said. “My audience was those in uniform. At this point, we are six days or so after the election. It was already contested, already controversial—and I wanted to remind the uniformed military that our oath is to the Constitution and that we have no role to play in politics.”

He would remain a dervish until Inauguration Day: reassuring allies and cautioning adversaries; arguing against escalation with Iran; reminding the Joint Chiefs and the National Military Command Center to be aware of unusual requests or demands; and keeping an eye on the activities of the men dispatched by Trump to lead the Pentagon after Esper was fired, men who Milley and others suspected were interested in using the military to advance Trump’s efforts to remain president.

Shortly after Esper was fired, Milley told both Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, another Trump loyalist sent to the Pentagon, that he would make sure they would see the world “from behind bars” if they did anything illegal to prevent Joe Biden from taking the oath of office on January 20. (Both men have denied being warned in this manner.)

I asked Milley recently about his encounters with Trump’s men. As is his on-the-record custom, he minimized the drama of those days.

I said, “You literally warned political appointees that they would be punished if they engaged in treasonous activities.”

He responded: “I didn’t do that. Someone saying I did that?”

“You warned Kash Patel and others that they were fucking around and shouldn’t have been.”

“I didn’t warn anybody that I would hold them accountable for anything.”

“You warned them that they would be held accountable for breaking the law or violating their oaths.”

Suddenly, acquiescence.

“Yeah, sure, in conversation,” he said. “It’s my job to give advice, so I was advising people that we must follow the law. I give advice all the time.”

Today Milley says, about Trump and his closest advisers, “I’m not going to say whether I thought there was a civilian coup or not. I’m going to leave that to the American people to determine, and a court of law, and you’re seeing that play out every day. All I’m saying is that my duty as the senior officer of the United States military is to keep out of politics.”

What is certain is that, when January 20 finally arrived, Milley exhaled. According to I Alone Can Fix It, by the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, when Michelle Obama asked Milley at the inauguration how he was doing, he replied: “No one has a bigger smile today than I do.”

The arrival of a new president did not mean an end to challenges for Milley, or the Pentagon. Attempts to enlist the military in America’s zero-sum culture war only intensified. Elements of the hard right, for instance, would exploit manifestations of performative leftism—a drag show on an Air Force base, for instance—to argue that the military under Biden was hopelessly weak and “woke.” (Never mind that this was the same military that Trump, while president, had declared the strongest in history.) And in an unprecedented act of interference in the normal functioning of the military, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has placed holds on the promotions of hundreds of senior officers to protest the Defense Department’s abortion policies. The officers affected by the Tuberville holds do not make such policies.

An even more substantial blow to morale and force cohesion came late in the summer of 2021, when American forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan against the advice of Milley and most other senior military leaders. The withdrawal—originally proposed by Trump, but ordered by Biden—was criticized by many veterans and active-duty soldiers, and the damage was exacerbated by the callous manner in which Biden treated America’s Afghan allies.

This summer, Milley and I visited the War Memorial of Korea, in Seoul, where Milley laid a wreath in front of a wall containing the names of hundreds of Massachusetts men killed in that war. I asked him about the end of America’s war in Afghanistan.

“I’ve got three tours in Afghanistan,” he said. “I lost a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan, and for any of us who served there and saw a considerable amount of combat in Afghanistan, that war did not end the way any of us wanted it to end.”

Do you consider it a loss?

“I think it was a strategic failure,” he answered, refusing to repeat the word I used. “When the enemy you’ve been fighting for 20 years captures the capital and unseats the government you’re supporting, that cannot be called anything else.”

He continued, “We sunk a tremendous amount of resources, a tremendous amount of money and, most importantly, lives into helping the Afghan people and giving them hope for a better future. For 20 years we did that. And our primary goal for going there was to prevent al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization from striking the United States ever again. That was the strategic promise President Bush made to the American people. And we have not, to date, been attacked from Afghanistan, so all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that served in Afghanistan should hold their heads high and should be proud of their contributions to American national security. But at the end of the day, the Taliban took the capital.”

[From the October 2023 issue: Franklin Foer on America’s final days in Afghanistan]

Milley had recommended to Biden that the U.S. maintain a residual force of soldiers to buttress the American-allied government in Kabul. Biden, Milley said, listened to the military’s advice, weighed it, and then chose another path. “It was a lawful order, and we carried out a lawful order,” Milley said.

But, I asked him, did you think Afghanistan was winnable?

“I think it would have been a sustainable level of effort over time,” he answered. “Take where we’re at right now. We are still in Korea today, 70 years after the armistice was signed. When North Korea came across the border in the summer of 1950, the South Korean military was essentially a constabulary, and we had a limited number of advisers here. And then we reinforced very rapidly from our occupation forces in Japan, and then we fought the Korean War. So we ended up preventing North Korea from conquering South Korea, and that effort led to one of the most flourishing countries in the world.”

He went on to say, however, that he understood why leaders of both political parties, and a majority of Americans, wanted U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan. “These operations aren’t sustainable without the will of the people,” he said. “Would I and every soldier who served there wish that there was a better outcome? Absolutely, yes, and to that extent, that’s a regret.

“The end in Afghanistan didn’t happen because of a couple of decisions in the last days,” he said. “It was cumulative decisions over 20 years. The American people, as expressed in various polls, and two presidents of two different parties and the majority of members of Congress wanted us to withdraw—and we did.”

If the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a low, then a continuing high point for the Defense Department is its enormous effort to keep the Ukrainian army in the fight against Russia. Milley and Lloyd Austin, his former commander and Biden’s secretary of defense, have created a useful partnership, particularly regarding Ukraine.

The two men could not be more unalike: Milley cannot stop talking, and Austin is loath to speak more than the minimum number of words necessary to get through the day. But they seem to trust each other, and they sought, after Austin’s appointment, to bring stability back to the Pentagon. When I met Austin in his office in mid-September, he alluded to this common desire, and to the turbulence of the recent past. “We needed to make sure we had the relationship right and the swim lanes right—who is responsible for what,” he said. “The trust was there, so it was easy to work together to reestablish what we both knew should be the rules of the road.”

The massive effort to equip, train, and provide intelligence to Ukrainian forces—all while preventing the outbreak of direct warfare between the U.S. and Russia—must be considered (provisionally, of course) a consequential achievement of the Austin-Milley team. “We’ve provided Ukraine with its best chance of success in protecting its sovereign territory,” Austin told me. “We’ve pulled NATO together in a way that’s not been done, ever. This requires a lot of work by the Department of Defense. If you look at what he and I do every month—we’re talking with ministers of defense and chiefs of defense every month—it’s extraordinary.”

Milley has been less hawkish than some Biden-administration officials on the war with Russia. But he agrees that Ukraine is now the main battlefield between authoritarianism and the democratic order.

Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic

“World War II ended with the establishment of the rules-based international order. People often ridicule it—they call it ‘globalism’ and so on—but in fact, in my view, World War II was fought in order to establish a better peace,” Milley told me. “We the Americans are the primary authors of the basic rules of the road—and these rules are under stress, and they’re fraying at the edges. That’s why Ukraine is so important. President Putin has made a mockery of those rules. He’s making a mockery of everything. He has assaulted the very first principle of the United Nations, which is that you can’t tolerate wars of aggression and you can’t allow large countries to attack small countries by military means. He is making a direct frontal assault on the rules that were written in 1945.”

The magnitude of this assault requires a commensurate response, but with a vigilant eye toward the worst possible outcome, nuclear war. “It is incumbent upon all of us in positions of leadership to do the very best to maintain a sense of global stability,” Milley told me. “If we don’t, we’re going to pay the butcher’s bill. It will be horrific, worse than World War I, worse than World War II.”

The close relationship between Milley and Austin may help explain one of Milley’s missteps as chairman: his congressional testimony on the subject of critical race theory and “white rage.” In June 2021, both Milley and Austin were testifying before the House Armed Services Committee when Michael Waltz, a Republican representative from Florida (and, like Milley, a former Green Beret), asked Austin about a lecture given at West Point called “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.” Austin said that the lecture sounded to him like “something that should not occur.” A short while later, Milley provided his own, more expansive views. “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” he said. And then it seemed as if the anger he felt about the assault on the Capitol spilled out of its container. “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?” he asked. “What is wrong with having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”

These comments caused a new round of criticism of Milley in some senior military circles, including from generals who agreed with him but believed that this sort of commentary was the purview of the political echelon.

Colonel Ross Davidson, Milley’s former operations officer, who was watching the hearing, told me he thinks Milley’s contempt for the January 6 insurrectionists was not the only thing that motivated his testimony. Seeing Austin, the first Black secretary of defense and his friend, under sustained criticism led Milley, as Davidson describes it, to “move to the sound of the guns.”

“That’s in his nature,” Davidson said. “ ‘Hey, man, my battle buddy Lloyd is being attacked.’ ”

Today, Austin defends Milley’s statements: “In one instance, in one academic institution, a professor was exposing his students to this,” he said, referring to critical race theory. “If you are familiar with all of our curriculum and what we do in our various schools and how we train leaders, it’s kind of upsetting and insulting” to suggest that the military has gone “woke.”

When I asked Milley recently about this episode, his answer was, predictably, lengthier, more caustic, and substantially more fervent.

“There’s a lot of discourse around whether it’s a tough Army or a woke Army,” he said, referring to commentary on right-wing news channels. “Here’s my answer: First of all, it’s all bullshit. Second, these accusations are coming from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re doing it for political purposes. Our military wasn’t woke 24 months ago, and now it’s woke?”

He continued, “You want woke? I’ll give you woke. Here’s what your military’s doing: There are 5,000 sorties a day, including combat patrols protecting the U.S.A. and our interests around the world. At least 60 to 100 Navy warships are patrolling the seven seas, keeping the world free for ocean transport. We have 250,000 troops overseas, in 140 countries, defending the rules-based international order. We’ve got kids training constantly. This military is trained, well equipped, well led, and focused on readiness. Our readiness statuses are at the highest levels they’ve been in 20 years. So this idea of a woke military is total, utter, made-up bullshit. They are taking two or three incidents, single anecdotes, a drag show that is against DOD policy. I don’t think these shows should be on bases, and neither does the secretary of defense or the chain of command.”

This table-pounder of a speech prompted an obvious question: What will Milley say publicly once he’s retired? Donald Trump is the presumptive favorite to win the Republican nomination for president, and Trump represents to Milley—as numerous books, and my understanding of the man, strongly suggest—an existential threat to American democracy.

“I won’t speak up in politics. I won’t. You can hold me to it,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on elected officials. I’ll comment on policies, which is my purview. I have a certain degree of expertise and experience that I think enable me to make rational contributions to conversations about complex topics about war and peace. To make personal comments on certain political leaders, I don’t think that’s my place.”

Never?

“There are exceptions that can be made under certain circumstances,” he said. “But they’re pretty rare.”

It is hard to imagine Milley restraining himself if Trump attacks him directly—and it is as close to a sure thing as you can have in American politics that Trump will. At one point during his presidency, Trump proposed calling back to active duty two retired flag officers who had been critical of him, Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, so that they could be court-martialed. Mark Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, says he and Milley had to talk Trump out of such a plan.

During one conversation at Quarters Six, Milley said, “If there’s something we’ve learned from history, it’s that aggression left unanswered leads to more aggression.” He was talking about Vladimir Putin, but I got the sense that he was talking about someone else as well.

If Trump is reelected president, there will be no Espers or Milleys in his administration. Nor will there be any officials of the stature and independence of John Kelly, H. R. McMaster, or James Mattis. Trump and his allies have already threatened officials they see as disloyal with imprisonment, and there is little reason to imagine that he would not attempt to carry out his threats.

Milley has told friends that he expects that if Trump returns to the White House, the newly elected president will come after him. “He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list,” he has said. But he’s also told friends that he does not believe the country will reelect Trump.

When I asked him about this, he wouldn’t answer directly, but when I asked him to describe his level of optimism about the country’s future, he said: “I have a lot of confidence in the general officer corps, and I have confidence in the American people. The United States of America is an extraordinarily resilient country, agile and flexible, and the inherent goodness of the American people is there. I’ve always believed that, and I will go to my grave believing that.”

I pressed him: After all you’ve been through, you believe that?

“There are bumps in the road, to be sure, and you get through the bumps, but I don’t want to overstate this. What did I do? All I did was try to preserve the integrity of the military and to keep the military out of domestic politics. That’s all I did.”

These assertions will be debated for a long time. But it is fair to say that Milley came close to red lines that are meant to keep uniformed officers from participating in politics. It is also fair to say that no president has ever challenged the idea of competent civilian control in the manner of Donald Trump, and that no president has ever threatened the constitutional underpinnings of the American project in the manner Trump has. The apportionment of responsibility in the American system—presidents give orders; the military carries them out—works best when the president is sane. The preservation of a proper civil-military relationship is hugely important to democracy—but so too is universal acceptance of the principle that political officials leave office when they lose legitimate elections.

As Milley cedes the chairmanship, he also cedes Quarters Six. I visited him there on a number of occasions, and almost every time he walked me out onto the porch, he would look out theatrically on the city before us—on the Capitol that was sacked but not burned—and say, “Rome hasn’t fallen!”

One time, though, he said, “Rome hasn’t fallen—yet.”

This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “The Patriot.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A Warning From Another Time

2023-09-13T07:00:00-04:00

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, two men apparently starving for both attention and meaning, have lately been promising to fight each other in a “cage match.” Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic’s in-house expert on this relationship (he has other responsibilities as well), recently wrote, “As the result of an inexplicable series of firing neurons, Musk managed to not only type but also send the following two-sentence tone poem: ‘I will be in Palo Alto on Monday. Let’s fight in your Octagon.’ ”

“At a sentence level,” Charlie explained, “these words, strung together in this order and seemingly without irony, are hilarious. From the standpoint of being a human, the Musk-Zuck cage match is an offensive waste of time—the result of a broken media system that allows those with influence and shamelessness to commandeer our collective attention at will.”

[Read: The Musk-Zuck rivalry isn’t worth your time]

Charlie’s acid commentary reminded me of our colleague Megan Garber’s March 2023 cover story, “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse,” which argued that reality has become distorted by our pathological need to be entertained. Megan examined society’s addiction to illusion and trivia and cited the great dystopian writers of the recent past, who warned that “we will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real.” The result, Megan wrote, “will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.”

I’m fascinated by Megan’s work, and the work of thinkers who have come before her, including Neil Postman and Newton Minow, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission who argued in a 1961 speech that TV was being turned into a “vast wasteland.”

Megan’s story prompted me to visit Minow in Chicago earlier this year. He was 97 when we met. I’d heard that Minow was, unaccountably, an optimist, and I wanted to understand how someone who thought that the television programming of 1961 was noxious and stupid could look at our culture today—a culture shaped by people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—and not feel despair.

Newton Minow, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, testifies before the Senate Small Business Subcommittee. (Associated Press)

We had lunch in his apartment, the same apartment in which he hosted the very first political fundraiser for one of his law firm’s former summer associates, Barack Obama. Minow was sharp, talkative, and wryly humorous. He was pleased that his 1961 speech—certainly one of the most consequential ever delivered at the intersection of culture and politics—had prompted the television executive Sherwood Schwartz to name the boat in Gilligan’s Island after him. Minow explained that, at his age, he was counting on God to watch over us, and that he believed in the dictum, widely attributed to Churchill, that Americans will do the right thing after trying everything else. More to the immediate point, he took comfort from watching every minute of the televised January 6 hearings. He noted, “They brought in a television producer to communicate to the American people.” This gave him hope that the tools at our disposal could be used for good as well as bad. “I’m still appalled that so many Americans don’t take January 6 seriously,” he said, but added that it means something that many millions of them watched, and learned, from the medium he once criticized.

I spoke for several hours with this prophet, who died a couple of months after our meeting. We discussed the fairness doctrine, the wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt, the history of the BBC. As I was leaving, he praised magazines like this one for holding the line, for believing that Americans are capable of sober, focused, complicated, and informed thought. At The Atlantic, we try to talk up to our readers, not down, and Minow reminded me that this is a worthy cause.

This month, we publish one of the most heartbreaking, insightful, and emotionally resonant stories in recent memory, “Jenisha From Kentucky,” by our senior editor Jenisha Watts. I cannot summarize it for you. I can only say that it is a beautiful and transcendent story, one that takes time to read and absorb. The support of readers like you is what allows us to publish the work we do, and I am in your debt. In a time of foolishness, of billionaire cage matches and political idiocy, I am all the more grateful.

This editor’s note appears in the October 2023 print edition.