The Atlantic

The FBI Director Is MIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: ‘It’s a five-alarm fire’]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: ‘The Trust Has Been Absolutely Destroyed’]

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

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

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

The Donald J. Trump Guide to Classic Fairy Tales

2026-04-17T16:12:00-04:00

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.

Donald Trump, as even some of his fiercest admirers will admit, is not always a paragon of personal virtue. Although the president’s aides sometimes treat him like he is a toddler, as the political scientist Daniel Drezner has observed, he’s not an especially well-behaved one. Trump often acts in ways that would result in detention or other punishment for an elementary-school student: bald-faced dishonesty, name-calling, unkindness, refusal to share, and an inability to use an inside voice. Put another way, Trump sometimes seems as though he missed out on all of the lessons that children are supposed to learn from fables and fairy tales. (Meanwhile, his administration is seeking to evict some lessons about tolerance from classrooms.) But perhaps that’s uncharitable: Trump isn’t ignoring those fables; he’s just taking different lessons away from them than the familiar ones. Here’s a set of classic stories and their morals, reinterpreted for MAGA political correctness.

“The Three Billy Goats Gruff”

Plot: Three brother goats must cross a bridge guarded by a malicious troll who wants to eat them. Walking in succession, they are able to trick the greedy troll into waiting for the third and largest brother, who throws the troll into the water, killing him. With the troll slain, the bridge is free for all to pass.

Moral: The goats could have saved time and made money by threatening to destroy the bridge and kill the troll, then proposing a joint venture with the troll to split the proceeds paid by those wishing to cross the bridge.

The Rainbow Fish

Plot: A fish is covered in beautiful iridescent scales. The scales make him very proud, but they also make him isolated in society, because other fish envy them and resent the Rainbow Fish for not sharing. After giving a single scale away, he makes his first friend. Soon, he has given away all of the scales except for one, and has created a tight-knit social group with the other fish.

Moral: Friendships are fundamentally transactional.

“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”

Plot: A family of three bears, upon preparing their breakfast, find it too hot to eat and decide to take a walk. When they return, they discover that a girl named Goldilocks has sampled their breakfast, sat in (and broken one of) their chairs, and is now sleeping in one of their beds. Goldilocks, startled by the bears’ arrival, jumps out the window and is never heard from again.

Moral: People with golden hair are entitled to whatever they want and must not face consequences for their actions, especially if those are official acts.

“The Pied Piper of Hamelin”

Plot: The burghers of a small German town beset with a rat infestation hire a man with a magical pipe to lure the rodents away, which he does, coaxing them to their death in a nearby river. But when he comes to collect his reward, the local authorities refuse to pay him. In retaliation, the piper uses his instrument to lure away the town’s children, who are never seen again.

Moral: Always pay vendors what they are owed. Charismatic European leaders are a threat to the future of your society.

“The Ant and the Grasshopper”

Plot: An industrious ant spends all summer gathering food for the cold months, while a lazy grasshopper dances and sings. Once winter hits, the grasshopper is cold and hungry, and goes begging for food from the ant, who refuses to share any of its bounty, upbraiding the grasshopper for failing to plan.

Moral: Ants are small and weak, and the grasshopper is entitled to destroy them and take the food he needs. He might also consider levying tariffs.

“Hansel and Gretel”

Plot: Two young children are abandoned in the wilderness by their parents, who cannot afford to feed them. They come to the house of a witch, who locks them up and plans to cook and eat them. But when the witch tries to put Hansel into the oven, Gretel pushes her in instead, burning her to death. The children, freed, take the witch’s treasure and return home with a means to live.
Moral: Unaccompanied minors are a violent danger and must be expelled.

“Rumpelstiltskin”

Plot: After a foolish miller falsely asserts that his daughter can spin straw into gold, the king imprisons her and says that he will marry her if the story is true and kill her if it is not. Weeping in her cell, she is visited by a magical imp who offers to turn straw into gold for her in return for her firstborn. The ruse works, and she marries the king and bears a child. The imp returns for the baby, and the queen is bereft. The imp agrees to give up his claim if she can guess his name, the wildly implausible “Rumpelstiltskin.” Although she cannot guess the name, she overhears him saying it to himself and is able to keep her child.

Moral: If you’re in the business of turning things into gold, trying to keep a low profile is counterproductive. Just plaster your name all over everything.

“Cinderella”

Plot: A girl is mistreated by her stepsisters, who call her Cinderella. One day, an invitation comes for all young women to come to a ball so that the prince can choose a wife. The wicked stepsisters force Cinderella to stay home working, but her fairy godmother provides a magical gown and carriage—with a warning that she must leave by midnight, when she will revert to her normal appearance. At the ball, the prince is smitten but cannot get her name before she dashes out just before midnight, leaving behind one glass slipper. The following day, he canvasses the kingdom until he finds the woman who fits the slipper and marries her. They live happily ever after.

Moral: This story’s message is perplexing, riddled with mysteries and contradictions. Why would it matter whether the shoe fits, and why would a wealthy prince want to stay married to the same person forever? And how big was the prince’s ballroom anyway?

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Today’s News

The Strait of Hormuz has reopened to commercial traffic, according to Iran’s foreign minister. However, President Trump said on social media that the U.S. blockade on Iranian ships will remain until “OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE.”
A 10-day cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah has taken effect, prompting thousands of displaced families to return to southern Lebanon. Israeli forces remain in Lebanon and have warned residents not to return, and Hezbollah has not clearly endorsed the truce.
Testifying before House lawmakers, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a new study finding no link between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism is “garbage” and should be retracted.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Lena Dunham’s new memoir is a fascinating primary source of Hollywood in the 2010s, Boris Kachka writes.

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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

Iran Had a Doomsday Weapon All Along

By Alan Eyre

President Trump has said that he went to war to stop Iran from ever having a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the war he launched led Iran to discover that it already had an extremely effective doomsday weapon—one that promised the economic equivalent of mutual assured destruction. The Strait of Hormuz has always been vulnerable; the United States has always known that Iran might try to close it if attacked. But neither Washington nor Tehran imagined how easy it would be for Iran to do so, how hard it would be for the U.S. to reopen it, or how widely and rapidly the economic effects of a closed strait would fan out.

Read the full article.

Iran Had a Doomsday Weapon All Along

2026-04-17T14:26:31-04:00

President Trump has said that he went to war to stop Iran from ever having a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately, the war he launched led Iran to discover that it already had an extremely effective doomsday weapon—one that promised the economic equivalent of mutual assured destruction. The Strait of Hormuz has always been vulnerable; the United States has always known that Iran might try to close it if attacked. But neither Washington nor Tehran imagined how easy it would be for Iran to do so, how hard it would be for the U.S. to reopen it, or how widely and rapidly the economic effects of a closed strait would fan out.

Fossil fuels are to modern industrial civilization what air is to the lungs: About 80 percent of the global economy is powered by oil, coal, and natural gas. Much of this comes from the states along the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. About 25 percent of global seaborne oil trade and 20 percent of global liquified natural gas transits the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

[Amos Hochstein: The Hormuz war will end]

Iran has two navies—one that is part of its national armed services and one belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—but it is not a maritime power. Its naval forces were quickly decimated once the American military operation began. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at an April 8 briefing that the U.S. had sunk more than 90 percent of Iran’s regular fleet, leaving 150 ships at the bottom of the ocean along with half of the IRGC navy’s small attack boats.

Nonetheless, Iran closed the strait at the beginning of the American military campaign, and it wasn’t all that hard to do. Even without much naval capacity, Iran could threaten passing ships with mines, missiles, and cheap Shahed-136 drones. By attacking a few merchant ships and laying a few mines, it created an atmosphere of such pervasive insecurity that global marine-insurance markets, risk-averse by nature, either stopped providing coverage for transiting vessels or gave prohibitive rates.

So the strait turns out to be easy to close. It is also difficult to reopen—and, more important, to keep open. Even if the U.S. were to invest the time and resources needed for this task, the effort would likely yield far more body bags than Trump is willing to meet at Dover Air Force Base. Iran could well retaliate not just against U.S. forces, but also against vital energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf countries. Naval convoys would be needed, which would require an international coalition, something Trump has proved uniquely unqualified to assemble.

The bitter reality is that getting maritime traffic through the strait back to the prewar level (about 130 vessels daily), and keeping it there, is essential to the global economy—and this can almost certainly not be done without Iran’s cooperation. The U.S. blockade of Iranian ports promises to inflict significant economic pain on Iran, but it doesn’t change this reality.

So why is Iran so keen on keeping the strait closed? The answer lies in strategic deterrence—the ability to prevent attacks on its homeland. Because its conventional military is underwhelming, the Islamic Republic has historically focused on asymmetric capabilities. The first pillar of Iran’s strategic deterrence was long understood to be its extensive armory of short- and medium-range missiles; the second was its proxy network, and the third was its advanced nuclear program, which gave it the capability to surge to nuclear-weapon-state status.

But events set in motion by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel—or, more precisely, Israel’s counterattack, culminating in the June 2025 12-day war with Iran—toppled these pillars. After that, Iran found itself largely defenseless and facing the threat of subsequent Israeli attacks should it seek to rebuild its deterrent potential. Once Operation Epic Fury began at the end of February, the Iranian regime, fighting for its life, sought a riskier, yet potentially more powerful form of deterrence: control of the Strait of Hormuz. Yes, shutting down traffic also hurts Iran, but the regime is gambling that it can endure more short-term pain than Trump can, especially in an election year.

In addition to weaponizing the strait, Iran is also seeking to monetize it, to generate funds for postwar reconstruction. Iran has announced a toll on all friendly ships passing through, payable in either cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan. Unfriendly ships (such as those belonging to the U.S. or Israel) will not be allowed to transit. Iran has claimed that such tolling is the new normal and will continue after the war is over, international law be damned.

The Gulf countries find such an arrangement unacceptable. It not only decreases their profits, but also requires them to give money to an enemy that just attacked them. Even China, which has significant influence over Iran, could wind up opposing the toll, because it depends heavily on commodities that pass through the strait. As for Trump, who knows? At one point he said that the U.S. could jointly administer a toll system with Iran. What matters most to him is that traffic through the waterway resumes as soon as possible, so as to minimize economic pain ahead of the November midterms.

But even if the strait were to fully reopen, months would likely pass before the economic damage would lessen and shipping flows would resume. On April 14, the International Monetary Fund warned that the extent of the economic shock from the closed strait, including inflation and reduced growth, “will depend on the conflict’s duration and scale—and how quickly energy production and shipment normalize once hostilities end.” The stoppage of oil and gas shipments is bad in itself; it also affects the flow of goods such as nitrogen fertilizer (essential for growing crops), sulfur, and helium (essential for the semiconductor and medical sectors).

[Missy Ryan: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

The history of war, the scholar Norman Ricklefs has noted, “is also the history of unintended consequences.” This war’s supposed proximate cause was Iran’s nuclear program. Trump conjured improbable images of Iranian nukes raining down on American cities. Then, like something out of Jorge Luis Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, the conflict sent us all lurching in a new, darker, and more ominous direction.

Tehran might well modulate its grip on the strait as part of the negotiations. Indeed, today Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that the strait will be “completely open for commercial ships for the remainder of the ceasefire.” But Iran’s performance has fallen short of its pronouncements before. According to hard-line Iranian media, Iran is now routing traffic to a new transit lane through Iran’s territorial waters (formerly the route went through Omani waters). Using this passage will require coordination with the IRGC Navy.

Regardless of whether Iran allows maritime traffic to increase during negotiations, the reality is that Iran continues to “hold the key to the strait,” as the Iran expert Danny Citrinowicz, formerly of Israeli military intelligence, put it on X. Tehran may have relaxed its choke hold on this vital waterway, but the Islamic Republic, battered and seeking a way to stave off future aggression, is unlikely to release it for the foreseeable future.

One of These Trump Threats Is Not Like the Others

2026-04-17T13:59:46-04:00

Twelve hours after Donald Trump warned that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”—after he’d previously threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages”—the president agreed to a temporary cease-fire. Since then, initial peace negotiations failed and Trump responded with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; a new round of talks may begin soon.

But what to do with his everyone in Iran is going to die comments last week? Because they were designed to pressure Iran to come to the table, and because the promised carnage did not materialize, many observers simply moved on, explaining away Trump’s threats as a ham-fisted negotiation tactic, some kind of 5-D chess, or another example of the president’s propensity to “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out).

Former military attorneys, human-rights lawyers, and genocide scholars told us that moving on from Trump’s remarks would be unwise. The president’s words, they believe, will have a lasting impact—not least because they appear to violate the rules governing warfare that the United States has supported since the aftermath of World War II. “There’s so much going on in the world, but this is the kind of issue that I really think deserves some sustained attention,” Rachel VanLandingham, who served as the chief of international law at U.S. Central Command from 2006 to 2010, told us.

Trump’s Truth Social post threatening to erase a “whole civilization,” scholars told us, was itself a violation of Article II, Section 4 of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of other nations. The American law-of-war manual—a binding document for members of the U.S. military that clarifies treaty and legal obligations—also prohibits “threats of violence” against a civilian population, especially if the threats’ primary objective is to “spread terror.” Nearly identical language appears in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, which was adopted in 1977.

The post was “basically an announcement that I’m about to commit war crimes at the very least—and possibly crimes against humanity and, in a worst-case scenario, genocide,” Leila Sadat, a professor of international criminal law at Washington University Law School, told us.

Perhaps as important, that post and others represented a sharp departure from how commanders in chief speak during wartime, when they ordinarily treat matters of life and death with solemnity. Trump is not the first American president to threaten mass bloodshed during war. Hours after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, President Harry Truman said that if Japan refuses to “accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” President Richard Nixon, in recorded conversations with Henry Kissinger, said during the Vietnam War, “I’d finish off the goddamn place” and threatened to deploy “even the nuclear weapon if necessary.”

Still, those statements were made more than 50 years ago, and they don’t negate the point that the language presidents use in official communications matters. “Presidents have always taken great care to make it clear that the United States was at war with enemy governments, not enemy peoples,” Devin Pendas, a Boston College historian who studies genocide and war-crimes trials, told us. Nixon was speaking in private. And Truman’s threat came after he had decided to seek an end to six years of global war by using weapons more powerful than anything seen before. Trump’s threat, nearly six weeks into a war that he started, was of a different order and shouldn’t be dismissed as just a “Trump-being-Trump moment,” Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told us. “That’s a no-go zone.”

One might argue that tone and word choice matter little compared with actions: the killing of civilians by the U.S. military in conflicts, including in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, prompted their own claims, and sometimes convictions, of war crimes. But what the commander in chief says matters. The Iran war stands apart because the president and the defense secretary are “saying things that seem to either authorize war crimes or seem to suggest that it would be okay if the U.S. did it, because no one’s going to stop us,” Daniel Maurer, a former Army judge advocate who is now a law professor at Ohio Northern University, told us. “That has never happened before.”

At least not since nearly 200 nations ratified or endorsed strict rules governing armed conflict, including the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and the United Nations Charter. The U.S. was the principal supporter of that postwar order—and now its president’s words gnaw away at the order’s foundations.

“When he talks about the destruction of a civilization, is it just hyperbole?” Gabor Rona, a professor of international human rights at Cardozo School of Law, said to us. “Or are we really at risk of the U.S. committing the gravest mass of war crimes since the Second World War?”

This is hardly the first time Trump has demonstrated an eagerness to ignore the laws and norms of conflict. The 12-day war last June, when the U.S. joined Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear and missile sites, was launched without the usual domestic or international legal sanction. Boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that have killed more than 175 people since September are intended to target suspected drug smugglers, according to the Pentagon, but some European officials have condemned the strikes for disregarding international law. The military operation that ousted the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in early January violated the UN Charter, several lawyers told us. (“I don’t need international law,” Trump told The New York Times shortly after.) Human-rights experts at the United Nations have denounced as illegal the U.S. fuel embargo on Cuba.

The launch of the war against Iran in late February may have violated terms of the UN Charter that prohibit military aggression against a sovereign state absent UN authorization or an imminent threat. The White House has claimed that Iran posed such a threat, but a U.S. intelligence assessment cast doubt on that assertion.

[Read: The Pentagon cut its civilian safeguards before the Iran war]

Within hours of the start of the war, the U.S. struck a school, killing more than 170 people, most of them children. A preliminary Pentagon investigation found that the strike may have been the result of errant targeting.

It is nearly impossible to assess whether the strike might constitute a war crime without knowing the chain of decision making, which would help determine whether the order was an honest mistake or the result of criminally reckless behavior, former military lawyers told us. Maurer, who has taught constitutional and criminal law at West Point, said that he has faith that U.S. service members would fulfill their legal obligations and, if necessary, refuse an unlawful order. “In the fog and friction of battle, mistakes get made; that happens—but I don’t see purposeful, deliberate actions that would constitute war crimes being a systemic concern,” he said. He worries, however, about the “dangerous signal” to troops from the top that the laws of war they were taught don’t matter. Over time, he told us, that could weaken service members’ “sense of duty.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has shown disdain for what he has called “stupid rules of engagement” and promised in a briefing on March 13 to give “no quarter” to the enemy. International law expressly prohibits declarations that “no quarter will be given.” This prohibition is also in the Department of Defense’s law-of-war manual.

Since the start of the war, Trump has repeatedly threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants. The Geneva Conventions and international law generally prohibit targeting civilian infrastructure, though there are exceptions. “If we have really strong intelligence indicating that an entire convoy of tanks is going to roll across a bridge at midnight tonight, we don’t necessarily have to wait until midnight, when the tanks are actually crossing it, to attack it,” Kevin Jon Heller, a professor of international law and security at the University of Copenhagen, told us. “We can probably attack it now.” But, he and others cautioned, such cases require meticulous fact assessments. “You’re not allowed to say, Oh, at some point in the future, this bridge might be used to ferry tanks or soldiers, so I’m going to blow it up now. That’s not how it works,” he said.

Three overarching principles of international humanitarian law must be factored in before a country can strike a primarily civilian object, such as a bridge or a power plant: the principle of distinction (you cannot deliberately target civilians or civilian objects), the principle of proportionality (you must weigh the military advantage to be gained against the harm to civilians, and that harm cannot be excessive), and the principle of precautions (you must take constant care to spare civilians from the ravages of war).

Those principles have come into play as Pentagon war planners have expanded possible target lists to include energy sites they describe as “dual use,” or used by both civilians and the military. The legality of launching a war is a separate issue from the legality of individual strikes—but the former informs the latter. If the Iran war violated international law from its inception, any further action can be thought of as “a force multiplier of the original sin,” David Scheffer, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, told us.

Hegseth has also dismantled the Pentagon office responsible for preventing civilian casualties. And he has fired and marginalized judge advocates general, the officials at the Pentagon who impose legal guardrails. Those actions could suggest to war-crimes investigators that U.S. officials failed to act responsibly and lawfully when selecting targets and executing strikes in the Iran war, scholars told us. Trump’s and Hegseth’s statements, meanwhile, have arguably created a record of mens rea—a reckless disregard for civilian life.

[Read: The Pentagon’s lawyers are now under review]

“There are questions in the law about whether criminal recklessness” rather than intent “is enough to charge someone with war crimes,” Beth Van Schaack, who was an adviser at the State Department on war-crimes issues during the Biden administration, told us. “But at a certain point, the recklessness absolutely becomes a violation of the laws of war.” The U.S. has frequently condemned Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure, including attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities, schools, and cultural sites. “We condemned them as war crimes,” Van Schaack said. “And now suddenly we’re committing the exact same conduct.” Iran, too, has attacked civilian infrastructure, including a major natural-gas facility in Qatar and oil-production equipment in Kuwait, prompting accusations of war crimes.

The tenor of top U.S. officials’ statements has left Steven Schooner, a former Army lawyer who previously taught judge advocates, feeling that “this administration isn’t really entitled to the benefit of the doubt on issues related to law of war,” he told us.

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told us in an email that the Iranian regime had “committed egregious human rights abuses against its own citizens for 47 years, murdered tens of thousands of protestors in January, and indiscriminately targeted civilians across the region in order to cause as much death as possible throughout this conflict.” (The Pentagon referred our request for comment to the White House.)

Finding evidence of potential war crimes is one thing; assigning accountability is another. Experts in the laws of armed conflict told us that it is extremely unlikely that an American president would be held legally responsible, especially given that the Supreme Court recently ruled that a former president has at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all official acts. Neither the U.S. nor Iran is party to the International Criminal Court, which adjudicates possible war crimes. (Since returning to office, Trump has imposed sanctions on at least 11 ICC officials.)

But hypothetical routes exist for members of the military, and possibly its leadership, to be charged through the military or the civilian justice system, or in foreign courts. Signatories of the Geneva Conventions (which include the U.S.) have “universal jurisdiction” over grave treaty breaches, giving nations the right to bring charges against other countries’ citizens regardless of where an alleged crime was committed. Some Israeli soldiers traveling abroad have been investigated for alleged war crimes in Gaza: Belgium arrested and interrogated two Israeli soldiers last summer for such alleged crimes; another Israeli soldier fled Brazil after a federal judge there ordered a similar Gaza-related probe. If U.S. service members were accused of war crimes by any other nation, “if I was their lawyer, I’d tell them they shouldn’t travel,” Oona Hathaway, an international-law professor at Yale Law School, told us. “They certainly shouldn’t travel to a country that has a universal-jurisdiction statute and that might potentially bring charges against them.”

[Read: Trump ditched hearts and minds in the Iran war]

Trump and Hegseth’s conduct of the war may ultimately be subject to the verdict of public opinion rather than to judicial review. What is more likely than legal accountability, Hathaway said, is that their crimes will be recorded in the history books for future generations to judge.

Breaking Free From Alex Jones

2026-04-17T13:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Josh Owens, a videographer and the author of a memoir about his years working for Infowars, the media company of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Owens traces his journey from a film-school student who stumbled onto Jones’s radio show to an insider who spent four years filming, editing, and traveling for the organization. Owens describes how Jones’s conspiracy machine works, as well as how his own moral compass was scrambled by Jones’s manipulative management. The conversation explores radicalization, the conspiratorial media ecosystem Jones helped create, and how Owens was able to pull himself out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Josh Owens: Jones was not sitting there telling us to lie about things. He was making us question our own minds. After years in that environment, you stop even believing the fire alarms that are going off in your brain saying, like, This is insane. This is crazy. This is wrong. And you think, Maybe there’s something else that I’m not seeing.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we talk about the twisted world of Alex Jones.

One day in the spring of 2017, outside of a courtroom in Austin, Texas, I got a tip about a potential source. I was in Texas writing a profile of Alex Jones: famous conspiracist and the founder of Infowars. I’d spent the last few weeks running around Austin, where Jones has lived his entire career. He started on public-access TV and, over time, he slowly worked his way into national headlines.

I’d met a number of former Infowars employees, but I was looking for an insider who could help me understand how Jones’s media empire worked. How Jones had gone from a fringe figure ranting about 9/11 being an inside job—and a person most of society ignored or mocked—to something much closer to the mainstream of the right wing.

He’d been preaching his anti-establishment, paranoid worldview for eons. But his business had evolved. He made a ton of money selling supplements with names like “Super Male Vitality Serum,” “Brain Force Plus,” and “Caveman.” And Jones’s profile began to rise around the 2016 presidential election. At that moment, Jones seemed like he was everywhere—Infowars’s Hillary for Prison T-shirts were fixtures at Trump rallies. Jones even managed to book an interview with then–presidential candidate Donald Trump himself. It seemed from the outside like Jones and his media empire could have a noticeable cultural impact on the 2016 election.

And so the question was: Had he ushered in this moment of brain-melting conspiracism and extremism? Or was he just good at profiting from it? This source, I was told, could help me find out.

I only got the bare outlines of his story, but: He’d been a key figure in the company, but had grown disillusioned. Had a change of heart. And then got out. I tried for weeks to reach him through a different source, but he wasn’t ready to talk yet. And then, almost a year later, he DM’d me out of the blue.

His name was Josh Owens. He was a 20-something video producer, and he’d won a contest to get hired to make videos for Jones and Infowars.

Over the course of a few hours, he told me his entire story. All of the things he’d done and seen working with Jones. His deep sense of regret for playing a part in spreading lies and hate. Things like Jones’s claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation. That the grieving families were playing the role of actors in an elaborate government plot.

Owens told me he wasn’t looking for any kind of absolution. He just wanted people to understand how the lies got made.

And so, the conversation stayed with me for months, in part because Owens appeared to have done something pretty remarkable in today’s landscape. Through the help of others, he seemed to have been genuinely de-radicalized.

Owens went public with his story in 2019, and we’ve stayed in touch since then. When Jones was sued in 2018 by the Sandy Hook families for defamation, Owens testified in the case.

And over the course of the last few years, Owens has been writing a memoir of his time at Infowars. It’s titled The Madness of Believing, and it’s full of staggering details about Jones, the erratic boss whose rantings off camera were as disturbing as the ones that got recorded. And for those trying to understand how the conspiracy machine that helps power fear and division in this country works, you’ll find it in this book.

But Owens’s story is also about his personal evolution. It tracks how he fell down the Alex Jones rabbit hole. But, more importantly, it documents how he managed to get out.

There are many important conversations out there—about radicalization and political extremism. But there are far fewer conversations though about de-radicalization. What that looks like and what, if anything, we can learn from people who’ve altered course.

And so I sat down with Owens to try to have that conversation.

[Music]

Warzel: Josh Owens, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Owens: Thank you so much for having me.

Warzel: So, let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about the first time that you discovered Alex Jones.

Owens: Yeah, the first time was in 2008. It had absolutely nothing to do with politics. It had to do with movies. I was watching Dr. Strangelove with a friend, and there’s a scene where Sterling Hayden goes on this diatribe about water fluoridation.

Jack D. Ripper (from the movie Dr. Strangelove): Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we’ve ever had to face?

So my friend stopped the movie, and he asked me if I’d ever heard of Alex Jones. I had no idea who Alex Jones was. So he ran to the bathroom, came back with a tube of toothpaste, and he showed me the warning label on the toothpaste. It said, you know: “Don’t swallow more than a pea-sized amount. If you do, contact poison control.” And so he asked, he was like, “Well, why is it that if we swallow a pea-sized amount, it’s dangerous, but we don’t know how much we’re consuming in the water supply?” I didn’t know what fluoride was. I had no idea what he was talking about. The only thing I knew was that I liked Dr. Strangelove, and I’d seen it before. That was it.

So, he said that Jones had had the answers for that. So that night I looked him up. There was a documentary I found called Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove. Which was this group of powerful men who got together once a year, and Jones infiltrated it with the writer Jon Ronson. And it was like this mashup of Blair Witch and Eyes Wide Shut, and it just sort of sucked me in. That was the beginning.

Warzel: What did engaging with Jones’s work do for you? Like, what was the experience of engaging in that worldview in this young version of yourself?

Owens: Yeah. Well first off, I mean, it was just exciting. It was terrifying, but also exciting. I was just coming out of high school. I just was directionless. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know who I was. I was a young kid. And my friends and I, sort of the way we communicated was through movies. Like, that was just sort of the medium. It was almost like a religion, honestly. It was like a language we used to communicate with one another. And Jones sort of created the world in those terms. He crafted this cinematic reality, but it wasn’t just cinematic. He literally used films to describe the world—not as like parables of the world, literally that they were pulling the curtain back. These directors were pulling the curtain back on reality. Sidney Lumet’s Network, John Carpenter’s They Live. You know, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, every Stanley Kubrick movie. And so it was, again, it was terrifying, but it, that language just sort of clicked in my head.

Warzel: What role does it all play for you in your life, for those years in between being a casual observer and going to work for them?

Owens: Yeah, well, that’s exactly how it started out. Just a casual listener of his show. I think that’s mostly how I consumed his program, was through the radio. I at the time was a janitor at a church. And so I had a lot of empty mental space to just have that guy in my ear.

And so it was years of that, off and on. I wasn’t constantly listening to him. I wouldn’t even say I got sucked into his world immediately. It was just like, Wow, this is fascinating. You tune in every now and then when you have time. The normalization process of the ideas were pretty slow to take hold, until I got physically in that world.

Warzel: The amount of time that he spent in your ears—was that essentially the reason why you wanted to go work for him?

Owens: Well, so yes. I think that was part of the reason. Another part of the reason, I think, was purpose. I grew up in an evangelical community. And, you know, that was what I was raised on. And at the exact time that I was introduced to Jones, I was stepping away from that world. Jones, in a lot of ways, sort of lines up to the televangelist way of doing things. It’s all about “everything is motivated by fear.” Everything is motivated by, there is this intense need to accomplish this thing in order to quite literally save the world. That’s the narrative that he spins.

So yeah, I mean, him being in my ear constantly was a big part of that. But also just the ideology, and the grandness of the ideology, was such an attractive concept. And I think that’s part of the reason that I decided to go there. Another part of the reason was I was trying a lot of stuff at the time. I interned a day at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta.

Warzel: Wow.

Owens: I was shooting a bunch of these commercial ideas. And at the same time, Jones offered me a job. I got offered a job at Tyler Perry Studios. And I thought, What a—

Warzel: —That’s a real sliding-doors situation.

Owens: I know; I know. I think about it often. Where would I be? But the thing that sort of made me choose that … I don’t think I’ve ever said that before, but the thing that made me choose that world was the purpose. Like maybe it could serve something bigger than myself. Maybe it could do something. Maybe, you know, I think at the time I was naively well-meaning.

Warzel: Now when people talk about Alex Jones, he’s so completely intertwined in the political, right-wing movement. I’m wondering for you, did it have any political valence at all? Because Jones was so different, in a way, back then—in terms of like being just totally on one side of the political spectrum, railing against one party only.

Owens: Yeah, it’s weird. Because in a lot of ways, he was different—and in a lot of ways those signs were there. You just had to know what to look at. You know, post 9-11, Jones was railing against the [George W.] Bush presidency. So it made this idea, like, Oh, maybe he’s going after these right-wing ideas. I think that’s why someone like Richard Linklater put him in his movies, because he was just like this weird guy in Austin who had a public-access show, and he wasn’t sitting around talking about literally how much he despises Muslims and immigrants. And like, just the narratives were different. I think the seeds were there, because I’ve gone back and listened to some of those shows, and I think there was always a piece of it.

My introduction to Jones wasn’t political, because I didn’t know the first thing about politics. I wasn’t interested in it beforehand. So, I mean, that wasn’t what interested me about Jones. But it came pretty quickly. You can’t listen to his show … I mean, it is, at the end of the day, a political show. That’s sort of like the subject matter. That’s the basis of the ideology. That’s what he’s talking about. He just weaves in all these other, like, grand conspiracies and movies and his own personality. And so, initially, no—it wasn’t politics. And when I’m trying to look back and understand how did I individually, because I try not to be prescriptive with this stuff, I try not to say like, “Well, I got pulled in that way.” So everyone does. I think there are a hundred different ways that people get pulled into Jones’s world. And I think it’s changed drastically, too. It’s much more incendiary. But the politics came, and I think they came pretty quickly.

But you know, the politics were there. But then, there’s Jones telling you to go through grocery stores and look at the ingredients list and, you know, aspartame in your drink. So it’s just like, it’s everything. But yeah, I mean, it’s under that umbrella.

Warzel: Tell me: How does Infowars work? Like, help us all understand the operation, the size, the scope, and just how it worked when you were there, especially early on.

Owens: Yeah; when I was there, I sort of entered in that liminal state where Jones was still broadcasting out of a studio that was essentially the size of a closet. Jones’s intro to the show made it seem like it was going to be this sort of nefarious, underground, hidden … you know, he was the tip of the spear in Austin, Texas. And in a lot of ways, it just looked like the places I was in film school. It was like this unkempt college media department. There was just junk everywhere. It was pretty messy. It was cave-like. It was dark. It was freezing cold. But at the time he had, I mean, I would say he had a significant staff. He had multiple writers. There were actually two buildings. But in the production building that I was in, there was his radio show, which is where he had producers for the show. Writers next to that studio.

Then there was a warehouse for all of his products in the middle. And then, on the other end, it was the production side. So Jones had just hired multiple reporters from the contest that I had entered. But the way that the operation ran was, Jones was at the top. And he basically told everyone what to do at all times.

And he was a micromanager, ultimate micromanager. And so, the show had to operate—his radio show—but everything else was pretty much up in the air. As to: What was his mood of the day? What did he want to talk about? What did he want to cover? What reports did he want to put out? And so, a lot of that was just waiting with bated breath in the early morning before he got there. And then he sort of set the tone for the day.

Warzel: And so, you describe him to me just now as a micromanager, but also, in the book, as just an extremely volatile and manipulative presence. Can you tell me how he worked as a boss in that way?

Owens: Yeah, yes. Well, so the volatility—or like his mercurial personality—is sort of, I think, the essence of how he operates. And how he, you know, keeps the people around him is that sometimes Jones could be kind of what you see on his show: this raging lunatic who is screaming about literal demons running the world. And then, in an instant, he is this complete other person; he is at times warm and jovial and fun to be around. But on my first day, I was sort of warned about that. I was told that that could turn on a dime, and sort of to always be watching out for it. Jones might try and rope you into a joke—but don’t play along, because you could be the reason that that turns.

Warzel: And it sounds like, in many cases … I’m reading this, and I’m like, This is just classically manipulative. Right? In a psychological perspective. I mean, there’s the “I don’t know whether this guy’s gonna break or not,” but also seemingly that intermittent-reward system of his presence. Right? Like showering people with praise for doing something. Handing out bonus checks, as you write in the book, for certain things. And then, conversely, excoriating people and screaming and punching things. And, you know, actually scaring people, physically, in this way creates this sense of this person—this leader of the organization—whose approval becomes absolutely paramount, right?

It seems like, from reading the book, that everyone there—yourself included—becomes almost monomaniacally obsessed with making sure that this guy is happy. Is that an accurate description of his management style?

Owens: Yeah; that’s the job. That is the job whether you’re in the office; that’s the job whether you’re in the field; that’s the job whether you’re, you know, shooting a video with him. About politics or whether it’s about the products that he’s selling. Like, no matter what, it’s about “How do we do what he wants?”

I can’t speak for everyone there. I can just speak for myself about this. But I was really trying to get his approval. So it wasn’t just “Let’s keep him happy,” but, like, “I want him to be happy with what I’m doing.” And I think that might be part of the reason why he sort of pulled me into his inner circle. Because he knew that I almost wanted it as much as he was sort of demanding it. And so, those people who were closest to him … I think he sort of senses that. And then he pulls those people in, because he can get what he needs out of them.

Warzel: So I’m curious about—in one sense, Jones is this pioneer, right? He was relatively early to understanding that you could take this radio show, you broadcast this thing over the internet. You create Infowars, the website, early. He got into streaming relatively early. What did you get as Jones’s relationship to technology and his theory of media? Was he super savvy with this stuff? Was he lucky? Was he just doing the most outrageous thing, and the internet rewarded him? Or did he seem to have a pretty explicit theory of technology and media?

Owens: I don’t think; no. I think what he knew fundamentally was that the loudest person gets the most attention. I don’t know if it goes beyond that. I’m not trying to take away from … I don’t know; I feel weird even saying “the pioneer.” He pioneered parts of it because, I don’t know if he just lucked out.

Beyond that, I don’t think there was any sense of, you know, “He had a deep understanding of technology.” He knew certain things; I just think he knew that the more incendiary he was, the more a certain subset of people would pay attention.

Warzel: Your book describes him, rather fascinatingly, as a chameleon, right? Changing his views pretty often. Also just, like, fixing to the nearest thing that’s gonna get him that attention, that’s gonna get him the thing.

I was struck, though, in the book, in all these different recountings that you have that shows Jones seemingly genuinely upset with the state of the world. Like using the civilizational-struggle language or the demon language, or things like that, when the cameras aren’t rolling. What’s your sense on where the performance and the actual person end and begin?

Owens: When people ask me that question—like, not what he believes, but “Does he believe the things that he says?”—my feeling on that has changed a little bit. I used to say, “Who cares?” Like, it doesn’t matter what he believes. He has been doing this for two decades plus. He broadcasts on his show six days a week, for hours a day. I don’t even think he could tell you what he believes, and what he doesn’t believe, with the things that he says. But his audience believes it. And so, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.

But I read this short book by Harry Frankfurt called On Bullshit. And the central idea is that liars intentionally skew the truth, and that bullshitters just don’t care what the truth is. And in a lot of ways, I think that’s Jones. Like, I just don’t think Jones has any value for truth. I think that it depends on the moment, and what can benefit him, as to what he says and what he claims to believe. I think that’s why it shifts so frequently.

But ultimately, I don’t think it really is about an ideology or anything. Or truth or not truth. I mean, Sandy Hook—that’s not bullshit. That’s something deeper and darker. That Jones, I feel like, just doesn’t care about how his rhetoric affects people.

I think you could probably hook Jones up to a lie-detector test, and he would pass it. I don’t think he cares what the truth is. So I think it frees him up, in some sense, to sort of say whatever he feels is of value to him in any given moment.

Warzel: Shortly after you get there, Jones gets fully into this … Infowars, I should say, gets fully into the supplements game. Gives him this injection of cash, right? And this ability to sort of grow the business, allow people to go out and do more outlandish things. Build bigger sets. Along this same period, Trump is coming up. And you write, kind of as you’re going through it, that you became—if not more ideologically radicalized—drawn at least into the machinery of it all.

And I want to quote you here. You write, “The echo chamber was relentless, pulling me back into a spiral of doubt, wondering if beneath the layers of exaggeration and fearmongering there might be something genuine at play.” Your compass is getting scrambled in this. And it is something that feels to me a little like, if not radicalization, it’s at least something akin to it. A cousin to it. It is this blurring of some of these boundaries, not being able to trust yourself. I thought that was a fascinating part of that. How do you think that happened to you?

Owens: Yeah. Well, I think it was that slow integration of the ideas over time. Also, getting the opportunity. I lived in Georgia. Jones was in Austin, and I somehow got this opportunity to go work for him. So I think I fooled myself in a lot of ways that like there was somehow providence or fate in that. I talked earlier about how Stanley Kubrick kind of drew me into that world, through that movie, or that was the doorway. And then I go to the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Vivian Kubrick is at that event.

And we end up having dinner with her, and she’s talking about the same things that sort of pulled me into Jones’s world. Her father’s films. And I remember saying, “It’s incredible that you’re here.” And Jones sort of interjected, and he was like, “No, it’s not. Like, every decision we make in our life brings us to these moments.”

And in that moment, I believed him. So you have two things happening. You have the banality and the chaos of every day in that office, interchangeable, shifting with it every 30 minutes, every hour. And then you have these big moments of, like, Jones can craft the world into making it seem like everything has this purpose. I can tell you a story to sort of explain a version of this. So Jones started sending us to the border. And the first trip I went with the reporter Joe Biggs, who a lot of people might know or might not know. But he became a Proud Boy, and then he was sentenced to 17 years. And then Trump commuted his sentence after January 6.

We were sent on a trip to the border. And the first trip that I write about, there was a Judicial Watch report that said there were these ISIS bases in Juarez. So we got there; there was nothing to show. And we ended up having him dress as an ISIS terrorist and walk across the border. One side of that story is how that’s the dumbest thing ever. The second side is that we lied. We didn’t actually cross the border. We were having to fill this void of nothingness to produce these reports for Jones, and make things more cinematic. That’s why he sent us there. So that’s one story. But when we returned, Biggs crossed over, and he was trying to find this ISIS base. He found what he believed was a mosque. And then he, we, posted a report that said that he had discovered the ISIS base. And so that previous report that had happened, that report, I’m sitting there going like, We’re screaming into the void. This is absurd.

It’s to the point where it’s a joke. Like, What are we talking about? This isn’t based on anything. I saw nothing in the video that I was editing and uploading that proved that it was an ISIS space. I mean, there was no … what were we looking for? An ISIS flag? The next day, when we were leaving, the FBI contacted us. And they wanted to meet with us. And at the time I was certain, like, This has to be illegal. We didn’t know for sure that it was a lie, but there was no evidence to prove that what we were saying was true.

So I thought that we were sort of … the reckoning was coming, and it was well deserved. And so we met these FBI agents at the airport. They tell us that they’re using our video for information. Like, they don’t have jurisdiction. They can’t go over into Mexico. And they’re speaking to us as if we’re not idiots, but as if we’re journalists.

And it was a moment of ... What is going on? The FBI is talking to us as if they are gathering information from our videos. To me, this is clearly ridiculous. What am I to believe? Like, is there something actually going on here? Because all we had was a Judicial Watch report. There was no evidence to prove that there was an ISIS base or anything.

But Jones and his insistence is that, Yes, there is. You are the problem. Jones was not sitting there telling us to lie about things. He was making us question our own minds. And so, after years in that environment, you stop even believing what your mind is. You know, the fire alarms that are going off in your brain saying, like, This is insane. This is crazy. This is wrong. And you think, Maybe there’s something else that I’m not seeing. Like, Maybe I can’t trust myself. Maybe eventually there will be a piece of evidence that comes out that proves Jones was right about this thing the whole time.

Warzel: I want to reiterate, too, on this ISIS example—that’s an example that you sort of show throughout the book. Of Jones sending you guys on this, “go find a thing, a specific thing that I want.” You guys getting there, being like, “It doesn’t really exist. We have to figure out some way to get him something.” And you know that that incident itself is, like as you describe it, despicable, right?

Owens: Yeah.

Warzel: Like: dressing up as this ISIS person. You have a fake severed head and an Aladdin–style sword. There’s sort of a racist depiction to camera. Or like, accent. Something about Sharia law that he mentions as he crosses the border, to the camera. It’s obviously a skit—but it’s also, like, very bigoted. Very, you know … it’s gross. How much were you disgusted by what you were doing in the moment? Versus how much were you like, I can’t listen to that?

Owens: I don’t know if, in the moment, I was thinking much at all. In the moment it was, “We have to get this thing done. If we don’t, it’s going to be a problem. I have to go back to the hotel room. I have to stay up all night. I have to edit this report. I have to be up the next morning to appear on Jones’s show.” Like, it was just constant. “We have to fly back. There’s going to be another trip immediately.” Like, it was the day-to-day that I feel like I was focused on the most.

And that’s on me. Like, that’s not an excuse. That’s 100 percent, that’s on me. I was focused on the exact wrong things. But it wasn’t in the moment that I realized. I mean, yes—of course I know that lying is wrong. I know that those things were wrong. I wasn’t saying that, you know, we were somehow proving that ISIS was able to come over, and that it was going to manifest, and then we would see that thing that we were filming, that we knew was a lie.

But I think, in a sense, I don’t think I was thinking that much at all in the moment. I think I was in that funnel, that cloudy funnel of the chaos of everything. The atmosphere that Jones created. And, in the moment, at least, that’s what the focus was. It was “Get this thing done; do it the right way. If you don’t, Jones is gonna make you look like a fool.” The people you’re surrounded by, you’re isolated. It’s the only people you spend all the time around. Jones creates this reality in his world. So, I mean, if I’m being honest, I think that is, in the moment, what the focus was so much of the time.

Warzel: The reason why I’m pushing on this, I think, is because it’s helpful to understand for other people. This is less, you know, to try to make you answer for these things, which you make an attempt to answer for in this book. But it also does seem like when you’re writing this, that you are struck with this. And I don’t know if this is you thinking about it after the fact, because it seems like there’s so much going on inside of your mind in these moments.

In that ISIS example, you’re unpacking the box. The costume, right? And you get to the severed head, and you say, “If there’s a hell, I think we’re going there.” Right? Like, there’s an acknowledgement in the moment that this is messed-up stuff. It seems to me, at least from how you’re writing, that there was that, too. This notion that “This is not good.” Is that accurate?

Owens: Yeah; that’s definitely accurate. But I think that’s a small piece of a larger puzzle of what’s going on in our brains at the time. Or at least for me individually. Like, there was an understanding that there were things that we were doing that were wrong, 100 percent. And part of the reason I wrote the book was to acknowledge that. And yet I did nothing.

Like, I chose to focus on something else. I chose to turn it back inward and focus on what my days were, and what my problems were. To me, sort of the exploration of the book was to go back. ’Cause you know, I wrote the piece for The New York Times. I talked about some of these stories, and I felt to me like there was more to discover for me.

Why did I stay there for so long? Why did I do those things? Why was I presumably okay with it? And that, at least, was part of the reason of writing the book—to sort of explore those questions and try and understand it. And also try and take accountability for it. Because with that, I lead up to that ISIS story where we’re crossing the border in that Jones didn’t tell us to do that. Jones didn’t even know that was a lie. We had just been in so many circumstances before where the world was exploding—you know, our small world was exploding—because we weren’t finding these things that he wanted. That it then just became an expectation of the job. Did I know it was wrong in the moment? Yeah; of course I knew it was wrong in the moment. And yet I still continue to do it. And to me, that’s the ... I keep thinking while I was working on the book, to myself. Like, my dad would always tell me, “You’re making yourself look bad.” I’m like, “Well, that’s the point.”

I have to talk about things in those terms, because I am responsible for those things. Jones created a world where you second-guess yourself, and you were in this cloud of confusion. And he gaslit you and made you see things a certain way, or question whether you were seeing things a certain way. But I still did those things. And so, to me, that’s the whole point of the book. It’s an exploration of these things. It’s an atonement, taking accountability of those things. So yeah, I think in the moment, of course I knew those things were wrong. At the same time, my brain was … I was choosing to focus on everything but that.

Warzel: It reminds me of the cult behavior where you get into a place—and Infowars is a version of this—where you’re immediately asked to kind of alienate yourself from standard norms and practices of behavior. Or with people who are ostracized from polite society in some way. And you kind of give into that just a little bit. And then you find yourself in a position where—and you reference this a lot in the book—you’re like, Where else am I gonna get a job? Right? I’m unemployable now to most places.

And I think that that element feels, to me, to be such a crucial part of this. Right? Because it sort of keeps you from being able to say—not you in general, and this is not to absolve anything that anyone does—but just the notion that there is this other societal pressure that tends to happen in extremist groups. Where it’s like, “I don’t know where the exit ramp would be, even if I was able to conjure that.” Is that how it felt to you?

Owens: Yeah. And it wasn’t … I think it’s important to say that wasn’t an idea that I conjured on my own. That was something that Jones said on a regular basis. He said that we wouldn’t be able to exist in the world outside of him, because of being connected to him. He told us explicitly, “You’ll never be able to get another job.” We have to change the world, because we won’t be able to exist in it after this.

So in some sense, it was like he was rationalizing that way of operating. And accepting the danger. Because in that part of the book is where the chief of police comes to the office, and he says, “We stopped a man with a trunk full of guns coming to the office, to presumably kill Jones.”

And Jones almost took that as a tool to then use against us. By saying, “You understand how dangerous this is? You understand how real this is? People hate me so much because I’m telling the truth that they’re coming to kill me. So you think that you can walk out of this office and be safe?”

So it wasn’t just about a résumé. It was literally about existence. And I think I write in the book at that time, I came to the realization in that moment it wasn’t just a job. It was a trap. It wasn’t all, People are going to think I’m a bad person for working for Jones. Or People are going to think I’m a right-wing nutjob for working for Jones. Or a conspiracy theorist for working for Jones. On some level, it was this survival in our brains that was sort of inflicted on us by Jones, I think, as a form of control.

Warzel: The book is largely comprised of recounting a lot of these different trips. One of the last ones in the book is this trip to this Muslim community, Islamberg, in I believe upstate New York. There’s this moment after you go and are told, basically, “You gotta come back multiple times. We’re gonna keep harping on this, keep reporting on this community.” And you fly home, and there’s a scene you describe of seeing a small little girl in a hijab, looking out the window of the plane. And feeling this real sense of, I guess, a breaking point, or some kind of realization. Of the world that you guys might be helping to create, and the world that this girl is going to have to live in. It’s a pretty striking moment. Was that the breaking point for you, in some ways?

Owens: It wasn’t one moment—as much as I wish that there was one moment that just completely turned things around. It was many moments. Small moments. Big moments. Over time. That moment specifically was not that I didn’t realize that there could be a young girl in that community. It was that I wasn’t thinking about the individual at all. I was focused on everything but that.

And it was a moment where I started to slowly shift into focusing on people and individuals, not grand conspiracies. Not saving the world, but day-to-day life. How are the things that we’re saying and we’re doing affecting everyday people that have done nothing to deserve it or ask for it? Or they’re just living their lives—and we show up, and we expect them to be a story so that then we can feel better sleeping that night, so our boss isn’t upset. That is what that moment sort of shifted in me.

Warzel: What was another moment—maybe that isn’t even in the book—or something where the focus shifted to people?

Owens: So, Jones says everything is a false flag. Every incident that happens—a mass shooting, a tragedy—is a false flag, because then it becomes a tool that he can use to explain the world. They did this for a reason. Sandy Hook, as an example. The reason that that was a complete “fake” thing, that he said, was to push for gun control. Well, he said that about everything. It was ubiquitous. Sandy Hook happened in that exact moment of when I was offered the job, and when I took the job.

So, much of my focus during that time period was moving to a new place, starting this new thing. I wasn’t even really paying attention to what was going on in that world. I mean, Jones would say a hundred different things about Sandy Hook. The narrative shifted constantly.

Warzel: And just to be clear, for the listeners, Jones was found liable for defaming several of the Sandy Hook victims’ families, for those conspiracy theories about the shooting. And he was ordered to pay damages that total $1.4 billion. Did you clock it in the moment?

Owens: I don’t know if I clocked it at all, or if it was just the norm of what he said. What I remember from that time period is the Boston Marathon [attack]. That’s what I remember. And I remember him. I remember the reports. I remember him shooting reports with certain reporters that he had just hired, and him saying that that was a false flag. That’s the thing I remember. Sandy Hook wasn’t really on my radar, because I never edited a report about Sandy Hook. I never had anything that was part of my job that had to do with Sandy Hook. That got on my radar during the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton in a speech said about Jones: “How dark does someone’s heart have to be to spread the lies that he spread about Sandy Hook?” And you would think for anyone else, a presumptive candidate saying that about you, it would be devastating. And embarrassing, at the very least. Jones literally pranced around the office after that, calling himself Dark Heart. He wore it as a badge of honor. But after that, the media started reporting on the families and the things that they had gone through, directly because of Jones’s rhetoric.

And I thought at the time: If that wasn’t even on my radar—I listened to Jones’s show, I worked for Jones for years after that—if that wasn’t on my radar, the effects of that, how many other Sandy Hooks were there? How many other instances where Jones talked about something, claimed something was a false flag? Claimed a Muslim community was filled with terrorists when it was just random families? How many people that will never get their day in court?

Warzel: So since there wasn’t one straw, and it was this constellation, was there a last straw? Was there something in which it just became untenable for you?

Owens: Yeah, no. There wasn’t this big moment of “I have to get out of this world.” There was hundreds of little moments, dozens of big moments. That moment in Islamberg was a starting point of focusing on people. But in another sense, it was people who sort of helped me get out. I had my partner, Lacey, who I had moved to Austin with me to take the job. She was consistently challenging me to question my actions, to consider the things that I was doing and why I was doing it. And she wasn’t pushing me. She wasn’t screaming at me.

And again, I’m not trying to be prescriptive about this stuff. I’m not saying “If you’re with someone who believes these things, and is doing certain things, stick it out.” That’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying that I had someone who cared enough about me to consistently challenge me and push me in another direction until I finally had the courage to leave.

But it took another person, my partner, pushing me in that direction. It also took relationships like with the writer Jon Ronson. I met him at the RNC. We started communicating. We met secretly at the inauguration, because I believed I had this whole big idea, of I was going to expose Jones’s world. And when I sat down with him, I didn’t have anything to expose, really, other than the lies that we were telling. Which a lot of people—they hear those and they go, “Yeah, of course, Jones is a liar.”

I mean, it seems obvious, at least from a listener standpoint, or the world standpoint of seeing his rhetoric. But I was just looking for someone that was slightly in that world that I could communicate with, that was a calming presence. That I could maybe unload some of the stuff that might understand it. And Ronson, in that meeting, I told him about Islamberg, I told him about the border stories. And he told me, because I had asked his advice on writing, I thought it would be nice to sort of have a little bit of a hermetic life after the chaos of that. And have some time to reflect. And writing was something that I thought was an option.

He said, “You’re going to write about anything; you should write about this.” And that’s when the purpose came. I thought, after all these things that I had contributed to, after all these things that I had done, maybe there’s an opportunity to talk about it. Maybe there’s an opportunity to finally tell the truth about those things. Instead of just going away, instead of just quitting that world, wiping my hands of it.

And so it was just those people in my life that sort of continued to open doorways, present opportunities to talk about things. But also just to be, you know, companions and create that space for conversation.

Warzel: Can you explain a little bit more how they pushed you? What were some of the things that helped push you in ways that helped, you know, create the fissures that became the cracks?

Owens: Yeah. So one instance is that Jones set up this rally outside of a Planned Parenthood. And when my partner and I moved to Austin, we were on diverging paths. I mean, it’s unbelievable that we stayed together, because I was getting pulled into Jones’s world, and she was teaching at a public art school. She was becoming friends with people in Austin, which was a progressive community, and she was getting pulled in this other direction. She was doing fundraisers for Planned Parenthood at the time, while I was in front of a Planned Parenthood with Jones, filming him protest it and scream as people pulled in to the parking lot.

She heard on the radio that Jones had been outside this Planned Parenthood. And when I got home, she asked if I had been a part of it. And I said, “Well, I didn’t plan it, but I had to be there to film Jones.” And she just asked me, “What the hell is wrong with you?” And I remember the argument that we got into that night, and she’s talking to me about how important it is for women to have access to these things, and how the rhetoric that Jones pushes about it eschews every individual that might need these things. And it was specifically moments like that, over and over and over again. Where I was being forced to sit in my house with my partner, who I loved and respected, and answer for the things that I was doing day to day.

Warzel: Have you spoken to any of the people who have been harmed by this? The Sandy Hook families or members of the Muslim community? The list of people who have been harmed by Jones is very long. Have you had conversations with those people? And if so, is there anything you can share about how that’s gone?

Owens: So after I started talking about my experience publicly, I was contacted by one of the attorneys in the Connecticut trial, the Sandy Hook trial. And I was deposed, and I did everything I could in that deposition to help them in that process. During that time, I was contacted by a family member that endured the things that Jones … the rhetoric Jones had spread and everything after. I don’t want to say who; I don’t want to talk about it. They were incredibly kind to reach out and speak to me, and it meant the world. And it made it a lot easier for me to deal with some of the things I was struggling. They didn’t have to do it, and I really, really appreciate it. But I feel a little uncomfortable talking about it, because I don’t want that to be something that I use as somehow absolving myself, or using it in order to say anything. But I would just say—yes, I spoke to someone. Yes, they were incredibly kind to me. And yes, I am eternally grateful for it.

Warzel: Have there been conversations that have gone the other way? And come away with, Oh, I’m not going to get the forgiveness here?

Owens: Well, first off, I don’t think it’s my place to even ask for or seek forgiveness from anyone. I don’t believe I deserve that. So I never enter a conversation with anyone expecting forgiveness. I have had conversations with people who have been perplexed, knowing me after leaving that world, as to why I would ever be involved in it. And there were difficult conversations there. And I would say there are some people that are no longer in my life because of it.

But as far as talking to the people, say, in Islamberg, or people that we directly … you know, honestly, I have had enough involvement in their lives. Those people don’t owe me conversations. Those people don’t owe me time. And so, to me, it feels incredibly presumptuous and short-sighted for me to seek it. If anyone wants to have a conversation with me, I will listen, regardless of how they feel about my past. Because I’m sure I feel the same. I am not happy with myself then, and there is no absolution in my mind. That’s not the point of the book. I don’t ever see that in the future. But I’m not going to seek that out, because that just doesn’t feel like my place.

Warzel: So in 2019, you wrote the essay in The New York Times, which becomes sort of the genesis for the book. We had spoken previously in some of this reporting. So you coming out and sharing your experience about your time at Infowars is not new. But obviously the book and the work for the book coming out, and all of this, kicks the dust up again. I’m curious: Have you heard from current or former Infowars employees? Alex Jones? People like that, recently, around the book? Are they talking to you about any of this decision to be so public about the experience?

Owens: When I left that world, I severed a lot of those ties. And then when I first spoke out about things that you’re sort of forced to, like, Jones would never be okay with people still in that world communicating with me. I have heard from some people in that world who are no longer there. People that I knew when I worked there, that were employees then that also left, that have paid attention to the things that I’ve talked about. And from those individuals, it’s been nothing but positivity; nothing but encouragement.

From Jones himself—I haven’t heard from Jones since 2019. The first thing I did was a piece with Ronson for This American Life, where I told him a story, and then he went and researched it, about Jones’s past. Well, after the This American Life piece, Jones sent me this voice memo that was very manipulative. And it was him saying that if I had to do that for people to like me, that’s fine. That’s okay. But he likes me, he cares about me, but he refuses to become my villain. And the mainstream people that I might be talking to are much worse than him, and I need to keep that in mind. Then when, fact-checkers reached out to him for the New York Times piece, he sent me two text messages. The first text message was, “I’m going public,” which I guess was a threat. I don’t know what that meant. And the second message was, “I hope you have good legal representation.” Then the piece came out, and I’ve not heard from him since.

Warzel: When you have those conversations with previous employees who are no longer there and they are supportive of you, do you ever say to them, “Come on in; the water’s warm. The more the merrier”?

Owens: Yeah, over the past decade, I’ve had a few of those conversations with former employees. And a lot of the responses I’ve gotten is: “Life is too hard without talking about these things. So, you know, I’m not interested.” Or “Jones will spin it in a certain way,” or “Jones will come after me. And so it’s just not worth it.”

You know, honestly, that was my hope when I first did it. I thought, naively, that it would be a snowball effect. Because, if I’m being completely candid, I push back against the idea that this book is a tell-all. Because there are a lot of things that I’m not talking about in the book, because they’re not my stories to tell. They aren’t things that happened to me. And so it’s not my place to talk about them.

And my hope was that, initially with the New York Times piece, is that if I talked about things, other people might follow. And other people had stories that I felt were incredibly important. And that didn’t happen. And so that was unfortunate, because in a lot of ways I felt like if I opened that door it would, and it didn’t.

All I know is that one thing I hope that people can get out of my story is that it is possible for that shift to happen. Because I am not the person that I was when I began listening to Jones and when I worked for Jones. I’m just not. A lot of times I even talk about these stories, and I think, That person is an idiot. I don’t sympathize with that person at all. And it’s me. I did the things. I even think to myself, Why would you stay so long? Why would you do those things?

I don’t think there’s an answer; there’s only an acknowledgment that it happened. And a promise to change. What should people do? How can you help people get out of that world? I don’t know, but I have to believe that there’s some hope. Because I did.

Warzel: And that’s ultimately why you wrote the book. I mean, you mentioned before the process of airing it out of, you know, perhaps atoning for this publicly. Is that the big reason? This is just showing that, in your case, change is possible?

Owens: Yes; that is a big part of the reason. There’s also another reason. I want people to understand that those connections, and those relationships in a sense—I mean, in my experience—saved me, in so many ways. And in a world right now where, because of your podcast, I didn’t actually know this was a thing, but I didn’t know who Clavicular was. Or any of these things. There’s this manosphere world that is rejecting the idea of connection. Where, “What’s the return on investment? How do you monetize this? How does this benefit you?”

And I’m not saying that my story is the … well, in some sense, my story is the antithesis of that. Because it is about connection. It isn’t about return on investment. It isn’t about what you can do for you. And that was something that drove me, in the book, to write about the story. Like, yes: I want there to be hope. I want something good to come from my horrible experience. But I also want people to realize it’s important to surround yourself—at least if they’re in the situation I was in—with people who are smarter than you, people who are genuinely considerate of you. They care about you, and that if they push you, maybe that’s a good thing.

Maybe conversations are good. Maybe being challenged is good. I saw that in that world so often—like, anytime someone was pushed, they cut that person out of their life. That’s the isolation of the conspiracy world. That if people don’t agree with you, people don’t believe with you, you cut them out. And if I had done that, then I don’t know where I would be.

Warzel: That’s a great place to leave it, on that hopeful note. Josh, thank you very much for coming on Galaxy Brain and for writing about this experience for other people to learn from.

Owens: Thank you. I really appreciate you having me. Also, I have to say, you were one of those people that treated me like a person, after I left that world, with kindness. And it made the world of difference. I don’t think I would have published the New York Times piece if you hadn’t stepped in and helped in the way that you did and been a resource for me. So you are one of those people, after I left that world, that it changed everything for me and meant the world to me—that you treated me like a person and not like some idiot who used to work for Alex Jones. So thank you for that, and thank you so much for having me on your show. Was an honor.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Josh Owens. I want to note that, after our conversation with Owens, we reached out to Infowars for comment. No one from Infowars responded to our request. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe to The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow journalists, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

The First Draft of Cultural History

2026-04-17T12:00:00-04:00

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

Newspapers publish the rough draft of history, as the saying goes. And what’s the rough draft of the news? I would argue that it’s gossip, as filtered by good reporters. Which means that gossip is the very rough first version of what ends up in the history books. I first thought of this syllogism while reading primary sources for my book of cultural history, and it came to mind recently as I dove into Lena Dunham’s highly entertaining new memoir, Famesick. “God bless a memoir that drops names—the more bold-faced and braggadocious the better,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote this week in an essay about the book. Gilbert also laments that Dunham’s second memoir fails at what her groundbreaking HBO series, Girls, managed to do: “make broader meaning out of her experiences.” It’s true that the book cannot compete with the show’s ability to explain members of a generation to themselves. And yet, as primary-source material about the making of Millennial art, Famesick is hard to beat.

First, here are five stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

“For everything that was written about Girls across its six seasons—and it was a lot,” Gilbert writes, “nothing has offered the access and insight that Dunham provides in Famesick.” The opening chapters describe Dunham’s arty, privileged Manhattan upbringing; her struggles to master the challenges—technical, physical, and emotional—of filmmaking in her early 20s; and her first encounters with the transactional creatures that operate Hollywood and the trolls that drive social media. Her material is tightly packed but lightly delivered, her writing funny and vulnerable. But as a memoir, her account is also by definition self-involved—the product of a single perspective. As Dunham’s alter ego, Hannah Horvath, says so memorably in the Girls pilot, she is, if not the voice of her generation, then maybe “a voice of a generation.”

Hannah’s statement of purpose gets at both the promise and the limitation of memoirs by public figures. In the hands of a skilled and thoughtful writer (or, in some cases, a ghostwriter), these books can be powerful distillations of what it felt like to live and work in a specific moment. Famesick reveals a great deal about how Hollywood worked in the 2010s, how America’s economic and social networks functioned, and how some Millennials responded to a set of opportunities and dangers specific to them. Dunham’s gossip about colleagues, friends, and enemies adds up to a generational portrait, a feast for cultural historians to come.

The book’s major limitation, meanwhile, is a common one. This is only “a voice”: one person’s account, colored by score-settling, self-justifications, and blind spots. Yet sometimes these qualities can be exactly what make a book compelling. The fun of reading a memoir by Cher or Barbra Streisand or (to cite one of my own primary sources) Sammy Davis Jr. comes from feeling enmeshed in a gossip session with an unreliable but charismatic narrator. You hang on every word in part because you don’t always believe them; if you’re a journalist or a critic, you consult other sources. Reality as we know it is made up of subjective experiences, none of which would feel complete on its own. Gilbert writes, “I’m not quite sure what the meaning of Famesick is, beyond getting certain things on the historical record.” Sometimes, that’s enough—especially if you can’t stop reading it.

Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Theo Wargo / Getty.

What Does Lena Dunham Want to Tell Us?

By Sophie Gilbert

Her new memoir captures the cost of being an impossibly popular target.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Party of Two, by Jasmine Guillory

Picking a favorite book by Guillory is like picking a favorite cookie. They’re all sweetly satisfying; it just depends on what flavor you’re in the mood for. Perhaps you’re interested in a fake-dating ruse that turns into real love. Maybe you want two rivals to realize how thin the line is between hate and love. In Party of Two—the fifth novel in a series featuring the same group of friends—the protagonist, Olivia, has to navigate the spotlight that comes with dating a senator without dulling her own ambitions. What makes Guillory’s characters shine is their passion: for their work (some, including Olivia, are lawyers, as the author herself once was), for improving their communities, and for the simpler pleasures in life, which here mostly take the form of good food. Olivia and Max meet at a hotel bar, where she’s enjoying an ice-cold martini with her Caesar salad and fries. They strike up a conversation about dessert. Later, he sends a cake to ask her on a date. The whole book offers a feast for both the heart and the stomach. — Karen Ostergren

From our list: Eight romance novels for romance skeptics

Out Next Week

📚 The Rolling Stones: The Biography, by Bob Spitz

📚 Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir, by Jayne Anne Phillips

📚 A Room in Bombay, by Manil Suri

Your Weekend Read

Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty

What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center

By Josef Palermo

On the day I was laid off from the Kennedy Center, I felt a little like Dolley Madison saving the Stuart portrait of Washington before the British sacked the capital. I was the staffer in charge of the artworks in the building. A crucial difference is that my institution, unlike the White House in 1814, had been on fire for months.

Read the full article.

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The Real Crisis of The Pitt

2026-04-17T09:20:00-04:00

This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of The Pitt.

The first season of The Pitt presented an emergency room brought to the absolute limits of its capabilities, unfolding as 15 hours of real-time drama at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center that culminated in a deluge of patients after a mass shooting. It was exceptional stuff, a throwback to classic medical TV dramas with just enough of a modern, high-octane twist, and was ladened with awards. But it also set the second season up with a sophomore-slump dilemma—how do you top that?

The answer: You don’t try. The Pitt’s excellent Season 2 didn’t attempt to match or outdo the crisis of last year’s PittFest calamity. Instead, it managed to wring equally compelling drama out of all of its characters just having a really, really crappy day.

[Read: The Pitt has revolutionized the medical drama]

For the show’s tightly wound protagonist, Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle), that manifested as a series of small work dramas—difficult patients, spats with co-workers, and a personality clash with his replacement—as he prepared to ride his motorcycle across the country in a reckless bit of vacationing. The season saw him growing ever more irritable and brittle, leading up to last night’s finale, in which his closest friends finally confronted him about his darker hints at not wanting to return.

Of course, other surprises still abounded over the season’s 15 episodes, each covering an hour of the July 4 day shift at the ER. The hospital’s computer system was threatened by hackers, forcing it to shut down and everyone to turn to pen-and-paper recordkeeping, complete with triplicate forms and eager messengers ferrying orders around. A local waterslide collapsed, resulting in some patients with gnarly, potentially limb-threatening injuries. But things never quite built to the all-hands-on-deck chaos of the show’s first season. Instead, the biggest crisis was internal, most acutely focused on Dr. Robby but featuring almost every member of the ensemble entangled in some sort of existential malaise.

The approach suggests to me that the show’s creative leaders—R. Scott Gemmill, John Wells, and Wyle himself among them—have learned lessons from the last medical drama they all worked on together, the juggernaut ER. That show ran for 15 seasons on NBC, with Wyle playing Dr. John Carter in 13 of them, but after early wild success (both ratings-wise and critically), it often struggled to outdo itself, insisting on bigger and bigger “event” episodes to capture viewers’ attention. In the first season of ER, a blizzard was a blockbuster event; later years featured exploding helicopters, toxic chemical spills, even a vengeful patient stealing an Army tank. The one-upmanship was unsustainable, cutting into the human drama that made the show actually worthwhile.

So The Pitt made human drama the main event, structuring the season around Dr. Robby’s last day in the emergency department before a three-month sabbatical—a much-needed break for someone who had already been depicted as struggling with the strain of his job after the nightmares of COVID. As patients filed through and he was confronted with typically wrenching ER cases, Robby appeared to sink into a deepening daze, eager to escape while alluding to the possibility that maybe he just wouldn’t come back. Toward the end of the season, every time he seemed close to leaving, some plot development would keep him for another hour past the end of his shift. I started to wonder if he would ever escape. (After all, the audience barely sees outside the walls of the Pitt.)

[Read: The Pitt is a brilliant portrait of American failure]

But although Robby’s plight was understandable, the radiating negativity of his unresolved PTSD was presented pretty starkly. Robby was quick to snap at his subordinates, lost patience with medical students and patients alike, and was generally a walking thundercloud. It was impressively unsympathetic work from Wyle, and while the long season did make some of Robby’s grim asides feel repetitive, the final episode provided necessary catharsis, as he admitted to his friend Dr. Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be alive anymore.

That was obvious to the audience, and was even dawning on some of the show’s characters, particularly the flinty charge nurse, Dana (Katherine LaNasa), but the confession still had real dramatic heft. In Season 1, Robby suffered a total breakdown at one point, collapsing in tears in the middle of a trauma event, but here, this quieter, vaguer confession felt just as devastating. Some fans had predicted a more definitive twist for the final episode: Perhaps Robby would be put on a psychiatric hold, or would just ride off into the sunset on his motorcycle with a wild glint in his eyes. But the episode ended on a more ambiguous note, with Robby cuddling an abandoned baby Jane Doe in the peds room, saying she had “so many wonderful things to see and so many people to love” ahead of her. I’ve no doubt that Wyle will return next season, but I’m intrigued to see in what state—and that’s enough of a cliff-hanger for me with a show this dramatically consistent.

Although Robby is the focus of The Pitt, the wider ensemble is what makes the show really sing, and this year all of the characters had similar internal predicaments to tackle. Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) was battling an unexplained estrangement from her mother on top of the career crisis that many a medical resident faces as they pick a specialty. Younger residents like Dr. King (Taylor Dearden) and Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) saw their sanity ebb over their shift as administrative nonsense piled atop personal drama. The 21-year-old prodigy Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) seemed ready to quit outright in the season finale, saying, “The more time I spend here, the more I realize the importance of my mental health”—a thought that seems to be pushing her toward exploring a career in emergency psychiatry.

In every case, the show mined some real pathos for its actors—though I’d love to see characters like King and Santos get even more to do as they rise in seniority. Yet their problems were relatable, the interpersonal spats dramatic but recognizable; if it ever felt like something disastrous was brewing, that was because Robby’s absence as a leader was more keenly felt as the season went on. The day ended with some of the staff hitting a bar to scream into karaoke microphones; pretty much everyone watching at home has wanted to do that after a cruddy day at the office. The Pitt just supersized that feeling without overblowing it. Whether or not the third season swerves back to something larger-scale, the show has proved that it doesn’t have to summon the apocalypse to its hospital doors every year to justify its continued success.

Photos of the Week: Glacier Performance, Gorilla Birthday, Moon Return

2026-04-17T09:00:00-04:00

Mehmet Emin Mengüarslan / Anadolu / Getty

Fiery streaks of handmade rockets light up the night sky over the village of Vrontados on the island of Chios, Greece, as two rival congregations engage in their traditional “rocket war” to celebrate Easter on April 12, 2026. Thousands of fireworks were launched between Saint Markos and Panagia Erithiani churches, turning the solemn resurrection night into a spectacle of light and sound.

Wason Wanichakorn / AP

People participate in the Songkran water festival to celebrate the Thai New Year in Prachin Buri province, Thailand, on April 13, 2026.

Guglielmo Mangiapane / Reuters

Pope Leo XIV releases a dove next to Archbishop of Bamenda Andrew Fuanya Nkea and other officials after a meeting for peace with the community of Bamenda in Saint Joseph’s Cathedral in Bamenda, Cameroon, on April 16, 2026.

Matias Basualdo / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters

A gosling rests among flowers along the banks of the Main River on April 15, 2026, in Frankfurt, Germany.

Yves Herman / Reuters

Wild bluebells, which bloom around mid-April, turn the forest floor blue in the Hallerbos, also known as the “Blue Forest,” in Halle, Belgium, on April 14, 2026.

Charlie Riedel / AP

Lightning flashes as a thunderstorm passes in the distance on April 13, 2026, in Lenexa, Kansas.

Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty for Coachella

Mariqueen Maandig and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Noize perform at the Sahara Tent during the 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, on April 11, 2026.

Avishek Das / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty

Hindu devotees have their bodies painted as part of traditional practices during the annual Gajan Festival in West Bengal, India, on April 12, 2026.

Sazzad Hossain / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty

A giant rooster statue is paraded during celebrations of the Bengali New Year, known as Pohela Boishakh, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 14, 2026.

Ina Fassbender / AFP / Getty

A bodybuilder performs at the FIBO trade show for health, fitness, and wellness in Cologne, Germany, on April 16, 2026.

Markus Schreiber / AP

Fatou, the oldest gorilla in Berlin’s zoo—and believed to be the world’s oldest gorilla—celebrates her 69th birthday on April 13, 2026.

Ramil Sitdikov / Reuters

Natalia Malinovskaya, a self-described witch, holds a crystal ball during an interview with Reuters at her apartment in Moscow on February 17, 2026.

Martin Bernetti / AFP / Getty

An airplane passes in front of the sun during sunrise in Panama City on April 15, 2026.

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

A Russian Geran 2 attack drone flies past apartment buildings in Kyiv, Ukraine, during Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, on April 16, 2026.

Serhii Okunev / AFP / Getty

A firefighter works to extinguish a blaze at a recycling-materials site following a Russian strike in Kyiv on April 16, 2026. Russian strikes killed at least 12 people in Ukraine, local authorities said on April 16, after Moscow pummeled its neighbor in overnight attacks.

McKlein Photography / LAT Images / Getty

Sami Pajari competes in his Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 during Croatia Rally, Round 4 of the 2026 FIA World Rally Championship in Zagreb, Croatia, on April 11, 2026.

Sheng Jiapeng / China News Service / VCG / Getty

A humanoid robot takes part in a test for the upcoming 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on April 12, 2026, in Beijing.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

Christina Koch, a NASA astronaut and Artemis II mission specialist, hugs the Orion spacecraft in the well deck of USS John P. Murtha on April 11, 2026, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Koch, along with the astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10 at 5:07 p.m. PT, after their trip around the moon.

Kevin Frayer / Getty

Workers stand on the roof of the Phoenix Center building as they clean the windows on April 12, 2026, in Beijing.

Gerald Herbert / AP

An alligator rests on a log in a pond along the batture of the Mississippi River in Harahan, Louisiana, on April 15, 2026.

Robert F. Bukaty / AP

A female eastern bluebird brings material to her nest on April 14, 2026, in Freeport, Maine.

Jenny Kane / AP

People walk through the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm in Woodburn, Oregon, on April 11, 2026.

Nick Lachance / Toronto Star / Getty

Shalini Maria teases her husband, Alvin Presley, with a tulip while singing “Kiss From a Rose” by Seal in Christie Pits Park in Toronto, Ontario, on April 13, 2026. Maria had just returned from a trip to New York City, and Presley met her at the airport with flowers, one of their traditions.

Hidenori Nagai / The Yomiuri Shimbun / Reuters

Cherry blossoms are in full bloom at Hirosaki Park in Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, on April 16, 2026. Many of the approximately 2,600 trees are lit up at night.

Odd Andersen / AFP / Getty

A fox pays a visit to the chancellery as journalists wait for the arrival of head of the African Union Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, in Berlin on April 14, 2026.

Joseph Eid / AFP / Getty

A boy walks with a flock of sheep along the shore in the Lebanese village of Kfar Aabida, north of Beirut, on April 11, 2026.

GreenPeace / Reuters

The Swiss musician To Athena, accompanied by a small group of musicians, performs outside a cave in Morteratsch Glacier to draw attention to climate-change issues, in Pontresina, Switzerland, on March 25, 2026. (Handout photo released by Reuters on April 10.)

Amit Machamasi / NurPhoto / Getty

Newari women pull Lord Bhairav’s chariot in Bhaktapur, Nepal, on April 16, 2026, during a Hindu festival. Biska Jatra, celebrated to welcome the New Year, spans eight nights and nine days, bringing communities together in a shared spirit of devotion and celebration.

The Scapegoat Scam

2026-04-17T07:00:00-04:00

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The Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who lost his election in a landslide on Sunday after 16 years in power, presented himself as a defender of Western civilization. But at best, his lofty rhetoric was a code for bigotry and a justification for the persecution of minorities; at worst, it was a scam to fleece Hungarians by persuading them to blame everyone but those responsible for their problems. Maybe both.

Eventually Hungarians decided that a major source of their problems was Orbán himself. Maybe someday Americans will come to a similar realization about Orbán’s great admirer, Donald Trump, who praised the former Hungarian leader before the election as a “fantastic man” who had done a “fantastic job.”

Orbánism was, more or less, a model for what Trump and the Republican Party are trying to do in the United States. The Trump administration was so desperate to prevent Orbán’s defeat that it sent J. D. Vance to ask Hungarians to “stand for Western civilization” and “freedom, for truth and for the God of our fathers.” Few vice presidents have more consistently debased the office, to the point that most people hardly noticed that Vance had praised as godly a man who publicly condemned “race mixing.”

Hungarians didn’t listen to Vance’s pleas. They swept the opposition leader Péter Magyar into office with a large enough majority to undo the changes to the system that Orbán had instituted to keep himself in power. Those changes forced an otherwise ideologically divided opposition to coalesce behind the center-right Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s party, because he was committed to restoring Hungarian democracy.

After 16 years of Orbán, freedom and truth, not to mention material prosperity, are relatively scarce. Hungarian media were consolidated by regime-friendly billionaires, the independence of universities was curtailed, and the distribution of state benefits was predicated on loyalty to Orbán’s party, Fidesz—making people reluctant to criticize the government. All this meant that more direct tactics of state control, such as violence, were unnecessary.

Orbán rode to power on resentment over the economic stagnation that developed under center-left governments. But he leaves office with Hungarians facing falling wages and higher inflation than similar countries are experiencing. Orbán’s sectarianism and intolerance have sparked neither a religious revival nor a fertility bump; Hungary’s population is shrinking and has become more irreligious, even as Orbán has demonized LGBTQ people, “Muslim invaders,” and Jews. Orbánism, in short, did not make Hungarians more rich, Christian, or free—unless you happened to be one of Orbán’s buddies, in which case you may have gotten rich. As most Hungarians felt their economic circumstances worsen, Orbán provided them with relatively powerless targets to hate.

That was effective, but it didn’t last forever. The massive turnout for a banned Pride parade last June, despite Orbán’s threat of “legal consequences” for any attendees, was seen as a sign that Orbán had lost his iron grip.

That Orbán’s carefully constructed system for keeping himself in power was ultimately overwhelmed by discontent over economic stagnation offers a warning for his successors. The European Union had held up funds for Hungary in response to Orbán’s corruption—a central issue in the campaign. Those funds may now be released, and this should help the Hungarian economy. Still, further stagnation could revive the authoritarian right and, as my colleague Anne Applebaum points out, much of the media and the private-sector economy in Hungary remain in the hands of Orbán allies.

Although Orbán has been defeated, America is following the path he blazed. Many American conservatives, surprised lately to find themselves on the defense regarding culture-war issues such as marriage equality—wars that, just a few short years ago, they seemed to be winning—openly admired the Orbán model, even inviting him to the Conservative Political Action Conference to inveigh against “wokeness.” The Trump administration’s public communication is almost entirely scapegoating—blaming immigrants for low wages, housing scarcity, and crime, while appealing to high-minded sentiments about “Western civilization.” The rhetoric of administration figures such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the adviser Stephen Miller is only slightly paraphrased from the 19th century, language used to justify colonialism and imperialism by framing Europeans as heirs to the great civilizations of antiquity and their enemies as worthless “savages.”

The Trump administration has ignored Congress in its distribution of funds, it has made corporate mergers and government contracts contingent on Trump’s approval, and it has used state power to threaten the free speech and independence of media outlets, universities, and political opponents. Trump has sought to compromise the independence of both the federal judiciary and the Federal Reserve. Although Trump has not entirely nullified Congress’s appropriations power, he has done enough to signal to powerful actors that they need to genuflect before him to protect their interests. Trump has done his best to centralize power over elections Orbán-style, but he has been largely thwarted by America’s federal system.

Demonizing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ people has helped the GOP win elections but, as in Hungary, economic prosperity has not been widely shared. The Trump administration’s economic policy has been to redistribute income upward, cutting taxes on the rich while slashing health care for everyone else, even as costs rise because of the president’s tariffs and his catastrophic war with Iran.

Traditional American conservatism once held that this kind of centralization was a sure path to tyranny, the very reason to keep government small, so as to prevent it from dominating political, economic, and cultural life. That view was informed by genuine insight, even if one is skeptical that anyone since Barry Goldwater has actually believed it. Whatever earnest commitment to small government that once animated the GOP has not survived its encounter with Trump. Opposition to equal rights, to higher taxes on the wealthy, and to a more generous social safety net is all that is left.

Trumpism will not deliver broad prosperity any more than Orbánism did, and keeping Americans strung along will require new enemies and panics to focus their frustrations elsewhere. It took Hungarians the better part of 20 years to reclaim their freedom. How long will it take Americans?

The Allbirds Pivot Is a Terrible Idea … Right?

2026-04-16T18:52:00-04:00

Walk into any Silicon Valley office in the late 2010s, and you’d probably see at least one pair of Allbirds. Woolly and eco-friendly, the sneakers once epitomized a certain kind of corporate culture (even Barack Obama was a fan), and the company behind them was valued at roughly $4 billion at its peak, in 2021. But for several years, sales have flagged. Attempts to replicate the success of its signature product—see: wool leggings and wool underwear—didn’t do much to keep the business afloat. Earlier this year, Allbirds sold most of its holdings for pennies and closed its remaining retail stores. Now it has a last-ditch idea: a hard pivot to AI.

The plan, announced yesterday, is to change its name to NewBird AI and spend $50 million from an unnamed investor on specialized chips called GPUs, which it will then lease to other companies. The move is a high-risk bid to save the company’s stock, and it has already kind of worked: Allbirds’ value increased by more than 600 percent yesterday. Although businesses reorient themselves around AI all the time, Allbirds is trying a far more extreme version of the strategy. At first glance, it might look like a cynical (and very possibly doomed) cash grab. But for a flailing shoe company, an AI rebrand might also be an escape hatch.

Last month, Allbirds was sold for less than 1 percent of what it was worth in 2021. Because almost nothing has been spared in the fire sale, it is now essentially a shell corporation. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine argued yesterday that the company might be banking on tech executives’ “nostalgic fondness for their brand” to make this pivot work. But Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio is a veteran of the outdoor-apparel industry and has no apparent AI experience; the company did not respond to questions about the future of its executive team or the future of other people who work there.

There’s an obvious reason for companies to jump on the AI train—the technology is creating enormous wealth. The S&P 500 hit a record high yesterday, thanks in part to the strength of the American tech sector. And that doesn’t even account for the two leading AI companies, both of which are private. OpenAI and Anthropic are valued at about $1.2 trillion combined—more than the GDP of Poland. When those companies go public, as they’re expected to in the not-too-distant future, they will generate astounding wealth for their executives and investors.

The idea that a shoe company can use an AI rebrand to quickly juice its stock price will likely strengthen naysayers’ suspicions that we’re in a bubble. It echoes a cautionary tale of the crypto craze: In 2017, shares of Long Island Iced Tea Corp. jumped as much as 500 percent after the company announced a pivot to blockchain technology. The highs were short-lived. A year later, Long Blockchain Corp. (it got a new name too) was delisted from the NASDAQ. When the struggling video-game retailer GameStop tried a similar crypto pivot in 2022, its stock climbed 30 percent in a day. But that ultimately didn’t prevent the company’s gradual descent from the meme-stock highs it had seen in 2021. The maneuver failed in the long run in part because it muddied the idea of what GameStop even was: Why was the brick-and-mortar store where I once bought Assassin’s Creed III suddenly selling NFTs?

But in this unprecedented market, where private lenders abound and VCs are doubling down on AI, flexibility can be a good thing. Plenty of companies have incorporated AI into their existing products over the past few years, albeit with varying levels of success. Mattel’s toys will soon have AI components, PepsiCo wants to rely on AI agents to transform its sales and operations, and Bath & Body Works has used AI to develop a “fragrance finder” called Gingham Genius. Few businesses are immune to the lure of this tech, and to the potential for investment that tends to come with it.

NewBird AI’s lack of experience in the sector will make it difficult to turn a short-term stock bump into long-term success. Questions remain about who’s investing in the business, and how effectively its leaders might continue raising money in the future. The $50 million that Allbirds has secured, with just $5 million up front, is dwarfed by what the biggest AI companies are regularly bringing in. OpenAI announced $122 billion in new funding late last month. And it’s unclear whether Allbirds will command the kind of access to private credit lines that other public companies have relied on for their AI ambitions. Despite the financial promise of its new business model, Allbirds is really just a tiny, inexperienced player in an already crowded market. Perhaps accounting for traders’ tempering expectations, the stock has fallen by about 25 percent today.

Allbirds is now shedding much of what made it distinct during its boom years and adapting to a business climate in which raw computing power is king. Despite a founding mission to make sustainable footwear, the company is turning to a notoriously energy-intensive corner of the tech industry and likely slashing language about environmental conservation from its charter. Whether or not this rebrand succeeds, it has already underscored the absurd pull of AI—and just how much of our economy is being drawn into its orbit.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump said that the United States could hold talks with Iran this weekend and that the two countries are “very close” to a deal, even as the U.S. military expands a blockade of Iran-linked ships. He also announced a 10-day cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon starting today and invited both country’s leaders to Washington, D.C., for peace talks.
A federal judge ordered Trump to halt aboveground construction of the planned White House ballroom despite the administration’s claims that it’s needed for national security, ruling that the project can’t proceed without congressional approval.
Trump nominated Erica Schwartz, a vaccine supporter who served as deputy surgeon general during his first term, to lead the CDC. If confirmed, she would be the agency’s fourth leader in about a year.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Attila Kisbenedek / AFP / Getty; Neil Milton / SOPA / LightRocket / Getty.

The Quiet Way Authoritarianism Begins to Crumble

By Gal Beckerman

In the days after Donald Trump won his second term, I called a handful of Hungarian political analysts to ask what the American future might look like. My impulse was not an original one; the analysts had been fielding many calls of this sort. Hungary seemed like a bellwether for the illiberal direction in which Trump said he was going to lead the United States. Over his decade and a half reign, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had rigged the electoral and legislative systems for his party’s benefit, come to control (directly or indirectly) 80 percent of the country’s media, and hobbled most independent institutions. But when I asked these Hungarians to give it to me straight, they started to tell me another story, about what was happening on “the islands.”

Read the full article.

RFK Jr.’s New Normal

2026-04-16T17:15:18-04:00

Updated at 6:58 p.m. ET on April 16, 2026

The White House has reportedly urged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to avoid talking about vaccines, but this morning he had no choice. When he appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee—the first of seven congressional testimonies that he’s scheduled to give in the coming days as part of the 2027-budgeting process—members pressed him on the issue, which he has written and spoken about nearly nonstop for two decades.

He mostly sidestepped those questions, declining to repeat claims he’s made before about the supposed links between vaccines and autism (no such links have been found), or about how contracting measles might boost a person’s immune system (the opposite is true). When asked whether an unvaccinated girl who died of measles in Texas last year might have been saved by the shot, the health secretary responded: “It’s possible, certainly.”

Kennedy recently seems to be steering clear of public statements about vaccines because the White House fears that his anti-vaccine agenda will tank Republicans in the midterms. Instead, he’s touted the government’s new inverted food pyramid and the return of whole milk to school cafeterias. The first episode of his new podcast, released this week, features the celebrity chef Robert Irvine—the man “making my dream come true,” Kennedy says, by revamping military meals—who sits with Kennedy in front of shelves displaying several of Kennedy’s conspiracy-theory-laden books and a picture of his father. (Irvine has a history of embellishing his résumé, which he’s called “errors in my judgment.” A Health and Human Services spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the department’s recent moves.)

This more restrained version of Kennedy is appearing as the Trump administration is making moves to tamp down turmoil at HHS. Two months ago, Chris Klomp, the head of Medicare, became the department’s chief counselor, reportedly to keep Kennedy in line. And today, after months of confusion and chaos, President Trump nominated a new director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Erica Schwartz, a former deputy U.S. surgeon general and a retired rear admiral in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service.

If Schwartz’s nomination is confirmed by Congress, she would step in as head of an agency that, over the past year, has dealt with several high-profile resignations and flagging morale. The CDC has had a confirmed director for only 29 days since Kennedy took office. Right now—at least officially—it has no director at all. The Trump administration missed a deadline last month to nominate a new one, which means the previous acting director, Jay Bhattacharya, can no longer claim that title, even though he appears to remain in charge. Bhattacharya, whose other job is serving as director of the National Institutes of Health, has seemed intent on winning over employees at the beleaguered agency, telling them at an all-staff meeting last month that they needed to “focus on what we know how to do” rather than getting caught up in politics. This month, though, Bhattacharya, who is known for his contrarian views on the public-health response to the coronavirus pandemic, reportedly delayed the publication of a CDC study showing that the COVID vaccine reduced the likelihood of hospitalization. (An HHS spokesperson told The New York Times that Bhattacharya “wants to make sure that the paper uses the most appropriate methodology.”)

[Read: RFK Jr. is losing his grip on the CDC]

Schwartz’s selection could signal a move toward stability. She has a long public-health track record, including serving in the first Trump administration during the coronavirus pandemic. She holds a medical degree from Brown University and a law degree from the University of Maryland. (The acting director who preceded Bhattacharya, Jim O’Neill, has no medical background and was viewed internally as a Kennedy loyalist.) Several current and former CDC employees I contacted welcomed the news of her possible selection.

A number of other key CDC roles that have been vacant for months will also soon be filled with qualified officials. Jennifer Shuford, an infectious-disease specialist and Texas’s health commissioner, who emphasized the importance of measles vaccination during the state’s outbreak last year, will be the agency's deputy director and chief medical officer. Sara Brenner, a physician who is currently serving as the principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, will become a senior counselor to Kennedy.

Such selections by no means guarantee that the agency will return to normal. The CDC’s last permanent director, a longtime government scientist named Susan Monarez, has testified that she lost her job because she refused to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s agenda or to get rid of certain public-health experts. (Kennedy has said she was fired because she denied being a trustworthy person.) If Schwartz in fact becomes the next director, she, like Monarez, could find herself standing between agency staff and Kennedy, who has repeatedly called the CDC corrupt. Daniel Jernigan, the former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases who resigned in protest over Monarez’s firing last year, told me he believes that, for the next director—whoever that turns out to be—acquiescing to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views is “likely a necessary job skill.”

[Read: A new level of vaccine purgatory]

If Kennedy was circumspect about his own views today, the actions he’s already taken on vaccines as HHS secretary are still bearing fruit. Last summer, he stacked the agency’s vaccine advisory board with allies; this spring, a judge temporarily blocked changes that the board made to the childhood-vaccine schedule and declared most of its members illegitimate. But last week, seemingly in response, Kennedy signed off on changes to the board’s charter, which now says that, among its duties, the board will work on identifying “gaps in vaccine safety research including adverse effects following vaccination.” It’s hard not to read that as code for continuing to cast doubt on vaccines.

When Trump made Kennedy health secretary, he famously promised to let him “go wild.” Lately, Kennedy seems to have been tamed. But that doesn’t mean he’s abandoned his anti-vaccine agenda, or that he won’t push it from behind the scenes.

This article has been updated to reflect Shuford’s and Brenner’s new roles

Israel Moderates Are Losing the Democratic Party

2026-04-16T17:08:05-04:00

Hasan Piker has attracted millions of followers across multiple social-media platforms, making him one of the most popular left-wing streamers. He has been the subject of several flattering magazine profiles that have lingered over what they describe as his handsome looks and bodybuilder physique. Some progressives see him as their long-sought entry point into alternative media that can reach a young, mainly male, audience.

But he is most important as a stand-in for a fight over whether the Democratic Party should be open to, or even dominated by, militant anti-Zionism. Although he allowed, after October 7, 2023, that “the Palestinian resistance is not perfect”—who hasn’t raped, kidnapped and massacred 1,200 civilians from time to time?—he defends Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler-colonial apartheid state.” He has likened the leaders of Hezbollah, a terrorist arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to Nelson Mandela.

A debate over American policy toward Israel is likely to divide the party in the next presidential-primary cycle even more clearly than Medicare for All divided it in 2020—even as many voters aren’t invested in the debate at all. The Democrats’ establishment opposes terrorism and backs a two-state solution; Piker and his allies want to cast that position as de facto support for the status quo, which is a single state controlled by Israel.

If the establishment has any hope of holding on to the party, rather than surrendering it to the Piker wing, it will need to defy that characterization by recognizing that facts on the ground have changed. Political morals and public opinion are pushing in the same direction: ending American financial support for Israel.

For decades, the Democratic Party’s consensus on Israel has combined diplomatic, military, and economic support, including several billion dollars in annual aid, and a friendly push for a two-state solution. In theory, Democrats have supported the national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians while giving themselves room to condemn Palestinian terrorism along with the excesses of Israel’s occupation and West Bank settlement project.

[Read: An end to U.S. military aid to Israel may be closer than you think]

The theoretical case for a two-state solution remains as sound as ever. The trouble is that the Palestinian side has rejected repeated attempts by Democratic presidents to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state, and that Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing coalition do everything they can to subvert such a solution. At some point, supporters of the two-state solution have to take “no” for an answer. The United States is effectively supporting a one-state solution whose entire strategy rests on an endless cycle of responding to terrorism with military force (a process of periodic attacks that Israel calls “mowing the lawn”) in place of any diplomatic path.

Netanyahu represents a parliamentary majority that has run the country for two decades. He has undermined diplomacy repeatedly by, among many other acts, lobbying against the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, propping up Hamas in Gaza before October 7 (to ensure that Palestinians didn’t have leaders he might be expected to negotiate with), and proposing that the Trump administration go to war with Iran.

At the same time, Israel’s standing with the American public has cratered. In four years, its favorability in one Pew Research Center survey plunged from 55 percent to 37 percent. The trend is reflected in other polls, and it has a steep age gradient. Young people in both parties now feel overwhelmingly negative toward it.

Sentiment within the Democratic Party is far harsher than among the general public. Rahm Emanuel is now saying that Israel can buy American weapons but should no longer get them for free. Say what you will about Emanuel, but he can read a poll.

If moderate Democrats continue to support giving Israel (which is getting more unpopular) military aid (which is broadly unpopular), they will sentence themselves to obsolescence. Social-media accounts such as AIPAC Tracker—which defines AIPAC as including organizations such as J Street, a liberal group that now favors ending aid to Israel and is bitterly opposed to AIPAC—have gained wide circulation. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who is not backed by AIPAC, recently was accused by a student at a public event of accepting support from “pro-Israel lobbies.” More and more, pro-Palestine activists treat acceptance of Israel’s existence in any form as genocidal.

The most essential task for liberal Zionists is to separate their ambitions from the stubborn realities of Israel’s government. Liberal Zionists can say that they oppose the status quo and favor two independent states, but as Israel’s willingness to trade land for peace recedes further into historical memory, those pleas sound detached from reality. The traditional Democratic posture is becoming outright impossible as long as the party continues to support sending billions of dollars to Israel every year.

By 2028, two consecutive presidencies are likely to have incinerated political capital attempting to leverage the American alliance with Israel. If a Democratic president is going to succeed Donald Trump, not only must he or she emerge from a primary electorate that is likely to be highly skeptical of Israel, but the candidate must also win over a November electorate that is highly skeptical of foreign aid of any kind.

The winning alternative to embracing uncompromising Palestinian nationalism will not be reviving the American partnership with Netanyahu, or one of his would-be successors (the most plausible of whom, Naftali Bennett, opposes any Palestinian state). It will be pulling up stakes from the Middle East and letting Israelis and Palestinians figure it out for themselves.

Renouncing unconditional aid to Israel may seem like a full-scale surrender to the Piker wing of the Democratic Party. But Israel can survive without American assistance—even Netanyahu has proposed weaning his country off American aid in a decade or so. More important, to equate the withdrawal of the American subsidy with the left-wing position misconstrues just how radical the latter has grown.

Anti-Israel activists such as Piker are calling for more than an end to aid for Israel. They are demanding an arms embargo, which would prevent Israel from even purchasing defensive weaponry from the United States, and cultural and economic boycotts of Israel (but not any other human-rights violator).

The anti-Zionist left sees Israel not merely as a recalcitrant and overly aggressive power but as a fundamentally illegitimate state that is a source of unique evil in the world. Piker’s reference to Israel as a “settler-colonial apartheid state” reflects a fashionable ideology that imagines Israel as an alien Western power that must be expunged so that the land can be turned over to its natural inhabitants.

That ideology propels activist groups that are pushing the party leftward. Every major pro-Palestinian activist group refuses to criticize Hamas, and either endorsed or justified the October 7 attacks. Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella group organizing campus protests, called the October 7 attacks “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” over “the facade of an impenetrable settler colony.” The Palestinian Youth Movement asserted, “We have a right to resist on our own land.” Within Our Lifetime stated, “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.”

Among the leaders of the protests against the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 2024 was Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. On October 7, 2023, Abudayyeh wrote on behalf of USPCN, “Palestinians have an internationally-recognized right to resist illegal military occupation, and today’s attacks from the Palestinian Resistance should be understood as a legitimate response to unending violence from Israel’s extreme right-wing, racist, white supremacist, zionist government and settler movement.”

Revealingly, the movement is focused on Gaza, to the point where Gaza is often used as shorthand for its goals. Although Gaza has seen the worst carnage, it was also the staging ground for horrific mass attacks on civilians. Pogroms by Israeli settlers in the West Bank have no defensive rationale, yet they have received a fraction of the attention bestowed on Gaza. The most convincing explanation for this selective attention is that Gaza, but not the West Bank, is controlled by Hamas, and the pro-Palestinian activist network in the U.S. is in solidarity with Hamas.

The anti-Zionist left is pursuing what activists call an “entryist” strategy, in which members of a faction try to move into an existing party and convert it to their ideology. It’s having some success.

Earlier this month, Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate in Michigan’s Senate primary, invited Piker to speak at a rally. El-Sayed’s two Democratic opponents criticized him for campaigning with Piker, but fellow Democrats such as Summer Lee and Rashida Tlaib joined the event. Matt Duss, who has advised Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on foreign policy, leaped to Piker’s defense, as did The New Republic’s Aaron Regunberg and The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, among other progressives.

Piker was not even the most radical anti-Zionist to appear at El-Sayed’s rally. Standing next to Piker was Amir Makled, a lawyer who has represented Michigan’s student protesters, who is running for regent in the state. Makled has written and shared numerous posts praising Hezbollah and Iran’s leadership, and has used Jew as a slur.

El-Sayed and his allies have defended his rally with Piker as the equivalent of appearing on controversial shows such as Joe Rogan’s, logic endorsed by commenters such as Ezra Klein—as if doing an interview with a podcaster is the same thing as accepting their endorsement at a campaign rally.

The anti-Zionist left understands that Piker’s views—which also run toward broad sympathy for China, Cuba, Russia, and authoritarianism in general—are repugnant to the majority of voters, even in a Democratic presidential primary. The main defense of Piker’s appearance at El-Sayed’s rally is that he is insignificant. Sunkara, enumerating a series of world crises, observed sarcastically in The Guardian, “So naturally, the Democratic Party has found something truly urgent to focus on: a Twitch streamer.” El-Sayed himself made the same argument. “Our president is waging a genocidal, illegal, unjustifiable war with Iran that is torching our tax dollars to the tune of $1.5 billion a day,” he said at his rally, and yet, “apparently the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were gonna campaign with Hasan.”

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]

If El-Sayed doesn’t think that people should discuss his rally with Piker, why would he hold a rally with Piker? The answer, of course, is that he believes Democrats should discuss Piker, but only to agree with him.

This sort of deflection is a common move for political activists when their ally has done something too embarrassing for them to openly defend, but that they do not wish to condemn. They are recognizing the unpopularity of the views they want to mainstream.

But those views can prevail within the party only if the alternative is equally unpopular. At the moment, it is. Israel has alienated public opinion, a shift that began even before Israel encouraged and joined in a potentially disastrous war in Iran. Instead of meeting pro-Palestine activism with defiance, the more intelligent strategy for moderate Democrats would be to sever their political liabilities and compromise with public opinion.

Liberal Zionists can win an intra-Democratic argument against anti-Zionist radicals, but they can’t win it while burdened with support for subsidizing settlements and a strategy of endless conflict. The most extreme anti-Zionist activists won’t be satisfied with anything short of committing the Democratic Party to Israel’s demise. But the most left-wing position in recent Democratic primaries—on Iraq in 2004, on health care in 2016—has rarely been adopted by the candidate who emerges as the party’s eventual nominee.

The decisive bloc of Democrats includes those who are disgusted with Israel’s policies and ready to wash their hands of American support for its maximalist strategy, but wary of going full Piker. Either mainstream Democrats will give up any illusions they have about the ugly nature of Israel’s current government, or they will no longer occupy the mainstream of their party.

The Tyranny of AI Everywhere

2026-04-16T15:48:00-04:00

I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that my shoes—my comfortable, unfashionable wool shoes—were pivoting to AI. “But you’re a shoe company,” I said. “Just go out of business! Keep your dignity!”

My shoes thanked me politely for the great question and then tried to walk me off a bridge. That was how I knew that their pivot to AI was complete. From Allbirds to AIlbirds (see, that L is an I!). Maybe I’ve cracked, I said to myself. Maybe this is the piece of AI news that has finally broken my spirit for good.

I yanked off my shoes and staggered home in a barefoot daze.

Everywhere I looked, things were pivoting to AI that shouldn’t have been pivoting to AI.

My cereal had also pivoted to AI (cereAI), which I could tell because of subtle changes in the recipe, such as the nuts now being the hard, metal kind. It was difficult to enjoy, but I did my best. My alphabet soup had become AI; all of the liquid in it had been redirected to help with processing, and every time I tried to spell Mississippi, the dry noodles gave me a different result.

I put on my glasses to read my children a book. The glasses company was pivoting to AI, so when I looked through them, I saw only things that weren’t there and, for some reason, Tilly Norwood. The storybooks had all pivoted to AI too. We read Goldilocks and the 4.5 Bears. (“You’re absolutely right, Goldilocks. Yes, you’re trespassing in a sense, but bears have no legal rights. Testing different bowls of porridge is a great strategy to find one that’s just right, and you deserve a treat.”)

I turned on the faucet, but the water company had pivoted to AI. No water came out, but I did get some slop.

I wanted to drive to work, but the company that made my car had also pivoted to AI. The car now had six wheels, and instead of carrying me to my destination, it carried me somewhere else that it assured me repeatedly and belligerently was my destination. Finally, I gave up and walked. I would have stopped for coffee, but the coffee shop had pivoted to AI. “We have never sold coffee here!” it told me. “But I can see the coffee!” I pleaded. “I’m sorry,” it agreed. “You’re right.” It still wouldn’t give me any coffee.

I tried to sit down on a bench, but the bench company had pivoted to AI. I couldn’t sit down, but the bench did tell me that I was right about everything. My newspaper had become AI a while ago, so there was nothing to read—or, rather, there were things to read, but I could not tell whether any of them were true. I thought I would go to a museum to cheer myself up. The paintings there had pivoted to AI (pAIntings), and their subjects were all following me with their eyes, not just Mona Lisa.

“There’s a place for AI,” I said. “But … not everywhere.”

“I’m sorry,” the painting said. “I didn’t want this either, but everyone is doing it!”

Outside, AI birds flapped past a window. Their wings made the sound of applause. The birdsong was a bit off too. It became more and more garbled the longer I listened. “Stop it!” I yelled. But it didn’t stop.

Frantic to find one person, place, or thing that was not pivoting to AI, I rushed home to my husband. At first I felt reassured: There he was, inaccurately recounting summaries of the Wikipedia page about the Holy Roman Empire, the way he always had. But just to be sure, I asked to count his fingers, and he ran away. “We’ll be profitable soon!” he yelled.

“It’s fine,” my grandmother said. I was surprised to hear from her, because as far as I knew, she was dead. “I’m not dead,” she said. “I’m just pivoting to AI, like that shoe company. Nothing dies anymore. It just becomes AI.”

“Aiee!” I screamed. There was AI in that too. I kept hoping that the scream would wake me up.

Trump Voters Are Over It

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

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

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

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

[Read: The manosphere turns on Trump ]

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Public anger is rising]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center

2026-04-16T13:34:54-04:00

About a year elapsed between the moment President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in early 2025 and his declaration this past February that he’d decided to shut down the nation’s cultural center for two years. In between, we had seen artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, firings of old staffers and influxes of new ones—a lot of drama, just not onstage. The date Trump announced for the closure was July 4, the country’s 250th birthday, an event that I had been hired to help commemorate as the institution’s first curator of visual arts and special programming.

Though staffers had been assured that we’d have our jobs until July, I was one of dozens of people let go on March 26. From the moment I received a calendar invitation for a meeting with human resources, I knew I had to scramble. Shortly after Trump’s shutdown announcement, the center’s president, Richard Grenell, told me to “get rid of everything” in the permanent collection because we needed all new art for the reopening. Although I had slow-walked this demand for several weeks by pretending I was waiting on another colleague for updates, I now had only two hours to tie up loose ends. I hurriedly emailed the families of the late maestro Julius Rudel, the center’s first artistic director, whose bust sits outside the Opera House, and of the late Nehemia Azaz, whose wood-carved installation depicting 43 instruments mentioned in the Jewish Bible covers a wall in the historic Israeli Lounge. They had been anxious about the coming closure, and I told them I would no longer be able to give them updates about the artworks. (A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center says that it is taking inventory of all artwork as part of preparations for the closure.) I was told to pack up my stuff that day, although at least my exit was more dignified than that of a colleague from the development office, who, a couple of months earlier, had been terminated while conducting a tour for donors.

The ostensible reason for the Kennedy Center’s closing is a renovation to make it—in Trump’s words, and capitalization—“the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World.” For months, my colleagues and I had been hearing chatter about a shutdown, but we suspected it wasn’t just because of problems with the physical structure (which certainly had issues but could have been upgraded piecemeal, without needing to close the entire complex), but also because a year of tumult had left the organization barely able to function artistically and financially. Trump had come in promising that “for the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” On the inside, my colleagues and I instead saw cronyism, incompetence, and a series of bizarre moves that would lead to the Kennedy Center going dark.

Last April, after reading about how Grenell was responding directly—if punchily—to artists who wrote to him, I sent him an email pitching a public art project I had been developing with a major nonprofit for America’s semiquincentennial: a series of ephemeral happenings on the National Mall, each dedicated to a Stoic virtue. Like much of the philanthropic world after the 2024 election, the private foundation that was sponsoring my project had reassessed its priorities and withdrawn its funding. Might the Kennedy Center be interested?

One of Grenell’s deputies reached out to me. Not only did Grenell want to include my project in the center’s America 250 programming, but he wanted me to join the staff and build out a visual-arts program to give visitors something to see when the center didn’t have a show running.

Shannon Finney / Getty

Richard Grenell at the opening night of Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center on June 11, 2025

I was wary at first. For Washington’s arts community, the Kennedy Center takeover had felt like an assault—the old leadership had been purged, and Grenell had brought in people of his own (many of them with ties to Trump and Republican politics). Many artists (including Issa Rae and Lin-Manuel Miranda) had severed relationships with the center, often citing Trump’s politicization of an arts center that was supposed to be welcoming to all.

I told my prospective employers that I had never voted for Trump. They assured me that it wasn’t a problem. I was also concerned about potential political interference, which I had seen up close when I served on D.C.’s arts commission. After being told that my personal political views wouldn’t preclude my employment—that, in fact, it was preferable that the Kennedy Center’s new hires not exclusively be MAGA loyalists—I responded that I would need to have full creative control of my exhibitions and programming. The deputy assured me that there would be no interference with my work.

Ultimately, I decided the Kennedy Center was too important an institution to abandon. It’s one of the most prominent venues through which we present a national cultural identity to the world, and taking part in that mission was an unmissable opportunity. I earnestly believed I would have a chance to develop programs with wide appeal, centered on themes related to our collective identity and set against the backdrop of a historic national birthday. While I sympathized with those choosing to boycott it, simply bashing the institution for the sake of virtue signaling seemed to me like the wrong move for anyone who professed to care about the arts. And if I was ever asked to do something that violated my conscience, I promised myself, I would quit. Maybe I was naive, but as critics compared the institution to a burning building, I resolved to run, Dolley-like, toward the fire to save what I could. Perhaps I had a chance to create something for the Kennedy Center that would outlast this current moment.

Most of my friends in the city’s arts community were surprised by my decision. But after I explained my reasoning, they largely expressed cautious optimism. The outlier was a dear friend who told me I was the equivalent of a Nazi collaborator. But you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

I was excited to work and started to develop three exhibitions, each devoted to a revolution in American artistic production that had global impacts: one about trailblazing musicians, another about the legacy of street art, and a third showcasing American artists using artificial intelligence, robotics, and augmented reality in their work. But these exhibitions never came to be, because I couldn’t get anyone on the executive team to allocate institutional resources, or money, to them.

I quickly started noticing things getting weird. It was understood among staffers that the new leaders’ plan to bring in donations was to emphasize the association of the center with President Trump. They put together a fundraiser for a preview of Les Misérables, where one could pay $2 million to sit in a box seat and attend a private reception with the president. “We are grafting political management principles into a nonpolitical organization,” one of my colleagues, a veteran of Republican campaigns, told me. The center had clearly alienated many of its old donors—some of them former board members whom Trump had expelled—and a new class of benefactors, suited to Trump’s Washington, had to be found.

One red flag: the sudden decision to sell sponsorships of the center’s lounges, fixtures of the institution since its opening in 1971. That year, as a gift to the American people and in tribute to President John F. Kennedy, the Israeli government paid for the decoration of one of the center’s rooms to celebrate the connection between Judaism and music. The Israeli Lounge and other spaces—the Chinese Lounge, the Circles Lounge (which, until the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was the Russian Lounge), the African Room—have been used for receptions and private dinners. They’ve also underscored the Kennedy Center’s role as a venue for cultural diplomacy.

Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg / Getty

The Kennedy Center

Last fall, I organized an exhibition commemorating the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks in the Israeli Lounge, featuring the paintings of an American Israeli artist. Speaking at the opening reception, Grenell warned the mostly Jewish audience that unless donors came forward to sponsor the space and pay for renovation costs, the lounge would be given away to a new donor. “It certainly would be a shame if we lost this room to a corporation or an individual and it was no longer the [Israeli] lounge,” he said. Such a strong-armed fundraising pitch, at an event commemorating a pogrom, struck many of us in the room as inappropriate. I was mortified.

Then there was the renaming of the Circles Lounge—a reserved space for donors who make annual gifts at a certain threshold—to the SyberJet Lounge, named for an aircraft manufacturer whose CEO was previously convicted of defrauding investors and who received a pardon from Trump in March 2025. According to The Wall Street Journal, the CEO paid “millions” for the naming rights. What was once the African Room now has a plaque on the door reading A Tribute to America’s Intelligence Community. This was a strange choice, not least when you considered the named donor for the new room: Gaurav Srivastava. Last year, Srivastava was the subject of a deeply reported profile—the Journal described him as “part Austin Powers, part James Bond,” someone who allegedly lied about having been in the CIA, and a living symbol of how anyone with enough “money and moxie can access Washington’s most influential people.” (A lawyer for Srivastava told the Journal that his client “never participated in any blackmail, fraud, threats, or extortion.”)

Among the priceless items that were taken down: beautiful handmade textiles from across the continent, a wooden sculpture donated by Ghana to represent Africans’ grief over President Kennedy’s assassination, and a pair of doors carved from 700-year-old wood depicting Yoruban village scenes. I was never told what happened to these items. A current Kennedy Center staffer told The Atlantic that they are now in the building’s archives. (A spokesperson said this was to “ensure safekeeping” during construction.) A long-empty room next to the center’s permanent exhibition on President Kennedy and the arts was prime real estate. When I wrote a memo to the executive team proposing that we convert it into a dedicated gallery for the new visual-arts program, a member of the team instead suggested that we sell the room as a lounge and drew up a list of Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations to approach. The center did bring in donations from Kazakhstan and other countries, but that space is currently still empty, the staffer told The Atlantic.

In the 10 months that I worked at the Kennedy Center, Grenell never held an all-staff meeting, a fact that was widely discussed among staffers but that the Kennedy Center now denies. He seemed more interested in fighting Katie Couric on Instagram than doing the job he’d been hired to do. Indeed, he spent a lot of his time attacking people on social media, politicizing what is meant to be an apolitical arts institution while accusing others of doing the same exact thing. (“You sound vaccinated,” he once wrote to a critic in the comments section beneath the Kennedy Center’s Instagram post promoting The Sound of Music.)

Though Grenell had instituted a return-to-office mandate upon his appointment, the rule didn’t apply to him or his immediate inner circle. Colleagues told me their requests for meetings with Grenell were routinely denied or ignored. When I inquired with his scheduler in the middle of August if I could get a meeting to discuss my projects, I was told that he would be out of the office for several weeks. We knew where he was—a yacht off the coast of Croatia, then in California—because he posted about it on Instagram. (A spokesperson at the Kennedy Center now denies this.) His trip to the Balkans wasn’t all pleasure; in Montenegro, he made time to meet with the pro-Russian former president of Republika Srpska, as well as government officials in Albania. In November, The New York Times reported that Trump was bypassing Grenell and having almost weekly phone calls with the center’s facilities manager (who ultimately replaced Grenell as the head of the center).

Grenell, who was also Trump’s special presidential envoy for special missions, seemed to blur the lines between his two jobs and his other activities. A colleague once told me she’d noticed documents concerning Venezuela (where he had been leading controversial negotiations with the government in his role as “envoy for special missions”) on office printers. One of Grenell’s top lieutenants once texted me about an artist whose work Grenell owned and asked if we could “do something with him.” Displaying that artist’s work could have raised their prices at auction and benefited Grenell, so doing so would have been a potential ethical breach. I ignored the request.

Grenell—a former ambassador to Germany who came to the Kennedy Center with no arts expertise—is rumored to have wanted to be Trump’s secretary of state. Several of his hires were similarly miscast—including, crucially, Lisa Dale, the top fundraising officer, a friend of the Trump ally Kari Lake. We rarely saw her in the office except during weeks with red-carpet events. In conversation, she professed unfamiliarity with the terms permanent collection, performance art, and emeritus (as in “emeritus trustees”), concepts that senior leaders at a prominent cultural center ought to know. Other top staffers included figures with connections to Republican politics who hadn’t worked in the arts, including one spouse of a Republican National Committee leader whose longest professional experience was working as a marketing and events manager at a Toyota dealership in Ireland. Many seasoned employees from every corner of the center fled under Grenell, and the departures intensified, culminating with the exit of the entire Washington National Opera and the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, which has a tough road ahead of it as it seeks a home outside the Kennedy Center for two years. (Grenell did not respond to repeated requests to speak with The Atlantic’s fact checkers for this story.)

Some days felt like being in Shear Madness, the theatrical farce that has been playing at the Kennedy Center since 1987. When Trump announced that the FIFA World Cup Final Draw would take place at the center (the same weekend as the Kennedy Center Honors), many of us were caught off guard. Scheduled concerts and other shows had to be moved. For security purposes on Honors night, guests had to come early and wait in the building’s Grand Foyer for about an hour before the program began. None of the bars was open, creating an anarchic scene in which I saw old men plead for water and women in ballgowns argue with catering staff for cans of Diet Coke. For the show itself, senior-level staff and their friends occupied prime seats that might otherwise have been occupied by donors. “Peter Gelb at each gala sits in back row,” one of my colleagues observed, speaking of the Metropolitan Opera’s legendary general manager.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty

Donald Trump stands in the Grand Foyer during a tour at the Kennedy Center last year.

While emceeing the Honors event, Trump joked about adding his name to the institution. “This place is hot,” he told the audience, referring to “the Trump-Kennedy Center.” But few of us thought that Trump would go through with it. I found myself thinking most of Caroline Kennedy, whose daughter lay on her deathbed at the time, and I hoped that the president and his team would think better of this narcissistic scheme. But he went ahead with it. The rechristening immediately made our jobs more difficult. One artist I was corresponding with for an exhibition told me they had decided to go “in a different direction.” A jazz ensemble canceled its New Year’s Eve show, and a New York dance company canceled two performances in April that were meant to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Grenell lashed out at them for being “far-left political activists” who suffered from a “form of derangement syndrome.”

With an absentee leadership, a growing list of artist cancellations, declining ticket sales, and a lack of financial resources, my projects never got off the ground. Two former colleagues told me that Grenell tasked them with planning an America’s Got Talent–style talent show for the 250th anniversary, basically turning the nation’s cultural center into a community recreation hall. The institution’s spending priorities seemed dubious. The roof has been leaking for years, and the willow trees in the River Plaza outside the Grand Foyer were visibly rotting, and yet the high-priority renovations made to the building involved adding gold gilding to the chandelier of the presidential box in the Opera House.

I first started hearing whispers of a possible shutdown in August. Our chief financial officer, colleagues told me, proposed closing the center at the end of September, before the start of the next fiscal year. Around this same time, a colleague told me that the center hadn’t paid its invoices from the company that handles its fundraising postage. Were the center to close, it would be done under the guise of a renovation, and the blame would be laid at the feet of the former leadership.

All year, the Kennedy Center had boasted of big fundraising hauls even as it saw ticket sales decline. But Politico reported that the development efforts were actually in deep turmoil, so much so that the center was bringing in a top Trump fundraiser to help Dale, the nominal head of fundraising. Though Grenell told Politico that its story was “fake news” based on “anonymous gossip and lies,” it elicited nods around the center. The announcement of the closure followed soon after, and then Grenell’s departure. Dale and other members of the fundraising team were let go on the same day I was.

When Grenell instructed me to “get rid of” the center’s permanent art collection because we needed new art to adorn the building’s walls after its renovation, I was taken aback by his cavalier attitude. If the donors of the works didn’t want to pay for their removal, he said, we could put them up for auction or give them away. My mind raced immediately to the eight-foot, 3,000-pound brass bust of President Kennedy standing in the Grand Foyer. Designed by the sculptor Robert Berks, it is surely the most significant item in the center’s collection. When I reported the order to another top leader, his eyes grew wide; he told me not to do anything, and said his office would handle it. I can only hope that the bust—and all the other works—will be safe when the center closes its doors.

In a final indignity, those of us who lost our jobs would be eligible for another month of severance benefits (including health-care coverage) only if we signed a separation agreement with confidentiality and nondisparagement provisions. I rejected this offer because I believe Americans deserve to know about the desecration of our nation’s cultural center. This is also why I have begun participating in the ongoing investigation led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and been in touch with Representative Joyce Beatty’s legal team to share information that may help her lawsuit. (She is suing the center in an attempt to stop its renaming.) There must be a firewall put in place by Congress to prevent this kind of hostile political takeover of the Kennedy Center from ever happening again. I hope that more of my former colleagues come forward too, even if anonymously.

The Quiet Way Authoritarianism Begins to Crumble

2026-04-16T13:15:00-04:00

In the days after Donald Trump won his second term, I called a handful of Hungarian political analysts to ask what the American future might look like. My impulse was not an original one; the analysts had been fielding many calls of this sort. Hungary seemed like a bellwether for the illiberal direction in which Trump said he was going to lead the United States. Over his decade and a half reign, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had rigged the electoral and legislative systems for his party’s benefit, come to control (directly or indirectly) 80 percent of the country’s media, and hobbled most independent institutions. But when I asked these Hungarians to give it to me straight, they started to tell me another story, about what was happening on “the islands.”

The political earthquake that Hungary experienced on Monday, when the party opposing Orbán won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, was unimaginable a year and a half ago, but there had been smaller, almost imperceptible rumblings of the kind that usually portend profound political change. Across rural Hungary—the source of Orbán’s base—small civic groups were forming in places where civil society had all but disappeared. The clubs were called Tisza Islands. They shared a name with Tisza, the center-right opposition party whose profile grew when the renegade politician Péter Magyar decided to leave Orbán’s party, Fidesz, and join Tisza in 2024. But the groups themselves, though inspired by this new flashpoint of opposition, functioned independently and were not formally connected to the party. Dozens of them began to emerge in unlikely places—at least 200 by the time of the election (Magyar himself claimed that there were as many as 1,200), adding up to tens of thousands of members.

When I called these same political analysts again on Monday, they all described, in their celebratory haze, a very specific and essential role that these (metaphorical) islands played, particularly in rural areas, where a third of the country’s roughly 10 million people live. Orbán had effectively polarized the country in a way that Americans might understand well: Political identity felt like an important tribal marker, and not just an indicator of policy preferences or even ideology. These small local groups created an opportunity to break through the concrete—first, by giving people permission to imagine a world without Orbán, and second (and most important), by reminding loyal Fidesz voters that before all else, they were citizens who had a choice.

In these areas, “people genuinely believed that Fidesz was always going to be in the majority, and they were afraid to speak out, afraid to show that they belong to the opposition,” Gergő Papp, a political consultant who is writing a book about the Tisza movement, told me. “And that created this kind of spiral of silence. The smaller the town is, the less likely someone is to signal that they are with the opposition.” The islands, Papp said, “made it possible for this spiral of silence and fear to end, and in the final weeks, that’s what mattered the most.”

What, I wondered, did people do on these islands? The answer was surprisingly banal. These were partly debate societies, where members could gather and talk about local issues, such as a factory that was polluting the countryside, or whether the village medical center was well stocked. The groups also organized litter pickups and painted bus benches. There was talk of movie nights. Under one subreddit query from nine months ago that asked, “What are the Tisza islands doing?” the responses mostly showed people coming together and being neighborly. “Things we’ve done,” began one post: “Water distribution in the heat, we collected school supplies and clothes for the family support center.” Also, “we organized a cooking competition.” This was a perfect illustration of Robert Putnam’s idea in Bowling Alone, his book about growing atomization in America—that civil society depends on people simply doing things together.

[Read: Hungary just ousted the unoustable]

Over the course of 2025, some of the islands became more political in their activities, sharing leaflets, recruiting candidates for upcoming elections—acting much more like field offices in a standard grassroots campaign. When Magyar began touring the country more openly and expansively than opposition candidates had in the past, these islands, deep in Orbán territory, were often his destination.

David Koranyi, who was Hungary’s national-security adviser in the late 2010s before Orbán took power, described two kinds of citizens who joined these groups. The first were people like his parents, who live in Budapest and are politically on the left. This subset would not necessarily affiliate with Magyar’s Tisza party, which was far more inclusive than Fidesz but still had conservative positions on immigration and traditional values. But these islands offered liberals a nonpolitical way to connect with other people interested in change.

The second group were the Fidesz voters; the islands helped them begin to feel okay about turning away from the party with which they had always identified. They could commiserate about corruption, for example, and how it might be linked to the rising cost of living—an issue they could agree upon without necessarily abandoning their conservative worldview. It helped that Magyar himself was a former Orbán acolyte. But people living in villages and small towns needed to feel that there were enough citizens like them to safely signal opposition without fear of being singled out for “political repercussions,” as might happen under Orbán, Koranyi told me. For these people, he added, the “sheer existence” of the islands is what mattered. The political diversity of the islands “went a really long way in sending that message that this is happening all over the place, that it’s okay to join the movement.”

The islands also allowed information to circumvent Orbán’s pervasive propaganda machine. During the campaign, Orbán-controlled media—basically every channel on television and every mass-market newspaper—described Magyar as a monster, and claimed that electing him would bring Hungary into war with Russia. The problem for Orbán was that Hungarians really love Facebook. Roughly 7 million of them—70 percent of the population—have an account. (That’s on par with the U.S., but under Orbán, Hungarians had fewer alternative ways to get real news than Americans do.) Most young people in Hungary also have a TikTok account. Social media was key in forming the islands—especially for older people who found one another on Facebook. It has also been a way to receive messaging from the Tisza party—about the corruption of Orbán’s circle, for example—that might not have otherwise broken through. Magyar in particular has had a Zohran Mamdani–like knack for short-form viral videos, which made him a popular figure among Gen Z voters.

[Read: What Viktor Orbán’s opponents sacrificed to beat him]

Past attempts to break through Orbán’s propaganda stranglehold had failed to reach the rural areas, Kornel Klopfstein-Laszlo told me. In 2017, he started an initiative called Print It Yourself, which provided PDFs containing independent news for people to print and distribute—akin to the way samizdat functioned in the Soviet Union. But these efforts were usually dismissed as the work of liberal Budapest intellectuals trying to impose their views, which allowed Orbán’s followers to easily disregard the news being shared. Most villagers never did end up printing it themselves. “We were not locals,” Klopfstein-Laszlo explained.

Last year, many of his Print It Yourself volunteers joined the islands, which produced their own newspapers, or collaborated with the Tisza party. Because they were creating this media independently and locally, Klopfstein-Laszlo said, it was much more effective at countering Orbán.

One thing I kept hearing from political analysts is that the concept of islands was not that original. In fact, Orbán created similar groups when he was building Fidesz’s power base back in the 2010s. They were called “citizens’ circles,” loose networks of Fidesz sympathisers opposed to the Socialist Party that was then in power. And they functioned in much the same way, building up civic muscle that had grown slack. Once Orbán took power, the groups basically disintegrated, but the desire for community and action never went away, even though no opposition parties filled this need—until the islands formed.

Orbán’s loss has been explained by pointing to many factors: his poor handling of the economy, his cozying up to Russia and antagonizing the European Union, his corruption, his whole schtick just wearing thin. All of this is probably true. But I don’t believe that it adds up to the ouster of an authoritarian leader without another ingredient: People need to feel emboldened and brave enough to break with a habit of mind, to recognize that no one in power is there permanently.

After my conversations with happy Hungarians, though, I wondered where our American islands might be. Where might the MAGA voter who has begun to worry about the state of the country turn, especially in regions where criticizing the president would seem to lead to ostracism? Maybe it means gathering with other like-minded people, registering voters, organizing a yard sale, having a movie night. Maybe it means finding a small, quiet, possibly banal path away from loyalty and back toward citizenship.

The DNA Fix for Aging

2026-04-16T13:11:00-04:00

On his son’s fourth birthday, Michael Prescott had his first heart attack. Prescott, who worked as a civil engineer designing bridges in Tennessee, was in his 30s, and until that day, he had appeared to be in excellent health. But within two years of that first heart attack, he had four more. His doctors, who were baffled by his repeated medical crises, decided that he needed a heart transplant. In 2001, he underwent the procedure in Nashville. But a few years later, he needed a kidney transplant too. No one could explain why his organs were failing him.

As time dragged on, Prescott’s symptoms became more outwardly visible. His skin began wrinkling like that of someone decades older than him, and he developed cataracts. By his early 40s, Prescott looked like he was in his 60s. When he attended baseball games with his son, Carter, people would mistake him for the boy’s grandfather.

Frustrated, Prescott decided to diagnose himself. He would sit for hours in the living room in his favorite chair, his slim form enveloped in a sweatshirt with the logo of his favorite football team, the Tennessee Volunteers, as he read one research article after another. “He had a hard time sleeping at night,” Carter told me, “and so he’d be in his recliner with his little lamp, on his laptop, just kind of scouring through stuff, taking notes and trying to figure it out.” Finally, Prescott struck upon a disease that seemed to explain everything. His doctors agreed to test him right away, and the results vindicated his hunch. Prescott had a real illness with a real name: Werner syndrome.

A person with Werner syndrome seems to age at fast‑forward speed. By their mid-20s, they experience hair loss, muscle atrophy, and loss of the fat under their skin. During their next decade of life, many patients develop other early hallmarks of aging, such as hardened blood vessels. Individuals with this condition live, on average, until their early 50s. They lack a functioning version of a DNA-stabilizing protein, and their cells rapidly accumulate sequence errors as they age.

A version of that same process occurs even in those of us without Werner syndrome. We all amass DNA damage and countless mutations in our tissues throughout our lives. We just do so a bit more gradually.

Scientists now recognize that spontaneous DNA errors, which we acquire in early development all the way until our last breath, can drive several ailments such as heart disease, autoimmunity, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. These errors could even be the missing piece in explaining the universal phenomenon of aging.

Scientists’ earliest understanding of genetic disease had to do with mutations in the genetic code people inherit at birth. (Think of hereditary disorders such as hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell disease.) Later, they came to understand that epigenetic marks—the chemical tags that sit on top of genes, helping switch them on and off—can play a role too. More recently, scientists have discovered the massive number of sequence mutations everyone experiences throughout life. Consider this stark possibility: Even as you read this sentence, the brain cells you are using to process it might be mutating.

Unlike inherited conditions, spontaneous genetic diseases can emerge at any point in a person’s life. Some non-inherited genetic diseases are rare, such as the bone condition melorheostosis, which was first described decades ago and causes a painful overgrowth of bone that on X-rays resembles dripping candle wax. But the list of diseases linked to spontaneous mutations expands with each passing year, thanks in part to advances that enable scientists to decipher the DNA of single cells rather than bulk-tissue samples alone. In 2020, doctors added a new one to the list. They discovered a sometimes-fatal inflammatory disorder resulting from spontaneous mutations in the UBA1 gene. Non-inherited genetic errors have also been implicated more and more in common conditions: Upwards of one-third of children with autism spectrum disorder possess spontaneous mutations that appear connected to their condition.

Scientists’ greater understanding of acquired mutations is already inspiring major updates to medical treatment. Take cancer: Decades ago, oncologists believed that tumors were driven by a couple of genetic errors. Now they know that cancers are rife with genetic change—by some estimates, thousands upon thousands of mutations per advanced tumor. By sequencing the genetic changes in a tumor, scientists can figure out which mutations fuel its growth, and design drugs to strike those targets. Meanwhile, in neurology, some epilepsy patients have received drugs for their seizures that target specific spontaneous mutations detected in their brains.

For decades, scientists have suspected that acquired mutations might also explain health problems adults experience as they age. Among the earliest researchers to make the connection were physicists who had worked on developing the first atomic bombs. The United States used these weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of people at the end of World War II, and they have since been linked to cancers in people exposed to the bombs’ mutation‑inducing radiation. Understanding the effects of such mutations remained an obsession for some Manhattan Project scientists, including Gioacchino Failla and Leo Szilard. In the 1950s, they theorized that “hits” to the genome could explain the universal process of aging.

By the next decade, British scientists observed that many men seem to be losing copies of their Y chromosome as they age. Scientists now know that almost half of men over the age of 70 have lost the Y chromosome in some of their blood cells—a phenomenon that has been linked to an increased risk of cancer. (Women also seem to lose copies of their X chromosome as they age, but the number of published studies related to this phenomenon is paltry.) In recent years, geneticists have found that people in their later decades of life are more likely to have blood cells with mutations in specific genes. These cells, present in about 10 to 20 percent of people ages 65 and older, double someone’s risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. Medical researchers have estimated that a single white blood cell from a 100‑year‑old can contain more than 3,000 acquired mutations.

Now that scientists have described just how much mutation happens in aging, they’re curious if DNA repair might offer a counteracting force. In other words, does fixing DNA improve longevity? Biologists are taking different tacks to find out. Some have turned to gene editing to try to create antiaging therapies: One company, Spellcheck Bio, has started designing a treatment that relies on the CRISPR-Cas9 genome‑editing system to look for—and correct—DNA mutations.

Vera Gorbunova, a biologist at the University of Rochester, traveled to the sea around Utqiagvik, Alaska, to study the genes of the mammal with the longest lifespan on Earth: the bowhead whale. “This is the only mammal proven to live longer than humans,” she told me. One bowhead whale was estimated to have lived to 211, and genetic clues suggest that members of the species could have a maximum lifespan of 268 years. Gorbunova and her colleagues worked with the local Inupiat community to collect small samples from whales hunted using traditional methods. In the lab, the scientists observed that the bowhead cells mended breaks and mismatches in their genetic sequence extremely well. The cells also contained astronomical levels of a molecule known as cold‑inducible RNA-binding protein, or CIRBP. Gorbunova imagines that proteins such as CIRBP—if they do indeed counteract DNA damage—could perhaps have a place in modern medicine.

Gorbunova is on the scientific advisory board of the start-up Genflow Biosciences, which leans into the belief that activating DNA repair might reduce damage to the genome, and therefore extend life. All of the drugs it has in development involve the SIRT6 gene, which makes a protein that helps guide DNA repair. Gorbunova previously helped lead a genetic-sequencing project that found that some centenarians possessed a rare variant of the SIRT6 gene that enhances genomic stability. The company aims to start clinical trials on a compound to reverse liver damage, and on another one it hopes will have antiaging effects in dogs. Genflow is also developing a drug to treat Werner syndrome, the inherited genetic condition of accelerated aging that affected Michael Prescott.

Prescott, for his part, forged ahead despite his worrisome prognosis. He continued cheering on the Tennessee Volunteers and guiding his son through life. Ultimately, though, Prescott developed cancer—another common complication of Werner syndrome. He died at age 52, weighing only 65 pounds.

The breakthroughs of recent years came too late for patients such as Prescott. But with the new understanding that DNA is dynamic and endlessly changing, modern medicine is now better equipped to adapt to—and perhaps even influence—the cacophony of mutations we all inevitably accumulate.

This article was adapted from Roxanne Khamsi’s new book, Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health.

AI’s Next Frontier: People Skills

2026-04-16T12:31:00-04:00

Earlier this year, when I walked into a renovated loft in downtown San Francisco, the couches and tables were littered with flyers advertising an “emotionally intelligent real-time AI coach.” They were for Amotions AI—one of several start-ups that had gathered that day to pitch investors, entrepreneurs, and tech workers. Pianpian Xu Guthrie, Amotions AI’s founder, was eager to tell me more. The AI model observes video calls on your computer, she said, and gives you real-time tips based on the other person’s tone and facial expression. Maybe you’re a salesperson, and the bot flags that your potential customer is “confused” and suggests what to say.

Emotions are the AI industry’s new fixation. Not only are growing numbers of start-ups such as Amotions AI promising tools that interpret feelings; the major AI companies are developing chatbots that apparently aren’t just smarter—they get you. When OpenAI launched a new version of ChatGPT late last year, it described the bot as “warmer by default and more conversational.” Anthropic has stated that its model, Claude, “may have some functional version of emotions or feelings,” and Google has claimed that its AI models are now capable of “reading the room.” Elon Musk’s lab, xAI, has boasted that a recent version of Grok did well on a test of emotional intelligence, or EQ, that posed scenarios such as this: “You think you might have been scapegoated by a fellow employee for the lunchroom thefts that have been happening.”

Silicon Valley has good reason to push EQ. For AI products to work as advertised—to genuinely substitute for personal assistants or co-workers—they have to be not just competent but caring; not just effective but empathetic. And so the AI industry seems to believe that the next step in developing smart and useful bots requires instilling them with people skills.

[Read: The people outsourcing their thinking to AI]

The search for an emotionally intelligent machine has long been part of AI research. In the 1960s, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum developed a primitive chatbot, called ELIZA, that could simulate a psychotherapist by repeating back what a person said in question form. One day, as Weizenbaum recalled, he found his secretary chatting with ELIZA; she asked him to leave the room to give them some privacy. The original ChatGPT from late 2022 was not smarter or more powerful than other existing tools—the underlying model was actually several years old—but OpenAI’s main innovation was to engineer the bot to converse like a human. ChatGPT had a surface-level ability to pick up on and respond to cues for, say, anger or joy.

Even so, the AI industry has since not been all that interested in emotions. Silicon Valley has spent the past two years pouring resources into so-called reasoning models in the hopes of making them good at writing code and solving math problems. Last year, Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist at OpenAI, said that “emotions are relatively simple” for bots to master on the path toward developing intelligence. By this logic, figuring out the nature of joy or anxiety would ostensibly be much easier than figuring out nuclear fusion. Industry-wide measures exist for all sorts of technical abilities, but until recently, companies simply did not seem to publicly evaluate anything relating to human feeling.

That dismissive attitude is changing. “Emotional intelligence is one of the most important capabilities of current models,” Hui Shen, an AI researcher at the University of Michigan, told me. The companies continue to chase raw intelligence and problem-solving abilities—but they seem to have realized that, for most people, that’s not the most relevant product feature. Whether Grok can solve difficult math problems is probably less useful to you than the advice it can give on ways to impress your boss at work or, even, how it consoles you when your cat dies. (Which, according to an example in xAI’s press release about Grok’s state-of-the-art EQ, could be: “The quiet spots where they used to sleep, the random meows you still expect to hear … it just hits in waves. It’s okay that it hurts this much.”)

Last year, both OpenAI and Anthropic separately published research showing that roughly 2 to 3 percent of conversations with ChatGPT or Claude were explicitly emotional—seeking interpersonal advice, role-playing, and so on. These are small proportions, but with some billion individual users between these companies, the actual number of people having emotional discussions with these two bots alone could be well into the millions. And many of the more frequent uses of chatbots, such as for tutoring and writing personal communications, also involve varying degrees of interpreting and managing emotions.

To the extent that human emotions or preferences were incorporated into the training of ChatGPT or other top models, much of that appears to have been accomplished through a process known as “reinforcement learning with human feedback”: A chatbot writes multiple responses to the same prompt, and human raters decide which they prefer. If applied without nuance, this approach can produce AI models that uncritically agree with and reinforce anything a user says—precipitating deep emotional dependencies on AI chatbots and, in the most extreme cases, appearing to encourage delusional thin king.

[Read: The chatbot-delusion crisis]

What AI firms are after now is something that resembles genuine empathy, which involves much more than validating what users already want to hear. This sort of bot would not only comfort but push back when necessary—and, crucially, would recognize its own limits as a piece of software. For instance, Anthropic noted in a recent update to Claude’s constitution—a document that tells the model, in an abstract sense, how to behave—to avoid situations in which someone exclusively “relies on Claude for emotional support.” But no AI company has really given a clear definition of how a truly emotionally intelligent bot would differ from today’s shallow miming of EQ.

To that end, a more cynical way to interpret the industry’s frenzy over emotions is that it’s a way to make AI models more useful, yes, but also a way to retain users—akin to features such as “memory,” in which chatbots can recall details from past conversations. The miming of an interpersonal relationship gives AI models a huge advantage over other software. “People don’t have a lot of emotions associated with Google search, but with these chatbots, people are having a lot of connections,” Sahand Sabour, an AI researcher at Tsinghua University, told me. (Anthropic did not respond to a request to discuss recent research on Claude and emotions. OpenAI declined to comment but pointed me to a Substack essay in which one of its researchers wrote that AI models should be warm without giving the illusion of consciousness. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.)

No matter the motivation, instilling any sort of EQ in a computer program remains very hard. Social scientists have spent many decades trying to develop tests for people’s abilities to recognize, regulate, and respond to emotions in the hopes that they might correlate with happiness or workplace performance. Such EQ evaluations have been adapted for chatbots, with questions to the tune of: Michael has been practicing a magic trick to show his friend Lily, but Lily has been attending his practices in secret. When he performs the trick, she knows exactly how it works. How does Michael feel?

As it turns out, generative-AI models do quite well on such tests—better, in some instances, than people. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, because there are mountains of similar scenarios all over the web that AI models are trained on. All of that data is probably why bots are “so good at solving these quite narrow tests that we developed for humans,” Katja Schlegel, a psychologist at the University of Bern, told me. Such encyclopedic knowledge could make these products useful in certain settings—and the process of reinforcement learning with human feedback largely involves eliciting and sharpening these abilities. But all of this is a far cry from genuinely understanding why someone feels a certain way, empathizing with them, and figuring out whether they need to and how they might be helped.

After all, EQ tests aren’t even that useful in people, let alone chatbots. Being able to label a scowl as “upset” in a lab is very different from interacting with a scowling child, spouse, or boss. Emotions are bound to a person, a relationship, a culture, a moment in time; they are an experience. The AI industry’s first great act of marketing was labeling its products as intelligence, a term so general and poorly understood in humans that it could encompass anything. Now the same AI firms have set their sights on an attribute that is even more poorly understood than IQ. Emotions are squishy and subjective, providing leeway to convincingly market chatbots as emotionally intelligent—and pushing more people to talk with them.

Pope James David Vance the First

2026-04-16T09:42:32-04:00

The Trump administration doesn’t seem to have many rules, but one of them is that once the president picks a fight, his posse must show up to support him, no matter how ill-advised the conflict. And few senior officials are more eager to back up the boss in every embarrassing beef than Vice President Vance, who recently seems to have decided that he, and not Pope Leo XIV, is the true arbiter of Catholic doctrine.

President Trump is personally angry with Leo because the pontiff has been deeply critical of America’s war of choice in Iran. Accordingly, Trump lashed out at His Holiness twice over the past few days. Vance might have seen this as a valuable opportunity to say nothing and let the storm pass; Leo, naturally, doesn’t seem to care all that much what Trump thinks. (As my colleague Liz Bruenig wrote, Leo answers to a higher authority.) Had the vice president remained silent, Trump might have moved on, and Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, would have been able to stay out of a dustup between his president and his spiritual leader.

But no. Vance just had to speak up. He could have taken his cues from John F. Kennedy or Mario Cuomo, Catholic politicians who were careful to note that their faith was personal and important to them, but that in their public life, they must govern as Americans according to the Constitution. Vance decided on a different approach: The pope, he implied, wasn’t a very good, or very smart, Catholic.

Vance’s response to Leo’s statements came during an interview at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia. It was a sour cocktail of equal parts hubris and ignorance with a spritz of Vance’s trademark smarm, and it is worth considering in full:

In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.

And I think that one of these issues here is that there has been—if you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful; you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth, and that’s one of the things that I try to do, and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy, whether they’re Catholic or Protestant.

Vance just told the bishop of Rome that theology should be “anchored in the truth”? What does that even mean? Whose truth? Somewhere in the nether gloom, Pontius Pilate is rubbing his aching temples and thinking he’s heard this one before.

Catholics, of course, believe that the pope is infallible when he issues ex cathedra pronouncements on faith and doctrine and, yes, morality, so challenging his pronouncements on war and peace seems a tad presumptuous for a member of the faithful. (My own faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, does not have a figure with power like the pope, but you can bet I’d think twice before telling our top cleric, the patriarch of Constantinople, that he was all hosed up on some important theological stuff.) Vance’s slap at Leo—including the pompous implication that he needs to go back and do some theology homework—illustrates the political and religious risks that Vance is willing to take not only with the Vatican, but with a country whose population is one-fifth Catholic, in order to demonstrate his utter fealty to Trump.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: A blasphemous president]

Some years ago, I wrote a book, The Death of Expertise, in which I examined the strange phenomenon whereby every person thinks they’re an expert, to the point where they are willing to lecture actual experts about those experts’ own field of competence. Doctors, lawyers, professors, and people in trades such as carpentry and electrical work can tell stories of some layperson who had ideas about medications, the law, or what kind of circuit breakers to use. It’s human, it’s silly, and it’s sometimes dangerous.

Vance, however, has blown right past all such minor examples and has now seized the top seat in the Death of Expertise Hall of Fame: He has lectured the pope—the pope, the leader of a billion and a half Catholics—about being too sloppy with theology.

It gets better—or worse, depending on how you look at it. Vance took issue with Leo’s declaration about war, in which the pope said: “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” What about World War II? Vance huffed. Wasn’t God on America’s side then? Of course, arguing that God takes sides in human wars seems a rather fraught business, which is why most Christian denominations tend to avoid such pronouncements and instead ask their adherents to pray for peace. During the American Civil War, although slavery was a manifest evil, Abraham Lincoln chose not to extol the North’s righteousness in his second inaugural address, but instead humbly reminded Americans that both sides “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God,” sorrowfully noting that the Almighty gave the conflict to both North and South as the price of exterminating the sin of slavery.

But Vance wasn’t really interested in arguing with his spiritual father; he was instructing him. “When the pope says that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword,” Vance pontificated, “there is more than a thousand-year tradition of just-war theory.”

It’s true that the early Christian world produced what is now known as the just-war tradition, a body of thought that serves as the foundation of much of American and international law about when countries may go to war, and how they should conduct themselves in combat. One of the first and most important of these thinkers was Saint Augustine. Indeed, Leo knows this because he was the leader of the Augustinian order for more than a decade, and so Vance might have paused for just one more nanosecond to realize he was lecturing the first Augustinian pope about the just-war tradition.

[David A. Graham: The parable of the president]

Less than a day after the vice president’s remarks, the chairman of the doctrine committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops spelled it out for Vance that a difference of opinion with the pope is not just another internet wrangle with some random troll: “When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church,” Bishop James Massa wrote, “he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ. The consistent teaching of the Church is insistent that all people of good will must pray and work toward lasting peace while avoiding the evils and injustices that accompany all wars.”

Perhaps Vance will take the hint. Meanwhile, his attempt to enlighten the pontiff revealed not only his arrogance, but his lack of knowledge about the just-war tradition itself. No matter what the vice president thinks, it’s not a set of rules that tells Christians when God is on their side. The just-war tradition attempts to reconcile the reality of a violent world with the undeniable spiritual peril of taking up arms, and it’s a lot more complicated than Christ blessing the good guys. For nearly 20 years, I helped students every summer at Harvard wrestle with just-war concepts, debating what constitutes a “just cause,” considering the meaning of a “right intention,” and evaluating “proportionality,” among other tenets of the just-war tradition.

These concepts are not a checklist to be completed; they are not chits to be collected that then allow national leaders to assume that their wars are approved by Jesus. The entire body of just-war thinking regards war as evil and every human life lost, ally or enemy, as a tragedy. Its precepts are not excuses; they are meant to be questions that leaders should ask themselves before risking their mortal souls by going to war.

Vance’s attempt to take on Leo by going after the pope’s, shall we say, area of expertise only showcases what Pope Gregory the Great called “the queen of all vices,” the deadly sin of pride. The Catholic Church, in Latin, calls this the transgression of superbia. But describing the willingness of someone like Vance to do such a thing requires a word from Yiddish rather than Latin: chutzpah.

If You Want a Better World, Act Like You Live in It

2026-04-16T08:00:00-04:00

One afternoon in the summer of 1846, Henry David Thoreau left his hut near Walden Pond and walked into town to pick up a shoe he was having mended. He was stopped by the local tax collector, who nudged him for the umpteenth time about paying his poll tax—the dollar and a half that every man over the age of 20 had to pay annually, or else lose the right to vote. The tax collector, who wanted to clear his books, even offered to cover the bill, which hadn’t been paid for four years. But Thoreau refused, and he was taken to jail. The one night he spent in a second-floor cell overlooking his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, was not particularly dramatic. But it was clarifying. As an opponent of slavery, he understood that paying the tax would mean legitimizing a government “which is the slave’s government also,” he later wrote. He couldn’t do that, and so he didn’t.

Thoreau has served different prophetic purposes at various moments in American history, depending on what we have needed him for. There is Thoreau the environmentalist, a proselytizer for the need to preserve nature because nature is what preserves us. There is Thoreau the libertarian individualist, suspicious of the state, hostile to bureaucracy, and committed to the sovereignty of the self. There is Thoreau the life coach who tells us to “simplify, simplify.” And a new three-part PBS documentary, co-produced by Ken Burns, offers us Thoreau the eccentric outsider—fittingly, Jeff Goldblum provides his voice. Images of Walden Pond, frozen over or surrounded by the vibrant fall foliage, flash by every few minutes, and we hear stories of Thoreau communing with ants and fish. The film keeps coming back to the insight that he was tuned in to bigger things, wider patterns, to the way the eternal makes its presence felt in the particular.

At a time of great political, societal, and technological upheaval, I’ve been thinking about yet another Thoreau, a messier and more dangerous one: Thoreau the dissident, the man who goes to jail rather than pay his taxes. This Thoreau belongs in a category with people who resisted dictatorships, theocracies, colonialism, and unjust systems throughout history and around the world. This Thoreau was not just a link in the Underground Railroad; he was also the first intellectual to publicly defend John Brown after his attempted slave revolt in 1859, calling him an “angel of light” while most others saw him as a terrorist. This Thoreau in recent years has also inspired some surprisingly personal vitriol; he’s been labeled a misanthrope, a moral purist, an obnoxious jerk. But dissidents are often perceived this way. I would say instead that he was, in the best sense, presumptuous—he held himself to a higher standard, in his abhorrence of slavery and also in his solitary contemplation of the changing leaves.

Although Thoreau was quickly bailed out from jail, his night in confinement led him to write his most famous essay, originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government”—and now known as “Civil Disobedience.” It has been read over the past century and a half by the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as a guide for how to avoid complicity with injustice and instead “let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” But it is also a psychological reveal, an expression of Thoreau’s presumptuousness: He is someone who no longer accepts the rules of his own society and has decided to live as if he were the citizen of a different, better one.

Thoreau announces that his individual conscience is more real to him than anything else. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right,” he asserts. This mindset could be the road to anarchy, but Thoreau was not an anarchist—he was ruled by principles. He had a straightforward standard for what it meant to act “rightly”: He refused to obstruct the freedom of anyone else. “If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders,” he writes. When asked to pay a tax that might support slavery—or a war of conquest against Mexico—he did not face a difficult choice. To violate this rule would reduce him to less than a man, to merely “straw or a lump of dirt.”

[Read: Why Concord?]

Think of the absurd self-assuredness that it takes to always live and act in this way while the rest of us are still entangled here on Earth, still busy paying our taxes. It’s no wonder that his dissidence could be interpreted as arrogance. And yet, how necessary such people are. Human history with no dissidents would be a depressing catalog of servitude and stasis.

Thoreau would not have used the word dissident, but it fits, especially when we consider how expert he was at what the Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky once called “the science of ignoring reality.” This was certainly true of his most famous experiment: living off the land for two years, two months, and two days in a wooden hut near Walden Pond. He was attempting to create the authentic and ethical life that he felt was impossible elsewhere. “If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before,” he writes, sitting at his green desk in his one-room cabin during his early days there.

In her biography of Thoreau, Laura Dassow Walls describes his Walden era as “an iconic work of performance art,” which stopped me at first because I had always pictured him as a hermit. But it turns out that Thoreau’s life in the woods—farming his beans, eschewing possessions, living in harmony and conflict with the seasons—could all be witnessed easily from a main road that ran to Boston. He was inhabiting a different reality not just for himself but for anyone who happened to pass by. At a moment when nature was something to be either exploited or conquered, he was showcasing a reverence for it that was not of his time.

The Soviet and Eastern European dissidents of the 20th century practiced a similar magic trick, which could be distilled into two words: as if. They lived in unfree societies under an authoritarian Communist system, but they acted and thought—and showed others how to act and think—as if they were free. They presumed their own freedom. When the historian Timothy Garton Ash visited Poland in the early 1980s, he used this formulation often. He was witnessing the emergence of the Solidarity movement, the first independent labor union in the Soviet bloc, which would end up including a third of the adults in the country, 9 million people. Solidarity effectively created a new republic within the shell of Communist Poland. As Ash met dissident poets and shipyard workers, he marveled at the way they disregarded the dangers and were guided instead, he wrote, by “one fundamental principle: behave here and now as if you lived in a free country.”

This mode of action doesn’t always take the form of civil disobedience. In fact, starting in the mid-1960s, the dissident movement in the Soviet Union practiced “radical civil obedience,” as the historian Benjamin Nathans recently put it. Whereas Thoreau fantasized about a country without immoral laws or practices, the presumption of the Soviet dissidents was that the existing, on-the-books laws, many of them enshrined by Joseph Stalin—including the rights to assemble and to receive an open trial—should actually be followed in practice and not just in theory.

Of course, the United States in the 19th century was also violating its own founding principles, beginning with the statement that “all men are created equal.” For Thoreau, so sure in his convictions about slavery, brief imprisonment had a counterintuitive effect: He came to pity the state. All it could do was lock up his body, which changed his thoughts not a bit. In his writing, he moves from feeling oppressed by the system to regarding it as something absurd. He had, in effect, already left the world that imprisons him.

[Read: Life without principle]

Thoreau thought this was a form of power that people tended to neglect. He was confounded by those opposed to slavery who went around with petitions to dissolve the Union. “Why do they not dissolve it themselves—the union between themselves and the State—and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?” he asks. For Thoreau, the system was held up by individuals, and individuals had the wherewithal to undo it. If everyone who thought slavery was wrong refused to pay their taxes and went to jail, then slavery would end. A minority, he writes, “is powerless while it conforms to the majority,” but “it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.” Or as one Soviet dissident, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, put it when describing why his fellow citizens should insist on their rights, “If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, they would be a hostile movement; but if everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive.”

Thoreau saves his harshest words for those who share his beliefs but “sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say they know not what to do, and do nothing.” Because actually making a decision to live in an imagined country is a transformative experience: “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations,” he writes; “it is essentially revolutionary.”

By dwelling on the way Thoreau was attuned to higher principles, the new PBS documentary explains his steadfastness. According to the various talking heads, the author lived in a dimension where not only was there no divide between humans and nature, but even inorganic matter—dirt and rock—spoke to him. From this cosmic perspective, people owning other people would seem nonsensical.

This kind of single-mindedness can also easily lead to self-righteousness. In 2015, the journalist Kathryn Schulz wrote a blistering Thoreau takedown, titled “Pond Scum.” She read Walden closely and found in it not a glorious mystic but a priggish man who had little fellow human feeling. He was, she writes, “in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed.” For her, even Thoreau’s radical position on slavery was more about his own commitment to “rugged individualism” than any kind of real moral core. I think this gets it backward: Like most dissidents, he was able to maintain such a moral core precisely because he was a rugged individualist; he didn’t let society dictate his perception of right and wrong.

And yet I understand why his presumptuousness could be off-putting. When it came to holding back his taxes, even some of Thoreau’s closest friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (who owned the land on which Thoreau built his hut), took issue with all of the purity. “But you, nothing will content,” Emerson writes in his journal, imagining his response to Thoreau. “No government short of a monarchy consisting of one king & one subject, will appease you.” His friend’s “true quarrel,” Emerson suggests, “is with the state of Man.” Emerson gets so worked up at Thoreau’s implication that taxpayers are hypocrites that by the end of his private screed, he is accusing his friend of being the real hypocrite. If Thoreau was going to refuse to pay the poll tax, why stop there? The purchase of taxed goods, like sugar or books, also helped fill government coffers. “These you do not stick at buying.” The friction revealed their differing worldviews. Emerson believed in self-transformation on a more spiritual plane, while Thoreau insisted on expressing one’s opinion through literal, bodily action.

[Read: In defense of Thoreau]

What keeps Thoreau the dissident relevant is that, although uncompromising, he was not a nihilist. He didn’t want to live outside of government. He even writes about looking for “an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land.” But these laws needed to recognize the individual as a “higher and independent power,” from which all of the state’s “power and authority are derived.” And for him, the only way to get there was to conduct yourself as if this was already a fact. When a tax collector asked what he was supposed to do, Thoreau told him to quit: “When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.” I don’t know if it’s quite so simple, but a dissident has to think like this, has to believe that through their own behavior they have the capacity to unmake and remake the world.

His championing of John Brown is pure dissident Thoreau. The moment created, as the scholar Lois Brown says in the documentary, a “seismic shift” in Thoreau’s life. He perceived that the issue of slavery was not going to be solved through persuasion, or even through politics at all. Blood would have to spill. He saw the Civil War coming, and he knew it would demand that many more people summon the courage of Brown, whose life ended at the gallows. Other abolitionists may have drawn this conclusion by then, but Thoreau was willing to say it out loud. By backing Brown, he was declaring that there were some ideas worth dying for.

This talent for seeing things that others can’t yet see is what the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called “anticipatory consciousness.” Bloch’s central concept is the “not-yet,” the notion that there is an infinite variety of possible futures. Some people have the ability to catch glimpses of these futures, even in the most seemingly unchangeable present. Their “anticipatory consciousness” is a little like looking at a block of limestone and perceiving a man and woman embracing, even before you have a chisel—or know what to do with one.

When Thoreau writes at the very end of “Civil Disobedience” about imagining a state that is “just to all men” and is built on respect for the individual, he knows he’s engaging in this kind of thinking, and that’s what makes it so potent: “A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.” Not yet.

This essay was adapted from Gal Beckerman’s book, How to Be a Dissident, which will be published next Tuesday.

If Hungary Can Do It

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

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The leader of a democracy overpowers many of the country’s institutions that could oppose him: the media, the universities, the courts. He encourages rich allies to buy big media companies and hobble independent journalism. In its place, he tells the population lies, about immigrants, the economy, and who their real enemies are. He does all of this openly and proudly, prompting other aspiring autocrats to emulate him.

This is a description of Viktor Orbán, the longtime prime minister of Hungary who lost reelection this past weekend. Besides being one of his key emulators, Donald Trump is also an enthusiastic supporter. Vice President Vance stumped for Orbán during the Hungarian election, and MAGA intelligentsia have pilgrimaged to Budapest for inspiration on how to reshape national institutions and the culture in their own image.

Until the day they voted, many Hungarians found it hard to believe that Orbán would be ousted, despite what independent polls showed. Autocrats have a way of seeming inevitable. Nonetheless, Orbán lost to opposition leader Péter Magyar by too large a margin to paper over with propaganda. Magyar had appealed to the people directly, traveling the country, avoiding culture-war issues, and talking mostly about economic hardship. Orbán swiftly conceded, and overnight, Hungarians were dancing in the streets.

Whatever happens next in Hungary, Orbán’s downfall contains obvious warnings for MAGA and Trump: Propaganda has its limits. Concerns about affordability are real. True democracy can reassert itself in a single election. Reality can bend only so far. In this week’s Radio Atlantic, the Hungarian journalist Veronika Munk shares her view from the streets of Budapest. And the Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who covers autocracy, democracy, and Europe, explains why the election is a turning point for world politics.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: Hi!

Veronika Munk: Okay. Nice to meet you! Hi.

Rosin: Nice to meet you.

Rosin: Last weekend, Hungarian journalist Veronika Munk—

Munk: —and I’m a journalist at Denník N.

Rosin: —was in Budapest covering the election between Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the opposition leader, Péter Magyar.

Orbán had been in power for the past 16 years, had changed the country from the top down—

Munk: They changed everything in the country to favor themselves.

Rosin: —the media, universities, the courts—in a way that certain global leaders who aspired to that kind of grand power admired and marveled at.

President Trump: And he’s done a fantastic job, is a very powerful man within his country, but he’s also beloved. They love Viktor. And people that know him—

Rosin: Vice President J. D. Vance—

Vice President Vance: I got a good signal here.

Rosin: —had even come to the country to give a stump speech for Orbán.

Vance: It’s ringing. It’s progress.

Rosin: Trump phoned it in from home.

Vance: Hello, Mr. President, how are ya?

Trump (on speakerphone): Hi. Hey, J. D., could you give me a second to just—

[Sounds of crowd cheering]

Rosin: And then on Sunday night, as the election results started to roll in—

Munk: It was a record turnout, like, absolute historic high.

Rosin: —Veronika almost didn’t believe what she was seeing.

Munk: Even for me, who is a news junkie and this is my profession, it was super hard to believe that it can happen.

It felt like the Orbán regime will be always here and he will always be ruling the country.

But I was wrong.

George Stephanopoulos (from ABC’s Good Morning America): Back overseas, in a major defeat for President Trump’s closest ally in Europe, Hungarian voters ousted longtime Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was also close to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

[Sounds of chanting]

Munk: I was on the streets of Budapest. I was in the middle of the mass. I’m sure that you saw the pictures, that thousands of Hungarians were dancing and celebrating and crying on the streets, hugging each other—

[Sounds of crowd]

Munk: —which itself was a really, really interesting experience because the Hungarian society is quite closed in a sense that it’s really hard to see people to dance and to hug each other.

I was 11 years old when the system change happened in 1990, and I still remember that the adults were really happy. But it was uncomparable on the streets of Budapest on Sunday night because I was walking with my microphone talking to people and I got so many hugs from people who I had never met.

[Music and sounds of crowd]

Munk: It was really something. Everybody was crying, and it was a really, really one-of-a-lifetime kind of experience.

[Audio from Petér Magyar’s speech]

Rosin: So you’re just walking around the streets, and people are just dancing and hugging and crying?

Munk: Yes, that’s correct. It was a festival feeling.

There were children and dogs and elderly people.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Munk: So, yeah, it was like a really big happy festival. Even the future government members themselves were dancing while they were announcing they’re winning.

Rosin: There is this viral video of your health—

Munk: Yes. (Laughs.)

Rosin: —minister dancing. (Laughs.) And it’s totally out of context for us. We just see him sort of dancing across the stage.

Munk: Yeah.

Rosin: You know?

Munk: Yeah, but basically, he was reacting, I think, for the vibe that he was seeing from the thousands of people in front of him. But at the same time, he is a dance king, right?

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Munk: So our future health minister appears to have these very good moves.

[Sounds of cheering]

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. The idea that a democratic country can be slowly co-opted by a leader with proud autocratic leanings and then one day, poof, it ends, there are obvious lessons for the U.S. in that.

We will have Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum on in the second half of the show to talk through those lessons. But we’ll start from the beginning.

One day, 16-plus years ago, Hungary was just a democracy and Veronika’s life was much like any journalist working in a free society.

Munk: Then it was very similar, like American journalists experience: When we ask questions, the leaders of the authorities or the politicians or the hospital directors answered. I did have all the important phone numbers in my phone as a political reporter, and I haven’t got any problems to get into a press conference or asking questions and getting answers for it. And that started to stop after 2010.

Rosin: That was the year Orbán came into power for a second time. He had blamed the media for his previous loss. So when he was elected as prime minister again in 2010—this would be the start of his 16-year reign—he was determined to do things differently.

Munk: First, the ministers started to stop answering their phones and even answering any questions by email. So generally speaking, access to information became extremely hard.

And the second thing was that they started to bought up media companies.

Rosin: They bought up media companies, people with a lot of money who were very pro-Orbán.

Munk: It was not like a red phone that they put some loyalist in every independent newsrooms, and they called on the red phone and said that you should always write nice things about Orbán. But they basically bought up the whole companies. (Laughs.) And actually, that was what happened with me.

Rosin: Veronika worked for 18 years at Index, which was one of the biggest independent news sites in Hungary. She was then its deputy editor in chief.

Munk: A new management came, and the new management started to restructure our independent operation. And they fired my boss, the editor in chief.

Reporter (from Al Jazeera English): Last month, he publicly raised the alarm over political interference in the outlet’s operations.

Munk: We thought that if we are not able to operate independently, if we are not able to work with those colleagues that we consider professionally qualified and someone from the outside would like to drive us to a direction that we don’t want, we decided to quit, all of us, on a single day on the summer of 2020.

Reporter (from Al Jazeera English): More than 80 journalists from the country’s most-read news site, called Index, have resigned from their jobs.

Munk: It was a very, very sad moment. It was the easiest and the hardest decision of my life.

Reporter (from Al Jazeera English): —Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who once branded it a fake-news factory. One of his allies recently—

Rosin: Now, years later, Veronika saw Orbán’s defeat on Sunday as a lesson. As much as Orbán wanted to control the narrative—

Munk: He wanted to own the media, wanted to reshape the information provided about reality itself.

Rosin: —he just couldn’t do it anymore. The people had had enough: enough inflation, enough corruption, enough division, enough distorted reality.

Munk: And I think it is a valuable lesson for every political leader, every autocrat, that propaganda and democracy are incompatible. You can have one or the other, but never the both.

Rosin: It does seem like a beacon of hope for liberal democracies around the world that are worried about tipping into illiberal democracies. Does it feel that way to you?

Munk: I believe so, that it is a crucial moment for other similar populists or autocrats, because even 16 years of ruling can be demolished in a day.

[Music]

Munk: It’s a very good message for the other populists that people will raise their voices, especially new generation will raise their voices if they don’t like what they see.

[Sounds of chanting]

Munk: It seems that Hungarians started to feel that they need to raise their voices, they need to step up for themselves on a democratic way, casting their votes and sending out the autocrat from the country.

So I think the biggest lesson is, if you’re slightly not agreeing to the politics or it affecting your life badly, don’t stay silent. Be critical and step up for yourself.

[Sounds of cheering]

Rosin: So if a movement that spanned years, more than a decade, could crumble and fall in a single night, what might that mean for other countries that are teetering on the edge—particularly one that, say, has a big vote in November?

After the break, we talk to staff writer Anne Applebaum, an expert on the rise of authoritarianism, democracy, and European politics.

[Break]

Rosin: Anne, welcome back to the show.

Anne Applebaum: Thanks for having me.

Rosin: You’ve been reporting on Orbán’s Hungary for years. You called his election loss a “real turning point.” What do you mean by that—a turning point for what?

Applebaum: Although Hungary is a very small country, under 10 million people, in Central Europe, it came to have under Viktor Orbán an outsize significance. And that’s because Orbán, although democratically elected, although the leader of a member of the European Union and NATO, set out to build what he himself called an “illiberal” regime. So he became the first leader of a European democracy who said, I want to have a different kind of state.

And he then began to export this model—in other words, to say, This is the way to do politics going forward. He had a particular form of propaganda that he used to justify it: He told Hungarians they were under threat; they were in great danger. Initially, it was from immigrants, who were supposedly diluting the blood of the Hungarian nation. Later, it was from the degenerate gender policies of the West. And he created this idea that he was fighting against some kind of modernity.

And that model of doing politics spread and was copied and was emulated by a lot of other people, including by a lot of Americans.

Rosin: Right, so how did it influence the U.S.? I remember you wrote a story—I think it was last year—“America’s Future is Hungary,” which is a very strong statement. So what similarities were you noticing? I think that was in March, so that’s about a year ago.

Applebaum: The influence was very direct and specific. Hungarians came to Washington and Americans went to Hungary to learn how they did it.

The leader of the Heritage Foundation described Orbán not just as a model, but as the model for going forward. And many aspects of what the second Trump administration did were copied from the Hungarians.

And so for example, the most obvious one is the takeover of the bureaucracy, the firing of state employees, the conversion of state employees from neutral people who are promoted based on merit to party hacks, which is part of what Trump and his people are trying to do, most obviously in the Justice Department and the FBI, but in all branches of government. This was a direct copy of what Orbán did.

And so they see him as a model, and they talk about him as a model. It’s not a kind of secret or underground movement. He was an open source of ideas for the illiberal and even autocratic part of the American MAGA movement.

Rosin: I don’t think I realized the degree to which Orbán innovated some of these ideas, like even the term illiberal democracy, because it’s not exactly autocracy as we have in our imagination. It’s something in between. We spoke to a Hungarian journalist who described it wasn’t exactly like a takeover of the Hungarian media. It wasn’t literally controlling what people can and can’t see on the internet. A lot of it was more rich allies buying up media companies. Because I think when you understand that gray zone, you start to see the similarities between what’s happening here more closely.

Applebaum: Absolutely, and the media is another area where I am 100 percent certain they are directly copying what Orbán did. They’re using their friends in business to buy up media—whether it’s CBS or whether it’s CNN—in order to shape it so that it’s more aligned with what the Trump administration wants it to be.

That’s the Hungarian model. And you’re right. I didn’t know that Orbán was the very first to do that. In some ways, it’s not that different to what Putin did. But he was the first person to do it from within a democracy and to do it while bragging about it.

Rosin: So let’s move on to the campaign. I remember this phrase—you called Orbán’s campaign the first “post-reality” campaign. What did you mean by that?

Applebaum: Orbán, as I said, tried for many years to create some kind of scare, some kind of threat, an existential fear in Hungarians that was so important that it would justify his attempts to overthrow or change the political system, the political order.

By this year, he’d run out of threats. And so the threat that he was using this year was the threat of Ukraine: a Ukrainian invasion, Ukrainian sabotage, some kind of Ukrainian influence inside Hungary. But the idea that Ukraine was going to invade Hungary was crazy. So Ukraine is not going to invade Hungary. Ukraine is fighting a war with Russia. Ukraine does not wanna invade another country.

And so in order to create this idea, they built this whole world of AI videos with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky snorting cocaine on a golden toilet; also posters of him all over Budapest, all over the country with the headline Don’t let him get the last laugh; sort of sinister versions of him and Ursula von der Leyen, who’s the leader of the European Union, with Péter Magyar, who’s the leader of the Hungarian opposition: They’re the risk. Fidesz, Orbán’s party, we represent safety.

In other words, they were building up this huge threat. And if you took one step back and thought about it for five seconds, you realize that this was nuts. It was not a real threat; it was invented by Orbán. And so when I was there a few weeks ago, the real question that people were asking was: Will people believe in it? Can you invent a completely fictional threat online and in your rhetoric and in your political campaigning? And by the way, he was using the institutions of the state to do it as well, so he sent Hungarian soldiers to guard Hungarian energy installations, supposedly against Ukrainian sabotage.

So they were using the state; they were creating these actions in order to make people afraid. And the question is: Would people believe it? And now we know the answer, which is that they didn’t—or at least not all of them did.

Rosin: Then we see the news that Orbán loses the election and concedes to Péter Magyar, which is not inevitable. It’s certainly not the way it happened here in the 2020 election, so smoothly. What did you think when you saw that?

Applebaum: I was extremely surprised. Even on the day of the voting, people around Orbán in the government were warning of terrorism. They were talking about threats. They were talking about violence. They were talking about the election being stolen. They were preparing verbally, and in terms of propaganda, to announce that the election was false or would be falsified. And that was another topic that came up a couple of weeks in advance of the election as well.

People were ready for all kinds of different outcomes—that the election would be challenged—and there were lawyers who were prepared for that. Just like in the U.S., people were prepared for a challenge, and they were prepared to fight it.

My guess is that Orbán resigned because the gap between the parties was so large and the number of seats in Parliament that the opposition won was so incontrovertible that there was nothing to challenge and that he thought he would’ve lost by challenging it. And my guess is that he and his party will try and make a comeback in other ways. That’s maybe another conversation.

Rosin: Right. I know it’s only been a few days, but it’s impossible not to start asking all the questions of what does this mean. A light went on, and what you want to believe is that a whole lot of things are gonna change. So I just wanna try and talk through with you what this victory actually means.

So we start with a post-reality regime. Did you get a sense of reality reasserting itself? How far do you believe in that?

Applebaum: I do think this election was about reality reasserting itself. Magyar’s campaign was about the Hungarian economy; health care, which is very poor; education, which has deteriorated; corruption, which people feel is everywhere; the poor fiscal status; the bad condition of the government in many different ways.

And the opposition know that the first thing they have to do is begin to address the real problems. One of the things Orbán was famous for was he had these annual television appearances where he would talk about the economy, and he would lie, year in and year out. He would say how great everything was and growth is gonna be very high. He used false statistics. I know economists in Hungary who knew they were false and could show that they were mismeasuring all kinds of things.

And so this is an opposition which says that it will go back to using real statistics and trying to solve problems that are real. And if they just do that, they’ll have an enormous amount of political success, and that by itself would be transformational. Of course, there are a lot of other issues they’re gonna face, which is a captured judiciary, captured intelligence services. All these things have been captured by Orbán’s political party and movement, and they will now have to find a way to pick those things apart. And I know from Poland, which had a similar experience after eight years of rule by the Law and Justice party, who are also a populist authoritarian party, that picking those things apart can be very difficult.

Rosin: I guess where we land is it’s, like, a narrow miracle. There are moments when I think that when a population’s mind is distorted by misinformation, it’s not reversible. So maybe there’s just something about knowing, well, people can actually see reality right in front of them. It can be reversible. People can believe actual data and statistics. And that’s just good to know, even if not everything else is fixed.

Applebaum: Yes, and that was actually one of the themes of the campaign. And one of the ways in which Magyar and his team campaigned, because they didn’t have access to media, they went around the country. And so he went to hundreds of towns and villages. He went to many of them over and over again. He made sure to travel outside of the big cities. And the purpose of that grassroots campaign was to reach real people in real life because he couldn’t necessarily reach them any other way.

Rosin: Another battle of ideas in this turning-point election: the traditionalism versus, I guess what you could call progress, some people would call “wokeness.” Was the election about that—people turning away from that strong clinging to traditionalism, anti-LGBTQ rights, all of that?

Applebaum: The election was absolutely not about that. The point was to walk away from those divisions; don’t get caught in the trap of these culture-war arguments.

He also stayed away from arguing about Ukraine. Even though Ukraine was the main subject of the Orbán campaign, he almost didn’t talk about it, or he tried not to talk about it. Towards the end, especially after there had been all these leaked conversations between Orbán and his foreign minister with their Russian counterparts, then people began to chant at his rally, “Russians, go home.” And that became very important towards the end of the campaign, but mostly Magyar stayed away from that. He stayed away from these polarizing issues. And again, he focused on health, the economy, corruption.

So these are issues that unify people and they don’t divide people, and that was how he ran the campaign.

Rosin: Right. Okay, this has been implicit in a lot of our conversation; now I just wanna make it explicit, which is: What does this mean for the U.S.? How does this reverberate over here, in a country which, as you said, has used Orbán as a model? J. D. Vance went to Hungary; Trump supported Orbán. Do you have a sense of what this might mean for their project of cultural overhaul, which is modeled on Hungary?

Applebaum: I think this offers an important corrective. They believe that what they are doing is inevitable—in other words, they will win, and then nobody will be able to challenge them again. And what the Hungarian election shows is that these systems can end and they can be overthrown by enough people voting, enough people caring, enough people being involved. And I think that will inspire people who dislike what Trump is doing to the American state, whether those people come from the center right or the center left.

It shows that these changes don’t have to last forever. It’s a reminder that nothing is forever. You don’t get to change the American political system and say, Right, we won. It’s over. Democracy ended. And now we run the show indefinitely.

And the Hungarian election, I think, reminds people of that. And that will affect both people in power, and I think it will affect people who are campaigning in the midterms this year and in the presidential election a couple of years down the road.

Rosin: Well, what about, at one level broader, the momentum? One way to tell this story is this election kind of halted the momentum of what seemed like a fast-growing rise of autocracy, illiberal democracy. What do you think about that?

Applebaum: I think this election absolutely halted this sense of forward motion that you had from the European far right, as well as the American MAGA movement. They were acting like this was their time and their moment, and it was just a matter of days and weeks or months before they took control and before they changed everything.

I think that Trump’s war in Iran was a breaking point for a lot of them. It’s very, very unpopular in Europe. Suddenly, it made closeness or proximity to Trump or to MAGA seem less attractive to a lot of European leaders, including on the far right.

And this will serve as a further reminder that you can get too far away from the ideals of democracy and the rule of law that people still believe in in Europe. And I think it will definitely have a chilling effect on the language and maybe even the political momentum of the European far right.

Rosin: I’m so happy to hear this, Anne. (Laughs.) I feel like in the last two years that we’ve had these conversations, this is maybe the first time I’ve heard you feel genuinely optimistic.

Applebaum: (Laughs.)

Rosin: You’re still sounding very professional, but this is a much more positive view than I often get from you, so I’m glad to hear it.

Applebaum: Well, many, many things can still go wrong, but—

Rosin: (Laughs.) Yes, yes.

Applebaum: —we don’t have to talk about them today.

Actually, I saw some Hungarians on social media who, just having these kinds of conversations, people were beginning to say, Well, what if Magyar turns out to be no good, and what if Orbán comes back? And all the Hungarians were saying, Let us have 10 minutes, 24 hours to be happy. Give us this little space and time before we start to worry about what bad things might happen next.

Rosin: Exactly. I wish the same for you, Anne.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Applebaum: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Fact-checking by Genevieve Finn. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

A Pillar of the Economics Establishment Admits That It Was Wrong

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

How does a country get rich? For decades, the economics establishment generally agreed on a simple answer: Embrace free markets and avoid “industrial policy”—state-led efforts to shape what an economy produces—at all costs. No institution embodied this viewpoint, widely known as the “Washington Consensus,” quite like the World Bank. Established in 1944 to provide low-interest loans to developing countries, the bank soon became the intellectual center of development economics. In the 1990s, it took a hard stance against industrial policy, turning the concept almost into a taboo.

But now industrial policy is back, and it has a surprising new champion: the World Bank. A report issued last month argues that the bank’s previous stance had things backward: Government intervention, when done right, can actually be an essential ingredient of economic success. Industrial policy “should be considered in the national policy toolkit of all countries,” the report concludes.

“It’s hard to overstate what a big deal this is,” Jake Sullivan, who served as national security adviser under Joe Biden, told me. “The most important institutional voice in development economics just admitted that much of what we thought we knew about what made countries prosper was wrong.” The reversal is a bit like when the U.S. government announced that dietary cholesterol and fat are actually fine, conceding that decades’ worth of nutritional advice had been in error.

The World Bank’s turnabout centers on a famous story in development economics. During the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, a group of Asian economies known as the “Four Asian Tigers”—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan—experienced some of the fastest growth ever recorded, transforming them from poor farming backwaters into rich industrial powerhouses even as the rest of the developing world lagged far behind.

[Mark Blyth: The world economy is on the brink of epochal change]

One school of thought held that these countries had succeeded because of industrial policy. The Asian Tigers, in this telling, recognized that if they embraced laissez-faire capitalism immediately, then any attempt to build advanced industries would be impeded by foreign competition. The countries therefore poured huge amounts of public money into building up companies in certain “infant industries,” such as automotives, semiconductors, and consumer electronics, and occasionally used trade restrictions to temporarily insulate those industries from foreign competitors. With enough support, these companies eventually grew from small, uncompetitive firms to giant, multinational corporations such as Samsung and Hyundai in Korea and TSMC in Taiwan.

This perspective was gaining traction in the 1980s—until the world’s top institutional authority on development economics stepped in and squashed it. In 1993, the World Bank published a widely read report, titled “The East Asian Miracle,” in which it argued that the Asian Tigers had gotten rich not because of industrial policy but despite it. Most of their economic interventions, the report argued, had made “little apparent impact” or “clearly backfired.” “Our assessment of three major uses of intervention is that promotion of specific industries generally did not work and therefore holds little promise for other developing economies,” the report concluded. The real reason behind East Asia’s economic success was “market-friendly economic policies” such as reducing trade barriers, maintaining low budget deficits, and removing regulations on private companies.

The first-order effect of the report was to turn the concept of industrial policy into the economic equivalent of flat-Earth theory, solidifying the Washington Consensus around free trade, deregulation, and privatization. It also shaped the conditions under which developing countries could access much-needed financing, because the World Bank began conditioning its loans on recipients’ eschewal of industrial policy and adoption of market-friendly reforms.

By the mid-2010s, the Washington Consensus was beginning to show signs of weakness. The first turning point came in 2016, when Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency by railing against globalization and free trade. The second came during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, when countries around the world, including the United States, found themselves facing shortages of supplies as basic as face masks and as crucial as semiconductors.

In the meantime, China had become more powerful than ever, even as it totally flouted the World Bank’s recommendations. Using huge government subsidies, cheap loans, and major trade restrictions, it turned a set of strategic industries from virtually nonexistent into global champions. By 2025, China was producing more than half of the world’s naval ships, two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, three-quarters of the world’s batteries, and 90 percent of the world’s solar panels.

For developing nations, China’s path was seen as a marvel worthy of emulation. “Lots of these middle-income countries have started to see their growth slow down a lot,” Mary Lovely, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me. “And so what do you do? Well, if you look at China, what they did was industrial policy—and that seemed to work pretty well for them.”

But for the U.S. and other advanced economies, China’s rise presented a serious economic and geopolitical threat that had to be countered. In 2023, Sullivan gave a speech outlining the tenets of a “new Washington consensus”: one in which the government would play a more active role in creating good middle-class jobs, building resilient supply chains, reducing dependence on geopolitical adversaries, and seeding new industries crucial to national security. To that end, the U.S. under Biden invested hundreds of billions of dollars in semiconductors and clean energy and imposed new tariffs on a handful of Chinese goods in strategic industries, including electric vehicles and batteries. When Trump returned to office last year, he went even further, issuing massive tariffs on nearly all goods from around the world and purchasing government stakes in companies such as Intel.

Now that the world’s two economic superpowers were both engaged in industrial policy, the rest of the world needed to find a way to keep up. When, that same year, the World Bank surveyed its country economists, 80 percent of them reported that client governments had sought their advice on how to use industrial policy more effectively. In a comprehensive review of the development plans of 183 countries, it found that all of them were engaging in at least one form of industrial policy.

So just over 30 years after the original East Asia report, the World Bank decided to publish a sequel. This time, it came to the opposite conclusion. The “East Asian Miracle” report’s anti-industrial-policy stance “has the practical value of a floppy disk today,” writes Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, in the report’s foreword. What changed? First, the body of evidence grew. Since the 1990s, poor countries have used industrial policy to become global leaders in key industries, such as Romania for software development, Brazil for agriculture, and China for shipbuilding. Moreover, when World Bank researchers reevaluated the East Asian experience with many more decades of data, they found that industrial-policy efforts had been far more crucial to the region’s success than was initially understood. For example, from 1973 to 1979, the South Korean government spent about 0.4 percent of its GDP each year to develop industries such as steel, electronics, and petrochemicals. At the time of the 1993 report, the cost did not appear to have been worth the benefits. But a more recent study found that the spending eventually increased the country’s annual GDP by 3 percent—an enormous amount of growth.

The second change is that developing countries have become more capable. Their policy makers are better educated, their bureaucracies more professionalized, and their budgets much larger than they were 30 years ago, giving the countries a greater chance of successfully intervening. Taking these changes together, the report concludes that industrial policy “is far more replicable than previously thought.”

[Listen: What really fueled the ‘East Asian Miracle?’]

The details of how countries use industrial policy matter a great deal. On surveying a litany of international case studies, the report finds that tariffs rarely achieve their stated goals, or they do so at the unacceptable costs of hurting industries that rely on imported goods and of inviting retaliation from other countries. Instead, the report argues for policies that offer specific industries direct support, such as subsidies, tax credits, or workforce-training programs.

Perhaps the biggest problem with industrial policy is that it can easily become susceptible to corruption and self-dealing as various special-interest groups lobby the government for favors or carve-outs. The report dedicates a chapter to “How to Get the Institutions Right,” which includes a recommendation to hand over policy implementation to a technocratic agency that is relatively insulated from politics, and that thus won’t be susceptible to pressure by politically connected interest groups. It also emphasizes the importance of making clear, credible commitments, ideally across political parties, that reduce uncertainty and allow current and would-be businesses to make long-term decisions in response to new policies. And it warns against “picking winners”—investing in particular companies or national champions as opposed to offering broad incentives for an entire sector.

This list of best practices is almost a photo negative of the approach that Trump has taken during his second term. He has imposed big tariffs on basically every good from every country on the planet. Those tariffs have been announced and then un-announced; paused and then un-paused; and revised through deals, overturned by courts, and then reinstated under different legal authorities, which also may be overturned by the courts. They have been issued based on the president’s individual authority and have resulted in an endless chain of lobbyists, foreign leaders, and CEOs making pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to secure carve-outs. When Trump has made targeted investments, they’ve been in the form of handpicked equity stakes in specific companies, such as Intel, rather than industry-wide commitments.

In this context, the World Bank’s implicit message to the rest of the world appears to be: Yes, industrial policy can work if done correctly. But please, for the love of God, don’t do what America is doing.

History Is Running Backwards

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

Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[David Brooks: A humanist manifesto]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Doesn’t Have the Power to Enact His Latest Elections Scheme

2026-04-15T17:23:00-04:00

Anxiety among election officials and experts had been building for months before Donald Trump issued his latest executive order purporting to ensure election integrity late last month. When the actual text emerged, the reaction wasn’t relief exactly—but a definite sense that things could have been much worse.

Americans have many reasons to be worried about whether the midterm elections will be free and fair. As I laid out in a cover story last fall, the president’s plan to subvert the 2026 election is multifaceted and already in swing. But last month’s order and the dismissive reaction it’s received from experts—along with this weekend’s decisive defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which shows how the competitive-authoritarian playbook that Trump has imitated can be beaten—also point to the reasons to resist doomerism.

“This is relatively mild stuff, at least compared to the draft EO that had been floating around from election denier conspiracy theorists that would have Trump declare a national emergency and take over all aspects of elections,” Richard L. Hasen, a top elections-law expert, wrote when Trump signed the order.

As for what the scaled-down order does include, many observers have predicted that it is most likely to be found unconstitutional, just as some of Trump’s prior election moves have been. The order first mandates that the Department of Homeland Security work with the Social Security Administration to create a nationwide database of voting-age citizens, then share that with each state government. That alone wouldn’t force states to use the database, so the order requires that 60 days before an election, states submit to the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters to whom they intend to send a mail-in ballot or an absentee ballot. USPS would be barred from delivering ballots to anyone not on DHS’s relevant state list.

You may have noticed that this is a byzantine way to achieve the apparent goal. That’s because Trump doesn’t actually have the powers that he’s claiming here. In general, the Constitution delegates control of elections to the states. Congress has the power to set election laws, but it hasn’t done so in this case. (The political scientist Seth Masket notes that when the federal government has intervened in the past, it has almost always done so to defend and broaden the franchise, not to restrict it.) In fact, congressional Republicans have not acted on Trump’s demand to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to present proof of citizenship when registering.

Trump is trying to concoct a work-around by using DHS and USPS, but he still doesn’t have the power to interfere in state laws with executive orders. He also doesn’t have direct control over USPS, his intended mechanism. The 60-day deadline for submitting names would also be practically unworkable. As the North Carolina politics expert Chris Cooper points out, such a law would have effectively disenfranchised many of the Trump voters hit hardest by Hurricane Helene, just 39 days before the 2024 election.

Experts’ skepticism of the order reminded me of a conversation I had last fall with Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former Justice Department official, that made me wonder if I’ve been too pessimistic. Levitt has criticized many of Trump’s election moves (including the latest order) but also contends that although Trump has abused his powers in many spheres, he simply doesn’t have power to abuse in the election space.

“There’s an awful lot of power that Congress has given the president where he’s got the switch. And then the question is, did he use it right or not?” Levitt told me. “But in elections, he doesn’t have the switch in the first place.”

As I wrote last fall, Trump’s biggest influence over elections may be the power to create chaos. Many of the steps he’s taken to interfere with elections, including last month’s order as well as previous attempts to mandate state deadlines for accepting mail-in ballots and to bar states from using existing equipment, don’t really seem aimed at enforcing compliance. Instead, they seek to confuse voters about the rules of the election or to intimidate them into apathy, disengagement, or despair.

“The most serious weak link is us. It’s always been us. If he can get us scared enough, panicked enough, to stop ourselves from voting, that’s really the only way he can change the meaningful conditions in 2026,” Levitt said. “If we choose not to listen, then we just choose not to listen.”

It may not be quite that simple. Even if voters tune out the noise and maintain faith in the system, Trump might be trying to create grounds by which he can claim after the fact that an election in which Republicans fared poorly was rigged. He has been making claims like this since before the 2016 election, never with convincing evidence. The executive branch could attempt to seize ballots, try to invalidate elections, or conjure who knows what other mischief. Experts also worry about Trump deploying the military or DHS personnel to interfere with voting itself. And a deep dive from ProPublica this week spotlights some of the ways that the administration has removed guardrails that kept Trump from stealing the 2020 election. These threats are good reasons not to be complacent, but the opposite of complacency is vigilance, not panic.

Related:

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Today’s News

U.S. warships issued warnings that prompted nine vessels to turn back in the first 48 hours of a blockade on Iranian ports, with no boardings by U.S. personnel or shots fired, according to U.S. Central Command. Iran threatened to halt trade across key shipping routes in response to a U.S. naval blockade of its ports.
President Trump said in a Fox Business interview that aired today that the war in Iran “can be over very soon” despite stalled negotiations, after U.S.-Iran talks in Pakistan over the weekend ended without an agreement. He reiterated that a condition for ending the conflict is that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
In the same interview, Trump said he will fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell if he doesn’t step down once his term is over next month. He also said that he won’t halt a Justice Department probe into Powell and the Fed’s headquarters renovation, despite a federal judge determining last month that the government had produced essentially no evidence of a crime to support the investigation.

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The Weekly Planet: A new kind of hybrid car is about to hit America’s streets, Andrew Moseman writes.

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Evening Read

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Critics Love It. But Who Wrote It?

By Daniel Engber

On a recent morning at Rockefeller Center, NBC employees strolled through the crowd with copies of Upward Bound, the latest book-club pick from the Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager. “It’s deeply heartfelt and moving,” Hager said, after holding up the debut novel from the 28-year-old Woody Brown, “and the reason it’s so authentic is that the author understands autism firsthand.”

That understanding is indeed profound. Brown’s autism is such that he can barely speak, and he communicates mostly by pointing to letters, one by one, on a laminated board. This is also how his novel, which is already a New York Times best seller, came to be. In the recorded interview that followed Hager’s introduction, Brown’s mother, Mary, sat beside him, holding the letter board and reading his tapped-out messages …

But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.

Read the full article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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