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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump posted on Truth Social Friday afternoon that he will not be attending Representative Ronny Jackson’s birthday party in the evening, as he is speaking at a Turning Point USA event in Arizona instead. Trump insisted that the move was not personal, praising Jackson as a politician and a doctor.

“He is a good friend, 100% MAGA, and one of the most talented Medical Doctors and Politicians in our Country. HAPPY BIRTHDAY RONNY!” Trump posted, concluding the long post by saying “Ronny Jackson is a fighter and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election. HE IS ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVORITES, AND WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

It’s funny that Jackson, who has quite a close relationship with the president, went through all the trouble of celebrating his birthday at Trump’s personal estate, only for him not to even show up.

A series of scandals during Trump’s first term, including giving White House staffers easy access to pills, eventually cost Jackson his job as Trump’s doctor and a Cabinet nomination to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs. But he then got a lifeline when Trump created a new position just for him in the White House: assistant to the president and chief medical adviser. Jackson later used his proximity to Trump to run for Congress and win in 2020, but now, he can’t even get Trump to show up to his birthday party at Trump’s own home.

“The Hezboolah situation in an appropriate manner. Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday morning. “They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!! Thank you!”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his team were shocked by the language in the post, Axios reported, believing it violated the ceasefire agreement. The text of that deal allows Israel to take military action “in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks.”

Israel claims that their bombing was defensive, making it within the realm of the ceasefire that was struck on Thursday, and came after six weeks of war in which Israel killed over 2,000 Lebanese civilians and displaced over one million. Israel is no stranger to breaking ceasefire agreements, as they have killed at least 766 Palestinians and injured over 2,000 in the Gaza Strip since that ceasefire was declared in October.

The secretary of health and human services was testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and was asked by Democratic Representative Greg Casar if he had “met with any of the 1.4 million people who have lost their health insurance just this last year from dropping off of Obamacare.” 

Kennedy was unmoved by the question. 

“They’re almost all illegal immigrants,” Kennedy responded. Casar pressed further, saying it sounded like Kennedy hadn’t met with anyone, referring to one person in his congressional district who lost insurance. Kennedy cut in.

Casar: Have you met with any of the 1.4 million people who have lost their health insurance just this last year from dropping off of Obamacare?

Sec. Kennedy: They’re almost all illegal immigrants. pic.twitter.com/NzPogNFn4u

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 17, 2026

“We found 1.5 million illegal immigrants illegally collecting Medicaid,” Kennedy said, before Casar interjected and noted that people in his district saw their monthly health insurance costs skyrocket by hundreds of dollars, including mothers and kids. He again asked Kennedy whether he had spoken to anyone who had lost their insurance, and Kennedy tried to claim that Affordable Care Act costs are lower for many Americans. Casar’s time for questioning then ran out.  

“Chairman, it sounds like he’s met with nobody and been able to explain to them why it’s okay that this policy kicks them off their healthcare,” Casar concluded, addressing committee chair Tim Wahlberg. 

Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In January, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which RFK Jr. oversees as health secretary, reported that 1.4 million fewer Americans had signed up for ACA plans because prices had gotten too high. That’s all thanks to Republicans and the Trump administration letting ACA subsidies expire. Kennedy doesn’t seem to care. 

Maria Medetis Long, chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, notified attorneys working on the probe that she would no longer handle the case moving forward, people familiar with the matter told CNN.

Two sources told ABC News that Medetis Long had expressed doubts about the investigation. The prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida are looking into allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about his role in crafting an intelligence assessment about Russian efforts to interfere on behalf of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Some attorneys were surprised by the news, sources said, because there were additional interviews scheduled in the coming days as the department weighed whether to bring charges against Brennan.

The U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida issued 30 subpoenas to individuals, including Brennan and other former intelligence officials, as part of a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies. Those cases are set to land on the desk of the same judge who handed the president his get-out-of-jail-free card back in July 2024: Aileen Cannon.

Asked about the move, a Justice Department spokesperson said, “As a matter of routine practice, attorneys are moved around on cases so offices can most effectively allocate resources. It is completely healthy and normal to change members of legal teams.”

Jenner lamented her status earlier this month on the Tomi Lahren is Fearless podcast.

“I love President Trump. And I think he signed this executive order.... I don’t know who underneath him was putting this thing together—that all federal documents, it has to be your biological sex at birth,” Jenner said, absolving the president. “Recently I had my passport, I had to get it renewed. I sent it back. [It] comes back, gender marker ‘M.’ Screws everything up.”

She went on to note that she tried multiple different avenues to remedy the situation, even sending in her female birth certificate, but to no avail.

“This is a safety factor, OK? I can’t travel internationally anymore.... I don’t blame President Trump, I love him. But for a lot of people this is a huge issue.... I don’t know what’s gonna happen because I don’t think this was really thought out, what this means—not just for the males-to-females.”

Jenner said she left a note for Trump with his Secret Service while visiting Mar-a-Lago two months ago, but still hasn’t heard back.

Trump signed the executive order in January 2025, and the Supreme Court upheld it in November, meaning many trans Americans are now dealing with the chaos.

Jenner is just the latest vocal Trump supporter to put her foot in her mouth. What exactly did she expect to happen when Trump made it clear more than a decade ago that the LGBTQ community would be a primary target? And how many trans rights organizations warned against the exact thing Jenner is now complaining about?

Speaking with CBS News, Trump claimed that Iran had “agreed to everything,” including working with the U.S. to remove the roughly 2,000 kilograms of enriched uranium that remains buried in underground facilities.

“Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States,” Trump said. He clarified that by “our people,” he did not mean U.S. troops.

Trump claimed that the U.S. and Iran would continue to meet over the weekend to iron out the details, and that the U.S. military blockade on Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz would continue “until we get it done.”

But sources in Tehran have denied Trump’s claim that any progress has been made. “Contrary to Trump’s claim, no form of nuclear material transfer has been negotiated,” a source close to Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf wrote on X. Another Iranian source called Trump’s claim “another lie.”

Trump’s seemingly unsubstantiated claim came shortly after Axios reported that the U.S. was considering releasing $20 billion in frozen Iranian assets in exchange for the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium—which Trump furiously denied earlier Friday. The two countries were reportedly discussing a three-page plan, and could send negotiators to Pakistan this weekend to try and finalize it. The talks would concern what specifically will happen to the uranium, and how many Iranian assets will be unfrozen.

The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to “avoid protracted litigation.”

“Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”

Any payment from Trump’s lawsuit against the government would be doled out to him via taxpayer funds.

The suit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department during Trump’s first term did not do enough to thwart Charles Littlejohn, a former contractor for the IRS, from leaking the tax returns to the press. Littlejohn leaked 15 years of Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times in 2019. The documents were published by the paper of record the following year, in September 2020, two months before the presidential election.

Trump’s attorneys have argued that, despite the fact that Littlejohn was classed as a contractor, he acted as a “joint employee” of the two agencies. They further asserted that the government was liable for Littlejohn’s actions due to the IRS’s “extensive, detailed, day-to-day supervision” of his behavior.

The legal challenge has raised numerous ethical quandaries, chief among them the apparent conflict of interest in the case. Legal experts have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.

A group of former government officials filed an amicus brief in February that challenged the suit’s core claims. Those officials included former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and former National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson. Together, the cohort argued that Trump’s lawsuit contains “significant legal flaws” and risks becoming “collusive litigation.”

This story has been updated.

Speaking before the House Education and Workforce Committee, Kennedy tried to peddle some of his classic pseudoscience.

“There’s an argument for vapes,” Kennedy said. “Vapes reduce cigarette tobacco smoking—”

“No sir. That was an argument Juul made, and I’d be happy to have a further conversation,” California Representative Mark DeSaulnier interrupted.

“I’d love to have that conversation,” Kennedy said.

RFK Jr: There's an argument for vapes. Vapes reduce cigarette smoking

DeSAULNIER: That was the argument Juul made pic.twitter.com/c5FmkDJwx8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 17, 2026

The Centers for Disease Control’s own website states: “E-cigarette aerosol generally contains fewer harmful chemicals than the deadly mix of 7,000 chemicals in smoke from cigarettes. However, this does not make e-cigarettes safe.”

The vape company Juul illegally tried to market its electronic cigarettes as a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes, earning it a strong admonishment from the Food and Drug Administration in 2019—another of the many health agencies which Kennedy now oversees.

No federally reviewed vaping product has been found to be less harmful than cigarettes. Studies have shown that vapes and e-cigarettes are just as dangerous—if not more so—than traditional cigarettes, because they can increase the risk of heart disease and limit blood flow to the heart. They also still contain nicotine, which is highly addictive.

While vapes may be considered preferable to cigarettes for adult smokers, that’s not who uses them: Children are, on average, nine times more likely to vape than adults, according to the World Health Organization.

Paula White-Cain, a Pentecostal televangelist who has offered Trump spiritual guidance since 2002 and was appointed to run the new White House Faith Office last year, once said that “saying no to Trump would be saying no to God.”

Earlier this month, White-Cain compared Trump to Jesus at the White House’s Easter lunch, likening Trump’s various political scandals to Christ’s crucifixion.

“It almost cost you your life,” she said, feet away from Trump. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you.”

White-Cain’s sycophantic public commentary offers a brief glimpse into the rhetoric circulating around the president, and could possibly explain why Trump felt it appropriate to circulate an AI-generated picture of himself as the messiah earlier this week.

That act earned Trump nationwide backlash, driving a wedge between himself and many of his loyal supporters, who overwhelmingly condemned the blasphemous depiction. (The image features Trump dressed in white and red robes, encircled in light, holding light, and sharing it with the fallen.)

Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS Now said that they were “disgusted” by and “ashamed” of the image, and further implied that they regretted voting for the self-identified Christian. (Reminder: while Trump has claimed the Bible is his “favorite book,” he couldn’t name a single passage from the text when prompted to do so in a 2019 interview.)

“Trump knows what he is doing. He knows what he posted,” former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X Thursday after prominent evangelist Franklin Graham came to the president’s defense. “He knows how to manipulate his followers. And he’s not sorry, he never apologized. Instead he lied, and said he was a doctor, which is also absurd.”

A Franciscan friar that spoke with CBS News earlier this week said that “no one” should try to “put themselves in the person of Christ.”

“I think that’s a little bit of a problem,” he said.

White-Cain’s remarks could also explain the president’s attitude as he escalates a seemingly pointless feud with Pope Leo XIV, who apparently upset the administration by advocating for peace, not war.

As Trump’s base begins to turn on him, questions have arisen about Trump’s other political miracles. Several MAGA voters have recently begun to reexamine the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in apparent suspicion that the ordeal was staged.

Wired reports that this conspiracy theory started to take hold after Joe Kent, who resigned from the Trump administration over the Iran war, went on conservative pundit Tucker Carlson’s show and asserted without evidence that investigations into the shooting were halted before they were finished.

“If you don’t want to address that question, then you just go silent and say you can’t ask that question,” Kent, formerly the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said. “Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions.”

Kent noted that this would fuel conspiracy theories, and ever since his interview, that is exactly what seems to be happening within MAGA. Trisha Hope, who served as a delegate from Texas during the 2024 Republican National Convention, posted on X last week that “if you cannot look at this story, and use critical thinking skills and have at least some questions, you are the problem and we need you to snap out of it.” 

“Since the attempt on his life, Trump has show [sic] no interest in investigating what really happened. He never mentions it, it’s as if it never happened, except when he tells us, he took a bullet for us,” Hope said in a long post.

Comedian Tim Dillon, who interviewed JD Vance on his podcast during Trump’s presidential campaign, said last week that he thinks “maybe it was staged,” adding that Trump should now say publicly that “some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”

Candace Owens, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has abandoned Trump, claimed on her podcast last week that Miriam Adelson, an Israeli-American billionaire and Republican donor, was actually behind the assassination attempt because Trump hadn’t followed through on a promise to allow Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.  

Ali Alexander, who helped pushed the “Stop the Steal” campaign around the conspiracy that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him, wrote on Telegram Tuesday that the attempt on Trump’s life could mean he is in the Antichrist, echoing a different right-wing conspiracy theory pushed by Tucker Carlson and others.   

“To be clear: if Donald Trump didn’t receive a miracle, then it was deception or a dark sign,” Alexander wrote. “There is biblical prophecy in Revelation 13:3 apparently about the Antichrist being struck on the head.”

Cracks are beginning to show in Trump’s support base following his decision to break a major campaign promise and start a war with Iran, attack the Catholic Church, and imply that he’s Jesus Christ. All of this could be the beginning of the end of his political career and control of the Republican Party. 

U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy said the DOJ lacked the authority “to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here.”

“In its September 8, 2025, letter to Secretary Amore (the ‘Demand Letter’), DOJ stated that the purpose of its demand for an unredacted copy of Rhode Island’s statewide voter registration list was ‘to ascertain Rhode Island’s compliance with the list maintenance requirements of the [National Voter Registration Act] and the [Help America Vote Act],’” McElroy wrote in her dismissal of the DOJ lawsuit. “The Demand Letter did not identify any facts suggesting that Rhode Island has not complied with the NVRA and HAVA, and it did not otherwise expressly identify any factual basis for DOJ’s demand.”

The DOJ initially filed the lawsuit as part of its effort to continue Trump’s immigration crackdown and weaponize voter registration information in deep-blue states. But now Rhode Island has become the fifth state—along with California, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Orgeon—to reject Trump’s meddling. 

“Neither the NVRA nor HAVA authorize DOJ to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here,” McElroy concluded. “As such, for the foregoing reasons, the Court DENIES the United States’ Motion to Compel Production and GRANTS Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss.”  

That leaves Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon with zero wins and five losses on her voting records lawsuits, with 25 states still waiting on decisions. 

It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of this finding. “This is an important and very concerning result,” Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “It shows that the ‘pessimistic’ models, which show a strong weakening of the AMOC by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones.”

These pessimistic models could entail dire consequences: brutal, frigid winters in Northern Europe; disrupted growing seasons in South America; drought across the Sahel; and rapid sea level rise and stronger hurricanes along the Atlantic Coast of the United States. A shutdown could further decimate the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide, leading to an additional 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming.

There is still debate within the scientific community as to the extent and speed of the AMOC slowdown and what exactly it will mean, but the historical evidence is sobering. When AMOC inexplicably weakened by 30 percent in 2009 and 2010, the Northeast U.S. saw seas rise at unprecedented rates. A study released last year showed that 50 percent of the doubling of flood risk there since 2005 can be attributed to AMOC’s slowdown to date. The last time the current collapsed—beginning about 12,800 years ago—Europe may have experienced Arctic-like conditions as average temperatures dropped by nearly 108 degrees Fahrenheit within a matter of decades.

The new study comes as climate change has largely fallen out of political debates across much of the West. In response to closure of the Strait of Hormuz for more than a month, liberal and right-wing governments alike doubled down on coal, oil, and gas in the name of energy security. The mood in the U.S. might best be described as climate nihilism: Climate-denying Republicans are gutting climate rules and doing everything in their power to punish renewables and expand fossil fuel production; Democrats who championed their climate bona fides just a few years ago are quietly rolling back both laws and rhetoric about reducing emissions.

It is easier, psychologically, to imagine that all those people who were yelling about climate change a few years ago were shrill blue-haired radicals, loony NGOs, and politicians who were so eager to capture those groups’ votes and endorsements that they foolishly took up catastrophically unpopular positions on the issue. It is also easier to debate the right way to talk about the climate crisis politically than it is to reckon with the actual problem at hand. Arguably a major reason why climate change has dropped out of the national conversation is because it is such an incredibly upsetting thing to think about.

Liberal-coded rhetoric about “solving” climate change—almost always connected to a handful of exciting green technologies—can seem like its own, more well-intentioned form of denial. There is no solving climate change. It is already happening, and it will continue to get much, much worse even if the world were to magically end all fossil fuel combustion tomorrow. A world-historic proliferation of solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear power will not on its own eliminate fossil fuel combustion, much less create viable fossil-free alternatives for cornerstones of modernity like concrete, steel, and nitrogen-based fertilizers. A thriving green tech sector also won’t figure out how to peaceably relocate the many millions of people living in places that are becoming uninhabitable.

To adequately plan for an inevitably climate-changed future—for mitigation, adaptation, and loss—the world’s governments would need to unite behind a war-like mobilization that would make even the most audacious of Soviet planners blush. In a war, however, at least by conventional metrics, one side can usually be said to have won once it’s over. Victory in a war on climate change, by contrast, would involve something like permanent battle, where the primary goal is to limit the numbers of losers to (optimistically) tens of millions rather than billions. The result would be a world that looks fundamentally different from our own. Given the quantity of greenhouse gasses that have already been deposited into the atmosphere, an enormous transformation in the ways people live now will happen—is happening—either way. The question isn’t whether we can preserve the world as it is and stop climate change, but whether we can plan for those changes to be as minimally destructive as possible.

This isn’t exactly a winning message. Neither, for that matter, will talking about the AMOC collapse win over swing voters in the United States. But the alternatives to engaging with reality are to lie about what’s happening or pretend that it isn’t happening. Those of us who aren’t running for office, at least, don’t have to be deniers.

Donald Trump, however, was not happy.

The president went on a social media bender as the news came in, complaining that he had not received enough credit for his handling of the war (that he started) while optimistically suggesting that the war was already over, despite lacking a concrete peace deal.

“The Failing New York Times, FAKE NEWS CNN, and others, just don’t know what to do,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They are desperately looking for a reason to criticize President Donald J. Trump on the Iran situation, but just can’t find it. Why don’t they just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT, and start to gain back their credibility???”

In a series of posts, Trump incorrectly referred to the vital waterway as the “STRAIT OF IRAN,” and declared that the U.S. blockade on the strait would “REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN, ONLY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE.”

“Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” Trump declared in a separate post. “It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!”

Trump thanked Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar for their involvement in the peace negotiations, and stated that while any potential peace deal will not pertain to Lebanon, he would eventually “MAKE LEBANON GREAT AGAIN.” At the same time, the president slammed America’s NATO allies, claiming in a separate post that the coalition had called to offer help in the region in the wake of the strait’s reopening.

“I TOLD THEM TO STAY AWAY, UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL. They were useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!” Trump said.

Earlier this week, France and the U.K. agreed to cohost a summit with more than 40 nations to “restore freedom of navigation” along the waterway. Its results, however, were dependent on a peace deal, according to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The war in Iran has thrust the entire world into an energy crisis, spiking oil and gas prices, stalling movement, and tanking economies. At the time of publication, Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—had dropped to around $89 per barrel. Last month, the cost reached a high of $108 per barrel—a dramatic increase from before the war started in late February, when Brent crude cost around $65 a barrel.

It is not clear exactly what the war in Iran has accomplished. Together, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, 13 U.S. soldiers have died. The war also spiked the cost of living for people around the world, agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the Western hemisphere—cost American taxpayers over $50 billion, and sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S.

Trump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to erase Iran’s nuclear capabilities—but his administration’s battle assessments have stood in contrast to other attacks they boasted about as recently as last year.

Prior to the war—which never obtained congressional approval—Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22, 2025. At the time, the Trump administration claimed that the one-off air raid had set Iran’s program back by “years.”

The Military Postal Service Agency and USPS have indefinitely suspended all mail to U.S. warships and zip codes in the Middle East. Family members of two service members—one aboard the USS Tripoli and another aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—shared photos with USA Today showing what that suspension was forcing them to eat while warring on Iran—even as their families sent them packages filled with homemade desserts, candy, and clothes.

One image shows a single dreary tortilla alongside a lump of what looks to be pulled pork or chicken. The other shows two horrid-looking slabs of meat alongside a pile of sliced carrots.

And the food is starting to run low. Dan F., a former Marine whose daughter is serving aboard the USS Tripoli, told USA Today that his daughter reported no fresh produce, low stock of hygiene products, and rationing of all non-perishable food.

“The food is tasteless and there’s not nearly enough and they’re hungry all the time,” said Karen Erskine-Valentine of West Virginia, a pastor whose congregation member has a son on the USS Abraham Lincoln. “That kind of breaks your heart.”

“We have the strongest military in the world. You shouldn’t be running out of food, and you shouldn’t not be able to get mail on the ship,” Dan F. said. “The one thing we had over our adversaries [was] we fed our people.”

USPS and the Military Postal Service Agency announced the suspension earlier this month due to “airspace closures and other logistical impacts from the ongoing conflict,” according to Army spokesperson Major Travis Shaw. “Resumption of mail service is contingent upon the reopening of airspace by civil authorities, and the area commander’s evaluation of regional transportation and distribution stability.”

The president posted on his Truth Social account Friday about a plan to end the war between the U.S. and Iran, and stressed that “no money will exchange hands in any way, shape, or form.”

That’s despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering releasing $20 billion in frozen Iranian assets in exchange for the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium.

The report states that the two countries are discussing a three-page plan, and could send negotiators to Pakistan this weekend to try and finalize it. Iran reportedly has close to 2,000 kilograms of enriched uranium buried in underground nuclear facilities. The talks concern what specifically will happen to the uranium, and how many Iranian assets will be unfrozen.

In earlier discussions, the U.S. was willing to release $6 billion to Iran for humanitarian relief, while the Iranians wanted $27 billion, according to Axios. The White House also wanted Iran to send its uranium to the U.S., while Iran sought to instead lower its enrichment through a process called downblending. Now, the two sides are considering a compromise in which some uranium would be sent to a third country while the rest would be downblended with international supervision.

If the U.S. does agree to release Iranian assets, Trump would be in effect doing what he and other Republicans criticized former President Barack Obama for: unfreezing Iranian money as part of an international agreement. As part of the nuclear deal Obama reached with Iran during his presidency, the U.S. lifted sanctions that froze Iranian government funds held in foreign banks and sent $1.7 billion to settle decades-old failed contracts between the two countries.

Back then, Trump and other Republicans made unfounded and fantastical claims that the U.S. was bribing Iran because the country was releasing American prisoners at the same time. If Iranian assets end up being unfrozen now, Trump and the GOP will make all kinds of excuses about how it’s different this time.

Trump says the arch will commemorate America’s 250th birthday, but let’s be honest: It will commemorate Donald Trump. If this monstrosity ever gets built, no one driving or cycling by it along the George Washington Memorial Parkway will look at it and think of the Declaration of Independence or Ben Franklin or John Hancock. They’ll think of one man. And that’s exactly how he wants it.

The federal Commission of Fine Arts officially gave its approval to the project on Thursday. We’ll come back to that commission—who they are, and the testimony they took before casting their votes. But first, for those of you who live outside Washington, I want to describe this place physically so people understand why this arch would land in Memorial Circle with all the grace of a walrus hogging an ice floe.

On many warm-weather weekends, I go for longish bike rides. Washington is one of America’s great bike-riding cities—it has copious bike lanes and the downtown area is mostly flat and incredibly scenic, with the monuments and all the lovely waterfront parks. (Trump also, by the way, wants to steal East Potomac Park, home to an admittedly down-at-heel but historic public golf course as well as gorgeous picnic and fishing areas, from the people and convert it into, you guessed it, a “world-class” private country club.) Most times, I drive down from my home in Maryland and park (for free, and there’s always a space) at the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, better known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, which is right next to Arlington Cemetery. I circle the memorial and go past the Netherlands Carillon, the modernist bell tower (127 feet high, incidentally) given by the people of that country to the United States for the latter’s role in liberating them from the Nazis.

I then zip across the Memorial Bridge, generally regarded as the city’s most beautiful, with its neoclassical arches, its martial yet tasteful statuary, and its wide pebbled sidewalks, and find myself face to face with the glorious Lincoln Memorial, the reflecting pool, and all the rest. I never, ever do this without feeling grateful to live here and to be able to do something so pedestrian (so to speak) as take a bike ride while being among these and so many other treasures.

I should add a few words about the graceful entrance to Arlington Cemetery. The National Park Service, which owns the land, calls this the Memorial Avenue Corridor. It was designed in the early twentieth century by none other than America’s most famous architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, under project architect William Mitchell Kendall, who also worked on the Washington Square Arch (75 feet tall), the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, and the main New York post office building, now in use as the wonderful Moynihan Station.

When you cross Memorial Bridge from Washington into Virginia, the traffic merges into the GW Parkway via a traffic circle, which is the Memorial Circle where Trump wants to plant his arch. It sits on an island, Columbia Island, which, though closer to Virginia, is actually part of the District of Columbia. Behind the circle, in a straight line from the bridge, is Memorial Avenue, a broad boulevard about 500 feet long that leads to the cemetery entrance. Its distinguishing feature is something the NPS calls the Hemicycle, a half-circle, Beaux-Arts style retaining wall designed in the early 1930s by the McKim firm. It’s all graceful and understated; it announces itself with a humility that is appropriate to so solemn a space. In the words of a 2004 NPS document I fished out: “Arlington Memorial Bridge and its features were intended to be both a monumental entry to the federal city and a formal, processional route to Arlington National Cemetery.”

I should add a word or two on the size of Memorial Circle, which in the coverage I’ve read has gone largely undiscussed. Trump’s arch, at 250 feet (the arch itself would be 190 feet, topped by a 60-foot golden statue of an angel, alongside two shorter statues of golden eagles), would be about as tall as a 20-story office or residential building. For perspective, there is in D.C. no such thing because of its stringent height restrictions. The city’s tallest commercial building is Franklin Square at 13th and K Streets, which is 12 stories and, with its spires, rises to 210 feet. (Its tallest residential building is The Cairo near Dupont Circle, at 164 feet, which was completed in 1894—and caused public backlash that led to the height restrictions that are still in place today.)

A 20-story building requires a certain footprint for the scale to be right. I searched the web in vain to find the exact square footage of Memorial Circle, but it’s small. If you go to Google Maps and move your cursor around, you’ll see that it’s clearly smaller than Dupont Circle; smaller than the circle that surrounds the Lincoln Memorial (99 feet high); much smaller than The Ellipse on the White House grounds; and not large enough to fit, say, the National Air and Space Museum, or the National Gallery of Art.

So to summarize, what Trump wants: would be far too large for the space; would undoubtedly tangle traffic because its mere overwhelming presence would force motorists to slow down; would dwarf everything around it; and would utterly disrupt the “formal, processional route” to the national cemetery.

Those are undoubtedly some of the reasons why the 1,000-odd comments received by the Commission of Fine Arts ran literally 100 percent against the arch, according to The Washington Post. This did not prevent the seven commissioners—all appointed by Trump back in January—from approving the project and heaping the usual sycophantic praise on it (one commissioner did suggest ditching the statues). Here, for the record, are their names. Only one is known to me: Roger Kimball, the longtime editor of The New Criterion. An intelligent and literary fellow, but stridently right wing and MAGA to his core.

It’s a disgrace. Again—whatever they’re billing it as, it’s a monument to Trump, just like he’s trying to turn the Kennedy Center into a monument to Trump (just wait: Today, he shares billing with JFK; there’s no doubt in my mind that plans are afoot to erase JFK from the center entirely). On that now-sad venue, read the blistering piece posted this week at The Atlantic by a former curator there.

God willing, the next president is a Democrat. He or she will have a lot of work to do and much damage to undo. But he or she absolutely must say on day one: We’re tearing down this arch; we’re razing Trump’s ballroom and rebuilding the East Wing mostly as it was; and the Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center. Any Democratic president who fails to do these things deserves the nation’s scorn. Washington ceremonial architecture, like the government itself, must be returned to the purpose for which it exists—to promote democracy, not the demented, bruised ego of one sick man.

“A year ago, our country was an embarrassment,” Trump said. “All over the world, they laughed at us. And they don’t laugh anymore, they are not laughing.”

Trump: A year ago, our country was an embarrassment. All over the world, they laughed at us. pic.twitter.com/voIgUfku6R

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 17, 2026

It’s just the latest indication that something could be seriously wrong with the president’s brain. Over the first year and change of his second term, Trump’s speeches have become more disjointed and incoherent, and his behavior has grown increasingly erratic, sparking concerns across the country about his health and aptitude for the country’s biggest job.

Just last week, Trump attacked several of his longest allies, claimed via a social media post that he would completely annihilate Iranian civilization, and started beef with Pope Leo XIV, claiming that the Catholic pontiff was “weak on crime.”

This week, Trump forgot when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and that one of his most fervent GOP critics—North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis—is still in the Senate. Trump also opted to go to a UFC tournament instead of overseeing his administration’s peace talks with Iran, and DoorDashed McDonalds to the Oval Office in a PR stunt that even he retroactively admitted was “tacky.”

HIs behavior has elicited a cultural shift on the ideological left and right. A group of MAGA thought leaders—including Alex Jones, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly—have denounced Trump’s recent behavior as it relates to the war in Iran, as well as his mass disavowal of his own political acolytes.

Liberal lawmakers, meanwhile, have invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to formally challenge Trump’s mental acuity. Fifty House Democrats filed legislation on Wednesday to create a commission that could shove Trump out of power and install Vice President JD Vance as his replacement.

Other Democrats have called for the president to have his brain tested by the end of the month. House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin last week demanded that Trump undergo another cognitive test by April 25, citing Trump’s escalating aggression toward Iran.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the committee, sent a letter to Kushner arguing his job managing the private equity firm Affinity Partners and his diplomatic work for the president—who happens to be his father-in-law—have “been haunting American foreign policy since President Trump returned to Washington in 2025.”

“You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time; you cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own,” Raskin wrote, referring to Affinity Partners’s extensive investments from “Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil autocracies.”

“Your clients Saudi Arabia and the Royal Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman have unique and significant strategic, economic and political interests that are certain to diverge sharply from the strategic, economic and political interests of the American people,” Raskin’s letter states.

“When you approach negotiations related to the catastrophic Iran War, the prospect of prolonged military conflict there, the rights of women and religious minorities in the Middle East or the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, are you representing 100% the interests of your business partners in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil autocracies or are you representing 100% the interests of the American people?”

Kushner secured $2 billion in funding for his firm from the Saudi Public Investment Fund six months after Trump’s first term ended. The firm is also bankrolled by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. At the same time, he has served as a negotiator between Ukraine and Russia and in U.S.-Iran talks, while also being involved in Trump’s “Board of Peace” in Gaza. Still, Kushner has no official government position, which means he can claim that he isn’t subject to legal requirements about his financial interests.

In his letter, Raskin requested extensive records from Kushner, including his business dealings, his communications on behalf of the Trump administration, corporate information about his investment firm, and communications with foreign governments. Kushner is not likely to comply, especially considering that Democrats don’t have control of Congress. But come November, that could change, giving Raskin and other Democrats stronger investigative and subpoena powers.

“We just defeated [Speaker Mike] Johnson’s efforts to sneak through a five-year FISA authorization tonight,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna said. “Now, they will have to fight in daylight.”

Four Democrats, including Jim Hines, broke with the party to try and help Johnson force the original FISA plans through. Not only did they fail, they drew even more attention to the surveillance bill that has been criticized by both the left and right for years.

“Speaker Johnson (R-LA) and Rep. Jim Himes (‘D’-CT), in EXTREMELY poor form and bad faith, tried to sneak through a FISA reauthorization missing key privacy protections at 2am last night,” Drop Site News’s Julian Andreone wrote on X. “This was a deliberate and bipartisan attempt to subvert the democratic will of the American people, turning over mass surveillance powers to Trump, including the ability to monitor your emails, search history, online dating matches, and even buy your commercial data.”

The vote now heads to the Senate, even as the program expires on Monday.

Analilia Mejia won in a landslide in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district Thursday, beating out her Republican opponent Joe Hathaway to serve the remainder of former Representative Mikie Sherrill’s term. Sherrill’s seat was left suddenly vacant after she won the state’s gubernatorial election.

The daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants, Mejia ran on an adamantly anti–Donald Trump message and secured a whopping 70 percent of the vote as a result. The Associated Press called her victory shortly after the votes started rolling in.

Mejia, a co-director of the nonprofit progressive advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy, had previously served as the national political director of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign—a detail that Republicans cited ahead of the election to claim that the 47-year-old activist was too extreme and too left. Voters in the northern New Jersey district did not agree.

“I think we’ve been tilting a little bit more to the right lately, which worries me,” Saran Cunningham, an 86-year-old retired special educator in the area, told The Guardian before the results rolled in. “I think that we need people in Congress who will fight for things that will help people as opposed to hurting them.”

Mejia was endorsed by Sanders, as well as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The progressive Democrat’s positions echo several of the policies that made Sanders a national phenomenon, including support for universal health care coverage, tuition-free college, student loan forgiveness programs, and strengthening unions and expanding labor protections in order to bolster America’s middle class.

But she believes that it’s some of her more independent views that have made her stand out to voters. In February, ahead of the primary election, Mejia credited her ardent opposition to ICE and the agency’s violent “overreach” as a defining policy point that connected with voters.

Mejia has also been vocal in her criticism of Israel, publicly denouncing the state’s war on Palestine as a genocide. That caught the attention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which funneled money into the race to bolster her opponents. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby’s efforts may have been one of the reasons that voters in New Jersey sent Mejia to Congress.

In a fiery victory speech Thursday, Mejia told a cheering crowd that her election was the beginning of a crusade against power that has a ​​“stranglehold over every aspect of our lives.”

Mejia does not yet have a concrete date for when she will start her term.

Speaking about taxes Thursday in Las Vegas, Trump’s apparent contempt for even discussing affordability was on full display, as he joked he had no idea what a corner store was.

“The Great Big Beautiful Bill also slashed taxes on millions of American small businesses, including restaurants, dry cleaners, corner stores—what is a corner store? I’ve never heard that term,” he said.

“I know what a corner store is, but I’ve never heard it described. A corner store. Who the hell wrote that, please?”

Trump: What’s a corner store? I’ve never heard that term. Who the hell wrote this? pic.twitter.com/9eDExMQYkQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 17, 2026

Like Trump’s campaign remark that groceries are an “old-fashioned” thing, his latest comment demonstrates just how far removed he is from Americans’ everyday lives.

That’s how he’s able to claim with a straight face that the U.S. economy is in good shape, even as Americans struggle to pay for gas, suffering through heightened inflation and a jobless boom.

Trump’s manner of reading speeches for the first time, struggling to understand or even pronounce the words, is also concerning for the oldest person to be elected president. Trump, who grew up in New York City, can’t possibly claim to not know what a corner store is—unless he actually forgot.

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

Donald Trump’s own allies and many other Republicans have quietly started to fear the worst about the midterms. According to new media reports, they worry the loss of the House could be bigger than expected. They’ve even started to contemplate the possible loss of the Senate too. What’s got them rattled is there’s no sign Trump can get the focus back onto the economy. He just exploded with wild new tirades about his ballroom, about Fox News, and about judges, and there are even signs that Trump’s spin about the war in Iran is backfiring for Republicans as well.

Few people understand the interaction between Trump’s derangement and GOP politics better than George Conway, the former GOPer turned Trump critic who’s running for Congress in New York City as a Democrat. So we’re talking to him about all of it. George, nice to have you on.

George Conway: Nice to be on.

Sargent: So just in the last few hours, Trump exploded on Truth Social because he thinks Fox News isn’t giving the California GOP gubernatorial candidate enough attention. He erupted because a judge blocked parts of his ballroom. His feud with the Pope continues. He just posted something that looked a little like opposition research about the Pope. George, anything but the economy, right?

Conway: Right! And look, he is somebody who has always been marked by personal obsessions, by whatever’s bugging him, whatever he sees on television, whoever he thinks has slighted him. And in a sense, this is nothing new, but he’s reached a different stage here because, even though he was doing a lot, there were weekends where we scratched our heads and said, what’s wrong with this guy? 25th Amendment, and so on.

But the difference now is that he’s less inhibited. People like him who are narcissistic sociopaths get worse over time. And in addition to that, his age—and I’m not saying he has dementia, but certainly his brain isn’t functioning as well as it ever did, even though I don’t think it really functioned that well. He’s becoming more disinhibited and he’s got fewer people around him who can tell him, don’t say that, don’t do that, please put the phone down. Not that they ever really could do it, but fewer people—basically, if you tell him no, you’re gone.

And that’s something that didn’t happen as much in the first Trump term, but now he’s just not listening to anybody. And as these types of personalities—these sick people, and we’ve seen them throughout history—get more and more powerful, they get more and more detached from reality, and as a result they become more dangerous. Not only to themselves, but also to the people they supposedly serve.

Sargent: There’s a Politico report that’s really striking about rising GOP anxiety about the midterms. It said Republicans are exasperated by the constant lunacy from the White House. One GOP operative said this: “Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” A former advisor to Trump’s 2024 campaign said this: “The road to victory runs through a consistent economic message. Unfortunately, Trump ignores the roadmap.”

George, you know how Republican politics works. What’s going on with all this? Who’s trying to communicate what to whom here?

Conway: I think they’re trying to communicate something to Trump, but he’s not listening. He no longer cares. He is off in his own reality now, and the Republicans are expressing concern because they know he’s driving them off a cliff. And you see it also in a lot of the Republican influencers—the Megyn Kellys, the Joe Rogans, and the Tucker Carlsons of the world. They’re basically talking about the 25th Amendment now.

And what’s happened—and I think this is happening all up and down the MAGA food chain, from the electeds who realize they’re no longer getting any usefulness from Trump, to the influencers who realize that there’s nothing in it for them anymore. And they’re getting sick of having to do the split-brain thing, where they’re saying one thing and reality is hitting them in the face with the other—the cognitive dissonance, in other words, is breaking down.

And the problem for them is there’s only one way out of it, and that’s to get rid of Donald Trump. He is not going to listen to them. He is not going to tone it down. If anything, he’s going to get worse because he is completely detached from reality.

And there was this report—I don’t know if you saw it, probably about a month ago—in Axios, where Ted Cruz apparently had spoken to the president privately and said, you’re driving us off a cliff, in substance, and we’re going to get killed in the midterms. And this was, I think, even before the war in Iran. And Trump just said, “Fuck you, Ted.” Literally, that’s what he was quoted as saying. So they have a huge problem.

They have a guy who—they’ve overlooked his mental disorders in the past, dismissed them. They’ve overlooked his lies, they’ve overlooked his depravity. They’ve overlooked the fact that he is basically an adjudicated sexual abuser, that he’s a convicted criminal. They overlook these things because it served their purposes. It no longer serves their purposes.

And in terms of what happens in the U.S. Senate—which we can get back to, and why that matters, of course—the Senate is full of cowards. The Republican senators are cowards and they’ve been afraid of Trump.

But at some point they’re going to have to be afraid of something else, which is people who used to be Trumpers who are now mad at Trump, moderate voters who are swing voters who have basically voted for Trump once or twice, maybe even three times, and have now turned on him. And that’s happening.

And so I think at some point a consensus is going to arise—because he’s going to get worse—that he has to go. And I think what has to be done is we have to start talking about that and preparing for that moment when everybody has had enough and the guy has to go.

Sargent: Your ad got at this in an interesting way. You had an ad in your congressional candidacy that pulls together dramatic imagery of January 6th, ICE’s paramilitary violence, the blowing up of supposed drug boats in the Caribbean, Trump’s alliance with Putin, the Iran War, and rising inflation—all of that is montaged throughout the ad in a fairly dramatic way. Then we hear this.

George Conway (voiceover): Just when you think it can’t get any worse—it does. It has to stop. We must make it stop. I’m George Conway. I’m running for Congress to take the fight right to Trump on your behalf. This is no ordinary time and I will not be an ordinary member of Congress. I’m George Conway and I approve this message.

Sargent: George, I’m interested in the line about this not being an ordinary time. Now you’re running in Manhattan, so obviously it’s a very liberal audience, but I have to think that this sense that Trump has unleashed just sheer horrors on an unimaginable scale in America weighs a lot on a lot of different voters. What’s the theory of the ad here?

Conway: The theory of the ad is we have a lot to do in this country that people want fixed—affordable healthcare, not just Democrats, but Republicans as well, affordable housing, infrastructure, all sorts of things that need to be improved to improve people’s lives that are actually getting worse because of Trump.

We have higher grocery prices, higher gasoline prices. He actually stopped this project that’s right out my window here—the Hudson River Tunnel Project, the rail project that he stopped because he stopped the funding for it, although a court enjoined him because he wants Penn Station named after him. You name it.

All these issues that people want to talk about and that affect people’s daily lives—how are you going to fix that? You can’t fix it in any significant way until he’s gone. He’s making everything worse. And he’s a criminal and the courts can’t fix it. So whose job is it to fix it? It’s Congress.

Congress has to start reasserting its constitutional powers—and not just the power of the purse the way they did to stop ICE from being funded, but the impeachment and investigative powers. Basically, my campaign is about: we need to talk about impeaching and removing Trump. We can’t survive another 33 months of what we’ve seen for the last 15.

Sargent: Okay, so you get into Congress. Would you immediately start pushing for impeachment articles to be drawn up? Would you be prepared to do things like recommend the criminal prosecution of people like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others who potentially broke laws—referrals to DOJ?

Conway: All of the above. And Congress has to go into maximalist investigation mode. And that’s Congress’s job. Congress is a legislature, to be sure, but one of its important powers is to investigate and to impeach and to remove criminal public officials.

And in fact, if you go back to the Federalist Papers—Hamilton and Madison and Jay talked about the impeachment power as being a grand inquest on behalf of the nation. They borrowed that phrase from Parliament.

This is how you hold executive officials to account. And this is what the Framers gave us to deal with a president who is failing at his job—not just because he is incompetent, which he is, not just because he’s crazy, because he is, but because he’s fundamentally a criminal who defies the law.

And the point I’m trying to make to people in this district is, let’s say we agree, we work out compromises on how to improve the affordability of healthcare, housing, groceries, building more infrastructure—let’s figure out all the different things that people have on their laundry list of things to do and put it into one big bill and call it the Everything Is Better Bill. Who’s going to sign that bill?

Sargent: Of course.

Conway: And then if you trick him into signing it somehow by saying Putin told you to sign it—who’s going to enforce that bill?

Sargent: A lot of things have to be on the table beyond just the kitchen table stuff as you mentioned before, I think impeachment of a number of different Trump officials has to be on the table.

I think referrals to the Department of Justice—even though obviously the current DOJ wouldn’t do anything with them except wipe their asses with them, essentially—but I do think Democrats in Congress, if they have a majority in the House and possibly the Senate, need to start really laying the predicate here for a major accountability agenda. And the start of that—they have the power right at the outset to start referring things for criminal prosecution that puts down on paper what it is that all these people are doing wrong. Are you for that?

Conway: I’m for that. It’s basically one of the two things I—this is the reason why I’m running. I want to be Jamie Raskin’s wingman. I want to spend a term on accountability. I never wanted to hold public office, and I think I can only do this for two terms because I’m getting too old.

First term would be accountability—exactly what you’re talking about. Impeaching and removing executive branch officials, creating a record for criminal prosecutions, including state criminal prosecutions, because remember, a lot of this stuff could also be prosecuted. The corruption aspects of it could be pursued—whether it be front-running on war news or anything like that.

We need to create the record for this kind of accountability, both accountability by Congress in the impeachment process and accountability in the criminal process, whether it be federal or state. And then the second thing we have to do is to make sure it never happens again. Mostly it’s going to have to be statutory because it’s so hard to enact constitutional amendments, but there are a whole variety of things that we can do.

Sargent: What’s on your list?

Conway: My list would include—there are bills that have been thrown into the hopper on restoring the integrity of the Justice Department. I think we need to codify a lot of the practices that developed but weren’t codified after Watergate, that Trump has simply blown through. I think we need to put more teeth on restricting executive officials from not spending the money they are authorized and required to spend by law. It’s the Impoundment Act—as it exists, it isn’t strong enough.

We need to, basically, I think we need to possibly even put criminal sanctions in place for people who refuse to spend the money in accordance with Congress’s will. And there’s also—I talked about this even before I launched the campaign—we need to create that advisory body to act as the judge of whether the president is fit to continue in office, and replace the cabinet. And that’s something that’s authorized under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Something that Nancy Pelosi once proposed, and now Jamie Raskin this week, to his great credit, has put it back on the table once again. And there are so many things like that.

Sargent: Let me throw a few out there and see what you think of them. I think a real revision of the War Powers Act so no president can do this shit again—what he is doing with Iran. Major reforms to the pardon power, because he’s just dangling pardons there for people so that they break the law for him. And then I think transforming ICE, or defunding it, or essentially ending it and creating a whole new bureaucracy to deal with immigration—maybe along the lines of, I think, Ben Rhodes’s good proposal in The New York Times. Are you for all those things as well?

Conway: I’m absolutely for all of those things. And absolutely, I think ICE has to be completely replaced. It’s rotten to the core. Sometimes you just have to take the functions of a dysfunctional organization—you just can’t replace any part of it and expect it to work now because it’s been so corrupted up and down the line.

Sargent: Yeah. And we can’t go back into this situation where a president can create private militias out of immigration enforcement. That has to be the guiding idea here, I think.

Conway: Yeah, absolutely. And the other things you mentioned are absolutely necessary.

Sargent: Okay. I just want to flag one other thing from that Politico report, back to the congressional races. It says White House allies now fear the Senate is in play. A GOP operative says this: “Everyone is focused on doing what we can to hold the Senate because people are very worried about that.” Amazing stuff.

This operative said it’s crazy that this is even a worry. It is. George, you’re obviously focused on the House, but if the Senate is really in play, then we could be looking at a bigger midterm rout than we expect. The Senate map is tough, but—

Conway: I think the Democrats are going to win the Senate.

Sargent: You do?

Conway: I do. And I think the extent of this wave—it’s going to be unimaginable. Because he’s getting—it’s bad enough now. People have had enough. Now you see him cratering in the polls. Now you see how he’s lost—he had this surge among young people in 2024, and among Hispanics, and it’s all gone now.

I don’t think you can [overstate] how precarious some of these Republican senators are. I think you get to 53 or 54, quite possibly. I think you could see Senator Talarico. I think you could even see a Senator Andrews in South Carolina. I think this is going to happen. Because I don’t see Trump turning it around. I don’t think he’s psychologically able to do that. I think he is in such a state of denial and unreality that he is not going to respond to these pleas to basically behave like a normal human being.

I think he’s going to double down. That’s what he always does. He may even invade Cuba, for example. Who knows? We don’t even know what crazy things he’s going to do between now and November. But he’s getting much worse. And that’s the one thing you can depend on with Donald Trump. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine—a journalist—in 2023 or 2024, and we were having dinner in New York and I said, he’s just going to get worse. There is no bottom with this guy.

And he’s going to take the Republicans with him unless they get smart. I think he’s going to take a lot of Republicans with him this year. And I think at some point next year they’re going to want to be done with him before 2029. And I think that we’re going to be able to make the case for impeachment and removal of the president.

Sargent: Well, CNN had a really interesting nugget of reporting on all this as well. It said that Republicans are panicked about the midterms but aren’t shifting their approach yet because Trump keeps promising that the Iran war will end soon, and his assertions along these lines have trapped the GOP in a holding pattern, as CNN puts it.

Now, I’ve got to say, that made me laugh because it’s Trump’s lies about the Iran war backfiring badly for Republicans. And that plus the fact that they just keep coming up with reasons to not change their approach with this guy—because on some level they just know that. It’s like they’ve thrown up their hands in some sense, or they’ve eagerly embraced him in every which way as well. What do you make of all that?

Conway: Yeah, I think they’ve lost—I think they just realize they’re in trouble. They’re in paralysis. And at some point, but not yet, I think they’re going to basically—and I think the thing about it now is that in the middle of this war, he keeps telling them, oh, it’s going to turn around, it’s going to get better, it’s going to end. And they want to believe that. Even though it’s hard to see a positive resolution to this situation, right?

We have essentially taken away our leverage—we’ve shot our wad, so to speak. The threats that we can make—what are we going to do? Impose sanctions on them? We did that. Bomb the hell out of them? We did that. So what incentive do they have to not do what they used to not do, which was control the Strait of Hormuz or enrich uranium? Basically we took away their incentive to cooperate with us and we don’t have any leverage over them anymore. And that’s a problem.

Sargent: So just to close this out, George—a lot of former Republicans who have broken with the party over Trump, or ones who are still Republicans but are never-Trumpers or whatever you want to call them, there’s a school of thought among them which tries to portray Trump as this kind of aberration. Like he somehow took conservatism in a dramatically new direction, took Republicanism in a dramatically new direction.

You’ve been willing to challenge that, I believe, and I wanted to give you a chance to. In many ways, Trump really represents the culmination of a lot of basic trends that were underway in the Republican Party and in conservatism, right?

Conway: Yeah, I mean, I don’t view him as conservative, right? I think there was this cancerous body within the right, or within the Republican Party, that has taken root and has basically destroyed the party. But—

Sargent: Predating Trump though.

Conway: Predating Trump, long predating Trump. It was always there. But it never took over the way it did during the Trump years. But is it conservative to impose these tariffs? Is it conservative for the government to own 10 percent of Intel? Is it conservative for the government to be controlling, to be determining winners and losers of auctions or takeovers from media companies?

It’s just unfathomable to me that all of this has happened. But it’s not conservatism in any sense of the word. It’s nihilism, radicalism, fascism, authoritarianism. And it’s just a terrible—it really is just a complete collapse of sense on the right. And we don’t have a two-party system anymore. We don’t have a healthy two-party system anymore.

We only have one political party that is actually trying to do things to help people and trying to have the government perform the functions it’s supposed to be performing, and only one political party committed to democracy now. And that’s a very unhealthy situation. But we have to go through this until there’s some kind of more permanent political change.

And I think we’re on the verge of a political transformation that I hope in the end turns out all right, where you end up with a sensible second party replacing the decrepit and depraved Republican Party, in the way that sometimes that has happened—the Whigs gave way to the Republicans in the past. And I don’t know. But that’s a long way away. And right now we have to survive, and I don’t know that we can survive over the 33 months with what we’ve seen over the last 15.

Sargent: The question of whether conservatism led to Trump is a big one. There are some indications that it did, but that’s a big conversation for another podcast. George, just to close out—you’re essentially saying the Republican Party has to be broken, otherwise we’re—

Conway: It is broken.

Sargent: —it has to be broken and driven out of business.

Conway: I think Trump’s going to destroy it. I think Trump is well on his way to destroying it because you can see the fractures as we speak.

Sargent: George Conway, pleasure to talk to you. Good luck with your congressional run.

Conway: I’ll talk to you later.

But the event did illustrate a bleak economic reality: Simmons said she needed the money to help pay her husband’s medical bills from cancer treatment, and to do so she is turning, like an increasing number of workers, to the gig economy.

The gig economy—which also includes rideshare services like Uber and handyman apps like Taskrabbit—is relatively new, but some of the issues its workers face are longstanding. One of the biggest is how to determine who counts as an employee versus an independent contractor. The distinction can make a huge difference to both businesses and workers, because the latter are covered by rules on overtime pay, workplace harassment, family and medical leave, and more.

The Biden administration expanded the definition of an employee in order to try to cover more workers employed in the gig economy. Now, though, the Trump administration is attempting to roll back the definition in a way that, as a new report from the Economic Policy Institute Report shows, could cost the most vulnerable workers thousands of dollars and leave them less safe in the workplace.

The question of who is an independent contractor versus an employee might sound easy to answer, but it’s actually a complicated legal test laid out by the Department of Labor. On one end, a truly independent, self-employed person has total freedom over their schedules, their work, who they work with, how much they are paid, and when they get days off. On the other is a traditional employer arrangement with guaranteed paychecks and a company who contributes to unemployment insurance and social insurance programs. In-between is a gray area of temps, contract workers, on-call workers, and independent contractors—all of which are distinct categories in the eyes of the government. In July 2023, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 11.9 million independent contractors to whom the Trump rule change would apply, accounting for 7.4 percent of total employment—a share that has steadily risen in recent decades, as union membership has declined and Washington has further deregulated work and the economy.

App-based jobs are just one manifestation of a longer trend of more workers being classified as independent contractors. The classification has traditionally relied on a three-pronged test that involves how much control the worker has over their work, whether it’s outside the usual course of the business for the employer (like a law firm employing janitors for its office building), or the individual works in a business where independent contractor arrangements are traditional and common (like freelance writers). The rise of apps like Uber and DoorDash led to drives to classify those workers as employees rather than independent contractors, igniting huge legal battles in California. Companies that rely on the gig economy have lobbied for the status quo, arguing that app-based jobs are typical of independent contractor arrangements.

But economists and labor advocates have long said that employers are misclassifying workers as independent contractors because workers are often performing the same core functions that employees would and the companies are failing one or many components of the test. Several examples, like a class-action lawsuit brought by FedEx drivers in California and the decision by a home health startup not to rely on independent contractors, show that those assessments are often correct. “What we see is employers are still exerting so much control over how work is done for independent contractors, but they’re not being held liable as employers,” said Dr. Kate Bahn, the chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

In a report released Wednesday, the Economy Policy Institute looked at the fields where workers are most likely to be misclassified. The list was filled with old-fashioned jobs like construction workers, truck drivers, home health and personal care aides, and manicurists and pedicurists. “It’s happening to a lot of workers outside of the gig and app space, even though I feel like gig and app [companies] have been taking up a lot of air, and that is largely too because these companies have also lobbied a lot to … carve out drivers or gig workers from employment status in the state laws,” said Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at EPI.

The report found that, on average, a worker who should be counted as an employee but is being treated as an independent contractor could lose thousands of dollars per year, depending on the industry, and as much as $20,399 for construction workers. Workers stand to lose even more in states where wages are higher. These workers also miss out on workplace benefits like paid leave and health insurance, and they foot the entire bill for their contributions to social security and Medicare, instead of splitting it with their employers. It’s also harder for them to get promotions or raises, reducing their long-term wealth.

Determining whether a worker is misclassified would require active enforcement by the Department of Labor, or an employee to challenge their status in court. But presidents can dramatically shape the lives of all of these workers by how they try to define and enforce the rule. Under President Joe Biden, the Labor Department adopted a change that expanded the definition of an employee to include the economic realities of a worker’s life and included six questions, all given equal weight, to determined how much control the person had over their day and their tasks, the degree of permanence of the work, whether the work the employee performed was integral to the business’s reason for being, and the skill and initiative involved in the job. It went into effect in March 2024.

But as soon as Trump was re-elected that November, he signaled that he would not enforce it. The rule change to roll it back, which was submitted in February, would focus on two questions above others: the nature and degree of control over the work and the worker’s opportunity for profit or loss. It sets aside many of the other questions, and argues that Biden’s broadened definition of employees was confusing and ignored the realities of the modern economy. (The public comment period for the proposed rule change ends April 28.)

Workers do like flexibility, although nothing is preventing businesses from giving their employees more flexibility while also fulfilling their obligations as full-time employers. “Sometimes I think when people try to discuss what they think are the benefits of independent contracting work, those things are available to direct employees as well. I think it’s a little bit of a false choice,” Bahn said.

But the services that rely on independent contractors, like DoorDash, are operating in an economy that relies on being responsive to demand moment by moment—a demand that was created in part by these apps themselves. And they remain popular, both to customers and to workers who want to make extra money. “When workers say they value flexibility, they often mean more than just scheduling,” said Kristin Sharp, the CEO at Flex, an industry group for rideshare and food delivery platforms. “They mean income that is responsive to the rest of their lives, and that fits around family, health, education, financial, or entrepreneurial goals.” She pointed out that a lot of gig work has low barriers to entry and quick payouts.

Flex supports Trump’s proposed rule change, as do many other industry groups, while many labor advocates and think tanks oppose it. More than 2,200 comments have been submitted so far—though many of them use the same language, having obviously been supplied by groups on opposing sides. There’s no comment yet from anyone named Sharon Simmons.

For the past two months, we’ve watched America’s macroeconomic program quickly erode. President Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran, which closed the Strait of Hormuz and marked the end of the Carter Doctrine era, cut off the supply of cheap oil from the Persian Gulf, raising inflation at a time when many have yet to see their pre-Covid purchasing power restored.

Another consequence of this shortage is that the U.S. Treasury is now desperately trying to finance a $1.9 trillion deficit without a large pool of captive foreign buyers, having failed to prepare for the crisis in which the United States now finds itself. China is dumping U.S. Treasuries at a rate not seen since the Global Financial Crisis, while stalwart buyers like Japan are seeing their bond yield rates creep up to their highest levels in 27 years.

All of that is structurally unhealthy for the U.S. macroeconomy, representing the rapid acceleration of a dynamic that has been playing out more slowly for the past six years. But the events of this weekend mark a shift that might be felt on a one-to-two-year horizon in the form of a liquidity crisis.

The Fed’s request that major banks detail their exposure to the private credit market should terrify risk assessors. When macroeconomists picked through the rubble of 2008, many landed on the conclusion that there had been a catastrophic mispricing of risk. The rating agencies continued to slap pristine AAA labels on toxic subprime mortgages, operating in a state of highly incentivized denial. But in 2008, regulators generally knew where those underlying assets were parked. The financial system was, in theory, visible.

The $2 trillion private credit market, by contrast, is a black box, grown in the regulatory shadows to facilitate high-risk corporate loans that traditional banks were forced to abandon  after the passage of Dodd-Frank. The recent limitations on withdrawals from many of these private funds tell us there’s a bank run taking place behind the velvet ropes, in the VIP section.

And if you’re interested in betting against this market, Wall Street has a product for you!

For anyone who lived through the 2008 global financial crisis, hearing the words “credit default swap, or CDS, probably brings to mind two things: first, and obviously, recession pop hits like “Just Dance,” “I Gotta Feeling,” and “Don’t Stop the Music”; perhaps more pointedly, the intense anger and confusion over how some people managed to profit from a crisis that saw nearly 10 million people lose their homes.

In 2008, these synthetic derivatives claimed a starring role in the drama that transformed a collapse in the U.S. housing market into the tits-up financial omnicrisis that nearly destroyed Southern Europe. To be introducing credit default swaps now into a $2 trillion market that is in the midst of a liquidity crisis, and which the Federal Reserve admits it does not fully understand, creates a mirror maze of transactions for regulators to navigate.

Eighteen years ago, the underlying subprime mortgage market peaked at around $1.3 trillion. Over a period of 12 to 18 months, following the inception of the infamous ABX index, the synthetic collateralized debt obligation market grew to $5 trillion in notional value. (And that’s just one type of CDS derivative.) Because CDSs allowed investors to place “side-bets” without ever owning the underlying asset, a small handful of mortgage defaults proved capable of  triggering a cascade of multibillion-dollar payouts across the globe.

Now we could see the same multiplier effect applied to the private credit market. By introducing a standardized CDS index to this $2 trillion pool of corporate debt, Wall Street is once again seeding flammable barrels of fictitious capital in the financial sector, virtually guaranteeing that if the underlying loans bomb, the blast radius will be much larger than the asset class itself.

There is also a crucial difference between the macroeconomic environment leading up to the subprime mortgage crisis and the reality we’re living in today. In 2008, when the private financial sector imploded, there was still an “adult” in the room. The U.S. government had a clean-enough balance sheet to step in, socialize the losses, and keep the global financial system chugging.

Today, U.S. government debt is equal to 122 percent–124 percent of annual gross domestic product. In the past, this was manageable because the petrodollar paradigm forced the rest of the world to buy U.S. Treasuries. But with the Carter Doctrine scuppered, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the State Department weaponizing the SWIFT system through sanctions, those once-captive buyers are finally beginning to abandon the U.S. dollar.

So what happens when the private credit market fractures and the “too big to fail” banks come begging for another bailout? The government will be backed into a corner with only a few viable exits, one of which is regressive debt monetization. To prevent a collapse of the global banking system, the Federal Reserve could be forced to act as the buyer of last resort for the Treasury, creating trillions of dollars out of thin air to purchase bonds so the government can turn around and bail out finance capital, again.

Monetization reduces the obligations of the debt-ridden U.S. government and investor class by eroding the wages and savings of the working class. The Treasury and the Fed would save the banks, but they would do so at the expense of America’s currency and credit outlook, plunging domestic consumers into an austerity crisis, while international central banks that are still exposed to the dollar are left to face potential sovereign debt crises.

When the domestic economy faced the last crisis of this magnitude, in the late 1970s, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker hiked interest rates, intentionally triggering a recession that broke the back of organized labor. The “Volcker shock” served as the founding act of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus, establishing a macroeconomic and foreign policy paradigm where the U.S. offshored its industrial base and policed maritime shipping lanes in exchange for cheap imports.

For decades, this consensus papered over a crisis of demand through the expansion of the debt market, sacrificing growth in real wages for the working class. With the return of the same derivative products that burned the global economy 18 years ago, we may soon witness the end of the program that has governed both Washington and Wall Street for the last 46 years.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz to dollarized trade is an acute crisis for the subsidy that keeps the American empire afloat. The Trump administration’s attempt to simultaneously retreat from and expand its footprint in the Persian Gulf is incompatible with global finance capital that requires stable unipolar dominance to service its opaque, trillion-dollar private credit markets.

The American politicians who spent the last 46 years immiserating the working class while simultaneously blaming them for the predictable rise in addiction, depression, and violence, are finally waking up to reality. They operated under the assumption that U.S. unipolarity was eternally guaranteed by the Navy, the petrodollar, and an infinitely expandable debt market. In less than two months, President Donald Trump has dismantled the policy infrastructure that once undergirded these assumptions.

The tools of finance capital are now exhausted. A government that is drowning in $39 trillion of debt, and that has just lost a large segment of its captive foreign buyers, can neither afford Volcker shock–style rate increases nor a 2008-style bailout.

The U.S. economy has now entered a phase where the only solution left is monetization and the reindustrialization of the long-neglected Midwest and Northeast. We must abandon the failed project of financializing basic social reproduction and pivot toward creating tangible goods that other countries want to buy, slowly rebuilding the value of the dollar and promoting sustainable wage growth for the working class.

My generation, having lived through the 2001 recession, the 2008 financial crash, the Covid epidemic, and now the Hormuz crisis, would likely suffer the most in the short term under such a program. But it’s the only way to rebuild a U.S. economy that our children deserve to inherit. The era of papering over America’s decline with cheap credit, imperial dividends, and toxic derivatives is over. The last Jenga block will eventually be pulled, and the tower that has loomed over us for 46 years will collapse in a heap.

It’s never been clearer in my lifetime that the U.S. needs a trans-partisan political coalition of socialists, foreign policy and anti-waste realists, and blue-collar workers to win control of the government before finance capital and the private debt market can expand any further, and dedicate themselves to answering the singular economic question facing the United States in the twenty-first century. Which productive forces should we build from the ruins of neoliberalism? I have my own opinions, but simply acknowledging that this is a scenario worth preparing for would be a massive improvement over the current status quo in Washington.

While strong bank earnings this week offer the illusion of stability, the underlying reality is anything but. By introducing a standardized credit default swap index to the private credit market today, Wall Street is starting a one-to-two year countdown that mirrors the launch of the ABX index in 2006. The likeliest trigger of a liquidity crisis is a looming maturity wall in 2028, when hundreds of billions of dollars in debt must be refinanced in our new high-inflation, high-interest Iran war reality. When the debt hits that wall in the next 18 to 24 months, we will find out if our politicians have the spine to let these lenders fail, or if the American working class will, once again, be forced to socialize the losses from Wall Street’s glorified casinos.

Thomas’s roughly hour-long speech on Wednesday at the University of Texas at Austin Law School began with a lengthy reflection on the Declaration of Independence and its importance in American history. The Declaration is not a legal text per se, Thomas argued, but it is an important testament to the nation’s founding ideals. “It did not establish a form of government; that was the work of the Constitution that followed,” he explained. “But it stated the purpose of government.”

That purpose, Thomas explained, is to “protect our God-given inalienable rights, rights that all individuals equally possess.” He argued that the most important part of the Declaration comes at the end, when the signers “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

“Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence,” he wrote. “Without that sentence, the rest of the declaration is but mere words on parchment paper—nice words, but nonetheless just words. What changed the world was not the words, but the commitment and spirit of the people who were willing to labor, sacrifice, and even give their lives—what Lincoln at Gettysburg called ‘the last full measure of devotion’—for the Declaration’s principles.”

So far, so good. This is fairly standard civic fare for justices when they speak in public. Thomas is one of many prominent Americans who has defined the nation’s conception of itself in the Declaration. Lincoln referred to it as the “sheet anchor of our republic,” a phrase that Thomas approvingly cited. The justice even linked the promise made by the Founders to the one made by his grandparents when they took him and his brother in as a child in impoverished rural Georgia.

“They told us, ‘We don’t have no education and no chance, but you boys are going to have a chance, [and] we going to devote the rest of our lives to you boys,’” he recalled. “It was their devotion, their love, their dedication to raising us right that has made the difference, not the words, though the words expressed as best they could what they intended to do, their devotion is what mattered.”

After this inspiring and touching recollection, however, Thomas’s oratory began to go downhill. He recounted how he had moved to Washington, D.C., nearly fifty years ago and found that there was “never a shortage of people espousing noble purposes” and “saying the right things” in the nation’s capital. “These people can be just as high-minded as the men who signed the Declaration,” he warned. “They can mouth the words of the Declaration and parrot its principles. They can write essays and talk at conferences about the Declaration with the best of them all too often. However, this was lip service, camouflaged by grand theories in the tall grass of big words and eloquent phrases. What seemed to be lacking was that devotion.”

Without that devotion, Thomas claimed, these people “become petrified by criticisms” and “fearful of negative attention,” or they “fall prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery,” or “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them.” The result is a personal shift away from their principles. “They recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences and their country,” Thomas claimed. It is hard not to read this line as a jab at some of his Supreme Court colleagues over the years, as well as a strong dose of self-promotion.

Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration’s principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. “As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure,” the justice warned. “At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.

“Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life,” Thomas continued. “It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”

Thomas is correct that progressivism was introduced around the turn of the twentieth century, that Woodrow Wilson was the twenty-eighth president, and that Wilson was a progressive. The historical accuracy ends there. Presenting Wilson as the inventor of progressivism is historically illiterate, akin to saying that Joseph Stalin invented communism or that Ronald Reagan invented conservatism.

In reality, the Progressive era emerged in the 1890s from the corruption and excesses of the Gilded Age. A broad range of activists, journalists, legislators, and judges challenged the societal ills that had emerged from the nation’s rapid industrialization. Arrayed against them were corrupt party machines in the big cities and corporate tycoons that had concentrated wealth in the form of trusts and monopolies. Progressivism consisted of multiple movements, some overlapping and some not. To say that progressives in general sought to lay out a “new set of first principles” that would replace the Declaration’s principles is baseless.

I’m sure that Wilson would have liked to claim credit for inventing the Progressive movement, but he was one figure in a much larger social and political ecosystem. Republicans and Democrats alike both supported the movement and its reforms, and the first president to embrace it was actually Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt ran against Wilson in 1912 and split from William Howard Taft’s Republicans, he created the Progressive Party instead. (It became better known as the Bull Moose Party.) Nobody can accuse Teddy of seeking to overthrow the Founders’ vision or Lincoln’s; he welcomed the carving of their heads alongside his on Mount Rushmore.

So why is Thomas so fixated on Wilson? The early-twentieth-century president is an omnipresent target for criticism by modern conservatives. An elitist academic from the Northeast, he oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the passage of stronger antitrust laws and the first federal ban on child labor. His progressive platform played a major role in developing the administrative and regulatory structures that many conservatives despise.

He is also much easier to criticize than Roosevelt, who is one of the nation’s most popular presidents, or Taft, who turned out to be more conservative later in life—let alone any of the other progressive activists and officials who defined the era. For conservatives, it is rhetorically advantageous to make him the standard-bearer of progressivism: Wilson was perhaps the most racist person to hold the presidency between Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump, and helped worsen Black civil rights throughout his term in office. It allows certain conservative intellectuals to adopt the guise of anti-racism while simultaneously opposing the civil rights laws passed decades after Wilson died.

I bring all of this up not to defend Wilson himself, but to point out the importance of getting history correct. From Thomas’s flawed Wilsonian premise, his errors only compound upon themselves. Here, for example, is how the justice describes the origins of progressivism:

Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the Founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated people of Europe. Wilson called Germany’s system of relatively unimpeded state power “nearly perfected.” He acknowledged that it was “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle,” which “offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas.” He thus described America, still stuck with its original system of government, as “slow to see” the superiority of the European system.

This is pure nonsense in multiple ways. American progressivism emerged organically from social movements that targeted the ills of late-nineteenth-century American life. Good-government activists like Robert LaFollette and Lincoln Steffens exposed local corruption and promoted the secret ballot and primary elections. Ida Tarbell, William Hard, and other muckrakers exposed the oligarchical abuses of monopolies like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Trustbusters ranged from Louis Brandeis and William Jennings Bryan to William Howard Taft.

Thomas’s fake history is drawn from Wilson’s famous 1887 article “The Study of Administration,” which is credited with helping found the discipline of public administration in the United States, which is distinct from progressivism. Wilson, at the time, was a professor at Bryn Mawr College. He and some of his contemporaries sought to apply scientific principles to basic methods of government and bureaucracy. In doing so, Wilson argued the exact opposite of what Thomas claimed:

No; American writers have hitherto taken no very important part in the advancement of this science. It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the precedents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign revolutions. It has been developed by French and German professors, and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government; whereas, to answer our purposes, it must be adapted, not to a simple and compact, but to a complex and multiform state, and made to fit highly decentralized forms of government.

Compare and contrast Thomas’s quotes above with their actual usage. Wilson’s point in those highly selective quotations was that the existing “science of administration” was a poor fit for American society, and that it must be adapted and developed to our unique systems of government. This was synthesis, not antithesis. “If we would employ it, we must Americanize it,” Wilson explained, “and that not formally, in language merely, but radically, in thought, principle, and aim as well. It must learn our constitutions by heart; must get the bureaucratic fever out of its veins; must inhale much free American air.”

I point this out to defend neither Wilson’s elitism nor his overall character. I do so because textual accuracy and historical fidelity are important qualities in any public official. They are especially important for a Supreme Court justice who claims to be able to infer the original public meaning of the Constitution from a broad range of historical sources. If this is Thomas’s attempt at historical analysis, it is woefully lacking.

From there, Thomas then veered into more Glenn Beck–ish pop history. He went on to attribute the worst offenses of the twentieth century to progressives. “The century of progressivism did not go well,” the justice claimed. “The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called ‘nearly perfect,’ led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen.”

It must also be emphasized that people’s views change over time. (The justice is well aware of this phenomenon, since he was a leftist in college.) Thomas chided Wilson for describing the Prussian system of administration as “nearly perfect,” using that comment to link progressivism to the European world wars. What he conveniently omitted is that Wilson went to war with that Prussian system in 1917 and ultimately sought to overthrow it. In his joint address to Congress on the eve of war, Wilson declared that “Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend.” Wilson instead called, somewhat aspirationally, “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.”

These small details are no match for Thomas’s broad strokes. “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based,” he continued. “Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.” Here he collapses nearly a half-century span of historical figures in one stroke: Mao would not lead China, for example, until 1949—when nearly every major figure from the Progressive era was already dead. Hitler’s regime drew some inspiration from American eugenics and Jim Crow laws, but he also sought to emulate the nineteenth-century removals of Native Americans from Western North America, which almost entirely predated the rise of progressivism.

These linkages are achieved by conflating any European-based political movement as “progressivism,” no matter its intellectual origins, ideological stances, or practical workings. I suspect that he may have wanted to use socialism as the buzzword, but even he could not reconcile Wilson’s worldview with Marxism. “Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions,” Thomas nonetheless claimed. In reality, fascism was avowedly anti-Marxist and anti-socialist, and the Nazi Party’s claims to “national socialism” were a branding strategy, not one of its bona fide ideological tenet. (To attribute “socialism” to the Nazis in this fashion is the hallmark of the uninformed or the mendacious.)

Surely Thomas must have wondered why so many neo-Nazis and fascists now support Donald Trump and not the Democratic Party if they are actually socialists in nature. That would require a level of historical analysis, however, that Thomas seems uninterested in attempting. His speech is a 50-ish-minute exercise in leveling the complexity and nuance of our nation’s history in favor of attacking one’s perceived enemies. Thomas approvingly quoted James Madison, an unabashed slaveowner who opposed the expansion of the franchise even to unlanded white men, even while citing Wilson’s segregationist policies as a stain on progressivism as a whole. Blame for the nation’s historical sins only flows in one direction for Thomas.

In the real world, people are capable of drawing upon the Declaration for inspiration without veering into reductive hagiography. One can embrace the notion that “all men are created equal” and draw upon some of the Declaration’s ideals while disagreeing with some of its complaints—for example, that King George III was trying to incite slave revolts. Even the Framers did not claim to get everything right from the start. When they scrapped the Articles of Confederation in favor of the Constitution, they explained in the preamble that it was to bring about a “more perfect union,” not a “perfect one.” By forbidding slavery’s expansion in the Northwest Territories and setting an expiration date for the slave trade, they originally intended for the institution to fade away. They had faith, in other words, in future generations’ ability to grow and improve—or, one might say, to progress.

If one wants to be truly cynical, there is something awfully convenient for Thomas about marking the turn of the twentieth century as the point where things went awry. As I’ve noted before, the Gilded Age was an era of widespread public corruption, extraordinary wealth disparities, and excessive concentrations of corporate power. “The century of progressivism,” Thomas claims, “did not go well.” For whom? By the mid-twentieth century, progressive reforms (and, later, the New Deal laws that built upon them) helped Americans reach higher standards of living than they could have imagined. Progressivism’s ideological successors helped overthrow Jim Crow laws and expand the Constitution’s protections for millions of Americans.

The only ones who really lost out were America’s wealthiest citizens, who had to give up their plutocratic control over government. In our current revival of the Gilded Age, they now hope to restore it with Thomas’s help. I found it almost amusing when Thomas castigated others for “fall[ing] prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery” and being “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them” when arriving in Washington, D.C.

“My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today,” Thomas had told the audience at the start of his speech, referring to the GOP megadonor who spent the last 20 years gracing Thomas with fancy vacations, personal gifts, and other forms of largesse that went unreported on public-disclosure forms. Among them were luxury yacht trips, more than $100,000 for a portrait of Thomas at Yale Law School, starting funds for Ginni Thomas’s political organization, and much more. No wonder the justice prefers the Gilded Age.

There’s more. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni blasted Trump for his repeated criticism of the pope. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “fed up” with Trump. Even Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, once an admirer of Trump and a Mar-a-Lago habitué, distanced himself from the American president, telling the Financial Times, “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by.” 

From the left (Lula), center (Starmer, Leo), and right (Farage, Meloni), Trump is taking it on the chin. World leaders, particularly Europeans, disliking Trump is nothing new. Some have been complaining about him for a decade. But the disdain for the U.S. president is now more open and blunt than earlier in his second term, the dismissal of his ideas more direct and unequivocal. 

This shift matters for two reasons. American presidents are much less constrained by courts and Congress on foreign affairs compared to domestic policy. But other countries can blunt a president’s international goals—and that’s happening now to Trump. Secondly, Trump’s domestic opponents are helped if they’re joined by a chorus of international critics. The mainstream media may downplay congressional Democrats’ latest rebuke of the president. It’s harder to ignore those same comments from the pontiff or the right-wing leader of another country like Meloni. 

The war in Iran is the immediate cause of this rising anti-Trump sentiment abroad. While we don’t have many surveys measuring support for the war in various countries, all indications are that it’s very unpopular almost everywhere. So their presidents and prime ministers aren’t eager to align with Trump on this issue. The surge in energy prices because of the war has created a huge economic and political problem for these leaders. And Trump blasting Leo over the pontiff’s criticism of the war inevitably resulted in backlash from Lula and Meloni, whose countries have huge Catholic populations. Put this all together, and Trump is insisting that other world leaders enthusiastically support a war that they in fact have little incentive to support at all. Of course they are frustrated with him. 

But it’s not just the war in Iran. Center and center-left European leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron have long felt that the U.S. president is trying to bully them on trade and other issues. Lula and other Central and South American leaders on the left are both furious and threatened by Trump’s overthrow of the Maduro regime in Venezuela earlier this year. 

And for right and far-right leaders who might be more ideologically in tune with Trump, his unpopularity with voters in their countries makes breaking with the American president a political necessity. For Meloni, who once touted her close relationship with the president, Trump bashing the pope provided a perfect opportunity for her to criticize the American. In Germany, officials of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, or AfD, have sharply criticized the war in Iran, and perhaps more tellingly have reportedly discouraged party members from publicly touting their visits to the United States to meet with Trump-aligned Republican politicians. In Britain, Trump is now being dissed not only by Farage, who a few months ago was using the slogan “Make Britain Great Again,” but by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, once one of Trump’s strongest allies abroad. 

This open disavowal of the American president could reshape politics both at home and abroad. Trump rejects most international cooperation, particularly with European democracies. But as the war with Iran is showing, America can’t unliterally conduct foreign policy. Starmer’s wariness about the United States using British bases abroad has complicated the war effort. It’s harder for the U.S. and Israel to make forceful demands in negotiations with Iran when it’s clear that so many other countries aren’t on board with America’s strategy. And the spread of far-right politics across the globe could be stemmed if Trump is considered not a political genius but a pariah, reviled by voters everywhere and seen as an enemy of one of the world’s most respected leaders in Leo. 

The disavowals of Trump abroad are also important here at home because of the unique dynamics of American politics in 2026. Right now, Democratic Party officials are wary of being cast as reflexively anti-Trump. Nonpartisan figures in the United States, such as journalists and academics, don’t want to be seen as biased against the twice-elected president. And Republican Party officials and GOP voters largely back whatever Trump does. So as a result, no matter how crazy Trump behaves, criticism of him is often either muted (journalists) or ignored (Democrats). 

But bringing in the views of the Pope, Starmer, Farage, Macron, Meloni, and others abroad changes the conversation. These people can’t be accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for a decade. Many of them weren’t in power in his first term. Others have either at times praised the president (Farage, Meloni) or at least tried to downplay differences with him (Starmer). Some of these new critics are ideologically centrist or even conservative. So Representative Hakeem Jeffries can now quote the pope casting Trump as divisive, instead of using his own words. The movement against the Iran war can describe itself as not just American liberals who hate Trump but a transnational coalition that includes far-right parties and politicians abroad. The New York Times can quote leaders abroad who agree with the president on immigration and other issues but still find his behavior erratic. 

That Trump is authoritarian with bad judgment is obvious. But having more people from different backgrounds, ideologies, and geographies saying that is extremely useful and powerful. 

Ultimately, of course, Trump is likely to ignore all of these critics. Because the U.S. has massive military and economic power, these foreign leaders still have to placate Trump to some extent. And Trump still has three years in office in the most powerful job in the world. But Trump is becoming more isolated and diminished. A year ago, he was not only the twice-elected American president but a leader of what seemed like a growing global far-right movement. Now Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson won’t praise him and Lula is practically begging Trump to come campaign against him in Brazil. Trump’s approval rating has plunged to 38 percent among American voters—and probably 3.8 percent among the foreign leaders that he has to deal with. That is worth  celebrating. 

Donald Trump dodged questions Thursday about a lack of progress at the Strait of Hormuz, instead claiming that “no ship” was passing the blockade that the U.S. had imposed on the waterway at the beginning of the week.

“How long can you sustain the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz?” asked a reporter.

“We’re doing very well with the blockade, it’s very routine for us, the Navy is incredible. And I think the blockade is doing very well. No ship is even thinking about entering, no ship is going past our Navy,” said Trump.

Q: "How long will you maintain the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz?"

Trump: "We're doing very well with the blockade. It's very routine for us…No ship is going past our Navy." pic.twitter.com/TIk1NZOYtQ

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) April 16, 2026

But that’s not true. Data obtained by Reuters indicated that the president’s blockade hardly affected traffic on the waterway the first day it was imposed, and at least one U.S.-sanctioned Chinese tanker sailed right by.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News earlier in the week that America’s military could keep up the pressure campaign forever.

“This embargo is squeezing the economic life out of the Iranian regime. The United States has the capacity to continue this indefinitely if Iran chooses the wrong path,” Miller said Wednesday night, further claiming that Trump had made energy costs a priority ahead of the war in Iran.

Meanwhile, Americans and their wallets are hurting. Gas prices across the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon. In five states—California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—gas has risen above an average of $5 a gallon. The soaring price has driven up the cost of practically everything else, as inflated transportation and shipping prices get offloaded to customers. Trump warned Tuesday that the cost of gas “could be the same or maybe a little bit higher” come midterm season.

As Trump’s two-week ceasefire in Iran comes to a close, it’s becoming less and less clear as to when exactly the war will end, and whether the U.S. has made any meaningful progress in its peace negotiations. Trump has repeated that the “war can be over very soon,” though talks to end it have so far fallen apart.

“Why are you fighting with the pope?” a reporter asked Trump outside the White House on Thursday. “And are you worried it’s upsetting your—”

“No, no, I don’t—I have to do what’s right. The pope has to understand that, very simple. I have nothing against the pope. His brother is MAGA all the way. I like his brother Louis.”

“Then why are you fighting with him?”

“I’m not fighting with him. The pope made a statement. He says Iran can have a nuclear weapon. I say Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon—”

“He didn’t say that,” a reporter interrupted. Trump continued on, ignoring her.

“And if the pope looked at the 42,000 people who were killed over the last two or three months, as a protester with no weapons, no nothing, if you take a look at that. So I can disagree with the pope. I have a right to disagree with the pope.”

This is getting crazy. The president of the United States warned “an entire civilization will die tonight” last Tuesday. After the world’s highest Catholic leader called it “unacceptable,” and decried the greed and violence accompanying the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon, Trump called him “weak on crime” for some reason. Again, the pope responded with grace. Then vice president and Catholic convert JD Vance entered the mix, and now we’re here with Trump putting words in the pope’s mouth.

Reporter: Why are you fighting with the pope?

Trump: I have to do what's right. I have nothing against the pope.

Reporter: Then why are you fighting with him?

Trump: I’m not fighting with him. The pope made a statement saying Iran can have nuclear weapon.

Reporter: He… pic.twitter.com/bxD6H9ctcb

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 16, 2026

While speaking with reporters earlier, Trump was asked if he’d meet with the pope to smooth things over.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” he replied.

Reporter: Mr. President, would you meet with the pope to even out your differences?

Trump: I don't think it's necessary. pic.twitter.com/OrJWGLxBZ9

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 16, 2026

A federal judge ruled Thursday that construction can only proceed on the underground, national security–related parts of the project, and not on the 90,000-square-foot ballroom the president wants to build to entertain guests.

“National security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon wrote, saying that the White House had an “incredible, if not disingenuous” interpretation of his order last month to cease construction on the $400 million ballroom until Trump got approval from Congress.

Leon’s order in March said that only construction concerning “the safety and security of the White House” was authorized, referring to the administration’s argument that an underground emergency bunker was needed to protect the president, the first lady, and White House staff. Trump argued that the order actually allowed for construction on the entire ballroom because bulletproof glass, bomb shelters, and other security measures would be part of the building.

“This is positive for us,” Trump said at the time, adding that construction would proceed as Department of Justice attorneys appealed the ruling. Last week, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said Leon, appointed by President George W. Bush, needed to clarify the specific parts of the ballroom project where construction had to stop.

Leon again ruled against the administration, pointing out that Trump’s lawyers had previously said that the underground and aboveground parts of the project were independent of each other.

“The fact that the ballroom is planned to include security features such as bulletproof windows and a drone-proof roof … may well be beneficial,” Leon wrote, adding that the White House had “not provided any national security justification for why these features must be installed immediately.”

Trump is not going to take kindly to the news, having complained about not being allowed to “get a ballroom approved” on multiple occasions, and he is not known for respecting judicial independence. If he wants to build whatever he wants on federal property without congressional approval, though, he’s going to spend more time in court.

Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., 35, was charged with assault in Minneapolis on Thursday for pointing his gun at two people in a car while trying to pass them in an unmarked vehicle on the highway. Morgan told investigators that he “feared for his safety and the safety of others” after the civilian vehicle “cut him off,” according to the state’s complaint.

Morgan faces two felony counts of second-degree assault for the apparent road rage incident. There is an active warrant out for his arrest.

This is the first time ever that a federal agent has faced local prosecution for their actions while on duty, according to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

While this is a welcome development, it’s an absolute disgrace that Morgan is the first and only ICE agent to be charged with some form of excessive force or brutality in Trump’s 10-week operation in Minneapolis, given that federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good for no reason at all.

The president has received nationwide backlash since Sunday for sharing an AI-generated image that depicted him as Jesus Christ. Graham brushed off the blowback in a statement on X Thursday, arguing that he didn’t believe Trump would “knowingly depict himself as Jesus,” and that he accepted the White House’s explanation: that Trump thought the heavenly portrayal suggested that he was a doctor rather than the messiah.

“When I looked at the illustration, I didn’t jump to the same conclusion as some,” Graham wrote. “There were no spiritual references—no halo, there were no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles, the Statue of Liberty, and I think this is a lot to do about nothing.”

But many of Trump’s Christian supporters saw something else: the president, dressed in white and red robes, encircled in light, holding light, and sharing it with the fallen.

“I’m not a Catholic, I’m an Evangelical, but I appreciate how President Trump has defended religious freedom for people of all faiths, including millions of Evangelicals and Catholics in the U.S. and around the world,” Graham continued. “He is the most pro-Christian, pro-life president in my lifetime, and he doesn’t shy away from it.”

Graham then chimed in on Trump’s ongoing feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has upset the administration by advocating for peace instead of war. Graham wrote that he hoped the pope “would have the opportunity to thank the President for his efforts to protect religious liberty for Catholics and people of all faiths.”

Trump has expressed no interest in connecting with the pope. Speaking with reporters outside the White House Thursday afternoon, Trump remarked that he doesn’t think it’s necessary to meet with the leader of the Catholic Church—a decision that could seriously injure his Republican allies in the midterms.

The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second most popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.

But there’s another possibilityL that Trump is merely playing coy with his disinterest in meeting the pope. The president was evidently irked by news that David Axelrod, former Obama strategist, visited the Vatican last week and had reportedly discussed efforts to get the 44th president and the Chicago-born pontiff in a room together.

Failing to meet the pope would make Trump the first modern president to break from the longstanding American tradition, which has remained intact since President Woodrow Wilson started it in 1919.

Meanwhile, even fervent MAGA politicians were not impressed by Graham’s defense.

Former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the evangelical missionary’s thin excuse was “one of the worst things [she’d] seen,” and included a warning from Matthew 7:15-20 about false prophets.

“Franklin Graham of all people, who is frequently at the [White House] and with Trump, should be leading Trump to be a Christian, NOT telling other Christians that Trump did nothing wrong when he committed blasphemy,” Greene wrote on X. “Trump knows what he is doing. He knows what he posted. He knows how to manipulate his followers. And he’s not sorry, he never apologized. Instead he lied, and said he was a doctor, which is also absurd.”

A Franciscan friar that spoke with CBS News earlier this week said that “no one” should try to “put themselves in the person of Christ.”

“I think that’s a little bit of a problem,” the robed friar said.

This story has been updated.

Representative Thomas Massie was the lone Republican to vote in favor of the measure, while Republican Representative Warren Davidson voted present and three Republicans abstained.

Every Democrat voted for the resolution except for Representative Jared Golden of Maine.

Democratic Representative Gregory Meeks proposed the bill, which “directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” making exceptions for extreme cases, “unless explicitly authorized” by Congress.

Before the vote, Meeks said on the House floor, “Donald Trump has dragged the American people into a war of choice, launched without congressional authorization. The president has no coherent strategy, and this open-ended, undefined military engagement is precisely what the War Powers Resolution was designed to restrain. Every day we delay, we inch closer to a conflict with no exit ramp.”

Golden also voted against a war powers resolution March 5, writing in a statement at the time that “The president has so far acted within the authorities given to him by Congress through the War Powers Act of 1973. He has been briefing Congress, and he has 60 days to make his case for ongoing operations. This is not an illegal war — but it could become one.”

Since then, despite damage to multiple schools and medical facilities in Iran as a result of the war, Golden is the only Democrat in the House who thinks that Trump’s Iran war hasn’t crossed any lines. Symbolic or not, Thursday’s vote shows that Congress is willing to let Trump keep using the military however he sees fit.

This story has been updated.

There were no injuries, and neighbors were allowed to reenter their homes after evacuation, after police conducted a comprehensive search.

There is nothing tangible that suggests the threat was connected to Trump’s attacks on the pope, and an investigation is still ongoing. Trump did, however, just invoke the Pope’s other brother, Louis—a Trump supporter who lives in Florida—in his “weak on crime” rant against Pope Leo.

“I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA,” Trump wrote on Sunday. “He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.”

“On Tuesday, the two Countries met for the first time in 34 years here in Washington, D.C., with our Great Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. I have directed Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Rubio, together with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Razin’ Caine, to work with Israel and Lebanon to achieve a Lasting PEACE. It has been my Honor to solve 9 Wars across the World, and this will be my 10th, so let’s, GET IT DONE! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump wrote.

Israel has said that it was targeting Hezbollah in its bombing campaign, which has killed an estimated 2,167 people in Lebanon since the beginning of March. Trump’s post didn’t mention whether Hezbollah, which has opposed the talks between Israel and Lebanon, is on board with the deal. He also made no mention of Lebanon being a sticking point in the U.S.-Iran talks, as Iran and mediator Pakistan maintained it was.

Whether this ceasefire will hold is anyone’s guess, especially considering that Israel’s sweeping evacuation orders in southern Lebanon suggest ethnic cleansing against Shia Muslims—but Trump will surely declare victory nonetheless.

This story has been updated.

The federal government has worked with the organization since the first Cuban exiles arrived in south Florida. The government, through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has paid the nonprofit for years to house immigrant kids who arrive in the U.S. without any adult guardians. The operation runs in a similar way to foster care, independent from state agencies, and the government notified the charity in March of its decision.

“The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski of the Miami Archdiocese said in a statement to the Miami Herald’s editorial board. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.”

Wenski added: “Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months.… It is baffling that the U.S. government would shut down a program that it would be hard-pressed to replicate at the level of competence” shown by the organization.

The Department of Health and Human Services told the newspaper that the refugee office is handling about 1,900 unaccompanied minors daily, compared to a peak of 22,000 during the Biden administration.

“ORR is closing and consolidating unused facilities as the Trump Administration continues efforts to stop illegal entry and the smuggling and trafficking of unaccompanied alien children,” said HHS spokesperson Emily G. Hillard. It’s unclear how many children are in the Catholic organization’s care, and what will happen to the children if their full-service child welfare program in Miami-Dade County is forced to close.

Trump has blasted the pope for being “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” but the administration’s criticism of the church’s immigration stances goes back even further. In January 2025, Vice President JD Vance suggested that Catholic bishops were more worried about their federal funding than administration policies. It would seem that Vance’s words back then have now become the administration’s policy.

In a heated exchange before the House Ways and Means Committee Thursday morning, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted that his department has “done better” at preventing measles amid a global epidemic than “any country in the world.”

Measles is an incredibly contagious disease, meaning that an outbreak anywhere is dangerous for people everywhere. Several countries across the globe, including India, Angola, and Mexico, are currently combating thousands of cases. But even America’s relatively small caseload—which currently sits at more than 1,800 for 2026—does not suggest that the Trump administration has excelled at combating the virus. Instead, that number has put the U.S. at risk of losing its measles elimination status, which it has maintained since the year 2000.

“There is no country that has seen a bigger percentage increase” than the U.S. under the second-term Trump administration, argued California Representative Linda Sanchez.

Measles does not have a cure. The disease can cause a blotchy rash, pinkeye, a high fever, white spots inside the mouth, full body aches, pneumonia, and severe dehydration, and it can result in hospitalization or even death.

Fortunately, however, it is highly preventable thanks to a vaccine that was developed by a couple of American scientists in 1963. Less than a decade later, in 1971, researchers created yet another vaccine capable of preventing measles as well as two other contagious illnesses—mumps and rubella—thanks to miraculous developments in modern medicine.

The joint shot was named the MMR vaccine, an acronym for “measles, mumps, and rubella.” Kennedy has railed against the three-in-one shot, baselessly claiming that it was not “safely tested.”

America’s diminishing herd immunity is due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents—whom Kennedy champions at the federal level—who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

During the deadly measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy advised that state residents take extra vitamins rather than receive the vaccine, and justified a local religious community’s decision not to receive it by claiming that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles.” Fact check: It does not.

But the 72-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: The more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his anti-vaccine lawsuits.

He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled anti-vax messaging in Samoa so badly that it started a 2019 measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of 5.

“In a 2024 podcast interview, you suggested that Black children on ADHD medication should be ‘re-parented.’ You said: ‘Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence,’ and that those children are going to have to go somewhere to get ‘re-parented,’” Sewell said. “Have you ever ‘re-parented,’ or parented, a Black child?”

RFK Jr. immediately went on the defensive.

“I don’t even know what that phrase means, and I doubt that I said it,” he replied.

“It’s just a yes or no answer,” Sewell responded.

“I doubt that I said that phrase, no. Not gonna answer something that I didn’t say.”

“You absolutely said it.”

“I’d like to hear the recording.”

Sewell: In a 2024 podcast interview, you suggested that black children on ADHD medication should be re-parented . Have you ever re-parented or parented a black child?

RFK JR: I'm not going to answer something that I didn't say.

Sewell: You absolutely said it. pic.twitter.com/Gbfppd6PaM

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 16, 2026

Kennedy is completely wrong here, and he said what Sewell is accusing him of saying nearly verbatim. Here’s the recording:

“My Peace Corps program is going to be wellness farms, rehabilitation facilities that I’m gonna start in rural areas all over the country, where people—any American—can go for free,” Kennedy said, painting a utopian picture for his solution to the prescription drug epidemic. “Psychiatric drugs, which every Black kid is now just standard put on—Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence—and those kids are gonna have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”

Even with the utopian framing, it’s impossible to ignore that Kennedy is pushing for Black children to be separated from their families and taken to farms to do God knows what—all because they’ve been prescribed depression or ADHD meds. That alone is extremely troubling given Kennedy’s position as health secretary and his lack of any kind of medical expertise. The fact that he denied even saying it during a congressional hearing—when there is clear evidence proving otherwise—is just as troubling.

The moment came at one of Hegseth’s Pentagon sermons on Wednesday morning. 

“They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17,” Hegseth erroneously said, saying the lead planner of the Combat Search And Rescue operation in Iran shared it with him.

So the prayer is CSAR 25:17 and it reads … “the path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Almost every single line from Hegseth’s prayer is ripped from Jackson’s iconic recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 in Tarantino’s film, not the prophet Ezekiel as ordained by God.

Here’s what the original verse in the Bible actually reads:

I will execute great vengeance on them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I lay My vengeance upon them.

That’s it. The flowery language, the allusions to destruction of evil—all come from Tarantino. 

But if that wasn’t bad enough, Hegseth added his own spin on a Bible verse that was already fake. Compare Hegseth’s monologue to the version in Pulp Fiction: 

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. 

Pete Hegseth quoted a fake Bible verse from Pulp Fiction during a Pentagon sermon.pic.twitter.com/1o3CJiJYRF

— Clash Report (@clashreport) April 16, 2026

It’s hard to parse how incredibly stupid this is. Why is the former Fox News alcoholic turned defense secretary even holding sermons at the Pentagon in the first place? And no one thought to let him know that the verse he so poetically interpreted was a blasphemous one? Did he even care? And to make matters even worse, this blatant display of religious ignorance comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV for his opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. 

The president sparked national outrage among his base on Sunday when he shared an image of himself as a haloed messiah cupping light into a bedridden individual (who, by apparent coincidence, looked almost identical to comedian and The Daily Show host Jon Stewart).

But the idea may not have been his own. Trump reportedly discussed the picture with Bill Pulte, the controversial director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, before he shared it online, insiders told Axios.

Pulte and Trump were both in south Florida over the weekend. Pulte reportedly saw the image first and decided to share it with the president.

“Everyone thought it was a joke,” one person that advised the president about the image told Axios.

The Christian faction of the MAGA movement did not find it funny, however. Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS Now said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, and further implied that they regretted voting for the self-identified Christian. (Reminder: While Trump has claimed the Bible is his “favorite book,” he couldn’t name a single passage from the text when prompted to do so in a 2019 interview.)

Trump deleted the image the day after he put it online, telling reporters that he believed it portrayed him as a doctor healing people.

It was a particularly bad time for the president to make a religious flub. That Sunday was Easter Sunday for Eastern Orthodox Christians. The previous Sunday, which was Easter for Catholics and Protestants, Trump threatened to completely annihilate Iranian civilization and wrote on Truth Social, “Praise be to Allah.”

Trump is also in the midst of a feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings by advocating for world peace. Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Holy See ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his “State of the World” address. Since then, the White House has issued several barbs directed at the pontiff, including claims that the religious leader is “weak on crime.”

The pope is touring Africa, and delivered his speech in a country in the midst of a civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people and displaced over 500,000. But the comments also come just days after President Trump, upset that the pope vocally opposes the war in Iran, called him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

Though the pontiff didn’t mention Trump by name, he condemned leaders who “manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”

For those that haven't seen the video of the pope telling trump indirectly 😂 pic.twitter.com/4mP7tdsQlt

— Necessary-Cliff (@theos_mafia) April 16, 2026

It’s a continuation of the pope’s response to Trump on Monday, when he told reporters that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do.”

“We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker,” the pope said on Monday. “I don’t ‌think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in ‌the way that some people are doing.”

One would think that a man who claims he ended multiple wars wouldn’t get offended if the pope calls for peace, but Trump has not engaged in any religious introspection this week, instead inciting a backlash from his Christian supporters by posting an AI image of himself as Jesus, which he later deleted, and then reposting a picture of Jesus hugging him. He probably knows deep down that he is actually a major source of conflict in the world right now.

A new biography called RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, by Isabel Vincent, includes a journal entry describing an instance where the health secretary left his kids in the car so he could cut the sexual organs off a dead raccoon on the side of the road, TMZ reported Wednesday. 

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members turned out to be,” the journal entry read. 

This is hardly the first gag-worthy story to surface involving Kennedy and dead animals. 

In August 2024, Kennedy revealed an incident 10 years earlier, when he’d picked up a bear cub carcass off the side of the road, and then ditched the body in Central Park when he didn’t have time to take it home. Before he abandoned the body, he mutilated it to make it look like it had been hit by a biker because he thought it would be funny.

In a 2012 interview, Kennedy’s daughter Kick spoke about a wild excursion the family had taken to Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, when she was 6 years old. Kick claimed that her father had used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a beached whale. He then proceeded to tie it to the roof of his family’s minivan and drive it five hours back to Mount Kisco, New York. 

And ahead of Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, his daughter Caroline wrote a letter to the Senate describing how he used to put baby chickens and mice in the blender to make food for his hawks. “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets,” Caroline wrote, “because he himself is a predator.”

When the first dead animal story comes out, you cringe. When the second one comes out, you gag. When the third one comes out, you seriously question the state that our country is in. But when the fourth one comes out, well, all you can do is laugh.  

The ODNI’s general counsel on Wednesday referred the whistleblower who led to Trump’s first impeachment, and the inspector general who found the complaint credible, for criminal prosecution, MS NOW reported.  

The whistleblower, whose identity has not been made public, claimed that in July 2019, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to pressure the foreign leader into investigating then-former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. 

Despite Trump’s insistence that his phone call was “perfect,” the president was impeached by the House of Representatives in 2019, and then acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate in early 2020. 

Earlier this week, Gabbard criticized how former intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson handled the whistleblower complaint, alleging that the watchdog had relied on “secondhand evidence.” 

She released a trove of documents related to Atkinson that she claimed revealed a “coordinated effort” by members of the intelligence community to “manufacture a conspiracy” to get Trump impeached. Ultimately, the documents did not demonstrate any criminal wrongdoing at all, CBS News reported.

It seems that Trump is after something specific with this latest attack against his perceived political enemies. Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday about the possibility of getting his impeachment “expunged.” If that’s really what he’s after, all of Gabbard’s efforts may be for nothing: Unfortunately for Trump, impeachment expungement is not really a thing. 

In the midst of an Iran war briefing Thursday, Hegseth delivered a sermon from the Defense Department’s press room dais, scolding the American press for its “relentlessly negative” coverage of the Trump administration and comparing journalists to the biblical Pharisees.

“A note to the press corps, as I just can’t help but notice the endless stream of garbage,” Hegseth said, referring to America’s myriad journalistic organizations as if they operate as some ubiquitous entity. “Sometimes it’s hard to figure out which side some of you are actually on. It’s incredibly unpatriotic.

“This past Sunday I was sitting in church with my family, and our minister preached from the Book of Mark, the third chapter. And in the passage, Jesus entered a synagogue and healed a man with a withered hand.

“The Pharisees came to watch, and as the Scripture reads, they came to see whether He, Jesus, would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him. You see, the Pharisees, the so-called elites of their time, were there to witness, to write everything down, to report. But their hearts were hardened,” Hegseth said.

“Even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda,” Hegseth continued. “I sat there in church, and I thought, ‘These press are just like these Pharisees.’ Not all of you, but the legacy, Trump-hating press.”

Hegseth then asked the press to “open their eyes” to the “historic goodness” of America’s military might, the recent developments in the war in Iran (which includes thousands of dead civilians, 13 dead U.S. service members, and internal reports that regional American bases were caught off guard), “historic recruiting numbers,” and two “miracle” search-and-rescue operations.

Hegseth: To the American media—I just can't help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage you cannot resist peddling. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on. It's incredibly unpatriotic.

Jesus entered a… pic.twitter.com/6K7mMK3yCq

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 16, 2026

The Pentagon chief was apparently undeterred by recent backlash to the Trump administration’s explicit evangelical bent.

Over the weekend, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ to his Truth Social acount, setting off sparks among even some of his most ardent supporters. Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS NOW said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, which depicted Trump as a haloed messiah. Trump deleted the image shortly afterward, telling reporters that he believed it illustrated him as a doctor healing people.

Federal employees across the executive branch have also complained about the administration’s hyperfixation on Christianity, claiming that the religious inclusions—which flagrantly defy the First Amendment and the Founders’ intention to separate church and state—have made the government a very uncomfortable place to work. Other, non-Christian staffers have expressed that the environment has made them fearful of potential retaliation within the workplace for failing to homogeneously identify as the same religion as their leadership.

Somehow, those aren’t the administration’s only recent Christian faux pas. The White House is also in the middle of a feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has apparently upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings by advocating for world peace. Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Vatican ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

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

Donald Trump’s war with Pope Leo has taken an uglier turn. His vice president, JD Vance, warned that the pope should be careful when discussing theology. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to the whole battle, committed a howler by bringing up “just war” doctrine, which Trump and Pete Hegseth are serially violating. It’s notable that this comes as The New York Times just weighed in with an epic piece detailing Trump’s mental decline. In some obvious and not so obvious ways, Trump’s battle with the pope neatly captures that decline and then some.

Olivia Troye, a former national security official during the first Trump administration, got an unusually close-up look at Trump’s mental unfitness for office. She just announced a run for Congress [as a Democrat]. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Olivia, thanks for coming on.

Olivia Troye: Hi Greg. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Recently the pope criticized Hegseth for praying for maximal violence and killing of the enemy. The pope said that God does not hear the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them. Now listen to Johnson.

Mike Johnson (voiceover): You know, I was taken a little bit aback, just honestly, frankly, something that was said—I think he said several days back—that something about those who engage in war, you know, that Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers or something. You know, it is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There’s something called the just war doctrine. There’s a time to every purpose under heaven. I think what the president’s comments, what the vice president’s comments reflect is their understanding deep in the, you know, the SCIF and the classified briefings of the stakes that are so high and the situation that we’re facing, and the fact that you had the nation that was the largest sponsor of terrorism now having had that ability taken away from them.

Sargent: Let’s break this up into two pieces. Johnson said there that Trump has access to all this classified info that somehow makes our attack on Iran acceptable, seemingly meaning that the threat posed by Iran justified the attack. That’s not at all true, is it, Olivia?

Troye: From everything that we’ve seen in the intelligence community and the reporting that we’ve seen, there was no justification for this war. During the first Trump administration, there were many of us in national security—there were career people who were assigned to the White House, and I lived that firsthand. And Trump was specifically talked out of engaging with Iran.

This is something that he has wanted to do for a very long time, but the prevailing minds in the room were able to navigate the situation and show him what the ramifications would mean. One of those being the Strait of Hormuz, which we are seeing play out right now in very, very plain view—the complications of what happens when you do that. It ultimately impacts us here domestically.

Sargent: That’s really interesting because Donald Trump was told again this time by senior members of his administration that if he went into this, it would be much harder than he anticipated. And he brushed them off. Sounds like you’re telling us that he was actually talked out of it by those same voices, or by similar voices, during the first term.

Troye: The issue right now is that you have an ongoing escalation that is happening in this conflict, where now I don’t think that they even know where to go from here. I don’t think they know how to de-escalate this. I don’t know how they’re going to navigate this internationally. This has become more of a regional thing, as we’re seeing. In many ways, the United States—this leadership that we have unfortunately at the helm—has been outplayed.

Sargent: It really looks that way. The second piece of what Johnson said is really something—he invoked just war doctrine. But Trump and Hegseth are violating that doctrine’s most basic tenets very seriously. Those tenets generally involve prohibitions on needless wars without imminent threats, and they involve proportionality toward the enemy.

Yet Hegseth has talked about killing people who surrender, and our war has killed well over a thousand civilians. Can you talk about the perversity of Johnson invoking just war doctrine? It is absolutely clear that Trump and Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth are violating those tenets regularly, right?

Troye: Yes, absolutely. The bigger concern with Pete Hegseth is just their invocation of this being almost their holy war to fight. That’s the irony to me about this entire situation—of Trump having the audacity to take on the head of the Catholic Church and attack him for wanting a de-escalation of this conflict, for wanting less loss of life, for innocent lives not to be lost in this situation.

While then you have Pete Hegseth at the helm, who is waving his very strong, almost Christian nationalism flag in the way he is approaching this war. We’ve seen the rhetoric come out of him in terms of that. When you combine all of these things, that hypocrisy is pretty astounding across the board.

Sargent: It really is. Hegseth is just absolutely saturated in bloodlust and sadism. Let’s listen to JD Vance now. Here’s what he said about the pope’s criticism of the Trump administration.

JD Vance (voiceover): I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. I think one of the issues here is that 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.

Sargent: That’s just amazing stuff. The pope needs to be careful about these debates, but Vance would never say that Trump needs to be careful when he viciously attacks a spiritual leader for a billion people. I’ve got to say, Olivia, it’s just so dark that they put Trump above the pope and treat Trump as a quasi-deity. It’s clear that these religious conservatives see their highest allegiance as being to Trump. I find this a mask-off moment. What do you think?

Troye: It’s pretty ridiculous for JD Vance to be the bastion of theology with the way he is approaching the pope. I also honestly think it’s shameful and it’s disgraceful. It’s a complete insult to any religious community of faith who is watching what is happening here by JD Vance and Trump and what they’re doing in terms of the Catholic community and the church—by their behavior ... attacking the pope on theology.

That’s pretty rich coming from these two individuals, certainly pretty rich from Donald Trump, who to me is like the antithesis of anything having to do with religion, considering how he conducts himself and the history of everything that he’s done in his life.

This is really just another level. But I will say this, Greg—I hope that this is an educational and enlightening moment for some of these individuals and communities who are watching this and are really seeing Trump for what he really is, the hypocrisy of this man in all manners. When it comes to religion, the way he uses religion as a cloak on himself.

That meme of Jesus was disgusting. It was atrocious. And also the hypocrisy of the no-wars campaign. We’re engaged in conflicts, we’re sending military service members, people are being killed. This is just so, so heinous that I just don’t see how it ends. I also think it’s only going to get worse the more unfit [he is] in his instability going forward.

Sargent: Well, speaking of Trump’s instability, I think it’s very clear that Trump himself wants this war with the pope to continue. Otherwise JD Vance and Mike Johnson wouldn’t be doing this. Now you’ve seen up close how the people around him operate. They are taking their cues directly from him. Can you describe that dynamic—how that works?

Troye: Yeah, absolutely. With this circle, unlike what I witnessed in the first Trump administration—back then there was some pushback, there was definitely recovery afterwards of like, How are we going to navigate whatever the madman in the Oval Office just said? This is a totally different dynamic where you have a circle of complete, all-in loyalist enablers who are there for their own power quest and enabling. They are not going to take this on. They are not going to be willing to put their own power on the line to push back on this, which is why this is so dangerous overall in terms of the demeanor.

They’re going to sit there, they’re going to watch what Donald Trump says, and they’re going to parrot what he says. I’ve seen this, where they parrot the talking points. At this point, I don’t even think that they’re coordinating. They’re just like, Whatever he said, now we’ve got to cover for him. Let’s say something more ridiculous so that way we can just pile on it and continue to perpetuate this narrative.

Sargent: The New York Times had this extraordinary piece with the following headline: “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate.” The piece ran through Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization, his attack on the pope for being weak on crime—that was the first attack—Trump’s tendency to wander off on weird tangents, his confusion about basic facts such as mixing up Greenland and Iceland.

The piece very well documented that his former allies are talking about the need for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment now. This includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, former White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who called him “clearly insane,” former chief of staff John Kelly, who concluded Trump is mentally ill, and so forth. Olivia, as someone who ran with those people a little bit, I wanted to get your thoughts on that piece.

Troye: It’s absolutely accurate to say that he is mentally unstable, mentally unfit to be serving in the Oval Office right now. We have the leader of essentially the free world who is off his rocker. Ty Cobb absolutely is accurate. He knows Trump well. If anyone knows Trump, Ty Cobb certainly does. And he is calling it how it is.

Trump aside, what it is doing to the global dynamic and the disruption here is going to be the aftermath of this. It’s going to last for years, Greg. The rest of the world and the dynamics and how they have completely disrupted the world order—our allies don’t trust us. Why would they? They have no idea what’s coming next and they’re left to deal with the fallout. Europe is watching this conflict and they’re trying to figure out within themselves how they’re going to navigate this because it’s obviously impacting them as well.

Sargent: When you were in the administration, what was your direct impression of his sanity or lack thereof? What did the people around him say privately when he wasn’t around? I’ve got to assume that it was already very, very pronounced. It was all sorts of craziness in the first term, but it got much worse in the second one. What was your direct experience of this man and the people around him?

Troye: I would say that when I observed him, he was certainly unpredictable. Obviously, the last person in his ear manipulates him. So, easily manipulated. I think also just short attention span, inability to really take in information unless you really are drawing it like a cartoon artist on pencil and paper—drawing it out to make sure that you can take it in, because you certainly can’t take in intelligence briefings. So that is a kind of persona. Obviously he’s got the narcissistic qualities, the neurosis and the manipulation factor there. He’s very power hungry, always self-centered, always seeking the attention.

What is different from what I observed then and what we’re seeing now is I do think his health in terms of mental stability and the way he is conducting himself has gotten significantly worse this time around and throughout the past couple of years—which worries me, because we are one year and change into this presidency. We have several years to go. And my concern is that he is going to continue to get worse.

He’s going to continue to decline. This insanity and this recklessness is only going to get worse over time. And we are going to see someone that is going to continue to lash out, especially as he becomes a lame duck and his power is coming to an end. I just foresee him slash-and-burn in a way that we’ve probably never seen before, especially if he’s not all there.

Sargent: Yeah, and especially if he senses his power slipping away from him, which it absolutely is. You’re running for Congress in Virginia. You’re in a crowded primary. There’s been some debate among Democrats—this is sort of an obsession of pundits—the take has sometimes been anybody who talks about Trump’s mental illness or his unfitness for the presidency or his erratic nature and derangement and so forth is missing what voters actually care about; voters only care about the kitchen table, they only care about their wallets, they only care about what’s absolutely immediate to their material lives.

I’ve never bought this line before. It seems to me a lot of Americans don’t want to have a madman as president. I want to ask you, as you sort of embark on this candidacy, are you going to talk about this kind of elephant in the room, so to speak? That the president is a nut?

Troye: Absolutely. You can’t discount what we have at the helm right now of the United States and the free world. But here is what I will say, Greg: The issues of affordability, the issues of rising gas prices, rising grocery prices, rising fertilizer [prices] for farmers—think about the Strait of Hormuz and what is happening there. Also health care, the ACA, things that actually everyday working-class Americans like the family that I grew up in—I’m the daughter of a truck driver, I’m the daughter of a Mexican immigrant—these are things that are tangible. Yes, kitchen table issues.

Never mind the fact that my mom, who’s 82 years old, is actually fearful right now because of ICE and what ICE is doing to torment our communities because they’re targeting people like her. When I look at the combination of this—yes, we care about affordability. We care about economic issues. But a lot of these things are driven from the very top. They’re driven by Donald Trump’s actions and his recklessness. That is what I plan to do: I plan to tie it back to people and explain to people as much as I can, to educate people that I want to work on that.

I plan to focus on health care because I have an aging mom and I know that there are a lot of people like me in my situation who are trying to figure out how we afford this. Or there are a lot of people who, like my husband, didn’t have health care for a long time—he has an autoimmune disease and couldn’t get affordable medication, so it took over his body and he got worse. These are things that are very real.

The issue is that Trump at the helm, and MAGA Republicans and what they’re doing, are actually making our lives worse by the legislation and the things that they are focused on and passing, that feed back into that loop of these issues. That’s why it doesn’t help to have a madman and unstable individual in the office who’s getting us into global conflicts that actually impact the kitchen table issues on a daily basis—and govern in this type of way. That is where my concern is as someone who witnessed this firsthand. I was there as a career person serving. Plenty of people are there in a career capacity right now that are having to live this daily nightmare firsthand and trying to navigate inside the government.

Sargent: It’s interesting the way you position all this, because it’s really an important factor that the Iran war is almost like a double whammy for Trump in the following sense. First, it shows how unhinged and how unfit to govern he is. At the same time, it also is having this very palpable impact on prices and on people’s everyday lives. In a certain sense, the war with Iran is like the perfect issue to capture all the profound pathologies—the whole bundle of madness and destructiveness that this presidency has ushered in.

Troye: Yes, 100 percent, because it all boomerangs here domestically. Instability, conflict—he’s making our world less safe. He’s making our communities less safe. He’s also creating the increases in the things that he ran complaining about. Let’s not forget during the campaign, he blamed Kamala Harris. They said, If you elect Kamala Harris, there would be war with Iran. The price of eggs. All of these things were the Republican narrative in 2024 that I was out there countering every day on the campaign trail when I was traveling to swing states. That is what you would hear. Well, guess what? We’re in those situations right now that Donald Trump has gotten us into.

Sargent: I want to close on this thought: When Donald Trump threatens to obliterate Iranian civilization, which would kill tens of millions of people, I don’t think that should be treated as just Trump being crazy Trump. It actually matters to a lot of Americans to hear their president do something that deranged and sadistic.

Can you talk a little bit about that? We don’t want the president to be saying that we’re going to use the American military to commit mass atrocities and extraordinarily serious and grave war crimes. We want our president to not do that kind of thing, correct?

Troye: We would want the United States presidency to exhibit diplomacy. We would want him to be a leader in foreign policy, to bring people to the table, to be a negotiator, not be threatening exactly what you said—war crimes, destroying an entire civilization.

To me, when I saw that, actually, my concern was the aftereffects and the implication of watching the president of the United States use such language globally and how the international community and how everyone perceives that. What that does: It antagonizes people against the United States. It radicalizes people against the United States. It makes people angry and overall it makes everyone much less safe.

Sargent: Well, you’re a very good voice to explain this to voters. So we’re glad that you’re running, if only for that purpose: to explain to people from a national security perspective just how unhinged and dangerous this guy really is. Olivia Troye, best of luck with your congressional run. Thanks so much for coming on.

Troye: Thank you. I appreciate the support. And if you want to learn more about me, visit OliviaTroye.com.

At a Tuesday event on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Bessent rattled off a hodgepodge of recycled and seemingly half-remembered talking points about how global warming doesn’t exist and/or isn’t a big deal. “The climate does change,” he said, before things went slightly off the rails. “As we all know, the natural habitat for the earth is actually water. Ice was probably … I mean, it’s a very long cycle, but ice was an unusual cycle. I mean we are going through cycles, and I believe that it is very difficult to deconstruct the reasons behind why anything changes.” Bessent—a former hedge fund manager who went to Yale—also called climate change a belief of the “elite,” and chalked up concerns about the economic toll of rising temperatures to a single 2024 study that was retracted last year. There is, of course, overwhelming evidence about the mounting costs of climate change. One recent study in the journal Nature, for instance, found that climate change has already cost the U.S. an estimated $16.2 trillion.

It isn’t unusual for members of the Trump administration to deny and downplay climate change. But climate denial—a mainstay of the GOP for most of this century—has also become something of an operating manual for the right as it reacts to other crises it would like to pretend are not happening. Bessent this week likewise dismissed the sprawling economic turmoil caused by the administration’s decision to go to war with Iran, which now involves a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Bessent told the British press that the war was worth a “small bit of economic pain.” He’s “less concerned about short-term forecasts,” he added, such as those projecting—as the IMF did this week—that a further escalation of the war in Iran could trigger a global recession. At another event in Washington, he asserted that price spikes resulting from the war in Iran—which helped inflation rise three times faster in March than in February—were a passing fad, despite the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is not poised to return to business as usual anytime soon. Whenever it reopens, experts warn that the effects of its now more than monthlong closure will be felt for years.

Whether it’s climate change or a looming global recession, the script is the same: downplay, deny, and project confidence. This playbook works for Bessent and other members of the Trump administration because they are wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the effects of both rising temperature and economic catastrophe. Bessent can withstand deadly heat waves from the air-conditioned comfort of his country home. With an estimated net worth of $600 million, he can afford to ride out a global economic downturn too, continuing to experience the economy as a series of lines that will probably make him richer. None of his friends’ kids will die in the administration’s pointless, destructive war in the Middle East. Fundamentally, that is, these people do not exist in the same world as the rest of us—which makes it all the more worrying that they have so much control over what happens here.

The Post’s self-immolation was, of course, hardly the first wave of devastating cuts to America’s newsrooms—nor was Johnson’s stranding the first time that foreign correspondents who deserved better found themselves unemployed. As Elisa Tamarkin tells us in her mesmerizing Done in a Day: Telex From the Fall of Saigon, her father was one such causality, left jobless decades earlier, after the Chicago Daily News closed in 1978. This was despite Bob Tamarkin having been, in his editor’s words, “promoted to trench coat”—industry slang for a dedicated, in-country foreign correspondent—full time, three years earlier. On April 30, 1975, he had managed to be the last American reporter to flee the fall of Saigon and one of the first to “telex” his story home, one of the triumphs of the Daily News’s 70-year-old foreign bureau, and among its last.

Yet though Done in a Day is in part an elegy for the newspaper business, Elisa Tamarkin resists turning the book into a straightforward hagiography. What results instead is a startlingly original meditation on the last day of the U.S. War in Vietnam and the end of the newspaper business—one that makes clear that, as much as newspapers were one of the great triumphs of modern civilization, they were also intimate partners in the violence that civilization seems to so endlessly produce.

The Chicago Daily News was part of the U.S. War in Vietnam from the start, or indeed, from before the start, with veteran war reporter Keyes Beech arriving in the early 1950s, when the war against Vietnamese independence still technically belonged to France. The truth, of course, was that the Daily News was there because the French war was also an American war, with U.S. money and political support backing Paris’s efforts to keep Vietnam from unifying under the popular Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. The News was one of the first U.S. papers to open a Saigon bureau, just as it had been among the first U.S. dailies to establish its own comprehensive foreign news service a half-century earlier. This was the idea of turn-of-the-century publisher Victor Lawson, who saw an opportunity to permanently embed his own reporters in foreign locales, a “man on the spot” rather than the in-and-out “spot reporting” of the wire services. Newsmen (and they were almost all men to start) could then become like locals, covering the world, as the pioneering Chicago reporter Ben Hecht wrote, “with the enthusiasm … brought in Chicago to four-eleven fires, basement stabbings, love-nest suicides and all the other hi-de-ho doings outside the norm of living.” This was reporting where, as Tamarkin writes, “if you listened you could hear the language of Dickens, Twain, Carlyle, and Rabelais, only breezier, like they were drunk.”

It’s hard to escape the romance of all this—a world of Graham Greenes and Martha Gellhorns, trench coats (or in warmer climes like Vietnam, as Tamarkin notes, cotton or linen twill jackets with extra pockets for pens and notebooks), cocktails on the veranda of the hotel where “everyone” was staying, and meetings in humid back alleys with informants whose faces are covered in shadow. All to be tapped out on a typewriter and sent home to a newsroom that prided itself on producing the “writer’s newspaper,” providing the story of the day—the “literature” of the day even—“done in a day,” as the paper’s unofficial motto put it. The daily paper, as Hecht suggested, was “a kind of shrine” that had “to be constructed and worshipped, then forgotten, then built again the next day,” all with a flair for “the whiplash phrase … sonorous syntax and bull’s-eye epithet.”

Bob Tamarkin, as his daughter tells us, was there at the end. Arriving in Vietnam in January 1975, Tamarkin began reporting from Saigon amid what Henry Kissinger allegedly called the “decent interval”: the period after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 1973 and the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in April 1975. Saigon was thus already, from a reporter’s perspective, something of a ghost town, emptied of the hundreds of journalists of earlier years, the war now largely fought by Vietnamese, not Americans. Antiwar activists like Rolling Stone editor David Harris—who flew in in January to protest continued U.S. support for the Saigon regime—couldn’t even get themselves arrested anymore, while reporters like Tamarkin demurred in covering their daylong protest in front of the U.S. Embassy. The “story was dead,” said one of the remaining reporters, and no one at home seemed to care.

This changed as winter turned to spring and a new offensive of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, gathered steam, crushing U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces in the Central Highlands and moving south toward Saigon. Reporters and writers started to pour back in—“tout le monde was there.… Le Monde was there,” noted one—only to have to immediately start flooding back out as the offensive became a rout and the “final” end grew near. Hunter S. Thompson made it a couple of weeks, arriving on April 8 and leaving on one of the last commercial flights on April 24, right before PAVN began shelling the airfield. Tamarkin meanwhile saw his colleague Keyes Beech through the crowd surrounding the U.S. Embassy and over the wall to the waiting Marines on the final day, remaining for a few hours more himself to witness the absurd scene: looters breaking into the embassy grounds as half-burned classified documents were caught up by the rotors of the escape helicopters and then drifted down from the sky to the sound of “White Christmas” (the song signaling to Americans and their allies that it was time to go). Tamarkin made it out on the last helicopter that carried civilians and, upon arriving on the USS Blue Ridge, banged out his “Diary of S. Viet’s Last Hours,” one of the first in-depth accounts of the fall of Saigon to reach American readers.

Within a few years, the decline of the newspaper too turned into a rout. The Daily News closed all its foreign offices in 1976 and then its own doors two years later—meanwhile other papers were cutting their foreign reporting “to the bone,” with international news having “almost reached the vanishing point” (as famed correspondent Peter Arnett put it) in most dailies, and the foreign correspondent “a vanishing species,” according to mid-’70s media scholars. The papers themselves would shutter in alarming numbers as the decades progressed, victims of corporate consolidation and hedge-fund machinations, a process grimly documented in a “morgue of final editions” (images of final font pages running from 1978 to 2025) that Elisa Tamarkin includes at the end of the volume—a visual testament to the crumbling cornerstones of popular literate culture.

It’s a simple enough story—one that, again, would be easy to romanticize—but as Tamarkin notes, that would be to mistake the perspective of the reporters, of the “West,” for the only one. Writing of her father, she describes how “his dispatches,” while honest and critical of U.S. officials, “never rose to an acknowledgment of the cause—of revolution and liberation—of the other side of the fall” of South Vietnam. They were usually just “Reds,” engaged in the various actions of warmaking, right up to and including smashing into Saigon and ejecting the remaining Americans, down to U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin’s little dog, Nit Noy (among the passengers on the final helicopters).

Violence and oppression had, in fact, been behind the news business from the start—this was true of city journalism and its regular beat of murders, sexual assaults, break-ins, and crooked politicians, but part of foreign reporting especially. Lawson’s idea for overseas bureaus, for example, first emerged in 1897 as he contemplated the brutal Cuban war for independence from Spain—a conflict of interest for Americans because the United States would soon join it to deny Cubans full independence—and came into its own thanks to Hecht’s 1918–1920 tour in Berlin, where he covered the aftermath of World War I, another conflict decided by late American arrival. World War II was its heyday: Pyle, Shirer, Gellhorn, and Hemingway on the typewriters, with Capa and Miller clapping home the shutters. The foreign bureau and international reporting for American newspapers and magazines thus emerged and reached their height in direct correlation with the emergence and expansion of U.S. imperial power in the twentieth century, two trend lines tracking up on the graph together, before tumbling back down the chart in 1970s Southeast Asia.

Tamarkin consequently avoids telling the story in a straightforward way, one that might overly valorize the correspondents and their trade, using her father’s time in Vietnam instead as a frame for an impressionistic and nonlinear consideration of one day and the way it was understood—moving in and out of the main story for extended digressions on small details. Central is the image of the telex. She considers Hans Haacke’s News, a contemporary art exhibit featuring an actual telex machine that began churning out page after page of news in 1970, the paper collecting in piles on the floor of the Jewish Museum in New York. This seemingly endless and transient accumulation of information was not unlike, Tamarkin suggests, the endless waves of information and news from Vietnam—news that had made clear to the government by the mid-’60s, and the American public by the early 1970s, that the war was unwinnable.

“Historians” she writes, sometimes “suggest the war was a transformative moment of accountability journalism,” where the press began to truly speak truth to government power—a narrative belied by the billowing piles of telex paper, reporting on a failed war effort that nevertheless kept failing for decades. The press may have raised questions, Tamarkin argues, but these often focused more on the process of the war than on whether or the why. “Journalists,” then as now, “rely on officials to share their perspectives and … leak information, so when there finally was dissent in the press,” it was because that view was shared by many in Washington, the State Department, and the intelligence community too.

Those officials were often leaking because their bosses, like the American public, also seemed impermeable to the waves and waves of news and information that swept over them. Ambassador Martin refused to begin the official evacuation, even as Communist forces closed in on Saigon in early April, and his CIA officers leaked like sieves in the hope press reports would change his mind. He made no plan for getting Nit Noy out—though he did pack his beloved stuffed ocelot and a suitcase full of top-secret documents (meant to help him justify his inaction before Congress). The dog, the ocelot, and the documents ultimately made it to safety, but thousands of the South Vietnamese who had supported the U.S. war effort did not. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, learning in Washington that the final evacuations were underway, chose not to attend a play at the Kennedy Center as planned—though, according to one photograph of that night, at least, he continued to wear his tux.  

The remaining Marine guards were the last Americans to leave (nearly left behind, actually, until one last helicopter was sent to their rescue). Among “the last things my father reported seeing in the Saigon embassy lobby,” Tamarkin writes, was one of them: “a young Marine … stuffing a paperback book,” The Fall of Rome, “into his knapsack.” Evidently a copy of a 1971 volume by R.A. Lafferty, the topic seemed well fitted to events from an American perspective. But the view of the PAVN was strikingly different: Official watercolorists depicted in vibrant colors not a “fall” but a glorious rising, a long-delayed but inevitable triumph of the “people” over the machinations of empire.

Those machinations, alas, have outlasted the age of newsprint. While today American power seems too to be in decline—withdrawing, not unlike the Post, from old allies in Europe—it retains enough strength to further an orgy of purposeless and horrific violence in the Middle East. At the same time, the last remaining newspapers have not transcended the flaws of their ancestors, relying on a set of well-practiced euphemisms to cover destruction in Gaza. Still, the successors to the PAVN watercolorists are also present today, bravely posting videos of the war crimes committed against them. These scroll across the screens of viewers and—in most American news and living rooms—accumulate like spools of unread telex paper on the floor.

Democrats’ eagerness to please industry is also evident in the past few years of revolving-door hires from the Beltway to Big Tech: President Barack Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney spent seven years at Amazon and now works at Airbnb. The Coinbase advisory council is stacked with a dozen Democrats, including Tim Ryan and Biden’s pollster John Anzalone. Stephanie Cutter, a key Democratic comms strategist and Sunday show mainstay, is now at the gambling firm (they refer to themselves as “prediction markets”) Kalshi. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Kelly, who worked in the Biden White House in artificial intelligence is now at Anthropic.

The open courting of Big Tech and Big Finance by Democratic leadership has always been sold as savvy. But after a series of bruising election losses and open hostility from the industries they once hoped to court, the strategy has done little but make the Democrats look more like impressionable rubes.

Despite wild claims by venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen that the Biden administration was their adversary, the Biden White House desperately wanted to be liked by Silicon Valley—and monied venture capitalists in particular. I worked in the Biden administration at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with a focus on Big Tech and cryptocurrency. The Biden White House hosted multiple crypto round tables that featured the CEOs of cryptocurrency firms, such as Sam Bankman-Fried (now serving a 25-year prison sentence for an $8 billion fraud) and wealthy tech venture capitalists like Rob Conway.

I was one of the many regulators at different financial agencies invited to these gatherings, which I found to be extremely embarrassing for the White House. These “listening sessions” lent credibility to industries that I, and many others, suspected were openly conning the administration. What’s worse, this embrace of crypto, in particular, by the White House happened despite the industry’s glaring adoption of the tech subculture’s racism and misogyny, which run squarely in opposition to core democratic values. Kraken’s CEO told staff he thought white people should be able to use the n-word at work, while Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong banned the phrase “Black Lives Matter” among his workforce, and a Coinbase official posted a public apology to the Pepe the Frog “community” when Coinbase sent a newsletter mentioning that Pepe had become associated with antisemitism. After Trump was reelected in 2024, Coinbase rushed to add the crypto token PEPE back to its product list.

But then came a series of humbling bankruptcies in the cryptocurrency space in the summer of 2022—Terra Luna, Celsius, Three Arrows Capital.* In the fall, news broke that FTX’s Bankman-Fried, who was hailed as a wunderkind by the likes of President Bill Clinton and the financial press, had been stealing billions of dollars from his users.

Around that same time, Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB—the darling of venture capital firms and the bank of choice of many large crypto firms—began to teeter. One of the bank’s largest depositors was the firm Circle, a company that works closely with Coinbase and offers a so-called “stablecoin,” a form of crypto money that claims to be tied to the value of a dollar. This “future of finance” institution had $3 billion stowed away at SVB, which far exceeds the $250,000 per account the FDIC insures per customer in case of a bank failure. Circle had committed a kindergarten-level financial mistake and put all its eggs in one basket. It was Silicon Valley Bank’s biggest client; the firm that stood to lose the most if SVB wasn’t bailed out.

The Biden administration was faced with a choice. It could simply allow the bank to fail—after all, it had few interconnections with the economy, and very few consumer, middle-class, or low-income clients. Or it could heed the panicked, loud, and insistent pleas for a rescue and a bailout from the bank’s numerous plutocratic clients, such as the wealthy tech titan David Sacks. The Biden admin chose a bailout.

What did the Democrats get in return? The bailout beneficiaries, Sacks included, backed Donald Trump with their rescued money and their time. Sacks, along with many other beneficiaries of the SVB bailout, endorsed Trump. Until recently, Sacks served as Trump’s White House crypto and AI czar. In V.C. parlance, they “cucked” the Biden administration.

Having been so utterly pantsed in public, one would assume that the Democrats would have learned a hard lesson. Alas, they have not. Under the leadership of Chuck Schumer, and with the assistance of Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Ruben Gallego, their losing strategy of sucking up to these backstabbing elites continues. With the party’s support for a bill called the CLARITY Act, it continues to court the same crypto firms who owe their wealth to Democrats but who largely contribute to MAGA politicians and ideologies—and who seek the destruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was Democrats’ North Star coming out of the financial crisis.

Not everyone in the Biden administration was fooled by crypto’s hype and the industry’s impossible promises (not to mention its laughably bad technology). Under Chair Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission pursued lawsuits against the likes of Coinbase, Binance, and others for violating securities laws. Gensler became the crypto community’s constant boogeyman, subject to memes and comparisons to Darth Vader.

Rather than have the SEC’s back as it doggedly tried to enforce securities laws against firms that had openly declared the rules didn’t apply to them, Undersecretary Nellie Liang at the Treasury Department actively negotiated with Republicans in Congress on legislation many financial regulators strongly opposed. It was a repeat of another failed attempt at stopping speculative manias before they started: In the Clinton administration, CFTC Chair Brooksley Born attempted to regulate the new forms of derivatives being churned out by Wall Street but was stymied by Larry Summers and Robert Rubin.

In short, Biden naïvely followed a path of least resistance, trying in vain to placate the very tech CEOs who then worked with Donald Trump to brutalize the federal workforce and gut entire agencies. Democrats need to break from this path and acknowledge that billionaires—especially those in the increasingly antidemocratic tech sector—are never going to side with them over the GOP. Democrats need to reject tech founders and their energy-hungry data centers that no one wants, and which have drawn grassroots opposition from the local communities caught in Big Tech’s rampage path. This is one of the best ways that Democrats can shed the identity of being Republicans-lite, where Silicon Valley’s robber barons are concerned, and one of the only ways they can truly make good policy for the multiracial, multiclass base they so badly need to win back.

* This article originally misidentified one of the bankrupt firms.

“Our faith is a living thing because it walks hand in hand with doubt, and if there is no doubt, there would be no mystery.” He concludes his homily by asking the cardinals to pray for a pope who doubts, and sins—and asks for forgiveness.

It was this great sin of certainty that was on full display this week in Trump’s Truth Social post in which he lambasted Pope Leo XIV, accusing the pontiff of being “weak” on crime and “terrible on foreign policy.”* The president claimed the only reason Pope Leo was named head of the Catholic Church was because the church thought that would be the best way to deal with Trump, stating, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The rant was accompanied by an AI-generated image of Trump appearing as Jesus Christ, surrounded by an American flag, bald eagles, the Statue of Liberty, and figures resembling … Power Rangers? Facing fierce backlash, Trump has since claimed the image was not meant to depict him as Jesus but as a doctor in biblical robes because, in his words, “I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”

Trump’s rant was a reaction to Leo’s condemnation of his administration’s recent military misadventures, which have included a genocidal threat to wipe out Iran’s civilization. It’s not hard to imagine this catching Leo’s attention. Indeed, during his Palm Sunday homily the pope declared, “God does not listen” to the prayers of those who wage war. His homily was in reference to rhetoric from Trump and his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who have claimed the war in Iran has been carried out “under the protection of divine providence.” But as crazy as Trump’s Jesus-like grandeur may be, it was his administration’s reported behavior earlier this year that gives real pause for concern.

In January, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then papal nuncio—the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S.—was invited to the Pentagon for a meeting with Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of war for policy. The invite was a response to the pope’s then-fresh comments lamenting the growing use of force to resolve diplomatic disputes. The meeting turned tense after Colby appealed to the papal nuncio to align the Vatican with Washington’s policies. When the cardinal declared that Pope Leo would continue to follow his own course guided by church values, a Pentagon official invoked the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century, when the French king appointed his own “antipope” in reaction to Rome. The invocation was read as a clear threat: If Leo did not start toeing the Trump line, the president might be forced to appoint his own rival pope.

Like many threats from the Trump administration, one to appoint a pontiff was not well thought through. Like all holy leaders, popes strive to be living allegories of their faith. Many throughout history have fallen short, but one spiritual responsibility of the pope is to serve as a unifying spiritual figure for over 1.3 billion believers for the Catholic Church. What sets the pope apart from other Christian leaders is that Catholics believe in papal infallibility; that when he speaks ex cathedra on doctrines of faith and morals, his words are inspired directly by God (JD Vance, take notice).

Following this same logic, any Trump-appointed Mar-a-Lago pope residing in palatial poolside splendor would not answer to God but to the president’s own godlike pretensions. Trump would no longer be a mere leader of men but a mortal who assumes all the celestial authority of a deity. In contrast to a pope elected to inspire all the teachings of Christ, a Floridian pope would encapsulate everything that embodies the spiritual rot of the MAGA movement.

When we think of the Antichrist, we tend to imagine demonic babies from horror films or red-tinted devils with pointed tails and horns. But what’s substantially more frightening than a diabolical figure brandishing a cartoon pitchfork is what Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil on display in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann was an ordinary man who joined the SS, not because he loved fascism but because he wanted a step up from his job as a door-to-door vacuum salesman. On hearing him testify, Arendt genuinely believed the man responsible for designing the final solution bore no ill will toward Jews. The “banality of evil” she referred to in her book about his trial is the idea that the greatest evils are not committed by psychopaths but by ordinary, unthinking people who conform to systems and fail to critically evaluate their actions.

Christian eschatology offers a more disquieting vision of the Antichrist as a “man of lawlessness,” who will deceive humanity by preaching a false alternative to Jesus’s teachings, turning Christ’s message of love, humility, and self-sacrifice on its head. Consider the Trumpian moral antonym of the beatitudes: “Cursed are the meek, because might makes right”; “Cursed are the merciful, for they are suckers and losers”; “Cursed are those who suffer persecution, because they had it coming.”

Unlike the pope on St. Peter’s seat in Rome who surrounds himself with theologians, a Mar-a-Lago pope would be spiritually influenced by those, like Eichmann, who never stopped to consider the meaning behind an authoritarian’s slogans. “Make America Great Again” is all they’d ever need to repeat to themselves to dismiss any shred of guilt when faced with images of bombed-out buildings or ICE officers yanking children from their parents’ arms. Around this Floridian pope’s golden throne would gather tech oligarchs who view introspection as an obstacle to action, along with advocates of AI superiority over human creativity. Here freedom would be defined as the absence of restrictions on desires, rather than the spiritual definition that stresses freedom can be found in virtue.

And rather than citing a holy text, a Mar-a-Lago pope and his College of Influencers would rely on “content” to preach their gospel of unlimited and untaxable wealth. Salvation would be promised with all the conviction and reflection of an adolescent YouTube influencer accepting money from a cosmetics company to convince children they will only be loved and accepted if they preemptively sheet-mask. Contemplation, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to accept that one day you too shall die are not virtues, but vices that can be treated with Joe Rogan–esque self help.

Although Washington is already infested with the signifiers of Trump’s moral decay, these signs lack a unifying symbol of the MAGA movement. The real value of a Mar-a-Lago pope is that he’d stand as an indelible reminder of everything that students of history will learn that defined the Trump era. The only metaphor better than a billion-dollar ballroom for understanding MAGA’s corrosion of moral authority would be the image of a gilded antipope standing next to Trump in the Oval Office after his ascension to the papacy. In that sense, the pontiff would not merely symbolize spiritual rot but would serve as its most enduring allegory for Trump’s sin of certainty.

* This article originally misidentified the Truth Social post as deleted.

To me, that sounded an awful lot like Zuckerberg was desperate to avoid talking to his employees. But earlier this week, the Financial Times’ Hannah Murphy set me straight. Sparing flesh-and-blood Zuck from talking to his employees, Murphy explained, is not the job of AI Zuck, but rather the job of an entirely different digital proxy, a “photorealistic, AI-powered 3D character” that we’ll call AI Zuck II. AI Zuck II’s avowed purpose, Murphy reports, is “to engage with his employees in his stead.”

Fobbing Meta employees off on AI Zuck II is necessary, per FT’s Murphy, because “Zuckerberg has become increasingly hands-on.” “Hands-on” used to mean doing what Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., in their bestselling 1982 business manual, In Search of Excellence, called “management by walking around,” or MAWA. But that isn’t what Zuckerberg is doing. Instead, according to Murphy, he’s spending five to 10 hours per week coding AI products and attending product reviews. Applying a Peters-Waterman-style analysis, I would call this “management by sitting splendidly on your arse,” or MASSA. I envision a spiral-eyed Zuck twiddling dials ad infinitum to create a secret army of Zuck cyberslaves that resemble the clone troopers in Star Wars Episode II.

For chief executives, digital spirit animals are all the rage. I know this because on Monday my onetime Politico boss Jim VandeHei, subsequently co-founder and chief executive of Axios, posted an “Axios C-Suite” self-help column headlined “Building and exercising an AI-powered version of you.” VandeHei “loaded every speech, internal memo, column and TV appearance of [his] into both ChatGPT and Claude to create JimGPT.” Flesh-and-blood Jim “got JimGPT rocking in an hour or so.” Only an hour? Isn’t that kind of … insulting? Let me assure you that, if it ever comes to market, TimGPT will have taken at least two decades to build, with white-coated technicians working in shifts round the clock.

Not that VandeHei lacks self-esteem. Unlike Zuckerberg, VandeHei created his AI familiar not to avoid talking to his employees (Jim loves to talk), but rather to supply another Jim VandeHei whose wisdom he can imbibe, like Narcissus contemplating his own reflection in a pool. Flesh-and-blood Jim advises, for example, the following prompt:

I have a hunch that [trend/shift] is taking place. Knowing I am the CEO of [company] in [industry], give me the five data points or signals I should look for to confirm or kill this theory, and suggest the cheapest way to test it this quarter. End by telling me an adjacent idea I am missing or underappreciating.

I don’t dispute this might be a good question to pose to AI (or, better yet, to another human being you hired to advise you). But why pose it to a digital version of yourself? Won’t JimGPT just tell VandeHei the sort of thing that would occur to him if he had a little more time? Where’s the added value in that? Another drawback is that JimGPT is programmed to write “in Axios style.” For my views on that subject, I direct you to my September 2022 post, “Hell Is a World in Which Everybody Writes Like Axios.”

When Mark Zuckerberg can use AI to avoid talking to the people on his payroll, and Jim VandeHei can use AI to talk into a digital mirror, the suspicion arises that chief executives are the most disposable actors in the AI-reengineered economy. I am not the first person to notice this. A September 2023 survey by the research firm edEx found that 49 percent of chief executives believed “most” or “all” of their jobs “should be completely automated or replaced by AI.” Anant Agarwal, the founder of edEx, told David Streitfeld of The New York Times that he thinks “80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”

Streitfeld further cited a 2017 survey in which 42 percent of 1,000 British workers polled said they’d feel “comfortable” working for a computer rather than a person (which doesn’t speak well of British bosses). In September 2024, an article in Harvard Business Review stated flatly: “AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs.” Sam Altman, godfather of ChatGPT and co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, told Axios earlier this month: “Our job is maybe one of the more automatable jobs.”

Then why the hell do we pay you so goddamned much money?

The economic logic of AI is that humans are expensive to employ, and no human is more expensive to employ than the human who runs the company. In 2024, the last year for which data are available, chief executives were paid, on average, 281 times what the typical worker earns, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. Why do we pay them anything at all?

Altman shrewdly takes himself off the hook by accepting only a nominal salary ($65,000 two years ago) and no equity in OpenAI. (He’s not a saint, only a billionaire, worth $3.4 billion from other investments, including many linked in one way or another to OpenAI.) But Zuckerberg pulled down a reported $27 million in compensation in 2024. With $230 billion in the bank, Zuckerberg would seem to need that paycheck a hell of a lot less than Altman does. When the day arrives that two or more bots take over so much of Zuckerberg’s former duties, exactly what value will he provide the company?

Well, like the FT said, he’s coding. Can you code? I cannot. So that’s worth something. Zuckerberg is probably very good at it! But at this late date, Meta must surely employ scores of people who do it much better. So it’s really not worth Zuckerberg’s (very expensive) time to do this work.

OK, maybe Zuckerberg needs more time to think Big Thoughts. Zuck built a gigantic company digitizing Harvard’s red-bindered Freshman Register, informally known as The Facebook; removing the “The”; then peddling its snob appeal to other colleges and eventually to all humanity. If you’d asked me the one time I met him (way back in 2005) whether this venture would yield a vast fortune, I’d have told you no. So obviously Zuckerberg possessed a few insights I lacked.

But more recently, Zuckerberg’s Biggest Thought was the Metaverse, a creepy virtual-reality realm in which we would all use avatars to shop, argue, bank, date, get scammed, etc. The Metaverse was a flop that cost the company a reported $80 billion over five years before flesh-and-blood Zuck finally threw in the towel last month. Even Meta employees reportedly disliked using the company’s V.R. headsets.

What exactly is it CEOs do, anyway? Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria spent more than a decade examining this question, reporting their findings in 2018. One surprising data point was that during the week, chief executives don’t work very many more hours than the rest of us: 48.5 hours, versus 44 hours for schmucks like you and me. They work through the weekend, though (79 percent of weekend days, averaging about four hours per day), and also on vacation (70 percent of vacation days, averaging about 2.4 hours per day). This suggests chief executives need to develop a digital doppelgänger to interact with their wives and children (and yes, sometimes with their husbands, though only about 10 percent of Fortune 400 CEOs are women, and less than 1 percent are gay men).

Porter and Nohria’s least surprising data point was that chief executives spent 72 percent of their time in meetings. Sixty-one percent of their interactions were face-to-face, and only 24 percent were electronic (typically email). Probably today, post-Covid, those numbers have flipped. In any event, the bulk of a chief executive’s job appears to be those very duties Zuckerberg is looking to off-load.

My findings here are tentative, but I’ll venture to estimate at least half of all Fortune 500 executives today should be replaced by AI bots tomorrow, their stock options and salaries to be distributed among all those close-talking, lapel-grabbing employees Zuck is moving heaven and earth to avoid. These mass layoffs will prompt many howls of outrage among the top 0.1 percent. But as those same corporate leaders have told us so many times in the past: We’re running a business here, bub, not a charity.

Seven Democrats joined every Republican in the Senate to vote against a resolution blocking the sale of bulldozers to Israel, given their role in razing Gaza to the ground. The resolution failed by a vote of 59-40. Another resolution to block the transfer of 1000-pound bombs failed by a vote of 63-36, with 11 Democrats voting against.

Despite protests at their offices on Monday urging them to support the resolution, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand still voted against both resolutions.

This was the latest in a series of efforts by Sanders to halt weapons sales to Israel, which is bombing Lebanon and Iran with U.S. weapons and continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank despite a ceasefire, exacerbating an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Israel is also accused of encouraging ethnic cleansing against Shia Muslims in southern Lebanon.

“Under Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, we’ve seen an expanded war in Lebanon that is putting innocent Lebanese civilians at risk, and ongoing violence against Palestinians and their homes being demolished in the West Bank,” said Senator Mark Kelly, who had voted against Sanders’s previous two resolutions against weapons sales to Israel. “All of this has undermined the path forward for peace.”

Last July, 19 Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blocked Sanders’s last attempt. This time, Kelly was among the Democratic senators who changed their minds and voted for the resolution, taking into account that the resolutions are intertwined with President Trump’s unpopular war in Iran. A vote to continue weapons sales, which include $150 million in 1,000-pound bombs and $300 million in bulldozers, could be seen by voters as an endorsement of the war, which has hurt the economy and caused gas prices to skyrocket.

Here is the full list of Democrats who voted to continue sending bombs to Israel, with those who voted against both resolutions in bold:

1. Richard Blumenthal (CT)
2. Chris Coons (DE)
3. Catherine Cortez Masto (NV)
4. John Fetterman (PA)
5. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY)
6. Gary Peters (MI)
7. Jack Reed (RI)
8. Jackie Rosen (NV)
9. Chuck Schumer (NY)
10. Mark Warner (VA)
11. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI)

* This article has been updated to clarify the number of resolutions and how Democrats voted on each one.

Alvin Brown, a Democratic member of the National Transportation Safety Board nominated by President Biden, was fired from his post in May 2025. In his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court on Tuesday, Brown said that political differences couldn’t have been the main reason for his firing from the NTSB. Brown’s lawyers, who work for the Democracy Forward Foundation, also claim that 75 percent of Black officials at independent agencies have been fired under Trump.

“Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB cannot be explained by the fact that Mr. Brown is a Democrat and President Trump might have wanted to exert Republican control over the Board,” the lawsuit states. “At the time of Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB, there were two other Democrats serving on the Board.”

Since Brown’s firing was racially motivated, the lawsuit alleges, it “therefore violated Mr. Brown’s constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment.” The lawsuit also points to people of color being dismissed at agencies including the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the Library of Congress.

The lawsuit cited Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and the fact that Brown’s replacement, John DeLeeuw, is white.

“President Trump has removed Black Senate-confirmed appointees; he has either nominated a non-Black individual for their replacement or has not formally replaced them at all,” the lawsuit states. “This trend fits with President Trump’s consistent messaging criticizing diversity and inclusion and his clear and demonstrable emphasis on hiring white people.”

Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to block a resolution that would have stopped Trump from taking further military action in Iran without the express approval of Congress. The vote was 47–52, largely along party lines, with Senator Rand Paul joining the Democrats, and Senator John Fetterman siding with Republicans.

Some Republicans, however, expressed that they were nearing their breaking points. 

“I hope that we are arriving at an exit strategy here to bring this to a close to preserve our security interests and bring down the cost of gasoline. They’re very high. Very, very high,” said Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. 

Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon as crude oil has climbed to more than $100 per barrel, placing a significant strain on Americans’ pocketbooks. Trump’s blockade of Iranian ports will only send prices higher.

It’s been 47 days since Trump first struck Iran. That means he has less than two weeks to acquire support from Congress. The War Powers Act states that the president can legally deploy armed forces in a hostile environment for a period of 60 days without congressional approval.  

South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said that if Trump expects Congress to support the conflict beyond the 60-day window, then the administration should be prepared to “come in and give us a full description of it and sell the point and the plan.”

“We’ve got to start answering questions,” said North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis. “The 60-day target is what I’m looking at.”

Earlier this month, Utah Senator John Curtis had warned Deseret News, “I will not support ongoing military action beyond a 60-day window without congressional approval. I take this position for two reasons—one is historical, and one is constitutional.”

The verdict was reached after four days of deliberations in a closely-watched trial in New York federal court. It comes after years of criticism of Live Nation’s predatory ticketing practices, and will likely completely change the face of the music industry from here on out. It also ends a long antitrust battle against Live Nation that Merrick Garland’s DOJ began in 2019.

The Department of Justice and 40 states sued Live Nation in 2024 for controlling “virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem” along with Ticketmaster. In a move that surprised many of the states, and even the judge overseeing the case, Trump’s Justice Department decided to settle with Live Nation a week into trial for $281 million. Judge Arun Subramanian called the move “totally unacceptable,” given the lack of transparency from the DOJ. To make matters even worse, a whopping 34 of the 40 states involved rejected the settlement and chose to continue the trial without the DOJ’s help.

This story has been updated.

Republican Representatives María Elvira Salazar (Florida), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania), Mike Lawler (New York), Don Bacon (Nebraska), Carlos Giménez (Florida), and Nicole Malliotakis (New York) voted alongside 212 House Democrats and one independent to advance a vote to extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitians for three years.

“I have one of the largest Haitian populations in the country in my district,” Lawler told The Washington Post. “If you end [temporary protections] without addressing work authorization, it will cause a huge crisis in our health care system, especially in an area like mine, where a lot of our Haitian TPS holders are nurses.”

The minority party utilized a discharge petition to bring the issue to the House floor, circumventing the whims of House Speaker Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.

Politicians across the country have argued that ending TPS for Haitians would threaten the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of families, disrupt state economies, and jeopardize the futures of the population’s American-born children.

Haitians have become a favorite target of the MAGA movement in recent years. In 2024, several prominent members of the party—including then–vice presidential candidate JD Vance—hurled racist and baseless accusations against Haitian immigrants in Ohio, claiming that they were causing “constant car crashes” and were capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets.

The Trump administration set an effective end date for TPS for Haiti of September 2, 2025, a decision that was expected to affect more than 348,000 people in the U.S. But the effort has since been held up in the judiciary as lower courts stepped in to prevent the suspension.

The admin has appealed the matter to the Supreme Court, which will hear the government’s argument on April 29. Nineteen attorneys general have jointly filed an amicus brief imploring the nation’s highest court to uphold Haitians’ legal status.

USA Today and Zeteo, both citing anonymous sources, report that the Pentagon is ramping up planning for a military operation in Cuba, should Trump make the call. Zeteo noted that the order came straight from the White House.

Trump has been threatening Cuba for months now, and in January signed an executive order imposing tariffs on countries that attempted to send oil there, essentially imposing a catastrophic oil blockade on the island. On Monday, he said that “we may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” in reference to his war on Iran, which still has no tangible end in sight. And last month, Trump said of Cuba that “it may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter.... They have no energy. They have no money. They’re in deep trouble on a humanitarian basis.”

Trump’s oil and aid blockade of Cuba has caused rampant human suffering on the island, as Cubans have experienced blackouts, food shortages, and inflation. While the Trump administration has framed this economic strangling as a liberatory endeavor, this kind of military escalation in a country that hasn’t been a threat in decades points to plans to impose its own agenda on Cuba and the rest of the Western hemisphere.

In June, Lee introduced a controversial measure to sell off 4.2 million acres of public land as an amendment to Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, after consulting with the Department of the Interior, Public Domain reported Wednesday.

The agency shared technical data about the proposal with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, of which Lee is the chair, according to internal emails obtained by the Wilderness Society. The department also offered feedback on the proposal, which Lee used to craft talking points and respond to concerns.

In one email chain on June 10, Chris Prandoni, the committee’s deputy staff director, asked two Interior Department staffers to approve a quote that would accurately reflect the agency’s research.

“This is the quote I’ve been working up with your guys to accurately reflect your research: ‘The Department of the Interior estimates that the Bureau of Land Management has about 1.2 million acres of land within 1 mile of a population city center and another 800,000 acres within 1-5 miles of a population center. Much of this land may qualify for disposal under this section,’” Prandoni wrote.

Jeremy Arendt, who serves as the Interior’s deputy assistant secretary of natural resources and infrastructure, urged Lee’s staff to “include a % of total acres this represents for [the Bureau of Land Management], which is about 0.7% of the total, or about 30% of lands within 5 miles of population centers.”

“Good to go on the quoted content. Thanks for running it by us!” wrote Greg Wischer, the Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management.

“Thanks, guys. See some of you all tomorrow,” Prandoni replied, implying that staff from the Senate committee would meet with Interior staff in person the next day, when Lee would announce his amendment to Trump’s massive budget reconciliation bill.

But just two weeks later, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tried to distance the Trump administration from Lee’s outrageous proposal.

“It’s not a central topic. I don’t think anybody is really thinking about it up there,” Burgum told Scripps News, later adding: “It doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill, because it’s not something that’s—it wasn’t part of the president’s agenda to be part of this bill in the first place.”

Ultimately, Lee’s massive sell-off wasn’t included in Trump’s behemoth budget bill. But contrary to what Burgum said, the privatization of federal lands is definitely a part of Trump’s agenda, even if it wasn’t for that particular bill.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which represents Catholic leaders across the country, issued a statement Wednesday from its chairman on doctrine, Bishop James Massa, in which he defended the pope’s opposition to the Iran war.

“For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war,” Massa said in his statement. “That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’”

Massa said that the pope wasn’t just “offering opinions on theology” but “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.”

President Trump called the pope “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy” in a Truth Social post Sunday, and Vance, who converted to Catholicism seven years ago, tried to defend him at Tuesday’s event in Georgia, claiming that God supports just wars—a stark contrast to the pope’s assertion that “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.”

“Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?” Vance said to a sparse crowd. “I certainly think the answer is yes.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed the same talking point on Wednesday, saying that “there’s something called the just war doctrine” and it is a “very well settled matter of Christian theology.”

Meanwhile, the U.S.-led war in Iran has killed an estimated 1,700 civilians in the country and damaged at least 17 Iranian health care facilities and 22 schools. Perhaps Vance and his boss in the White House need to take some moral direction from higher authority on what a just war actually is.

Arizona Representative Yassamin Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against the Pentagon chief Wednesday, accusing Hegseth of repeatedly violating his constitutional oath.

“Pete Hegseth broke his oath to the Constitution, put U.S. troops at grave risk through the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, engaged in abuse of office and conduct beneath the dignity of his office, and carried out unlawful military actions despite his obligation to refuse—including strikes on civilians and a girls’ school in Minab, Iran,” Ansari said in a statement.

The text of the articles claims that Hegseth engaged in “high crimes and misdemeanors” when he obeyed Donald Trump’s orders, initiating a war against Iran without congressional approval.

“Only Congress can declare war; his actions demand immediate removal,” Ansari wrote on X.

Ansari also accused Hegseth of demonstrating a “willful disregard” for the Constitution, a willingness to abuse the powers of his office, and reckless endangerment of American servicemembers deployed in the Middle East. She further argued that Hegseth’s relative incompetence fronting the war effort caused thousands of civilian casualties.

But his actions in the Iran war were not the only topic of concern. Ansari also said that Hegseth had inappropriately politicized America’s military, and that he had broken the established rules of engagement by approving illegal “double tap” strikes on noncombatant boats in the Caribbean. She even alluded to the March 2025 Signalgate scandal, claiming that Hegseth had “demonstrated gross negligence” in his handling of classified military information.

A dozen other liberal representatives cosponsored Ansari’s bill: Sarah McBride (Delaware), Lauren Underwood (Illinois), Al Green (Texas), Steve Cohen (Tennessee), Jasmine Crockett (Texas), Nikema Williams (Georgia), Dina Titus (Nevada), Dave Min (California), Shri Thanedar (Michigan), Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico), Mike Quigley (Illinois), and Brittany Pettersen (Colorado).

This story has been updated.

Tillis came up while Bartiromo asked the president if he’d have enough support in the Senate to confirm his preferred replacement for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Board of Governors member Kevin Warsh.

“And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? You think Thom Tillis is gonna give you a vote—”

“Well, we’re gonna have to find out, he might not. But that’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator,” Trump replied. Tillis is very much still a senator, although he’s stated he won’t seek reelection in 2026.

“OK,” Bartiromo said, staring blankly at Trump before trying to change the subject. But he didn’t let her.

“Thom Tillis is no longer a senator right, he quit?”

“Well, he’s on his way out.”

“But he quit.”

This isn’t just some minor slipup. As Bartiromo herself said, Tillis could stand in the way of more than a few of Trump’s goals, from confirming the next Fed chair and attorney general to passing his desired budget. In this same interview, Trump claimed that Ginsburg died after his 2020 election loss, when in fact she died a month before. The whole interview added yet another chapter to Trump’s long record of mental instability.

Trump: Thom Tillis is no longer a senator.

Bartiromo: ...

Trump: Thom Tillis is no longer a senator, right? pic.twitter.com/8TFou0Q8v6

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) April 15, 2026

“A pontiff or any religious leader can say anything they want, but obviously if you wade into political waters, I think you should expect some political response and I think the pope has received some of that,” Johnson said Wednesday.

Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened an ambassador of the Holy See in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. In the days since that report, Donald Trump has fired off several antagonistic comments against the leader of the Catholic Church, repeatedly trying to sour the pope’s reputation by claiming that Leo is “terrible for foreign policy” and “weak on crime.” That is despite the fact that religious leaders are neither responsible for foreign policy nor in charge of lowering crime rates.

“I was taken a little bit aback, just honestly, frankly, by something that he said, I think he said several days back, something about ‘those who engage in war, Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers’ or something,” Johnson continued.

The Republican House leader was referring to the pope’s Palm Sunday Mass, in which the pontiff said that “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Johnson went on to preach against the highest Catholic’s teachings, claiming that it’s a “very well settled matter of Christian theology” that war is sometimes justified, and invoking the “just war” doctrine within military ethics.

The House speaker added that Iran was the “largest sponsor of terrorism” in the world and that the Trump administration’s siege had potentially saved “millions of innocent people” from “being killed by terrorists.”

The war has so far cost the lives of more than 3,000 people in Iran, including dozens of political leaders, reported Reuters. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have also been killed, and nearly 400 have been wounded, according to U.S. Central Command.

Meanwhile, gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon. In five states—California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—gas has risen above an average of $5 a gallon. The soaring price has driven up the cost of practically everything else, as inflated transportation and shipping costs get off-loaded to the customer.

Trump imposed a formal blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil tradeway between Iran and Oman, on Tuesday, and has promised repeatedly that the war is “very close to being over.” In the same breath, however, he added that his administration is “not finished” with Iran.

“We’ll see what happens,” Trump told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo Wednesday.

The Washington Post reports that about 6,000 troops are heading to the region on the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier, and about 4,200 troops from the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group and 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which can conduct limited ground operations, will arrive in the region at the end of the month. There are already an estimated 50,000 U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, and a two-week ceasefire with Iran is set to expire April 22 unless a peace deal is reached.

Negotiations between Iran and the U.S. could resume this week in Pakistan after hitting an impasse over nuclear enrichment. But Trump’s new blockade on Iranian ports, aimed at forcing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by squeezing its economy, may not help the situation. Still, the president told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that he thinks the war with Iran is “close to over, yeah. I view it as very close to being over.”

“You know what? If I pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild that country, and we’re not finished. We’ll see what happens. I think they want to make a deal very badly,” Trump said.

BARTIROMO: You keep saying 'was.' Is this war over?

TRUMP: I think it's close to over, yeah. I view it as very close to over. If I pulled up stakes right now, it would take them 20 years to rebuild that country. And we're not finished. We'll see what happens. I think they want… pic.twitter.com/X9aNELvyRA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2026

Is Trump planning to escalate the war by sending more troops, or is he trying to intimidate Iran into agreeing to terms more favorable to the U.S.? It’s impossible to say, as Trump is unpredictable and impatient. In fact, it was he who begged for the ceasefire in the first place. The question is whether he’s willing to continue an unpopular war that’s hurting the economy and his poll numbers.

Speaking to CNN Tuesday evening, Marshall was asked if he actually expected his constituents to buy into his earlier claim that national security was “more important than your pocketbook.”

Marshall insisted that Kansans understood the “long game,” and that things could be a lot worse if the United States had not attacked Iran.

“I would argue that if Iran ever had nuclear weapons, and then they controlled the Strait of Hormuz, that gasoline would be $10 a gallon,” Marshall said. “The good news, what gas in America right now is $3.14 a gallon on average, something—oh no, $4.14, forgive me, $4.14 a gallon. In Europe right now it’s $7 a gallon. So, it’s not great. I’m concerned about it.”

Sen. Roger Marshall: "The good news, ah, what gas in America right now is $3.14 a gallon on averag-- no no, $4.14 a gallon, forgive me. $4.14 a gallon. In Europe right now it's $7 a gallon. So it's not great, I'm concerned about it. The good news is we're the largest oil producer… pic.twitter.com/MT4dCZEop1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

Of course, experts say Iran was nowhere near having nuclear weapons. And while the country didn’t control the flow of trade through the Strait of Hormuz before, it certainly does now.

Meanwhile, the “short-term sacrifice” Marshall describes is hurting Americans—and his own party’s chances at reelection. A recent poll from CBS News/YouGov found that 51 percent of Americans found gas prices presented a significant financial hardship. At the beginning of April, Donald Trump’s approval on the economy hit a new low, and gas prices have only continued to climb.

But Marshall claimed there was an upside to paying more at the pump.

“The good news is we’re the largest oil producer in the world right now. That we’re a net exporter,” he said, as if average Americans would ever benefit from oil executives’ war profiteering. That’s sure to be a winning message for the midterm elections in November—hey, we should get this guy a regular spot on Fox News!

“Look at [what] happens to Justice Ginsburg. She was not exactly a young woman. The election was taken. They had a Democrat who could’ve appointed a liberal justice—and the liberals do stick together, that’s one thing about those justices, they stick together like glue, not like the Republicans,” Trump said in an interview that aired on Wednesday morning. “But she decided that she was gonna live forever, and about two minutes after the election, she went out. And I got to appoint somebody.… She really hurt herself within the Democrat Party.”

a very confused Trump: "Look at Justice Ginsburg. She was not exactly a young woman. The election was taken. They had a Democrat who could've appointed a liberal justice. About two minutes after the election, she went out." (Ginsburg died in September 2020, when Trump was… pic.twitter.com/6Hw6bQzlaE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2026

Trump is very wrong here. Ginsburg died in September 2020, well before the general election, and he replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett before his 2020 election loss, which went directly against Ginsburg’s dying wish.

Trump shared the factually incorrect story in response to a question about the possibility of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, 76, stepping down while Republicans still control the Senate—appearing to warn the justice that his time is at an end.

The flub is a cherry on top of what has been an absolutely awful few weeks for Trump’s mental fitness, and it’s only Wednesday. From his weird AI posts depicting himself as or with Jesus Christ, to saying the pope is “weak on crime,” to threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, the president seems to be unraveling at a faster rate than usual.

It’s shocking that Trump could even forget Ginsburg’s death. His raw, cinematic reaction to it on an airport tarmac—with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” playing in the background—was perhaps one of the most iconic moments of his first term.

Gorka, a former Breitbart News editor and conservative radio personality, has served as a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council since January 2025.

The London-born Hungarian has been a fixture in Donald Trump’s inner circle since 2017, though his appointment to Trump’s first administration came as a surprise to many in his field. Gorka had previously been known for his extremist Islamophobic views, which relegated him to the fringes of Washington. Even during Trump’s first term, Gorka’s work was stunted after he failed to obtain the security clearance necessary to actually work on national security issues.

The position at the National Counterterrorism Center has been open since Joe Kent resigned last month over the war in Iran. In his exit letter, Kent argued that Iran “posed no imminent threat” to the U.S., and that there was no available intel suggesting that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Gorka does not agree. Last month, he told the Council on Foreign Relations that he believed Operation Epic Fury would “solve perhaps the most trenchant and strategic terrorist threat the world faces today.”

Four people familiar with Gorka’s potential political ascension told The Washington Post Wednesday that it would give him “broad powers over the country’s vast counterterrorism apparatus.”

His influence could make the country a hostile place for anyone the administration deems a leftist. At the National Security Council, Gorka has advocated to expand the definition of terrorist threats to include far-left groups. His work bore a result: In September, the White House branded antifa—a catchall for self-described antifascists—a terrorist organization. The executive order deemed antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” although the Post reported that no such label exists in federal law.

Speaking to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo in an interview that aired Wednesday morning, Trump dodged a question about his “top priorities for the economy” for the rest of the year, insisting that the economy was already in great shape.

“To be honest, we are doing so well. You look at this. I hit the 50,000 Dow mark, which everyone said couldn’t happen in four years. I did it in one year. I hit the 7,000 S&P mark in less than one year,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Now we have to do a little bit of a turn, a detour, to a place called Iran, and we have to stop them from ever having a nuclear weapon.’”

Unfortunately, Trump’s words were undercut by the Fox Business chyron, which displayed in glaring red and white graphics that the Dow Jones Industrial Average
wasn’t in great shape.

BARTIROMO: Moving to domestic issues, what are your top priorities now for the economy for the rest of the year?

TRUMP: To be honest, we are doing so well. You look at this. I hit the 50,000 Dow mark. pic.twitter.com/V8fkVgQZUx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2026

The Dow topped 50,000 in February, shortly before the launch of the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign in Iran caused it to crater, obliterating nearly all the growth Trump had seen during his first year. In the past several weeks, the Dow has gone back up, but the Fox Business graphic located just inches from Trump’s face revealed that the Dow futures market predicted that that level would drop yet again.

Trump insisted that the stock market was “almost as good as it was two months ago,” and that he was pleasantly surprised that oil was selling for $92 per barrel, saying that many had predicted it would be closer to $200.

But Trump’s assertion that the Dow is somehow the most important economic indicator is nothing short of delusional. Gas prices and inflation are up; employment and consumer sentiment are down. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval on the economy has hit a career low. How does he plan to address this? He doesn’t.

The president posted a screenshot of an image of him with Jesus Christ just days after coming under fire for making a post of himself as Jesus Christ. It’s a screenshot from an “Irish for Trump” X account that shows Trump and Jesus in a tender embrace, eyes closed, standing in front of the American flag with a celestial light shining behind them. 

“I was never a religious man,” the random caption reads. “But doesn’t it seem, with all these satanic, demonic, child sacrificing monsters being exposed … that God might be playing his Trump card!” 

“The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!” Trump captioned the screenshot. “President DJT.” 

These are the posts your senile uncle with deep religious psychosis posts on Facebook, not the president of the United States.

You’d think that Trump would abandon the Jesus posts after being criticized from all sides for his previous one—and for his strange beef with Pope Leo XIV. But he continues to put up these baffling images. And that caption? What satanic and demonic things has Trump “exposed”? His Cabinet has done more work to further obscure the Epstein files, he dropped an f-bomb on Easter Sunday, and is currently engaged in an illegal war with one of the oldest civilizations on earth.  

In an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday morning, Trump complained about a made-up scandal involving renovations to the Federal Reserve headquarters, and said he’d have to fire Powell “if he’s not leaving on time,” as his term ends May 15. But Trump’s replacement, Kevin Warsh, has not been confirmed by the Senate, leaving open the possibility that Powell will stay on as chair “pro tempore,” as regulations state.  

WATCH: 🇺🇸 President Trump says he will fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell if he remains beyond his mandate. pic.twitter.com/4o0NaoK06c

— Global Markets (@globalmarketss) April 15, 2026

Warsh’s confirmation hearing with the Senate Banking Committee is scheduled for April 21, but his nomination faces opposition from Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who has refused to confirm Warsh until Trump ends his investigation into the Fed chair. Powell himself said last month he would stay on until the investigation ends. 

“I have no intention of leaving the Board until the investigation is well and truly over with transparency and finality,” Powell said. 

Trump has complained about Powell for months because he won’t lower interest rates to the president’s liking. In Wednesday’s interview, Trump still tried to bring up his sham investigation into the Fed’s building renovations, even as it holds up his preferred Fed nominee. 

“Does that mean we stop a probe of a building that I would have done for $25 million that’s going to cost maybe $4 billion? Don’t you think we have to find out what happened there?” Trump told Bartiromo, adding that “it is probably corrupt, but what it really is is incompetent, and we have to show the incompetence of that.” 

This story has been updated.

The president posted a strange remark about America’s strongest economic adversary on Truth Social early Wednesday, claiming that Chinese President Xi Jinping will give him a “big, fat hug” when they see each other next month.

“China is very happy that I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz. I am doing it for them, also—And the World,” Trump wrote. “This situation will never happen again. They have agreed not to send weapons to Iran. President Xi will give me a big, fat, hug when I get there in a few weeks.

“We are working together smartly, and very well! Doesn’t that beat fighting??? BUT REMEMBER, we are very good at fighting, if we have to—far better than anyone else!!!” the president added.

Trump is scheduled to meet Xi in Beijing on May 14 and 15 to reopen trade talks, although this time, the United States does not appear to have the upper hand. Last year, the U.S. president aggressively repositioned the two countries’ trade agreements, imposing enormous tariffs in an attempt to strong-arm China into trade deals that he argued would benefit Americans. Yet foreign policy advisers warn that Trump does not have the leverage to continue that position this time, as the U.S. economy wobbles under whopping gas and oil prices and mass layoffs.

The meeting will be further complicated by reports that China has been cooperating with Iran since at least March 10, sharing military intelligence that includes the locations of U.S. troops and equipment and targeting coordinates. It is not clear why China began distributing intel to Iran, or whether the information exchange was the source of harm to U.S. forces. So far, 13 U.S. service members have died in the war.

China has also conducted cyberattacks against the U.S., and has been selling advanced air defense systems to Iran.

Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday morning, Trump explained that his suddenly fuzzy feelings toward Xi were related to a “beautiful letter” that the Chinese president had written him about the reported weapon transfer.

“I wrote him a letter asking him not to do that,” Trump said, “and he wrote me a letter saying that essentially he’s not doing that.”

Speaking at the University of Georgia, Vance was faced with backlash to Donald Trump’s Middle East policies up close and in person. While local activists expected a large crowd at the event, which was heavily promoted by TPUSA, the 8,000-seat arena venue was only a quarter-full. Videos and photographs of the event posted to X showed thousands of empty seats.

Six minutes to go and the scene is the same at the Turning Point event at UGA pic.twitter.com/rhnSrXcVCB

— Matthew Boedy (@MatthewBoedy) April 14, 2026

Despite the meager turnout, not everyone in the audience was a fan.

“How can you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword?” Vance asked, describing the liberation of Europe from the Nazis during World War II—a truly ridiculous analogy to Trump’s reckless war in Iran.

“Jesus Christ does not support genocide!” one audience member shouted.

“I agree, Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide, whoever yelled that out from the dark. He certainly does not,” Vance said.

“Why are you committing genocide in Gaza?” the heckler continued.

Vance: How can you say that God was never on the side of those who wield the sword…

Audience member: Jesus doesn’t support genocide. pic.twitter.com/ypaiyr295z

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2026

The crowd burst into boos at the interruption, and Vance insisted he be allowed to continue his point before he responded. A few minutes later, turning his attention back to the heckler, Vance lied that the Trump administration had ended the killing of Palestinians.

“So, if you want, sir, to complain about what happened in Gaza, why don’t you complain about Joe Biden and the last administration? We’re the administration that solved that problem.”

“You’re killing children!” the heckler shouted. “You’re bombing children!”

VP Vance getting heckled at TPUSA event

“You’re killing children!” pic.twitter.com/1rPZzghChb

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2026

Vance claimed that there was more humanitarian aid coming into Gaza now than anytime in the past five years. In reality, Israel is still severely limiting humanitarian aid into Gaza, and has closed all but one border crossing since the start of its military campaign in Iran.

When the U.S. supposedly mediated the end of Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza, the Trump administration turned it into a lucrative real estate deal, while clearing the way for Israel to continue its deadly strikes, oppression, and violent land grabs in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, in Iran, the U.S. and Israel are bombing children: At least 22 schools and 17 health care facilities have been damaged since the beginning of the war, when the U.S. conducted a missile strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab that killed at least 168 children.

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

Donald Trump is raging in all directions. After exploding at Pope Leo over his criticism of the war, he’s now lashing out at an ally, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Why? Because she sided with the pope on the war and because she won’t help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This comes as a new polling analysis shows him cratering with noncollege white voters, who are of course a critical voting bloc. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has a high floor of support due to his base. But what if he hasn’t bottomed out yet? We’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been writing well about the catastrophic politics of Iran for Trumpworld. Alex, always good to have you on, man.

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: Let’s start with some polling, because it’s amazing. CNN’s Harry Enten looked at an average of polls to calculate Trump’s approval with white voters who didn’t go to college. Listen.

Harry Enten (voiceover): We are talking about noncollege white voters and he is sliding right into the water. This is a “ruh-roh” moment, to quote the great Scooby-Doo. Trump’s net approving with noncollege whites. Look at this. In February of 2025, it was plus 32 points and now it is minus two points. That is a 34-point shift. And I will note this is an average of polls.

Sargent: So that was overall approval. Now listen to what these voters are thinking on the Iran war.

Harry Enten (voiceover): What about the war? Well, the war ain’t helping him because just take a look here. Noncollege whites, net approval rating of U.S. military action against Iran, minus five points. You think that’s low? Come over to this side of the screen. How about Trump on Iran? Minus 13 points, a very unlucky 13 indeed for the president of the United States with a key core group of his.

Sargent: Just to recap, Trump’s general approval with noncollege whites has slid by 34 points and he’s now underwater with them. On the war, support for it is five points underwater with those voters and support for his handling of Iran is 13 points underwater with them. Alex, that is something. Your thoughts?

Shephard: It’s just terrible. There’s always been this misguided idea that Trump’s support among the white noncollege, working-class vote is ironclad no matter what. That’s just not true. We saw this during the pandemic as well. But even during the pandemic, which basically did create a global recession, we did not see the president do this level of economic self-sabotage. The extent to which many people—myself included here—overstated some of the causes of Trump’s victory back in 2024, it’s really coming into the foreground right here.

The big thing that rode him to victory was inflation. And Trump is taking a number of actions right now to cause prices to rise. If you look back, the cratering support started at the beginning of this year, so all the way back in January—it predates Iran and it’s post-tariff inflation. That was the start of the erosion of white working-class or white noncollege support. Now Trump has basically quadrupled down on that by starting a stupid war for no reason that he’s now stuck in. You’re seeing things like, for instance, gas going up by 30, 40 percent in some cases. That is forcing people to reckon with what the president is actually doing here, and understandably they are recoiling.

Sargent: Well, Alex, I followed up and asked Harry Enten if Trump has ever fared this badly with noncollege whites in polling, and Enten told me that this rivals where he was with that demographic just after January 6. That suggests he’s at a low point with them, as you also said.

What’s critical to me here, though, is it isn’t just the economy. His base is cracking over the war, too. Maybe the perceptions of the war are colored very strongly by the impact it’s having on prices. But I also think the war is just filling the headlines with awful news and stuff that makes him just look like a preposterously ridiculous moron. And so this demographic is really souring on him over that as well.

Shephard: One of the reasons why a lot of Trump’s voters stuck with him, even amidst all the erratic fire and fury, garbage and nonsense of the first term, was that Trump’s outbursts—they were relatively low stakes—were about people that Trump personally cared about. In general, he was doing things that didn’t tend to affect people’s day-to-day existence. And for some voters, that erratic behavior only communicated the fact that Trump was a different sort of politician.

And again, the stakes were relatively low in the first term. If you look back then, as bad as things were, for the most part it largely amounted to a big tax cut pre-pandemic, a big tax cut bill that any Republican president would have passed anyway. Now what you’re seeing are those voters having to reckon with what those policies look like in the real world, in a way that they haven’t had to before.

They are having to actually see that this guy, Donald Trump, who claims to be breaking the system on our behalf, is actually engaging in another stupid Middle East war. He’s not explaining why he’s doing it. Every action that he’s taken since that war began has only made it worse. It’s only made costs go up. In general, people are looking at this with understandable wariness.

Where you look at a situation like the Strait of Hormuz, it’s impossible, regardless of your political beliefs, to not to be incredibly cynical about it and say, This is a situation in which the U.S. has managed to lose in the Middle East faster than at any time in our history—maybe even going back to when we were fighting the Barbary pirates or whatever. That also matters here.

For all of the talk about the president’s ability to communicate with these kind of low-propensity voters, there has not been any of that about this war. The things that have cut through to the mainstream are Trump tweeting that he’s Jesus or whatever. It’s not a rationale for going to do regime change in Iran. That’s because there’s no one in this administration that can actually tell you what they’re doing here. If you are a voter, what you will see is, for instance, I went on vacation two weeks ago and when I came back gas was a dollar and 40 cents more expensive than when I left.

Sargent: You got to the critical point there, Alex, which is that the Strait of Hormuz situation is just really legible to a lot of voters. It’s a choke point. A lot of important stuff passes through it. Trump has said that he will obliterate Iranian civilization to compel Iran to open the strait—and they didn’t open the strait. So people are wondering, What is this half-cocked lunatic doing? He’s threatening to incinerate tens and tens of millions of people, and it’s not actually forcing Iran to do his bidding. I really think the entire mystique is just cracking up over that. What do you think?

Shephard: They’re totally high on their own supply and they have been for a really long time. If you look back, for instance, at the Iraq War; that is a much more significant use of American manpower, but that war at least had a sort of fake rationale of providing democracy to the Middle East, and it existed as a kind of post-9/11 catharsis for people. Both of those things were legible. This war is just not legible.

It is legible when you explain to people that this is a longstanding Israeli preoccupation and that the Gulf States had their own reasons for wanting the U.S. to do it. But none of these parties could understandably take out the Iran regime themselves because they don’t have the military power to do it. So they convinced Trump to do it. Which is what happened. When you look at it more broadly, people understand that that’s what happened here.

Inside the administration, my general sense is that Trump believed that he had gotten in and out of Venezuela in this way, that he could just keep doing this, and that he is the sort of sole master of reality and he can declare victory whenever he wants. We’re in a situation now where Iran—our stated adversaries—are in a much stronger negotiating position than they were before. They can hold the United States economy hostage, and they know that Trump is terrified of that as well. But he also can’t get out of a situation in which he’s not the sole winner, which is already impossible here. That’s the bind that you and I and the millions of noncollege white voters that we were talking about earlier find ourselves in right now.

Sargent: Trump’s frustration over Iran right now is just white hot. After the pope criticized the war and Trump unloaded on the pope, the prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called Trump’s attack on the pope unacceptable. This really angered Trump. He said this to an Italian newspaper: “It’s her who’s unacceptable because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance.”

Alex, this isn’t just any pointy-headed European leader. Meloni is a member of MAGA International. What’s funny about this, though, is that Meloni didn’t understand that she’s not even allowed to defend the pope if it makes the ailing American despot look bad in the least. Trump has to be above the pope, even for the prime minister of Italy.

Shephard: And of course, we all know about the Iranian nuclear threat to Italy right now, too. This tells us something that is really interesting to me, though, which is that basically from the moment that Trump really emerged—especially since him and Steve Bannon linked up—there was this idea that they were the spearhead of this global far-right movement. This was back in June of 2016. After the Brexit vote happened, Trump was going around calling himself Mr. Brexit.

This is where a lot of the Viktor Orbán links come from, the Hungarian president who went down after 16 years basically of power over the weekend. There was this idea that they were part of this groundswell of the global far right, that populists were fed up with open borders, that they were fed up with bureaucrats, that they were fed up with people in faraway places like Brussels—which is ridiculous to me—dictating how to live, and that they were going to rise up. What we’re seeing is the crackup of that everywhere.

Look at Canada, for instance—Canada was probably on the verge of electing a Trump-esque figure last year. Trump comes into power, puts in these tariffs. Now you have a technocrat, Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of England, running there. Meloni is fascinating, because she is the furthest-right Italian prime minister since Mussolini. That’s not debatable. That’s crazy in its own way. But she has really had to dial back on her populism and conservatism because of the association with Trump and how toxic that is. What you’re seeing is that even among far-right figures, tying yourself too close to him is a problem. Of course, if the president attacks the pope and you’re the prime minister of Italy, you do sort of have to step in. But that again is the absurdity of this moment.

And once you speak out against Trump, you have this ridiculous situation where Trump is watching television on Sunday and sees these three American cardinals speak out against the war and then literally—kind of literally—starts a holy war right after that. And the reverberations from that are huge. But the Orbán defeat there is not immaterial to this—global far-right leaders are looking around and saying, This is a pretty bad moment for us. People are turning against this far-right populism that has been ascendant since Trump essentially walked down the escalator in 2015.

Sargent: I want to underscore what you’re saying by pointing out that when Meloni ascended, that was seen as a real sign that this global far right, this MAGA International, was really on the march. For her to have to really start distancing herself from the unquestioned supreme leader of MAGA International is a real sign that it’s just starting to crack. That, plus Orbán going down to defeat, suggests that the global right is on much shakier ground than it looked as if they would be. And boy, it happened fast.

Shephard: This was already baked in before Iran. Iran is the most catastrophic thing an American president has done since Iraq. It’s maybe worse in some ways, which is crazy to say. But what we’re seeing here is a huge global trend that is manifesting itself everywhere and seems to be manifesting itself here as well, though we won’t be able to see its results in full view until the midterm elections in November.

Sargent: Trump’s anger at Meloni is also over the fact that she’s apparently not willing to send military help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said this to the paper, speaking about Italians: “Do they like the fact that your prime minister isn’t giving us any help to get oil? I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong.”

Alex, I don’t know if Trump understands the situation at a basic level. The problem doesn’t appear to be that we don’t have enough military firepower. It’s that military firepower can’t force Iran to open the strait. Isn’t that the essence of this?

Shephard: The other thing, too, is what Trump is doing is psychological more than it’s strategic. He wants other people to take the blame here. He is trying to bring in NATO and the European Union, which have wisely kept their distance from this entire farce. The United States does not need help militarily to bomb Tehran, but it does need the help of other nations to end this conflict.

It needs the help of countries specifically that are not Israel to end this conflict. It needs those countries to help find an off-ramp, or to build one that is acceptable to the United States, Iran, the Gulf States, and the Iranian regime, to the extent that such a thing exists right now. Instead of trying to bring those sort of partners in to find a way out of this, Trump is alienating them and demanding that they share in the blame for something that is just colossally stupid.

Sargent: Well, to return to some stuff you said earlier in this discussion, there’s an interesting through line to all this. Trump’s MAGA allies in Europe are turning against him over the war—MAGA International is splitting over it. Meanwhile, Trump’s base is splitting over the war at home. That means MAGA in America is fracturing over it.

The scale of betrayal—in a way—of what Trump is ostensibly supposed to represent and what MAGA is ostensibly supposed to represent—never mind that it was always bullshit that they were antiwar, but they’re supposed to be that. The scale of this betrayal is at the point where it’s really seriously endangering a massive movement. I find that really striking. I’ve got to say, man, if this is what brings MAGA crashing down, then boy, is that a certain satisfying, poetic justice—aside from the fact that thousands and thousands of innocent people are getting killed.

Shephard: You’ve been seeing this sort of crackup—I’ve been writing about it for the last couple of months, especially since Iran started—it started with people that are all opportunists. They are almost all, or maybe all, antisemites. They are people like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly. But these are also people that were genuinely trying to intellectually backfill the notion of Trumpism with something that’s not just the president. The first schism was between people that were trying to come up with a meaning outside of Trump for this stuff. They left. You now have these true believers that just say, Well, MAGA is Trump, it’s whatever Trump says; it’s just a straight-up cult of personality.

But one of the things that you saw this week was, after the Jesus picture, people like Riley Gaines or these Catholic influencers—they were out too. That was notable to me, not because it will necessarily last, but you see how quick these people will leave now. If there’s a sort of exit door that cracks open, they will speak out about it. That’s a notable difference from the first term, where for the most part the Trump opposition on the right was from a more establishment or moderate wing.

What we’re seeing now—in some ways it resembles the aftermath of January 6—is that there’s a sense that he’s done. He’s a loser. He’s cooked. The people that understand that they are going to have to be fighting over what power in the Republican Party looks like post-Trump are starting to position themselves and sharpen the knives. That is something that I assumed was going to happen closer to the end of this term. But it’s happening right now. And it’s causing this accelerated breakdown of this coalition.

Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up, here’s the best part of all. JD Vance can’t do that. He can’t distance himself from Trump. He’s tied to Trump very, very tightly. All he can do is get dutiful reporters to write things in newspapers saying that really, really, he totally opposed the war, and at the same time, he is really loyal to Trump, so he’s going to stick by Trump because he’s a loyal guy, even if he has misgivings. He’s the guy who’s supposed to be inheriting this movement and this coalition, and it’s cracking up under him. Yet he can’t distance himself from the dark force, the vortex that’s causing the cracks to really radiate out in all directions.

It couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy. You wrote about this. Can you sort of take us through how JD Vance kind of manages this at this point?

Shephard: I’ve been fascinated with Vance more or less since I first came into contact with him via Hillbilly Elegy. He is one of our great opportunists and cynics and is a shape-shifter par excellence. What he’s been doing this term has been really interesting to me because he’s trying to build connections with these various sort of independent movements within MAGA—whether they’re this podcast crowd or the more intellectual wing. Certainly he has his Catholic conversion story and his upcoming memoir about that. So he has a religious conversion take as well. But one thing that Vance does not have, which Trump does, is an independent base of support within the party.

Where Vance is fascinating is that you’re seeing somebody who’s trying to figure out what a Vance coalition post-Trump could look like. And he, in the lead-up to Iran, basically said, OK, well, if I can keep my hands clean here—while Marco Rubio, his main rival probably for the nomination, has his fingerprints all over that—then he can go out and say, Look, Trumpism still works, right? We moved too far with it. This Iran thing is a mistake, but you can follow me and I will take care of all of that. That’s just not going to work at all.

As we’ve been discussing, he is tied to all of this. So what we’re seeing is that there isn’t a successor who can come in and just say, I am MAGA now. We’re going to do MAGA without Trump and it’s going to be even better—because Trump has never allowed somebody like this to flourish or prosper in any way. That also points to a kind of failed-state situation. Trump will be term-limited—he’s not going to hold on to power, I don’t think ... and you’re going to have these people that are fighting over the sort of scorched earth that we’re left in, which is $6 gas, a strengthened Iranian regime, no strong ties to Europe or even to the Gulf States, maybe, in the Middle East. And a country that is more isolated, weaker, and poorer than it was 10 years ago, solely because we elected this moron twice.

Sargent: Well, there is one other thing that Trump has that JD Vance definitely lacks, and that’s charisma. Which is also a problem because he’s going to need that to try to hold together all these different competing factions who, as you say, will have their knives out for each other. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Shephard: Thanks for having me.

So the answer to long airport lines isn’t, apparently, for Republicans to reach a deal with Democrats that funds DHS while also implementing ICE reforms. It’s simply to hand over airport security to the private market.

These proponents make claims that echo other arguments in favor of the private market—that it improves quality and efficiency—and note that the U.S. airports that employ private security screeners have run smoothly amid the shutdown. But there isn’t a lot of evidence that privatizing the TSA would indeed make airport security smoother and cheaper. It would, however, reduce the federal government’s workforce and possibly save on employee salaries and benefit costs, since TSA workers are unionized and private screeners usually are not. And that, perhaps, is why Trump and his ilk are so keen on it.

We don’t really know what fully privatizing the TSA would accomplish because there hasn’t been a ton of good data collected and analyzed about the private airport security that exists now. The TSA was created in the immediate wake of 9/11, replacing passenger screening that had been handled by airlines, which often contracted with private companies. But in 2004, Congress passed a law creating a TSA pilot program that allowed airports to apply to hire private companies to perform security screenings overseen by the agency. The Screening Partnership Program became permanent after the pilot ended, and 20 airports use it today. Most of them are small, but participants include San Francisco’s and Kansas City’s international airports. In a sense, using private companies to screen passengers goes back to pre-TSA days, but today they have to follow the same stricter rules and procedures that TSA screeners do, and they have to qualify to be a TSA vendor. There are 27 companies eligible to provide airport screening, and many also provide security for other government agencies and buildings.

The Government Accountability Office evaluated the program several times from 2009 to 2015, and Tina Sherman, who leads the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice Team, told me the evaluations suffered from imperfect data. “While it will save tax dollars if they take money off the books to pay private screeners and no longer pay the federal workforce … there are a lot of questions about just costs in general,” she said.

Early reporting from the program failed to account for the costs of things like employee benefits, and didn’t fully compare private company performance metrics to the federal government’s performance metrics. The GAO recommended in 2012 that the TSA regularly report that data to Congress, but there hasn’t been a comprehensive evaluation since then. So it’s hard to say whether the program is more cost-effective.

The law creating the program also required that private security operators prove they’re meeting or exceeding the safety standards set by the TSA, but they can’t exceed what it would cost the federal government to screen at that airport. One way those companies might save money is by cutting worker pay. The federal workforce is heavily unionized compared to the private workforce, and the TSA screeners’ union argues that privatization is just a way to cut pay and benefits. Nothing prevents private security screeners from being unionized, but it’s also not guaranteed, and rates of unionization in the private sector remain much lower than in the federal government. That usually does translate to lower pay and fewer benefits.

Sherman said one thing privatization wouldn’t change is the stressful and demanding nature of the job. She pointed to a 2023 GAO study on morale of TSA screening officers and found that they had low job satisfaction, despite a small improvement in morale from a recent raise. It’s hard for them to call out sick, take breaks, or find opportunities for advancement because of the demands of the job, leading to a lack of work-life balance and complaints about management practices. “This is a difficult job,” she said. Private-sector contractors face the same demands in the same environment. “Being at the airport, how the shifts run, the kind of customer interactions because everybody wants to just get on their flight, because all of the technologies and procedures for screening are exactly the same, even though the individual is being paid by someone else, those pressures remain,” she said.

Even if airport screening were fully privatized, the federal government would continue to oversee airport security and thus would still have to ensure that private companies are meeting the necessary standards—so there would still be federal workers involved and costs associated with privatization. And it’s not clear that there would be other benefits to privatization. Because airport screeners provide an essential service—public safety—it’s not easy to compare their privatization to other such efforts. But when other countries have privatized mail services, for example, the service level hasn’t measurably improved, and while some generate profits they also struggle in hard times, like many industries do. While screeners working for private companies aren’t subject to the current shutdown, they’re still vulnerable to the kinds of layoffs and downturns that affect private companies everywhere.

Republicans have been calling to privatize chunks of the federal workforce since the Reagan era, and the results have been mixed. Elliott Sclar, an urban planning professor at Columbia University, wrote in a 2001 book that it is too complex and inefficient to transfer some public services to the private domain. And he argues that Americans are so suspicious of the government that anything that could have been privatized likely has been by now. “The reason we have so little privatization despite two decades of an ideological full-court press to change that is because Americans are also pragmatists,” he wrote.

It’s worth considering that airports haven’t rushed to sign up for the program since the GAO last evaluated it in 2015, either. “They’re all essentially the same as the ones that had been operating a decade or more ago,” Sherman said. “This [program] has been available, but it’s not something that airports have necessarily taken advantage of.… I can’t opine at all as to why.”

It’s clear that the Trump administration has an ideological interest in dismantling the federal workforce, whether it’s good for the U.S. or not. This is the second time in Trump’s second term that a fight over funding has shut down at least some federal agencies, and voters increasingly disapprove of his leadership and that of the Republican Party. The administration likely doesn’t have enough goodwill from voters to make a big change like privatizing all airport security operations. The last thing Americans want at this point is for more disruptions when they travel.

HBO Max experienced a systems failure of its own on February 26. That morning, Netflix announced that its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery—which owns HBO—was off. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, which also had been vying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, had come in with an offer of $31 per share, and Netflix dropped out of negotiations, clearing the way for conservative mogul Ellison to finalize his takeover of yet another media conglomerate. Last summer, Ellison’s company Skydance merged with Paramount in a move to consolidate several legacy media assets under a new, Trump-friendly umbrella. The changes made to Paramount post-merger have been both substantively and symbolically significant; in particular, the axing of Stephen Colbert’s resistance lib version of The Late Show and the hiring of Free Press provocateur Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Ellison has stated that entities like HBO and CNN will continue to operate independently if and when Paramount Skydance completes its acquisition, but, if you’ve been paying attention, then you know to be skeptical of such claims.

So, as The Pitt’s second season comes to a dramatic end, we are left to wonder if HBO is coming to an end of its own. For over two decades now, HBO has sold a sometimes hyperbolically praised but largely exemplary vision of creative freedom and risk-taking. There have been ebbs and flows, and the network’s recent overreliance on spin-offs and existing IP seemed to foretell the beginning of its “enshittification” era. But, all the same, the network that ruined Meadow Soprano’s college visit to Bowdoin, chopped off Ned Stark’s head, and pulled the chair out from under Tim Robinson is facing its first real looming possibility of active outside constraint. What does HBO look like if it can’t do whatever it wants?

For obvious reasons, it would be too much to say that The Pitt is about Ellison’s looming acquisition of HBO’s parent company. It is, however, a show about a virtuous and brilliant group of workers whose vision and independence allow them to thrive even as their industry crumbles around them, destabilized by new, unregulated technology, corrosive financialization, and the broader cultural devaluation of their work. This is a state of affairs that might sound familiar to people who work in television.

Season 2 of The Pitt begins with Dr. Robinavitch, or “Robby” (Noah Wyle), riding his motorcycle helmet-less across one of Pittsburgh’s many gorgeous golden suspension bridges, looking forward to either getting away from work for a while or killing himself. It’s unclear which. While each season of The Pitt takes place over the course of one long shift, during which time a never-ending stream of almost unmanageable crises unfolds, a running refrain is that this is what every day is like in the ER. The Pitt is almost always in crisis; the people who run it are able to do so because they are, just barely, hanging on.

Robby, one of the ER’s attending physicians, has been right on the knife’s edge of breakdown since we met him. In the first season, this was largely the result of post-pandemic PTSD. Robby occasionally had to duck into a corner of the ER to have a quick panic attack, and the show intermittently cut to hair-raising flashbacks of the hospital managing the fallout of Covid-19. This season, his stress is more existential. As the boss of the Pitt, he is both its primary manager and its sin eater. Every horror and every mistake, no matter whose fault, makes its way back to his mortal ledger. This season, we find him lashing out at his colleagues—residents, charge nurses, interns—mostly, it seems, because he so acutely feels the weight of all the devastation for which he is, according to the org chart at least, responsible. And he feels the start of the unraveling that he fears might take place if he were ever to leave.

Understandably, he wants to go on vacation, and our second season tracks his—alleged—last shift before he takes a three-month leave to ride his hog out to the Badlands. So the mood is a little bit apocalyptic. Several of our young docs are nearing the end of their time in the ER, deciding what to do next. Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez), a wunderkind medical student, wants to continue her work in emergency medicine, for which she’s shown tremendous skill, but her parents—high-powered docs in the same hospital—want her to dream bigger. Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), a sharply insightful resident with an intuitive bedside manner, is coming to terms with the idea that the ER is going to burn her out in the long run. Arrogant new med student James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) is pondering the possibility that he has neither the stomach nor the improvisatory genius necessary to survive in this job that, prior to his shift, he thought was hack work. A longtime patient dies, and several docs witness the last goodbyes of a young mother in hospice. Charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) keeps trying to retire but can’t walk away. Her night-shift counterpart charge nurse has taken on a day job as a death doula. The grim reaper and all four horsemen are sitting patiently in the hospital waiting room.

All of this is complicated by the arrival of Robby’s leave replacement, Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), a bright and energetic physician who seems to be treating her stint as a sub in the Pitt as a project of institutional transformation. Within a few episodes, she’s established a new patient processing system, convinced several docs to try a new AI charting app, and even suggested that people should stop calling the Pitt “the Pitt.” Throughout the season, the show emphasizes that Al-Hashimi is a good doctor, giving her lots of opportunities to impress us with her virtuosic skill and her sometimes radiant empathy, but it also positions her as an outsider who only thinks she knows how this ecosystem works and what it means to its patients and its doctors alike. She can flag inefficiencies and minor rule violations and patient satisfaction scores, but that is missing the point, the show wants us to see. These are men and women of science, but what they practice is an art.

The counterpoint to Al-Hashimi is Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard), a nursing graduate being mentored by Dana. Wide-eyed where Al-Hashimi is steely, Emma is a sponge for the Pitt’s bespoke vision of medical care. Emma helps Dana meticulously and tenderly clean and prepare the body of a homeless man for viewing, even though they know no family is coming to view him; she stays beside Dana for hours as they prepare a rape kit for a sexual assault survivor (a multiepisode arc that’s one of the most patiently detailed and humane narrative achievements I’ve seen on TV); she gets choked and nearly killed by a psychotic patient; she gives another homeless patient a fresh shave and haircut that brings him to tears. By the end of the shift, she’s a convert. Everybody around her is ready to give up or die. Emma, who walks out the door begrudgingly late in the season—after her shift ends—never wants to leave.

The Pitt could very easily tell a simple story of antagonism: executives versus docs, insurance versus the patient, new technology versus human care, Dr. Robby versus Dr. Al-Hashimi. And there is, admittedly, a clarifying simplicity to some of the program’s moral stances. When a pair of ICE agents show up with a detainee they’ve tossed around, the staff stand united against them, and Robby drags them to hell on their way out the door. The show’s frequent rage about the inequities of the U.S. health care system seethes brightly out of numerous subplots this season. But just because The Pitt is about a virtuous group of hardscrabble heroes doesn’t mean it lacks nuance.

The series spits out Al-Hashimi’s AI initiative with disgust, but it also asks us to consider that her arrival is not solely a harbinger of doom. Robby is a valiant knight in the service of humankind; he’s also a mess. As much as Al-Hashimi might seem to represent the very forces seeking to destroy his model of care—it doesn’t help that she arrives as a favorite of the aforementioned hospital execs—she also represents the possibility that someone might genuinely share the burden of the Pitt with him. As the season rolls on, she seems increasingly eager to form a partnership with Robby, rather than a rivalry. Robby is, understandably, paranoid about interlopers, but his rejection of the relief that Al-Hashimi offers, the specter of professional intimacy with another person, seems more about him than about her. Is the Pitt killing Robby, or is he killing himself?

The Pitt, in other words, is not smug or strident, despite its righteous polemics and its portraits of tortured genius. What animates this show is a sense of excitement around artistic innovation; like the best of HBO’s offerings over the past quarter-century, it is a project that rewards attention, debate, the investment of time and emotion. What David Ellison’s cynical acquisitions represent is a flattening of the ambitions of media, whether it’s journalism or entertainment. Bari Weiss’s CBS wants to silence dissent under the guise of heterodox thinking, to produce propaganda under the guise of programming for “normal” Americans. Conservative critics of series like The Pitt might claim they are liberal agitprop, the dull vessels of woke ideology. But for those watching week to week, it’s clear this show is not the same kind of blunt force political object. It’s about a group of people whose job is to remain human within a system that does not treat them that way, to practice care within a system where care is understood as inefficiency. The Pitt can feel the end coming—perhaps its own end—but it also can’t, and won’t, stop.

I envy the confidence of those who publicly broadcast their faith in the TACO maxim in the lead-up to Donald Trump folding on threats to war-crime Iran. The ability to hold no doubt in your mind that Trump will always, inevitably, back down from his most unhinged threats likely leads to sleep more untroubled than mine. Trump does follow through on his ghastly ultimatums. He does not always chicken out. Look at the tariffs, imposed imperfectly but crushing us still. Ask the people of the Twin Cities. Or, for that matter, Iran.

Whether predictions that Trump will inevitably knuckle under are sincere or not, confidence always performs better than nuance. What I have to tell you is this: The only constant in Trump’s decision-making, whether he follows through on his latest insane idea or backtracks—either as a result of real-world blowback or his suddenly losing interest—is his enormous capacity for delusion. Anyone correctly predicting his action is the person who talked to him the soonest before the decision is announced.

The true line in Trump’s decision-making is not, unfortunately, some essential cowardice. It’s transactional nihilism. The transactionality is well documented, almost hilariously obvious. He conceives of every interaction as a means to some end. Newly apparent is the changeable nature of those ends. They are gaseous, conforming to the container of his last conversation.

Observe recent Polymarket trades: The most successful bets on Trump’s Iran reversal last week happened mere hours before he announced he’d stumbled back from the brink.

One user, who created his account seven hours before Trump’s Truth Social post about the ceasefire, made $200,000. Suspiciously well-timed bets are not just predicting whether and when Trump chickens out, either. Last month, The New York Times reported that hundreds of “eleventh hour” bettors made hundreds of thousands betting on Friday that Trump would bomb Iran on Saturday. (Last week, White House staffers got an email warning them to not participate in prediction markets related to domestic politics since, as one official told The Wall Street Journal, “Congress and other government officials should be prohibited from using nonpublic information for financial benefit.” Presumably this does not apply to the Trump children, who are investors in Polymarket itself.)

Trump doesn’t necessarily want to control the flow of oil or the strategic shipping straits, achieve peace, or get credit for forcing regime change. He wants all of those things, or none of them! Maybe he wants some secret other thing: a Big Mac, a blow job, the love of his father.

Crucially, because his own desires have no anchor, he cannot conceive that others hold wants and needs that can’t be dealt down, negotiated, shifted entirely. All offers and threats are contingent. Everything is just an opening bid. That’s how he can promise civilizational destruction and believe that walking it back should still result in good-faith negotiations.

I suspect he regards bombings themselves as no more consequential than a rejected settlement in a lawsuit—as long as he dangles the promise of helping to rebuild (it’s the second, more generous offer), how can victims hold it against him? He expected to dicker over the presence of ICE goons (while holding government funds hostage) with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey after the assassinations of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. He promises to “redevelop” a devastated Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” as if the problem was a lack of topless beaches and casinos and not food and potable water.

This is not the art of deal. Transactional nihilism is existentially unstable. Some opening moves can’t be undone. He seems to truly believe that his wholesale wrecking of the economy is just a temporary downturn and that Americans will be made whole after all the numbers go back up. He clearly holds a fantasy about tariffs leading to the magical reinvention of American manufacturing and the dissolution of the income tax. But there is no quick repair for how he has flippantly remade both household economics and large-scale institutions.

America’s academic and research infrastructure will take generations to rebuild, if they come back at all. A recent survey by the academic journal Nature found that 75 percent of U.S.-based career scientists are considering leaving the country, most commonly for Europe or Canada. Among postdoc students, it’s close to 80 percent. Then there are the researchers who won’t even arrive on these shores to start building our future: New international student enrollment in the United States fell by 17 percent in 2025, the largest single-year decrease in history. (An analysis by the National Association of International Educators posited that this drop has led to the loss of $1.1 billion in contributions to the U.S. economy and the elimination of 23,000 related jobs.)

The fears he has instilled about the future among ordinary Americans, the real-time physical terror he’s kindled in immigrants and queer people: These insecurities will undercut the way most Americans feel about the sturdiness of their democracy. And democracy, to function, needs some bedrock of belief that it has a chance to continue.

Voter disengagement and distrust in national institutions propelled Trump into the White House; now he continues to sabotage them from the inside. Ironically, the left’s best chance at ousting him lies in framing that distrust of the government as a reaction to abandonment by it.

All of Trump’s various bids and offers have meaning and impact. His blindness to this is why he was not a successful real estate developer. His transactionalism was not the great tactic over which he believes he has exclusive ownership. I was once a party to a real estate deal where the opening bid was so low it derailed the entire relationship. It triggered more lawyers, delays, a longer process, and a losing deal for all parties when an honest and fair starting point might have been a win-win. The insult resonated to the point where all anyone wanted was revenge. The transactional nihilism of my counterpart didn’t even serve his own purpose. For my followers of international relations out there, does this sound familiar?

This utter inability to imagine that threats and promises have meaning beyond themselves is likely what gives the appearance of ruthlessness—but ruthlessness implies a goal; “madman theory” still requires a rational goal to be worth the manic pursuit. Trump’s untethered id is monstrous, chaotic, morally empty, inherently untethered to any goals beyond the ego boost he receives from using power. An elite few have stumbled upon a way to use Trump’s vile eruptions to get rich or die trying. Most of us, alas, won’t have that first option. He may not be crazy, but he’s beyond reason.

Trump’s foreign policy has long been misunderstood because of its inherent incoherence. He came to power in 2016 by telling Americans what they wanted to hear. He had little interest in laying out a grand strategy or a bigger worldview beyond his promise to “Make America Great Again,” itself a slogan in which voters could hear what they wanted. His forceful criticism of the Iraq War, however, differentiated him from Hillary Clinton, who voted for it when she was in the Senate in 2002. But it was never all too clear whether Trump had opposed George W. Bush’s invasion or just thought his Republican predecessor should have taken the oil.

The president’s more recent turn to militarism has led to immense changes in U.S. statecraft. In the first months of his second term, he enlisted Elon Musk and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle America’s soft-power infrastructure, notably the humanitarian and development arm USAID, but also government-funded think tanks, media organizations, and other Cold War legacy programs. In Trump’s world, soft power apparently has little value. At the same time, Trump has dismantled the global alliance system. He has slowly chipped away at NATO, built a “Board of Peace” to counter the United Nations, and levied tariffs in contradiction of the global economic order.

Trump is known to cut bait on unpopular policies, but his war continues. The risk-averse president who turned away the jets from striking Iran in June 2019, much to the chagrin of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, is gone. In his place is a careless, casual warmonger, a leader who thinks that he can recklessly use force whenever and practically wherever he wants—and that his past track record of avoiding quagmires and entanglements means he can do so with few long-term consequences.

Bolton, the perennial hawk, has transformed himself into a critic of Trump’s latest misadventures. One recalls his candid admonition from 2022: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat—not here but, you know, other places—it takes a lot of work.” In his second term, Trump has embraced the coup—but not the work.

The president’s tendency to jump from conflict to conflict has made it difficult to understand where one war ends and another begins. But Iran and Venezuela are part of the same war—and that war is at the center of America’s foreign policy under Trump.

The first act of the Iran war, it must be noted, was the strike on a girls’ school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The fact that Trump can launch a war on a whim that has already killed thousands and is sending the global economy into shock is not so much an indictment of him—although it is that, too—but of the security state he presides over. It’s remarkable that decades after the Cold War, it’s still possible to stumble into war without guardrails or stopgap measures to get in the way. The national security infrastructure cobbled together in the paranoid, red-baiting moments at the end of World War II gave the American president the capacity to launch shadow wars; after the September 11 attacks, those powers were further consolidated. There has been no real accountability for war on terrorism part one, and so here we are barreling into part two, with terrorism even more vaguely defined.

Trump is also breaking conventions and laws from the era before that. Political assassinations have technically been banned since 1976, but Executive Order 11905 was not enough to stop Trump (along with Israel) from killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the same day bombs killed the students in Minab.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973, enacted in the midst of Nixon and Kissinger’s endless Vietnam folly to prevent the prospect of secret campaigns, like the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, is no match for Trump either. Congress has long undermined its coequal foreign policy–making powers. Democratic members failed to assert themselves over Venezuela and did little in response to Trump’s strikes on Iran last June. The most Democratic leadership has offered is procedural criticisms of the warpath-president. As Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement released on February 28, the day Trump launched the first airstrikes, “House Democrats remain committed to compelling a vote on this resolution upon our return.”

The multitude of U.S. military bases in the Middle East and environs makes them far too easy to use—and to become targets for adversaries in counterstrikes that lead to Gulf of Tonkin–level flubs. More than a month into the war, 13 American troops have been killed and nearly 400 injured. In late March, Iran showed further capacity to cause havoc by reportedly launching its first intermediate-range ballistic missile toward Diego Garcia, a joint U.S.-U.K. military base in the Indian Ocean. In Washington, however, the policy discussion rarely considers the deeper question of how and why the United States has a base on the island territory and other far-flung places to begin with.

And so a military budget exceeding a trillion dollars for the first time in global history can all too easily be augmented with a supplemental $200 billion for a new war. Republicans who are cautious about government spending can’t curb their appetite for military spending, which only serves as encouragement for the president’s militarism.

And the architecture of the disastrous war on terrorism had never been dismantled, including the potential surveillance mechanisms in place since the Patriot Act, the militarization of the police, and congressional authorizations for the use of force abroad. These all sit ready for new enemies, with an attendant domestic network of law enforcement powers that can be used to threaten critics of the war.

Meanwhile, the functional experts—in this case, apparently, the energy eggheads at the State Department, who may have warned that the Strait of Hormuz was kinda important—have been DOGE’d. And even if they were there, would the president have listened?

Nate Swanson, a career government official who worked on Iran policy in the State Department and most recently on the U.S. negotiating team, warned in essays that Iran would escalate. Since the United States attacked, he has warned that the war would backfire. Sage counsel. Too bad it appeared in Foreign Affairs, not in the Situation Room. Swanson was Loomer-ed last year.

One of the few constraints holding back the president’s war seems to be a shortage of weapons. When the undersecretary of defense (war) for policy, Elbridge Colby, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in early March, everyone came armed with their own questions and were listening for different things. Several investors and private-sector leaders I spoke with beforehand said they were there to hear about magazine depth—the stockpiles of munitions and the weapons production capability of the country. Stocks are low. This has major implications for Americans’ ability to fight multiple wars at once, or even this one.

Asked directly by the moderator, CFR president Michael Froman, about how depleted U.S. weapons are, Colby remarked, “Well, I just say up front that our armed forces have the necessary equipment to take on anyone and pursue the president’s goals and objectives. And nobody should have the impression that we’re somehow, you know, behind the curve.” The answer may have calmed some nerves, but the data suggests a more complicated picture. One study shows that the United States fired more than 5,000 munitions in the first four days of its war on Iran, a quantity it could take up to $16 billion and years to replace. What’s even more frightening is that supercharging weapons production, as most of Washington’s defense planners have been pushing for, would further enable more wars of choice. Rebuilding the defense industrial base was a major priority, for example, of Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and now presumably those bombs are a-flying.

Colby, who calls himself a “flexible realist,” is the Pentagon’s number three official and the author of the National Defense Strategy that was released in January. He argued in his widely read 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, that the United States ought to focus on countering China in Asia and dispense with its Middle East delusions. Yet here he was, a day after being grilled by senators on the Hill, presenting to the Washington establishment his staunch support for Trump’s war of choice. Colby took great caution to not make news or get ahead of the remarks of Secretary of Defense (War) Pete Hegseth; he regularly deferred to the president’s statements.

Critics speculated that he was holding back because of the immense contradiction between Trump’s war and Colby’s worldview. Or as Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian put it, “Resign, man. Have some self-respect. Resign!”

A simpler yet persistent constraint on the president seems to be his attention span. Early in the interview, Froman asked Colby, “Is Cuba next?” The council members in the audience laughed. Colby carefully explained how the president’s actions in Venezuela fit in with the published security strategy. Then he added, “One thing that people should calculate on and should factor is that the president … is not going to be bound by the sort of shibboleths of the past, if those are not consistent with Americans’ interests.”

When President Biden followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a ruthless war against Palestinians that many international organizations have documented as a genocide, not enough Democrats spoke up. Now, however, some are drawing a red line about Iran. “The Democrats are way better than they have been in the past,” Matt Duss, the former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders who’s now at the Center for International Policy, told me on the podcast I host, None of the Above. Duss cited Senator Chris Murphy as “a real standout here”: He has been sharing his (unclassified) takeaways from closed-door briefings, educating voters, and “making public the fact that this war does not make sense. It’s obviously illegal. It’s strategically stupid.”

The “No Kings” protests that involved millions of people in thousands of locations across the United States were motivated in part by opposition to the Iran war—but how much can a peace movement achieve? The students who fought against Gaza were silenced by law enforcement and university administrators, and Duss points out that historic protests in recent years, from Black Lives Matter to Palestine, had little effect on legislation. “Did it manage to move the needle on the policy? No, unfortunately not. And I think this goes to a bigger problem of just Americans having so few opportunities and ways and channels and levers with which to impact foreign policy decisions,” Duss explained.

A large majority of Trump voters (79 percent), meanwhile, favor declaring the Iran war a victory and getting out, according to a Quincy Institute/American Conservative survey fielded by Ipsos. Although the war is broadly unpopular, there is some reason to believe that little will shift public opinion unless its character changes substantially via the presence of thousands of U.S. ground troops. Until that happens, it is likely that the public will broadly disapprove of it, but that Trump’s base will back it—which is not a recipe for change in this administration, at least.

That has not always been the case. Nixon was much more influenced by pushback from the peace movement, mass protests, and public opinion than was previously understood, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg argues in her authoritative history of the Vietnam War, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia, which draws on newly unclassified documents.

In the book, Eisenberg revisits an iconic moment at Woodstock, where 400,000 attendees joined Country Joe and the Fish to sing in protest:

And it’s 1, 2, 3
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Open up the pearly gates
Ah, ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

In early March, when the United States was already in Iran and Venezuela, Country Joe passed away in Berkeley, California, at the age of 84.

Next stop is Cuba? Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.

“Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels?” he asked them at a campaign rally. “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán!” Vance was apparently not very persuasive: Hungarians backed the anti-Orbán party by such an overwhelming margin that it will have enough seats in the country’s Parliament to enact far-reaching constitutional reforms.

President Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran continues to disrupt shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing the global economy’s femoral artery. A ceasefire last week reportedly required the U.S. to accept Iranian control of the strait among other concessions, leaving the world with the distinct impression that the U.S. had effectively lost the war. Trump himself, however, was unconcerned. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” he told reporters on Saturday.

This is what happens when losers are elected to lead the world’s only superpower.

“Loser” is the president’s favorite insult. He has used it to describe, at various times, Rosie O’Donnell, John McCain, Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Graydon Carter, Russell Brand, Bill Barr, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron DeSantis, Paul Ryan, Joe Biden, Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, Michael Bloomberg, Sadiq Khan, George Conway, Hillary Clinton, as well as ABC and CNN. This is only a partial list, but I think you get the picture.

A loser is often not someone who is actually left behind, nor is it someone who simply failed at something. Failure is a part of life; it can even be the first step on the path to success. Instead, a loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, for example, Vance criticized his fellow conservatives for going soft on their own constituents. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations they had for their own lives,” he wrote. “Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.” His implication is that it is your fault if you’re a loser.

Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” Trump once wrote in a 2004 book. To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Trump, for example, often describes migrants in eugenic terms, claiming that they are “low IQ” or bring “bad genes” into the country. Conversely, he often describes himself as highly intelligent on genetic grounds. “Same genes, we have the genes,” Trump once said of an uncle who was an MIT professor, as if it were a credential for his own cognitive ability. “We’re smart people.… We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones don’t work out so well, right? But we’re no, we’re no different in that sense.” In 2020, The New York Times reported, he described a largely white crowd at a Minnesota rally as having “good genes.”

Fascism and loserdom go hand in hand because fascism is predicated on the notion that the fascist has been unjustly cheated and robbed, and that only through force can they restore and revitalize themselves. Fascists idolize losers because no fascist society has ever flourished and because they see themselves reflected in other people’s failures. It is fitting that Trump and his allies have lavished praise and public statuary upon Robert E. Lee, a Virginia-born colonel who is best known for leading a failed rebellion against the United States on behalf of a slaver aristocracy in the South.

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It helps that Trump’s administration is often populated by people whose worldview is driven by personal grievances against the world. Foremost among them is Vance, whose memoir sought to rationalize his impoverished background with his own sense of superiority. Vance’s Appalachian childhood was not an easy one: His father abandoned him, his mother remarried multiple times while wrestling with drug addiction, and his grandparents largely raised him. Even his own name changed multiple times.

That disjointed upbringing led Vance to define his identity in other ways. “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast,” Vance wrote. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

Vance’s description of a distinct Scots-Irish identity is far from baseless. Distinct cultural and religious communities settled America in the 1600s and 1700s, ranging from the Puritans of Massachusetts and the Quakers of Pennsylvania to the Reformed Dutch communities in New York and the Catholic dissidents of Maryland. What Vance attempts to describe, however, is some sort of Scots-Irish American Volk that is more authentic than anyone else. He then transmuted his perceived sense of cultural inferiority into one of apparent personal superiority for escaping into the affluent world of Yale Law School and a hedge fund backed by Peter Thiel, the far-right tech magnate.

Throughout his public writings, Vance has often sounded self-consciously haunted by his origins. In a 2017 New York Times op-ed about the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, Vance described the disappointment he felt with Bill Clinton—a “poor boy with a vaguely Southern accent, raised by a single mother with a heavy dose of loving grandparents”—after the president’s personal failings dragged down his marriage and his administration. “I cared that he had managed to build the domestic tranquillity that he lacked as a child,” Vance reflected. “But here, in one sex scandal, he had blown it all up. If a man of his abilities had done this, then what hope was there for me?”

He then contrasted Clinton’s failings with Barack Obama’s happy family life. The two men weren’t on the same political wavelength at the time. (That gap has now obviously become a chasm.) But Vance professed at the time to admire Obama for overcoming his own untraditional upbringing. “Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal,” Vance said.

“At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams,” he wrote. “For that, I’ll miss him, and the example he set.” Six years later, he would be elected to a Senate seat of his own in Ohio. Vance has built the family life that he once craved: He met his wife, Usha, at Yale and they now have three children together, with a fourth one on the way.

Despite these successes, Vance seems unsatisfied. Throughout the years he has denounced “childless” liberals and “cat moms” by claiming they have no stake in the future of the country and, therefore, should not decide it. He spent the 2024 campaign spreading a racist smear that Haitian refugees in Ohio had eaten people’s pets, a claim vehemently denied by local officials and by the state’s Republican governor. Though he is now one heartbeat away from the presidency, he has no real accomplishments in public life. His recent ventures on the world stage—which my colleague Alex Shephard described as a “hell of a losing streak”—have not helped matters.

Other far-right figures are even more openly troubled. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has spent the last year trying to reshape the U.S. military into a whiter, less politically neutral, and more religiously sectarian force. Hegseth had a largely unremarkable military career in the Army National Guard and rarely stood out while working as a television host on Fox News. But he did catch the eye of Trump, who elevated him to run the world’s most powerful bureaucracy.

Along the way, Hegseth’s Senate confirmation narrowly survived damning allegations of sexual abuse and harassment. In a 2018 letter, his own mother condemned his behavior toward his ex-wife during his divorce. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote. “You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” (She later recanted the accusations during the confirmation fight.)

Since being installed in the Pentagon, Hegseth has sought to redefine the American military along the social and cultural lines of a teenage Call of Duty voice chat. He oversaw the department’s rebranding to the Department of War, its pre-1940s name, and turned “lethality” into the reigning mantra. He has replaced judge advocate generals who might advise against military operations’ legality and restored medals to soldiers who slaughtered Native American women and children in the nineteenth-century frontier wars. Under his leadership, even the names of American military operations sound like something a teenager came up with. Hundreds of American service members have been killed or wounded in Operation Epic Fury—his latest creation.

In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth laid out his self-centered vision for the military. He described the nation’s service members as a “camouflaged class” of Americans who stand apart and above the sordidness of American society and politics. That changed, according to Hegseth, when Obama took office and began to impose leftist values upon American service members. Warfare and military service, in Hegseth’s eyes, are a credentialing process for masculinity itself, which the woke left had come to threaten.

“We used to see the dignity and value of men who got up early, made real things, lived by a code, and worked with their hands,” Hegseth wrote. “Cowboys were our heroes, as were soldiers, explorers, and astronauts. Now? It’s Tony Fauci and Michelle Obama who get the hero treatment. Careerist media-types only recognize so-called elite people like themselves.”

The persistent desire to overcome a young man’s personal insecurities radiates from the book. He recalled how a “stoic Vietnam veteran” told him when he was 19 years old, “Pete, whatever you do, don’t miss your first war.” He described that “the stark statement ricocheted around my brain like a stray bullet” and that he was struck by the “certainty that I had yet to hear in my short life, except from a pulpit. (And they didn’t teach that in church.)”

“Through those four words—don’t miss your war—he spoke of honor,” Hegseth continued. “Of duty. Of courage. Of God and country. Of the arena. Like an evangelical preacher of America’s civil religion—and like Teddy Roosevelt—he had been to the arena, and he was urging me.” America’s twenty-first-century wars, which involved long foreign occupations, building complex relationships with civilian populaces, and trying to suppress elusive insurgencies, must have paled in comparison in Hegseth’s mind to the pitched battles of yesteryear.

Hegseth then claimed that “coastal elites” had turned military service into a “passive-aggressive mark against a man,” blaming progressive presidents like Woodrow Wilson for the shift. (Yes, history is not Hegseth’s strong suit.) “This inversion has jettisoned a lot of attributes that virtuous men used to covet: honor, selflessness, courage, integrity,” he declared. “Instead, these values are replaced with optics-obsessed performativity, selfish careerism, effeminacy, and duplicity.” In Hegseth’s worldview, it is military service that confers dignity to the soldier, not the soldier who confers dignity to military service.

One does not need to be a veteran to sense that all of this doesn’t line up. The U.S. military’s ability to kill people has never really been in doubt; its greatest challenges over the past quarter-century have been mission creep, indefinite wars of choice, and poor grand strategic planning by the nation’s political leadership. Hegseth’s own oversight of the Iran war is both a testament to, and an extension of, these failures: U.S. forces killed numerous Iranian political leaders and severely reduced their conventional military strength, yet still managed to yield de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz to Tehran in the ceasefire.

Other personal grievances appear to have driven Hegseth’s monomaniacal focus on eradicating “wokeness” from the armed forces. In his book, he opened by recounting how he had been “deemed an ‘extremist’” by the military in which he had served for twenty years. “Yes, you read that right,” he added, apparently under the impression that this would be a surprise to most readers. “Twenty years ... and the military I loved, I fought for, I revered ... spit me out,” he wrote, complete with dramatic pauses. “While writing this book, I separated from an Army that didn’t want me anymore. The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either.”

What actually happened was that Hegseth was initially assigned to a D.C. National Guard unit that provided security to President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, only to be pulled after another soldier reported him as a potential “insider threat” for, as Politico reported two years ago, having a “tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.” While Hegseth claimed it was because of a cross tattoo on his chest, Politico reported that it was actually because of a “Deus Vult” tattoo on his arm.

A sense of betrayal permeates Hegseth’s version of events. “I could have stayed in, which would have required renewing my top secret security clearance—and an extensive background check,” he claimed in the book. “I’ve done it many times before. No sweat. I have nothing to hide. But, to put it plainly, I don’t trust this government, this commander in chief, or this Pentagon. That’s not to say the situation is permanent—hence this book—but my trust, for this Army, is irrevocably broken.” Given his perception that it defines his manhood, the shift must have been deeply psychically wounding.

Since taking over the Pentagon, however, Hegseth has largely validated those 2021 concerns about his ideological views. He approved new policies on facial hair that would disproportionately require Black men to leave the armed forces and oversaw a purge of the general-officer corps that largely affected generals and admirals who weren’t white men. Last February, Trump fired General Charles Brown, a Black man, from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after Hegseth previously called for his removal for pushing a “woke” agenda. According to NPR, Brown had supported policies that sought to “increase recruitment by attracting Americans from more diverse backgrounds.”

A common refrain from opponents of DEI is that diversity programs are anti-meritocratic because they elevate unqualified minority applicants. Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon suggests that the opposite is true: DEI policies help prevent qualified personnel from missing out on merit-based opportunities by virtue of their race or sex. Hegseth made a rare intervention last month in the Pentagon’s internal promotion system for flag officers, for example, to block two Black men and two women from advancing to a one-star general rank. The move was internally criticized by some Pentagon officials as overturning the department’s meritocratic processes.

For Hegseth, symbolism and aesthetics are paramount over results. His order to purge any Pentagon material that involved “diversity, equity, and inclusion” led the department in 2025 to briefly take down a website honoring Jackie Robinson, the World War II veteran who later broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. In his book, he made a pitch that he would later carry out. “The next president should also change the name of the Department of Defense back to the War Department,” he declared. “Sure, our military defends us. And in a perfect world it exists to deter threats and preserve peace. But ultimately its job is to conduct war. We either win or lose wars.” So far, under his tenure, it has been the latter.

I could go on and on. One can also think of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has squandered his family’s legacy of public service by demolishing the nation’s public health institutions and spreading anti-vaccine conspiracies that have and will cost lives. Or there is Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and the owner of a rocket ship company. One might think that would bring a measure of personal satisfaction, but according to him, it does not. “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about,” he wrote on Twitter in February, adding a sad-faced emoji at the end. Since his divorce in 2016, and especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, Musk has increasingly devoted himself to funding far-right causes, tweeting racist conspiracy theories, and turning Twitter from a useful public forum into a cesspool of AI-driven fascist slop.

Musk’s use of Twitter is particularly ironic, since his political evolution appears to be driven in part by the algorithmic forces he now commands. A central theme of the modern far-right political project is to make people feel like they are worthless and powerless so it can exploit the anxieties and resentments that come with that. One influential figure among young conservatives is Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist and sex trafficker. His hatred of women and minorities is perhaps his best-known attribute, but he also hates the audience of troubled and alienated young men that he has cultivated.

“You’re obsessed with [Grand Theft Auto VI] because you have zero cars, women, yachts, money, or action in your real life,” he wrote in a September 2025 post on Twitter, directed at his own fans. The only way to overcome your self-described inferiority, Tate evangelizes, is by inflicting harm on those you perceive to be inferior. “Being racist is one of the last things that’s fun,” he wrote in a February 2026 tweet. “It’s basically the only remaining reason to not kill yourself.”

Nigel Farage, a far-right politician in Britain, once described Tate as the spokesperson for repressed and “emasculated” young British men. “You three guys,” he said in a podcast appearance in 2024, referring to the hosts, “you are all 25, you are all kind of being told you can’t be blokes, you can’t do laddish, fun, bloke things.… That’s almost what you’re being told. That masculinity is something we should look down upon, something that we should frown upon.” Even Farage had to concede, however, that Tate “maybe took that alter-ego of masculinity too far in his relationships with women” and that some of his social media posts were “over the top.”

Other manifestations come from incel culture, which blames some men’s failure to form romantic relationships on women instead of the men themselves. This subculture is popular among young, insecure men who are typically at an emotionally tempestuous time in their lives. Part of their online radicalization is “blackpilling,” a term for embracing incel ideology that is derived from a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.

“It’s about a feeling of gleeful nihilism,” Elle Reeve, a reporter who wrote a book on incel culture, explained in a podcast in 2024. “That all of this is corrupt. It’s hopeless. Like society is irredeemable. And so the best thing you can possibly do is accelerate towards its destruction, because what comes after will be a golden era. You can remake the world the way it ought to be. And with blackpill thinking, you can rationalize a lot of immoral and unethical actions because the morals and ethics created by this society are totally bankrupt.”

These semi-adolescent ideologies often manifest themselves in adolescent ways. In the mid-2010s, one of the precursors to alt-right ideologies and Trumpism took the form of Gamergate, a targeted harassment campaign of feminist figures in video game circles. Central to the harassers’ grievances was the perceived infringement upon video games—which they saw as a traditionally white and male space—by women and racial minorities, especially as game developers sought to appeal to broader audiences.

The newest iteration is “looksmaxxing,” where young men injure themselves and self-administer drugs to supposedly improve their looks and reach some sort of aesthetic ideal. The goal, however, is not actual self-improvement but rather the humiliation of perceived lessers. Braden Peters, a 20-year-old influencer who goes by the name Clavicular, is the most prominent figure in this online subculture. He often seeks, somewhat strangely, to try to humiliate other men by standing next to those he perceives as less attractive and “mogging” them.

Looksmaxxing is not only unnecessary for improving one’s self-image and handling body dysmorphia, but it may be dangerously self-defeating and even self-destructive. Peters told a New York Times reporter that he thinks his testosterone treatments have left him sterile and that his goal is not to actually sleep with women, which would “gain me nothing,” he claimed. This week, after 60 Minutes Australia reporter Adam Hegarty questioned Peters about the incel community and his connections to Andrew Tate, Peters suggested that the reporter was a cuckold and that he would look into “who your wife cheated with.” Hegarty noted that he wasn’t married, and Peters ended the interview shortly after. (One might even say that he had been interview-mogged.)

This relationship between some far-right influencers and their audiences can almost be described as abusive in nature. The apparent goal is to make them feel weak and unwanted, to feel lesser than their peers and cohorts, and then to provide a false sense of community to soothe their insecurities—as well as an out-group to blame for any shortcomings. Trump and other leading far-right figures have sought to apply this on a national scale, holding out themselves as the only chance for salvation. “I alone can fix it,” the president declared a decade ago during his 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention.

In 2026, there is no social problem that the Trump administration says it cannot solve through mass deportations. Trump officials and right-wing policy wonks have sought to de-educate and de-intellectualize Americans by targeting universities with anti-DEI lawsuits, slashing federal funding for sciences and the humanities, and demanding ideological compliance from the nation’s cultural, entertainment, and journalistic infrastructure. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir and a Thiel associate, recently predicted that widespread adoption of AI products “disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less” even as it “increases the power, economic power [of] vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters.”

That is a dubious assertion on both fronts, of course, but it speaks to the aspirations of Silicon Valley’s increasingly illiberal caste of tech moguls. Destabilizing sources of economic stability is an opportunity for profit. “Brexit, just the beginning,” Jeffrey Epstein said in an email exchange with Thiel shortly after the U.K. referendum in 2016, writing with the poorly structured sentences that the financier and sex trafficker always favored: “return to tribalism. counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain.” The result, if they succeed, will be an ironic egalitarianism: In this far-right future, everyone will be a loser but them.

The New Yorker published a long article Monday about the medical neglect of children under Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown, and the story highlights Amalia, who was detained by ICE with her parents and sent to Texas’s Dilley Immigration Processing Center in December when she was only 18 months old.

At the time, Amalia was a healthy toddler with no known issues. The water at Dilley smelled strange, so her parents, Kheilin Valero Marcano and Stiven Arrieta Prieto, bought bottled water at the center’s commissary for her, despite having no income in detention. (The article noted that nonprofit organizations who work on immigrants’ rights, such as Human Rights First and RAICIES, have found that families detained at Dilley say the water there is “unclean, foul-smelling, and causes stomachaches.”)

Marcano also said that one child found a bug in her food in the facility’s cafeteria, leading other kids not to want to eat. Not long after that, children in the facility began to fall sick, including Amalia. In January, Amalia developed a high fever, and at the facility’s clinic, Amalia was given ibuprofen and her parents were told the fever was “good, because it means she’s fighting off a virus.”

But after two weeks, the fever persisted, and Amalia started vomiting and having diarrhea. Going back to Dilley’s medical clinic didn’t help, as Marcano told The New Yorker she waited in line on eight different occasions without her concerns being addressed. Marcano at one point gave Amalia a cold bath to try to lower her temperature, only for her daughter to pass out. She went to the clinic and shouted, “Are you going to watch my baby die in my arms?”

A few days later, the facility’s clinic measured Amalia’s blood-oxygen saturation levels, which are supposed to be between 95 percent and 100 percent for a healthy person. Amalia’s were in the low 50s, a level so low that it can kill off parts of the brain. This was enough for ICE to allow Amalia to be sent to a local hospital, and eventually a larger hospital in San Antonio, where she was diagnosed with Covid-19, RSV, bronchitis, pneumonia, and an ear infection. She got supplemental oxygen and intensive care.

Even in the hospital, ICE agents constantly supervised Marcano and Amalia, writing down when she spoke with the nurses, and even getting upset when nurses gave her a bag of clothes and hygiene items. After 10 days in the hospital, the pair were sent back to Dilley, and Amalia was prescribed a medicine to be administered by nebulizer, which her mom said was confiscated by agents.

Amalia and her family were released after 57 days in detention without Amalia’s birth certificate, her vaccination records, or the medication. Her story later showed up in a congressional hearing with then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March. But as the article states, Amalia was one of many children suffering from medical neglect in ICE custody, most of whom we will likely never learn about.

On Tuesday, responding to Meloni’s comment the day before, Trump told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that he was “shocked by her. I thought she was brave, but I was wrong.”

Meloni had said it was “unacceptable” that Trump called the pope “weak on crime” and “terrible on foreign policy.”

“The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and proper that he call for peace and condemn all forms of war,” Meloni said in a statement. Trump told the newspaper that “it’s her who’s unacceptable, because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance.”

The war in Iran is unpopular in Italy, and Meloni announced on Tuesday that her government has suspended a defense cooperation agreement with Israel. Italy’s continued refusal to join the war has left Trump fuming.

“They pay the highest energy costs in the world and are not even ready to fight for the Strait of Hormuz.… They depend on Donald Trump ​to keep it open,” Trump said.

Almost 80 percent of Italians say they are Catholic, and Vatican City, where the Catholic Church is headquartered and where the pope lives, is located entirely within the Italian city of Rome. The pope opposes the war in Iran, and told reporters on Monday, “Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent ‌people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way to do this.”

A report last week revealed that the Department of Defense had threatened the pope in January after he criticized increased U.S. militarism during his yearly address. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned the Vatican’s U.S. representative, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and told him that “the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

That appears to have caused a ripple effect leading to Trump feuding with both the American-born pope and a right-wing leader whom he used to count as a close ally. Considering Trump’s penchant for refusing to admit when he’s wrong, U.S. relations with both the pope and Italy may be strained for some time.

Both lawmakers were facing House Ethics investigations into sexual assault allegations against them.  Gonzales, whose resignation will be effective at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, was accused of sexual misconduct with women who worked for him, including a staffer who later died by suicide. Swalwell resigned merely an hour after yet another woman, Lonna Drewes, came forward and said she was raped by him in 2018 in an incident that made her think she died.

“I had contact with Eric Swalwell on three separate occasions after meeting him socially. He offered me connections to further my software company, and I also had an interest in local politics. He invited me to two public events. I knew he was married at the time and that his wife was pregnant. He was my friend,” Drewes said on Tuesday afternoon. “On the third occasion, I believe he drugged my drink. I only had ONE glass of wine. He—we were supposed to go to a political event and he said he needed to get paperwork from his hotel room. When I arrived at his hotel room, I was already incapacitated and I couldn’t move my arms or my body. He raped me. And he choked me. And while he was choking me, I lost consciousness. And I thought I died. I did not consent to any sexual activity, although I did not undergo a rape kit at the time, I disclosed this all to the people closest to me.”

”My delay in taking action against Eric was driven by fear, not doubt. Fear of his political power, his background as an attorney, and his family law enforcement ties. I have never doubted what happened, I stand with the other women WHO have come forward. And I will be making a report to law enforcement shortly with my attorneys.”

Lonna Drewes on Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA): "I had contact with Eric Swalwell on three separate occasions...On the third occasion I believe he drugged my drink...he raped me and he choked me...I did not consent to any sexual activity...I have never doubted what happened. I stand… pic.twitter.com/1mJPrZPQrx

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 14, 2026

Swalwell—who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women—was a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, and Gonzales was actively running for reelection for the House. Now they are both out of a job.  

This story has been updated. 

During the latest episode of Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered podcast, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host the president picked to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, revealed some of the president’s unorthodox beliefs about health.

“Your dad argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass, if poured on grass, so therefore it must kill cancer cells inside the body,” Oz said.

Don Jr. laughed incredulously at his father’s apparent delusion.

Oz recounted Trump’s defense when the health official spotted him drinking Fanta aboard Air Force One. “He starts to like, sheepishly grin. He goes, ‘You know this stuff’s good for me. It kills cancer cells.’ And then he tells me, ‘It’s fresh squeezed, so how bad can it be for you?’”

Dr. Oz: Trump argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass, if poured on grass, and therefore it kills cancer cells inside the body pic.twitter.com/JNDffH8aGY

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 14, 2026

“But then, maybe he’s on to something,” Don Jr. replied, boasting about his dad’s level of energy, recall, and stamina.

But we wouldn’t recommend writing prescriptions for Diet Dr. Pepper quite yet. Trump has repeatedly been spotted dozing off during press conferences, bill signings, and Cabinet meetings, among other apparent instances of cognitive decline.

Obviously, Trump’s attitudes about diet soda wouldn’t matter if he were simply any ordinary 79-year-old man. But he’s the president of the United States, who plans to make sweeping cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal science and health care programs in order to keep waging war abroad, all while remaining less than transparent about his apparent health issues.

The bill, introduced Tuesday by House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, would establish a “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office,” a move that would allow Congress to complete its part in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process. It also calls for the commission to hold “a medical examination of the President to determine whether the President is mentally or physically unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.”

Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment empowers the vice president and either the majority of the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to determine the president is no longer fit for office.*

“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ,” Raskin said in a statement. “We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation.”

It remains highly unlikely that this attempt will be successful, even as some of Trump’s staunchest former supporters call on Congress to “25th Amendment his ass.” If the bill does somehow pass the Republican-controlled House and Trump vetoes it, which he likely would, then at least two-thirds of both the House and Senate would have to agree to overturn his veto.

* This piece has been updated to clarify Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.

In a 2–1 ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a writ of mandamus Tuesday rebuking U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, saying that he overstepped his authority by pursuing the charges against former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials. In March 2025, DHS quickly deported over 100 Venezuelans that the administration claimed were gang members, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to justify their removal without due process.

The immigrants were put on planes to El Salvador as part of an agreement with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, to house them in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, where human rights abuses are alleged to take place. These flights took place in spite of Boasberg ordering them to stop.

Boasberg subsequently ruled that “probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt” for the government’s defiance of his order, but over the next year, the administration dodged the contempt charges with multiple appeals to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which deliberated on whether Boasberg had the authority to hold the federal government in contempt.

The two judges who ruled against Boasberg, Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, were both appointed by Trump, and they claimed the lower court judge abused his power with the contempt probe.

“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy,” wrote Rao in the majority opinion. “These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion.”

Incensed over Boasberg, Trump called for his impeachment last year, earning a rare and light rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who warned about attacks on the judicial branch of government. While Boasberg isn’t being penalized with this ruling, the White House will be happy that none of its officials, for now, will face penalties for breaking the law.

Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, are scheduled to accompany Donald Trump on a state trip to China next month, Kimberly Benza, a spokesperson for the Trump organization, told Reuters Tuesday.

Two sources told Reuters that Eric and other members of the Trump family planned to work on business relations between the U.S. and China, but Benza insisted that Eric was attending the trip in a “personal capacity.”

“He does not have business ​ventures in China nor plans on doing business in China. He will not be ‌participating ⁠in private meetings, but will instead stand alongside the President to mark this historic occasion,” Benza said.

Donald Trump has previously alleged that Hunter Biden made a fortune from business dealings in Ukraine and China thanks to his father’s connections. Now it appears that the president is setting his own children up to do just that. This is the kind of thing that should raise alarm bells in Washington but probably won’t.

Eric serves as executive vice president of development for the Trump Organization, which does not currently have any upcoming real estate projects in China. But during Trump’s last term, China and its state-owned entities paid a whopping $5.5 million at properties owned by the president’s family—far more than any other country.

Eric and his brother Don Jr. co-founded World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform that has attracted the financial interest of foreign investors who then benefited from Trump’s policy changes.

Eric and Don Jr. recently merged their publicly traded golf course holding company with Powerus, a Florida-based drone company, with the goal of filling the gaps left by the Trump administration’s ban on Chinese drones, another blatant move to profit off their father’s policy changes.

In October, Donald Trump and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto were caught on a hot mic discussing plans to set up a meeting between “good boy” Eric, the foreign leader, and another potential business associate. In February, speaking from his father’s gilded ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, Eric didn’t bother to push back on claims that the brothers had financially benefited from their father’s office.

“You have the authority to go ahead and release more [of the Epstein files], do you not?” Blanche was asked Tuesday on Fox News. “And you have the authority to go to Congress, perhaps?”

“No, we have released everything,” Blanche replied. “So listen, we reviewed six million pieces of paper. What we released with anything that’s associated with the Epstein file. So we are not sitting on a single piece of paper.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing that should be released. If we find something else tomorrow, we’ll release it. I don’t anticipate we will. So the misguided assumption that there is more to be released is because we reviewed millions and millions of pages within the department, millions of which had nothing to do with Epstein.… If we didn’t release it, it’s because it was not responsive to the law, and therefore not part of the Epstein files.… By law, we had to make certain redactions.… But we said to Congress, any congressman can come in and spend as much time as they want looking at everything unredacted.”

FOX NEWS: You have the authority to go ahead and release more Epstein files, do you not?

ACTING AG TODD BLANCHE: No. We have released everything. We are not sitting on a single piece of paper. If we didn't release it, it's because it was not responsive to the law. pic.twitter.com/i9dnICXNh9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

“I don’t know how this department or this president can be more transparent than saying ‘American people, here is every single document in our entire database. And if we had to redact it … anybody can come look at it if you’re a member of Congress.’”

This is facetious at best. As reported earlier this year, 2.5 million documents in the Justice Department’s investigative files on Epstein have yet to be released publicly, and many of the 3.5 million pages that were released have been redacted to hell.

“Todd Blanche needs a reminder that there’s a legally binding subpoena for documents that is different than the law,” Democratic Representative Robert Garcia wrote on X. “This investigation is not a hoax. The DOJ needs to release the rest of files.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration flagrantly defied it.

On Easter Sunday, Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, sent out a blatantly Christian email to some 100,000 government employees. The subject line read: “He has risen!”

“Happy Easter—He is Risen indeed!” starts the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.

“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed,” continues the email, signed by the secretary. “Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life—risen life—there is hope.”

Staffers were shocked by the constitutional violation.

“This has never happened before,” one government employee, who described the email as “grotesque,” told Wired. “I have never gotten a message like this from anyone.”

The same employee noted that such a message wouldn’t even be expected from military chaplains, commissioned officers who provide religious services.

Another employee, a 15-year veteran of the department, told the Post, “I have never seen that overtly of a religious email in all my years of government service.... It’s a separation of state and religion for a reason.”

Yet another employee found it telling that Rollins was “forcing religion down everybody’s throat,” noting that non-Christian USDA employees had expressed concern about their futures in the department.

A USDA spokesperson insisted to Wired that Rollins was “within her rights” to issue an Easter-themed missive.

But the note was just one of many breaches by the Trump administration of America’s longstanding religious freedom. Weeks into his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the official White House Faith Office, led by televangelist pastor Paula White-Cain. That same week, Trump issued another executive order to “end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.”

Months later in July, the Office of Personnel Management issued a similar memo, effectively allowing federal employees to attempt to convert their colleagues in the workplace and encourage them to pray in the workplace.

The Department of Labor also established its own faith office, where its religious leader, Kenneth Wolfe, hosts monthly worship services.

“Generally, people who are working for the government understand that their job is to work on behalf of all Americans,” an unnamed source at the Labor Department told Wired. “And this is something very different. This is very explicitly Christian, and even within the realm of Christianity, a very narrow representation of that.”

“People are uncomfortable. I know several who are offended and angry,” they continued. “These [worship services] are very Christian in nature.”

The evangelical infusions have been unabashed and shameless. In January, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and the senior adviser on faith and community outreach at USDA, Alveda King, told DOL employees that “we have different denominations, different faiths, and some have no faith.”

“Those are the ones I would be more concerned about,” King emphasized.

In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged Americans to pray “every day” on their knees “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Employees say the hyper-fixation on Christianity has made the federal government a very uncomfortable place to work, spurring an environment in which staffers fear religion-based retaliation. Another staffer told Wired plainly that the “vibes are bad.”

“They always spend a lot of time carrying on like, ‘No one’s forcing you to pray, these are voluntary,’” they said. “But it’s happening in the middle of a government workplace.”

Speaking on Newsmax’s Wake Up America Tuesday morning, Marshall was asked about the Iran war, and the Kansas politician was dismissive of its negative economic effects on the American people.

“I’m sorry the gas prices are going up, but help is on its way, and your national security, yes, is even more important than your pocketbook,” Marshall said.

Sen. Roger Marshall: "I'm sorry that gas prices are going up, but help is on the way, and your national security is even more important than your pocketbook." pic.twitter.com/GSUEDVHQml

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

Marshall doubled down when asked how long Americans would be paying higher energy costs, saying, “I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War II.”

“Could you imagine trying to tell the president, ‘Look, you only got so many days to defeat Hitler or defeat Japan?’ We have to do it till we get the outcome that we want. I hope it’s weeks and not months, but at the end of the day, Americans are going to be safer,” Marshall said.

NEWSMAX: How long do you think Americans will be willing to pay the higher energy costs?

SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War 2. Could you imagine telling the president, 'You only got so many days to defeat Hitler?' pic.twitter.com/eEYmUlxxUh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

This is all rather callous to say with gas prices averaging $4 per gallon across the country and more than $5 per gallon in places like California and Oregon, all because of a war of choice that had nothing to do with any imminent threats to the U.S. The latest threats to national security were actually caused by President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, and Marshall is stubbornly defending the war out of loyalty to him.

The warning came in a letter addressed to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

“Far from being a mere procedure, democracy recognizes the dignity of every person and calls each citizen to participate responsibly in the pursuit of the common good,” Leo wrote. “Democracy remains healthy, however, only when rooted in the moral law and a true vision of the human person. Lacking this foundation, it risks becoming either a majoritarian tyranny or a mask for the dominance of economic and technological elites.”

While the statement didn’t mention President Trump by name, it’s hard not to see Leo’s warning as the latest installment of their ideological feud. Trump says the pope, of all people, is “weak on crime,” and doesn’t understand why his Holiness is opposed to an illegal and deadly war on Iran. Leo has responded with the case for a democracy rooted in Catholic social teaching that “regards power not as an end in itself, but as a means ordered toward the common good.”

The letter also comes just a day after the pope stated that he was not a politician and had “no fear” of the Trump administration. Read his letter here.

Gregg Phillips, who serves as associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has repeatedly doubled down on claims that he was instantaneously transported 50 miles to one of the popular chain restaurant’s locations.

In a brief interview with CNN’s KFile, Trump was directly asked about Phillips’s wild journey.

“What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?” Trump said.

After being assured that Phillips was very much not kidding, Trump replied: “I don’t know anything about him teleporting.… It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”

Trump’s apparent disbelief underscores just how little the president knows—or cares—about anyone who works for him. Phillips has made a slew of outrageous claims in the past. He previously claimed to have spoken with God and with Satan, and claimed that he was “already dead” but was kept around to do God’s work. Phillips has said that many of these instances occurred while he was undergoing self-directed treatment for metastatic bone cancer, using ivermectin and fenbendazole.

After a 2025 incident where he said he collapsed at a Lowes and came to in a McDonald’s parking lot, with 15,000 steps logged in his health app and a Big Mac in his lap, he insisted: “The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all—it fell with me.”

“This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing,” he said.

But one of his rather outrageous claims may have been exactly what kept him in Trump’s circles. Phillips is a major proponent of the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory that Trump only lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him.

Since Phillips’s outlandish claims first began to circulate in March, FEMA’s No. 3 official has been relegated to the sidelines of his own agency—enraging Phillips, multiple insiders at FEMA told CNN.

Péter Magyar, who unseated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Sunday in a landslide, told reporters Monday that the outbound leader had diverted Hungarian taxpayer funds toward financing the American Republican conference.

Magyar noted that his government will be investigating Orbán’s expenditures, and will no longer finance CPAC or other right-wing institutions abroad.

“I believe the state should never have financed them in the first place, it was a crime,” Magyar said, according to an English translation of his remarks. “Mixing party financing with government spending from the state budget is, in my view, a criminal offense, and this will have to be investigated by the future authorities, including the National Office for the Recovery and Protection of Public Assets, since those budgetary funds were not meant to finance party events.”

The Trump administration fervently advocated for Orbán in the run-up to the election. Vice President JD Vance and State Secretary Marco Rubio both traveled to Budapest to campaign for him, while Donald Trump repeatedly praised the authoritarian, far-right politician. All three American politicians endorsed Orbán, as did CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp.

Under Orbán’s 16-year rule, Hungary became an “illiberal state” with feigned elections. Orbán dismantled democratic checks and balances, silenced and controlled the news media, and weakened the country’s judiciary system.

The day of the election, CPAC’s official account released a statement in full support of its apparent antidemocratic fundraiser.

“CPAC is closely watching this very important election in Hungary today. We stand firmly with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people as they vote,” the statement read. “We have proudly held CPAC Hungary five times, and each gathering has been wildly successful, bringing together conservatives from across Europe and the United States to champion sovereignty, family, and national identity.

“He is a true example of a leader with strong conservative values who has courageously stood up to elitists and globalists from the EU and beyond to protect what is right for his country,” it continued. “We are with you, Hungary.”

Not only did Orbán lose on Sunday, but his party did, as well. Orbán’s Fidesz won just 55 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat National Assembly. Magyar’s Tisza party won 138.

Sharon Simmons was described as a “DoorDash grandma” delivering McDonald’s to the White House Monday, and she said that not having to pay taxes on the tips she receives as a driver allowed her to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments. But in three different interviews on Monday, Simmons presented conflicting numbers on how much she saved from untaxed tips.

“I figure that I’m probably going to be saving about $3,000 to $4,000,” Simmons told Fox News Digital. In another interview with Fox’s America Reports, she said half of her income came from tips, and at the White House, she said she made about $11,000 in tips. That would make her income $22,000, a salary so low that the standard deduction is what helped her—not Trump’s “no tax on tips” rule.

On top of that, footage resurfaced of Simmons testifying before Congress last July, in which she extolled the benefits of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” claiming that it would help her as a caregiver and mother. Republican Representative David Kustoff had posted her testimony to his X account.

🇺🇸 During the @WaysandMeansGOP field hearing in Nevada, I had the privilege of hearing from Sharon Simmons about how the One Big Beautiful Bill will make a real difference in her life. As a mother and caregiver, she shared how this tax relief will help her and her family.

Her… pic.twitter.com/3nkdGBT3u4

— Rep. David Kustoff (@RepDavidKustoff) July 28, 2025

This makes it obvious the event was staged, as were the mathematically incorrect talking points. A DoorDash communications employee, Julian Crowley, seemed to be crashing out as this came to light, claiming on X that while the event was planned between DoorDash and the White House, Simmons is a real DoorDash employee.*

One X user pointed out that because Simmons is not actually a D.C. resident and was flown to Washington from Arkansas, she was receiving compensation and may be considered an “undisclosed lobbyist.” It’s clear the White House’s feel-good event Monday wasn’t what it appeared to be.

* This article previously misnamed the DoorDash communications employee.

Trump removed the post Monday after receiving a 24-hour tidal wave of backlash from his MAGA supporters, including Riley Gaines, an anti-trans activist and right-wing commentator who had struggled to make sense of the president’s post.

“Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this?” Gaines wrote on X Monday. “Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.”

When asked that afternoon if he took the post down because of Gaines’s and others’ criticism, Trump said: “I didn’t listen to Riley Gaines. I’m not a big fan of Riley, actually.”

Gaines’s response to being called out by the president was predictably sycophantic.

“I love the President and I’m so grateful he’s in the Oval Office. Of course, I’ll continue to support him and the America First agenda,” she wrote on X. “At the end of the day, I do nothing for the approval of man. Our purpose on this earth is to glorify Him in all we do. The truth social post missed the mark. It’s now deleted. Amazing!

“I know with the President it’s really not personal,” Gaines added.

So, even after Trump slighted her, Gaines still managed to find a way to exalt him. Forgiveness is a virtue, but this is just embarrassing.

Trump has offered limp excuses for the post and claimed he had to remove it because it was confusing to people. But despite his dismissals, it seems clear that some dregs of backlash did reach their way into the Oval Office.

Republican lawmakers and politicians are turning on the Catholic Church to defend the president’s warmongering.

Speaking with Fox News Monday night, Senator Lindsey Graham spoke directly to Pope Leo XIV, telling him that he was “miscalculating” by advocating for world peace.

Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Vatican ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. In the days since that report, Trump has fired off several antagonistic comments against the leader of the Catholic Church, repeatedly attempting to sour the pope’s reputation by claiming that Leo is “terrible for foreign policy” and “weak on crime.” That is, despite the fact that religious leaders are neither responsible for foreign policy nor in charge of lowering crime rates.

Graham went on to compare Iran’s ayatollah to Nazi Germany, claiming that the religious order really did not “get” the level of “evil” that Trump was contending with in Iran.

Also Monday night, in a roundtable on CNN, prominent Republican donor Hal Lambert claimed that the clash was “all about trying to hurt President Trump’s Catholic vote for Republicans during the midterms,” citing former Obama strategist David Axelrod’s visit last week to the Vatican.

The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second-most-popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.

Vice President JD Vance—who converted to Catholicism in 2019—tried to squash the beef, telling Fox News that “it’s a good thing” that the White House and the Holy See are at odds with each other.

“We’re always going to have disagreements on matter of public policy,” Vance said. “We certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican, but we’re also going to disagree on substantive questions from time to time, and I don’t think it’s particularly newsworthy.”

It’s not clear how “good” that relationship is, however. Many in the Vatican reportedly interpreted the Pentagon meeting as a threat to use military force against the religious order. The church has since rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

But feuding with a peace-loving pope has not been Trump’s only recent Christian faux pas. Over the weekend, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ to Truth Social, setting off sparks among even some of his most ardent supporters. Several Floridians interviewed by MS NOW on Monday said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, which depicts Trump as a haloed messiah.

“That’s a disgrace. I’m very upset about that. I mean, how egotistical can you possibly be?” said John North, a medical lab worker. “I’m ashamed that he would actually do that. A man I voted for and trust. How could he do that? I mean, people are going to see this at work. I’m upset about that.”

Trump has since deleted the post, telling reporters at the White House that he thought it illustrated him as a doctor healing people.

“Are you on the pope’s side or the president’s side?” a TMZ reporter asked Cruz on Monday evening.

“You know what, I’m quite confident that both the pope and the president can speak for themselves,” Cruz replied.

“Well, they are going through a very public sort of beef right now—”

“I understand you wanna get me in the middle of that,” Cruz interrupted. “I trust both of them to express their own views.”

TMZ then proceeded to ask Cruz various questions regarding Trump’s attack, all of which Cruz rebuffed. “Every way you ask the question you’re gonna get the same answer.”

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Republican senator Ted Cruz wouldn't say if he's Team Trump or Team Pope, no matter how many different ways he was asked. 👀 pic.twitter.com/AO3qbXVS0A

— TMZ (@TMZ) April 13, 2026

This beef with the pope—in which Trump called him “weak on crime” and accused him of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon—comes while Trump and his base are still reeling from the president’s AI post depicting himself as Jesus Christ. Cruz, a devout Southern Baptist, hasn’t commented on that either.

Speaking to Fox News Monday night, the vice president made a startling admission about how Donald Trump intended to end the war in Iran.

“When it comes to weapons of war, what they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. They’ve basically threatened any ship that’s moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Well, as the president of the United States showed, two can play at that game,” Vance said.

VANCE: What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. As the President showed, two can play at that game. pic.twitter.com/pd9HIdamV7

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2026

“And if the Iranians are going to try and engage in economic terrorism, we’re going to abide by a simple principle: that no Iranian ships are going to get out either,” Vance said.

Still, the vice president insisted that Trump only wanted to see Iranians “thrive and succeed,” as if the president had not threatened to end their entire civilization a little more than a week ago.

Trump’s naval blockade on Iranian ports began Monday. A sustained military blockade would be incredibly expensive and require a large number of warships, and U.S. allies have made it very clear they have no intention of helping out. While it may seem like a quick fix, taking Iranian oil off the market will only squeeze the market, causing energy prices to surge higher. Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon, as crude oil has climbed to over $100 per barrel.

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

When Donald Trump viciously attacked the pope and then posted a picture depicting himself as a divine figure, it provoked a massive backlash from many in his own base. That was bad enough, but then Trump offered some rambling spin on it all that was so preposterous in its dishonesty, so insulting, that it quickly made things worse. We think this mess hints at deeper truths about how Trump approaches religious voters, particularly the right-wing evangelicals who are critical to his support. It also helps explain why the Trump coalition and the Trump project are so fragile right now. So we invited on Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of several books about religion and the American right, to make sense of all this for us. Robert, good to have you on.

Robert Jones: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Sargent: So Trump is angry because Pope Leo has repeatedly criticized the Iran war and especially Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization. In response, Trump unleashed this crazed rant describing the pope as “weak on crime,” adding this: “I don’t want a pope who thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also said, “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the president of the United States” because I’m doing what I was elected for. Robert, I wanted to get your general thoughts on that first.

Jones: Well, I’ll start with the last one. “I was doing what I was elected for”—Trump, of course, thinks that now that he’s been elected, he can be constrained by nothing but his own whims. That’s really what he’s reacting to here.

But in this case, he’s got the leader of a worldwide church who is also operating out of a 2,000-year-old theological tradition. Leo is not firing from the hip here. He really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism is not just about the war. It is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching. Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever. This is the authoritarian playbook. That you should have no dissenters, and certainly no dissenters with influence or power.

Sargent: Exactly. And it doesn’t matter whether they speak for a 2,000-year-old religion or not. So Trump also posted this deranged image that portrayed him as a divine figure in a white robe, healing a sick man by placing his hand on the man’s forehead. This got MAGA figures angry.

Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an anti-Christ spirit.” A Daily Wire reporter called it “outrageous blasphemy,” adding “he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness.” Christian MAGA activist Sean Fucht said: “This should be deleted immediately.” And former Republican spinner Ari Fleischer said “it’s inappropriate and embarrassing—it’s offensive.”

There was much more like that. Robert, can you just explain at the core why this image is seen as blasphemous?

Jones: Well, Trump is clearly displaying himself as Jesus. In the image he’s got on a white robe with a kind of red robe over it. You could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus dressed this way—this white robe, this red sash over the top. He’s got this glowing hand as he’s leaning over this person in their sickbed.

So this is also this depiction of supernatural divine healing power that he’s claiming for himself. One other thing is that this is not the first time Trump has done this. It was actually just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the pope, dressed up in papal vestments. This is not the first time he’s posted things like this, assuming either the chair of the pope himself or the image of Jesus.

Sargent: Well, Trump actually deleted the image of himself as a divine figure. Now let’s listen to how he tried to spin his way out of this.

Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, it wasn’t a depict—it was me. I did post it and I thought it was me as the doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. So I had—I just heard about it. And I said, “How did they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor.”

Sargent: So, Robert, apparently Trump thinks doctors have celestial light pouring forth from their palms and can heal people by touching them, as the picture showed. What did you make of his excuse?

Jones: He’s reaching deep for this one. The problem is that the image really didn’t allow much wiggle room. So the best he could say is, I’m a doctor, I’m at a bedside.

But there are angels in the air behind him. And as we said, these glowing palms. So he’s just trying to obfuscate and back away from it. And again, if he thought this was just an image of him as a doctor and did this innocently, why remove it? Just leave it up if you really believe in it.

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. It’s obvious and very clear that a big motivator here, a big core of this whole thing, is that for Donald Trump, he doesn’t really understand why something like this would actually bother a lot of people, don’t you think?

Jones: That’s a really good insight. Things that are sacred, things that are holy, things that deserve awe and respect and deference. These are all religious emotions that actual people who have some sense of piety take very seriously. That’s why we’re seeing some of this kind of reaction, even from some of his strongest supporters, is because they also have a religious sensibility.

Whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off very tin ear, because he just has no sense of piety. It becomes very clear, whether it’s his misnaming a book of the Bible, walking across the street, clearing it with some violence and then holding up a Bible awkwardly in front of a church. These are all things that actual religious people wouldn’t do that way. But he just has no innate sense of that.

Sargent: So Robert, I wonder if part of what we’re seeing here is that in Trump’s genuine understanding of the situation, evangelicals really do matter a lot more within his base than Catholics do. What does the data show on that? It confirms that, right? How would these different groups perceive this controversy generally?

Jones: That’s right. His strongest supporters have always been white evangelical Protestants. They have voted more than eight in 10 for him every time he has been on the ballot. Catholics are a much more complex story. His support among Catholics has actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines.

He’s always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six in 10 for him, not 85 percent for him. The real difference is that inside the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democratic, typically. In the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics that supported him, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. There’s this racial tension inside the Catholic Church, and it’s just not a monolith in the way that it is among white evangelicals.

His statement that he could walk down the middle of the street and shoot somebody in the middle of the day and people would still vote for him—I think that’s actually largely true among white evangelicals today. In fact, he made that comment at an evangelical college in the first place. It’s not so true among Catholics.

Sargent: I want to ask you about that, because it seems like there may be a fundamental difference between how devout evangelicals and how devout Catholics perceive Trump. Evangelicals are much more prone to understand Trump as a flawed vessel sent to them by God to carry out his and their plans in the world. Whereas Catholics aren’t really at that place. Is that distinction correct?

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

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

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

Jones: With Catholics overall, it’s actually a little bit underwater—just below majority. But that’s because his favorability rating among Hispanic Catholics is 25 percent. It’s half as high as among white Catholics.

Sargent: So let’s listen to some more of Trump here. He’s asked if he’ll apologize to Pope Leo. Then he says this.

Reporter (voiceover): You don’t apologize?

Donald Trump (voiceover): No, I don’t, because Pope Leo said things that are wrong. He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran. And you cannot have a nuclear Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You’d have hundreds of millions of people dead, and it’s not going to happen. So I can’t. I think he’s very weak on crime and other things. So I’m not. I mean, he went public. I’m just responding to Pope Leo. And you know, his brother is a big MAGA person, and he’s a great guy, Louis. And I said, I like Louis better than I like the pope.

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

Jones: Well, the never-apologize mantra, right? Straight from Roger Stone all the way through. This is his MO. Just while we’re talking about religion, it was striking to me when he was running for president the first time around, where he just outright admitted he’s never even asked God for forgiveness. He outright said, “I’ve never asked forgiveness for my sins,” which for most Christians is a pretty threshold moment to joining the religion or becoming part of the religion.

This is really part of his MO. Don’t ask forgiveness, even of God. Certainly don’t apologize to any human being. Just stand by it. But you’re right that in this case, it is so far over the line—it may actually do some damage.

Sargent: Another way to put this is that he thinks of himself as answering to a higher authority than the pope, and that higher authority is Roy Cohn.

Jones: Yeah, that’s right.

Sargent: He’s basically applying his longtime policy of never backing down—which was taught to him by Roy Cohn—to his relations with the pope, a spiritual leader of many, many millions who is operating from a 2,000-year-old theology.

If you think about it, the pope is saying some fairly unsurprising things. He’s saying that violent conquest and domination are contrary to the spirit of the Lord, that we have to take care to welcome the stranger. These are things that he probably shouldn’t be surprised by coming from the pope. But Trump is only capable of understanding this as an affront to him personally. I wonder whether that makes things worse in the minds of at least some religious people. Can you talk about that?

Jones: Well, being surprised by something depends on having some knowledge of where the benchmark is in order to even know whether you should be surprised by something. Trump is so out of his depth here that he doesn’t really even realize what he’s walked into. Catholic just war tradition goes back to Saint Augustine. It is more than 1,500 years old, serious Catholic theology. It’s very developed, and it’s over the very serious question of: If there’s a state that has a monopoly on violence and can wield it at such high levels, what are the moral restraints that should be placed on a state—even on a king, in its original formulations? It turns out there are moral constraints according to Catholic moral tradition.

One of the key ones is that there’s no such thing as a preemptive just war. In other words, preemption is never a moral reason to go to war. War always has to be a last resort, after all modes of diplomacy have failed, and there has to be an imminent threat before. You could imagine a different world in which Trump knew this tradition and tried to frame a justification for going to war with Iran that might meet some of those criteria, even if it were kind of spun very heavily. But he hasn’t even attempted to do this. He just doesn’t really realize the kind of bandsaw he’s run into here with Catholic moral theology.

Sargent: I want to clarify for listeners what you’re saying here, which is that the just war doctrine and the laws of armed conflict are nourished by Catholic theology going back to Saint Augustine.

Jones: It’s really telling in that clip you’ve played about Trump that he’s simply appealing to ends. If you think about ends and means in your philosophy classes, he’s just appealing to an end and saying, We should want this kind of end with Iran. And if we want that end, then we could just go to war.

But that’s not the way moral philosophy works. There are principles that one must meet. You can’t just declare an end and then willy-nilly deploy any means to getting there. That’s the whole point of moral theology; to limit what can be done, particularly when we’re talking about wielding violence. The thing that is so revealing is that Trump can’t even recognize the functioning of a principle that might limit power. That’s just not even in his lexicon.

Sargent: It’s probably worth bringing in here Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s been holding these monthly sermons at the Pentagon, which is itself probably a violation of the church-state separation. Pete Hegseth is a Christian Reconstructionist, and that’s really a radical theology. Hegseth has also, not coincidentally, been essentially saying that maximal force and violence and brutality is a good thing. He’s been saturated with bloodlust and sadism as he’s talked about how our precision weaponry will kill people on a mass scale. He even recited one prayer which essentially said, in some form or other, the Iranian enemy doesn’t hear God when he cries to God.

By contrast, Pete Hegseth believes he does hear God when he speaks to God—God speaks to Pete Hegseth, but not to the enemy. That itself is something that, if I understand correctly, Pope Leo is rebutting. Is he not? Can you explain that?

Jones: Pope Leo rebutted it directly by saying that God does not hear the prayers of those who pray for violence. So he came straight at those in response to that. We do have these diametrically opposed things, where one is saying, We are declaring ourselves the instruments of God’s violent justice in the world and God is on our side.

What Pope Leo is saying is something quite different. He’s saying, No, we actually have to go through this process to figure out whether what we’re doing can actually put us on God’s side, which is a very different way of thinking about it.

Sargent: Do you think a lot of religious Catholics out there will understand this dimension of the debate? Will they see Trump not just blaspheming himself, but also being so diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine on principle? Will that trouble them?

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

Because the most powerful thing is what happens at the local community level. Not what happens on high. Pope Leo’s leadership here is creating more space for bishops and parish priests to have a different conversation—one where maybe they just have a whole Bible study or a whole theology study on the Catholic just war tradition. And if you do that you’re very quickly going to discover there’s no way to shoehorn this Iran war into anything to be approved by that tradition.

Sargent: Do you think that Pope Leo, by saying this stuff, is actually in some subtle way trying to invite these conversations on the local level?

Jones: I think so. That’s the church’s job, to provide moral teaching, and that’s part of what the hierarchy does. It organizes the worldwide church and can influence certain kinds of conversations and bring them to the fore. By spotlighting this as something very important, addressing it on Easter—these are very strong signals to local parishes that this is actually something important to talk about.

Sargent: What that would ultimately mean is that Pope Leo is, in some sense, subtly undermining Trump with a constituency among whom he’s already vulnerable.

Jones: I don’t think Pope Leo would think about it directly like that, but that may be the end result. I did take a little bit of a look, and what’s important to remember is that Trump’s super-support among evangelicals largely occurs among states that are very safe Republican states. So even if he dropped 10 points among evangelicals, he’d probably still be OK.

But his support among Catholics, particularly white Catholics, is very heavily concentrated in places that are all swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—these are places where elections are won or lost. If you’re thinking about very close elections in those states—again, 60 percent of white Catholics voted for him, his favorability is now 53 percent among white Catholics, only 46 percent of white Catholics support the war in Iran—if he loses 10 points among white Catholics, it’s game over in those swing states.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, can you explain how that plays out for JD Vance in 2028? He’s someone who converted to Catholicism, and he’s making that a major part of his political identity.

Jones: He did, very early on. And he’s also earned his own direct rebuke from the Vatican when he tried to bastardize a Catholic teaching about immigrants—he was trying to invoke the Ordo Amoris, the Order of Loves. He was trying to say, First we love our family, then we love our friends, then we love our community, and then we love the rest of the world. He got a straight rebuke from the Vatican saying, No, actually, that’s not the way this theology works. So he may run into the same problems, even though he himself is Catholic. And because he’s Catholic, that may actually create more problems for him than it does for Trump.

Sargent: Because he’ll have to explain himself in more detail?

Jones: I think so. And if you consider yourself to be a Catholic in good standing, how then can you be being rebuked by the head of the Catholic Church at the same time?

Sargent: Well, best of luck to JD Vance sorting that one out. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Robert Jones’s new book, which will be out soon. It’s called Backslide. It’s about Christian nationalism and democracy. Robert, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Jones: Thanks so much.

This attitude might sound an awful lot like what we’ve come to know as a “tradwife”—a woman celebrating and righteously elevating the quintessentially feminine. A woman beatific in the awareness that life’s deepest meaning lies in kneading dough, gazed upon by the adoring faces of small children, a shaft of warm sunlight in the kitchen. 

Yet this was also the woman who wrote with unapologetic frankness, “I hate domesticity.” She sent her son to boarding school when he was 3 years old, and later confessed in a letter to Hahn, a close friend, her “most passionate desire just TO GO AWAY.” West did go away, often: to Yugoslavia, to Mexico, to the southern United States. Her son had a tortured childhood and went on to excoriate West for it in a novel of his own, whose publication West tried her hardest to block.

“Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built,” wrote West in her magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. “The other half of us is nearly mad.”

West is referring here to the absurd human impulse to go to war, having just witnessed the devastation of World War II Britain. But she also, Cooke suggests, is speaking to a profound psychological tension she shared with Hahn and Gellhorn, between a desire for the traditionally feminine realms of motherhood, domesticity, stability, marriage—and an urge, as Martha Gellhorn expressed it in 1941, “to be hell on wheels.”

That tension is never reconciled, and remains a central thread of the book, and yet the story is also much bigger than this. Cooke manages to pull off the rare feat of profiling women writers without rendering their lives tragic tales of suppressed ambition, perpetual struggles against the limitations imposed on their sex, or exemplary narratives of triumphing over expectations. They’re all of these, of course, because how could they not be? But they’re also more than any story about how a woman should be. They evade the ideology that seems to have captured so much contemporary writing about womanhood, in which a woman must stand for something: a bold countercultural desire to “go back to the kitchen,” unflinching art monsterhood, leaning in and girlbossing—in which a woman’s story is an inspirational template or cautionary tale for other women about how to be the right kind of woman.

Instead, Cooke’s book illuminates the profound complexity of women’s lives without any apologizing, justifying, or moralizing. These women do not take flight into the great beyond and liberate themselves once and for all, or fail to do so and flounder in desperation. They leap and they return, they spin in place and they flee, they create nests and abandon them and create new ones and long for the old. They grow, learn, regret, reflect. Cooke’s book offers the reader the rare gift of space without judgment, which isn’t to say she endorses all of these women’s choices. She simply lets them live, without wedging them into some sort of moral or ideological framework. She presents them not as a blueprint but as a kind of permission, above all, to evolve: to move through many iterations of oneself and of womanhood.

These three women lived personal and professional lives of startling range. Of the three, Mickey Hahn may be the least well known, despite being absurdly prolific and immensely popular in her era. Hahn published her first book in her twenties and her last in her eighties, with more than 50 histories, biographies, memoirs, travel books, and novels in between—plus a handful of children’s books and an entire archive of feature stories and essays as a correspondent for The New Yorker. Born Emily Hahn in Missouri in 1905, she also embodies the restlessness of Cooke’s title, with one bout of self-reinvention after another. In her wild twenties, Hahn described mothers as “placid unafraid cowlike beings”; a decade later, she had survived the Japanese occupation of China, married a British Army major and had a daughter, and settled into rural domestic life in England. China to Me, her 1944 book about her years in China, detailed the adventures of a fearless twentysomething who reigned over Shanghai’s nightlife with a gibbon on her shoulder; England to Me (1949), her book about her time in England, “depicted a chorus of maternal and domestic complexity,” as she raised her children in a rural English village. Later, when Hahn’s daughters were off at school, she left again, returning to New York as a staff writer for The New Yorker, embarking on frequent international journeys.

Of Gellhorn, meanwhile, Cooke writes, “She had no idea how to handle a baby but decided, after traveling from Rome to New York, that flying with an infant was harder than covering the Russian attack on Finland.” In 1949, at the age of 41, Gellhorn became a single mother to an Italian war orphan, with whom she lived first in Cuernavaca, then Rome, and finally England. She could not, Cooke points out, “sew a button, make a bed, cook a potato,” and told her lover at one point that all she needed was books and travel. Yet she also described the experience of mothering her son, to adopt whom she had to fight using all her influence, as “having the sun built in to one’s private world.”

West’s story is arguably the most tragic: In 1913, she became pregnant by literary giant H.G. Wells, who declined to leave his wife and offered to support her and their son only if she kept his paternity secret and moved to the rural hinterlands. West was 21 years old. She refused to get an abortion or comply with Wells’s mandates, and yet, brimming with ambition and hunger for the world, she struggled with single motherhood. The decision to send her son away to school created a trauma he’d remember with bitterness all his life. She and her son would always have a contentious relationship, even as she tried constantly to reconcile with him, apologize, and support his own family—whom he ultimately abandoned. Her life’s deepest hurt was her desire to understand him and be understood; his was his inability to forgive her.

These women’s lives are less movements from A to B to C than revolutions around persistent longings and ways of seeing the world. The tensions—between stability in family relationships; motherhood; career ambition; and the need for movement, for finding meaning outside—never dissipate, nor are they reconciled. Cooke doesn’t overwrite their lives with political or ideological codes, instead asking us to find a kind of relief in their complexity, in the way their relentless seeking took many forms, at turns quiet, interior, loud, fearless, wild, humbled, gentle. They cycled through many identities and often did not recognize their former selves.

Cooke describes Mickey Hahn’s transformations in this perfect passage: “She would soon perform a series of roles, each canted at a slight angle away from how she saw herself, each a slightly more public person than the last: a woman alongside a well-known man; a pregnant woman; then a mother.… The independent young writer with the gibbon on her shoulder–not a monkey–would stay behind forever, drifting somewhere into the silt at the bottom of Shanghai’s river.” Yet long after this young, carefree version of herself had sunk into silt, Hahn returned to her passions and visions. Cooke defines Hahn and her compatriots not so much by who they were or weren’t—mothers, independent young writers, wives—but by how they performed and understood these roles, often in tension with one another.

Women can feel so much pressure to position themselves vis-à-vis their womanhood, or to adopt a particular identity around it: Are you more tradwife or career woman? Are you a ruthless artist or a crunchy mama? A “choice feminist” or a feminist? I felt this pressure intensely as a “woman writer,” a moniker that comes with its own baggage. I wrote a book about becoming a mother and quickly realized that for many in the literary world, this sounded the death knell of a “serious” career. I tried to look head on at this problem instead of running from it, advocating for motherhood as a significant subject for art. I essentially assigned myself the motherhood beat, though I discovered that the range of what is acceptable to write on that beat is limited. 

“Quite a job being a woman isn’t it; you cannot do your work and simply get on with it because that’s selfish, you have to be two things at once,” Martha Gellhorn wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt about her flailing marriage to Ernest Hemingway, who was pitching a fit about her reporting from war-torn Europe instead of tending to him on their Cuban finca. Yet it was precisely this condition of being “two things at once” that gave Gellhorn’s writing, and West’s, and Hahn’s, its poignancy, depth, and power.

Reporting from Spain during its Civil War, Gellhorn recounted both the expected drama—the bombs shattering buildings, the bodies on the front—and the surreal mix of tedium and tragedy that defines domestic life during wartime. While witnessing the advancing fascist troops from a bombed-out house, she wrote about both the troops and the house: the wedding photos, “the curling pins and emptied peroxide bottles in the bathroom.”

When she went to send her dispatch, a “laughing, condescending German” filed only part of it, having deemed it “human interest” instead of a war story. Gellhorn was furious but undeterred: She wrote of mothers and children, houses, wallpaper, and battle. While Hemingway tended to embellish the war experience into a profound and manly trial of life, death, and courage, eventually transmuting his time in Spain into For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gellhorn saw a confusing mess—“college kids on an outing”—that ended in devastation. She wrote in her journal: “Note the role of women in this mess.”

Later in life, Gellhorn fled her house in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and left her son—the war orphan she had recently adopted from Italy—with a nanny so she could hole up in Haiti and work on a novel about … the life of an Italian war orphan growing up in expatriate circles in Cuernavaca, Mexico. 

Mickey Hahn too embodied these contradictions. She wrote then-scandalous novels about her abortion and her friend who was a high-level paid escort in Shanghai; she wrote a bestselling biography of the Soong sisters, American-educated Chinese women married to China’s most prominent political figures; she wrote travel books that mixed memoir about her relationships and domestic life with political and cultural observations. She sailed third-class to the Belgian Congo at the age of 25, moved to Shanghai on a whim and learned Cantonese, relocated to World War II Chongqing as it was riddled by Japanese bombs, and made her career “like a he-man”—yet resisted the label of “feminist” when a New Yorker editor described her as one. Feminists had clubs, they had causes; she had her life and her writing.

Hahn had an aversion to politics in general, declaring she was interested in “everything else—art, sex, people, what they wanted, who they were, and how they got that way.” Still, her life and work were feminist in nature: She argued for women’s right to work, often to great frustration and exhaustion as the women of her era insisted a woman must stay home. She practiced the same sexual liberties as her husband when they lived apart, in England and New York. She traveled, relentlessly, as way of seeing and as a way of freeing herself from the pull of stasis, which could trap a woman. “Families are the devil,” she wrote Rebecca West. Still, she had two daughters and a marriage that lasted decades, until her husband’s death, and she described birth as her “ideal of an experience.”

West, for her part, explained in a letter, “I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships.” Yet that dedication to personal relationships arguably gave her the vision she needed to write books like The Meaning of Treason, a treatise on the Nuremburg trials that drew in part on her experience attending the trials for The New Yorker and in part on the paroxysms of drama she was experiencing with her son, who had left and then returned to his wife. She compared the inability of children to reconcile the love and hate they feel for their parents with the inability of the traitor to accept his society, and the urge to destroy it instead. This work, born as much out of psychoanalysis of her own motherhood as old-fashioned courtroom reporting, led a New York Times reviewer to declare, “She writes with such force as to make most male writers appear effeminate.”

Cooke could have taken a structural lens here: These women’s struggles, particularly those of single mothers Gellhorn and West, could have been ameliorated with more familial and societal support; all of the women swam upstream against sexism and discrimination that has extended even into their legacies, with the story of “new journalism” written largely as one of the gonzo bro journalists of the 1960s (all hail Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson). More structural support for women is something all of us should be fighting for if we care about the health of our society; if we truly value women’s lives and perspectives, and don’t treat them as an invisible safety net for all our social problems.

But even with those structural supports, the difficulty of being a woman, a wife, a mother, a writer, a traveler, all at once, in one short life, remains. It’s easier, but still there. Instead, it’s worth asking what this complexity and tension might offer.

In Cooke’s book I find a rare kind of permission: it’s OK to be all the things at once, messy and jumbled; or maybe one thing for two years here, or five years there, or even several decades, and then something else entirely. American culture is obsessed with linear narratives—a neat and tidy bio that shows how a person has become increasingly accomplished until they’ve reached a shining zenith; a satisfying story, in which someone ceases to be X and becomes Y, or finally gives up on A to embrace B. Mutability is unsettling. But the uncertainty and friction created by mutability is what makes great art.

After Mickey Hahn’s girls left home, she took a trip to Taiwan. “The sheer joy of reporting while traveling—the balance of toughness and flexibility it required, the spontaneity and grit—had all come sweeping back,” Cooke writes. After a whole lifetime raising children, having polite conversations with proper ladies in the English countryside, tending to her marriage, she returned, alone, to Asia, and found yet another version of herself—sans gibbon, sans pizzazz of the early ’20s, perhaps, but still leading “the strangest, most fascinating existence, wandering around in an inefficient manner,” carrying a toothbrush in her pocket in case she didn’t make it back to her guesthouse.

“My whole life I have spent squirming around, wriggling, shifting, scratching, trying to find a way to be comfortable in my skin and on earth, and failing,” Gellhorn wrote to an expat friend in Mexico. In its rendering of this “squirming … wriggling, shifting, scratching, trying,” Cooke’s book is a reminder that there is no end, no settled self, no ultimate definition—just cycles, revolutions, and returns, the traces of seeking in which other restless women may seek solace.

That’s thanks in part to shortages of electrical equipment like transformers and batteries. But many also face challenges from a growing, bipartisan backlash to data center construction. Maine’s legislature recently passed the country’s first-ever statewide moratorium on data center construction for projects over 20 megawatts, to last until November 2027. Similar bills have been introduced in at least a dozen states. The Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington voted by a margin of roughly 2-to-1 for a referendum requiring voter approval before the city can extend any preferential tax treatment to projects valued at or costing $10 million or more. The referendum was a reaction to the city approving tax incentives for a $15 billion data center project to be operated by Oracle and OpenAI. (That project will not be impacted by the vote.) In Festus, Missouri, last week, voters kicked out all four incumbents who’d voted to approve a $6 billion data center plan from the developer CRG.

Not all data centers are being built for AI hyperscalers. The International Energy Agency projects that roughly half of the electricity demand from new projects planned through 2030 will be for facilities equipped to meet needs for generative AI like ChatGPT, as opposed to the less energy-intensive data centers handling cloud storage and more traditional computing tasks. The upsides of those AI-specific projects aren’t self-evident, and there’s a growing divide between the glorious futures promised by big AI developers and what people see it actually doing—generating eerie school papers and TikTok content, for instance, or flooding X with AI-generated child pornography. In addition to concerns about rising electricity bills, air pollution, and noise, fights over data centers seem to be channeling deeper frustrations. What and whom, in other words, is all this stuff actually for?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year wrote that “the gains to quality of life from AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous; the future can be vastly better than the present.” On Thursday, meanwhile, Florida officials opened an investigation into whether OpenAI’s ChatGPT had assisted in the planning of a mass shooting last year at Florida State University, and the extent to which chatbots might “facilitate criminal activity, empower America’s enemies, or threaten our national security,” per Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier. Court documents examined by a local news outlet show that the suspected shooter messaged extensively with ChatGPT about video games, dating, his feelings of isolation, and—eventually, less than a year before the shooting last April—guns. On the day of the shooting, where two FSU students were killed, he asked, “If there was a shooting at FSU, how would the country react?” and “What time is it the busiest in the FSU student union?” ChatGPT responded that the busiest time at the student union is “typically between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.”

News also broke this week that OpenAI is backing an Illinois bill that could exempt companies from liability in the event that frontier models—those trained with more than $100 million of computational costs—cause “critical harms,” like creating a weapon of mass destruction, killing more than 100 people, or causing at least $1 billion in property damage. U.S. bombs in February killed between 175 and 180 people at a primary school in southern Iran—mostly girls under the age of 12—with the help of an AI targeting system developed by Palantir for the Department of Defense. Since 2024, the Pentagon has awarded the defense contractor multiyear contracts for that system worth up to $1.4 billion.

On the more quotidian end of things, AI seems to be helping students cheat on their schoolwork, filling social media feeds with news of fake TV shows and bizarre AI fruit cucking videos, and leading otherwise rational people to fall in love with chatbots. Sloppily added large language model, or LLM, features in apps, email services, and search engines churn out useless summaries of two-line emails and false information spelled out in authoritative tones. While AI’s full impact on the U.S. job market remains “guesswork,” former Biden administration official Jennifer M. Harris argued last week, it’s deepening already historic levels of inequality. Investors are rewarding companies that announce AI-fueled layoffs with surging share prices. “What’s worse,” she adds, is that “much of the trillion-plus-dollar investment in the AI boom isn’t happening in the stock market at all—it’s happening in private funds out of reach to all but the wealthiest, most connected among us.”

Despite claims from AI developers that their technology will eventually solve climate change and run on renewable energy, for now—and into the foreseeable future—they are using a lot of gas. Meta is planning to fund the construction of seven gas plants to provide 5.2 GW worth of power to its Manhattan-size Hyperion data center complex in rural Louisiana. The state’s regulators previously greenlit Entergy to build three gas plants, generating 2.3 GW for the project. As part of Meta’s agreement with Entergy, it has also agreed to finance the construction of 240 miles of transmission lines, battery storage, and nuclear power upgrades. More speculatively, Meta made a “commitment” to “help” fund “up to 2,500 megawatts of new renewable resources.” As The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong notes, greenhouse gas emissions from data centers could more than double by the end of the decade—long before AI developers’ well-advertised investments in fusion power are likely to pay off. There is still scant data available on how much electricity data centers actually use.

Unsurprisingly, all this hasn’t made AI especially popular. A Quinnipiac poll published late last month found that just 35 percent of U.S. residents are either “very excited” (6 percent) or “somewhat excited” (29 percent) about AI. Sixty-two percent are “not so excited” (29 percent) or “not excited at all” (33 percent). Eighty percent of poll respondents were “very” or “somewhat concerned” about it, and 55 percent think AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives. Nearly two-thirds think AI will do more harm than good in education. Seventy percent think AI will decrease job opportunities. Sixty-five percent of respondents—including 78 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans—would oppose building an AI data center in their community.

So, again, why is the U.S. embarking on a state-sponsored spending-and-building binge for a technology that most people here think will make the world—and their lives—worse? Data center developers and supportive politicians promise construction jobs and additional tax revenues that can translate into bigger municipal budgets and tax decreases for residents of the places where data projects are built. Data centers don’t employ huge numbers of people over the long-term, though, and tax upsides for their neighbors are often undercut by generous tax incentives offered to developers. The Texas Tribune this week reported that the Lonestar State is expected to lose out on $3.2 billion in sales tax revenue over the next two years as a result of tax exemptions offered to data center developers.

To make their case, AI boosters typically pitch their products in graver terms than just jobs and tax revenue. The Trump administration, prominent Democrats, and AI hyperscalers have all framed “winning the AI race” as a national security imperative, raising fears that China will beat the U.S. to achieve a mysterious state known as “artificial general intelligence,” or something even more powerful called “superintelligence.” These terms are not well defined, and neither is the material threat posed by China “winning” and the U.S. “losing.” The United States is not at war with China. China’s government does not seem especially eager to start a war with the U.S. Our government has in the last few months kidnapped a head of state, threatened to annex Greenland, and started a stupid, reckless war of aggression against Iran—a war in which it’s used AI to kill more than a hundred children. At home, ICE is using Palantir’s AI to hunt down and disappear migrants as the Trump administration demands universities hand over lists of Jews. Criticisms of China’s domestic and foreign policy shouldn’t obscure the fact that the U.S. government is already doing extraordinarily dangerous things with AI. The companies building it are under zero obligation to further the interests of the U.S. government, much less those of most of the people who live here. If something called superintelligence is indeed real, which seems doubtful, do we really want Sam Altman or Donald Trump—who threatened to wipe out an entire civilization last week—to control it?

It isn’t a coincidence that AI hyperscalers in the U.S. have sold their models to the public, policymakers, and investors in terms of what’s likely to happen down the road. The prospect of a foreign power gaining access to a godlike, world-destroying entity certainly inspires more urgency than, say, B2B software, vibescoding, and AI therapists. But rather than taking executives’ predictions about an inevitable utopian/apocalyptic future at face value, conversations about the future of AI infrastructure should be grounded in what most people are presently getting out of it. For now, the answer is not much.