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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026

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

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

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

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am speaking of the “Trump Always Chickens Out” maxim that has taken root since the beginning of Trump’s second term. This refers to the persistent belief that Trump is perpetually climbing down from his most dire threats—a paper tiger forever on the verge of folding. TACO theory always gives you the out when it comes to worrying about Trumpian misrule. It also gives Trump’s opponents an easy shorthand for insulting him and making themselves feel better. But it’s worth questioning whether TACO actually has much merit. Off the top of my head, I’m guessing that an untold number of obliterated Iranians may take issue with this contention.

It’s fitting that the TACO meme was largely birthed by Wall Streeters, operating under the shield of plutocratic wealth and chronic naïveté that is intrinsic to the financial services sector. As the Huffington Post reported back in May 2025, the term was cooked up by the Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong to refer to how the markets reacted to “the president’s tendency to announce massive tariffs, causing the markets to plunge, only to back off days later, causing them to rise again.” A certain swath of investors were using TACO theory to do some heavy-duty buckraking. As Ted Jenkin, the president of Exit Stage Left Advisors, told the New York Post, the strategy worked like this: “Once he delivers bad news, investors are buying those stocks when they are beaten down waiting for him to chicken out and watching those stocks rebound in value.”

Over time, TACO morphed from a form of tariff-whispering to a sort of catch-all delusion for markets to pretend that the damage Trump is doing to the economy never really has to be priced in. But it also expanded beyond the concerns of Wall Streeters to become a comforting security blanket anytime Trump either seems to be on the brink of doing something catastrophic or has backed down from escalations.

The Trump administration has actually grown pretty adept at managing and manipulating the TACO theory to its own advantages. Earlier this year, the ouster of Customs and Border Protection commander Greg Bovino, the real-life version of Sean Penn’s character in One Battle After Another, was widely depicted in the press as a sort of chickening out: Trump was forced to retrench in the face of widespread public horror over the administration’s deadly operations in Minneapolis. But under the new management of border czar Tom Homan, the terror machine kept running in the city for several more weeks. Similarly, at the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem’s dismissal in favor of Markwayne Mullin was seen as a setback for the administration, but really it just traded new excesses for old ones. If you were sitting there thinking that the temperature had been lowered or the administration had been chastened, you got played.

It may be comforting to think that in Iran, Trump once again chickened out. After all, a civilization threatened on Tuesday has made it to the end of the week, and there’s a two-week hold on all the proposed war crimes in Trump’s latest atrocity pitch deck. If you’re of the mind that any of this is true, check yourself. Trump has not chickened out; he’s already gone all in: This war of choice has bequeathed a mountain of casualties, tons of destruction, and economic ramifications that will linger for years. What you think looks like a cowardly retreat is actually Trump flailing. He is not in control of the situation, and the danger is far from over.

Also not over: the aforementioned buckraking. Trump’s TACO cycle continues to be fodder for insider trading and market manipulation. Trump’s late-March threat to “obliterate [Iran’s] various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” was followed by a belligerent response from Iran and a hasty Sunday-show appearance from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to head off any market volatility on Monday morning. Trump retreated from his threats in an early morning missive on Monday, citing the phantasmal success of nonexistent diplomatic discussions. But as FT reported, people were getting rich behind the scenes: “Traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Donald Trump’s post touting ‘productive’ talks with Iran sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.”

Once you crack open the shell of this TACO, what you’ll find isn’t a source of reassurance or a fun gibe to toss in Trump’s direction. It’s all the same misrule, criminality, and corruption. Paul Krugman, who credibly argues that these insider trades are tantamount to treason, bottom-lines it in this way: “You can’t trust a corrupt government to protect national security. And our government is now utterly corrupt: It’s hard to find a single senior official, from the president on down, who treats public office as a grave responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal self-aggrandizement and profit.”

As the events of this week prove, life under these arrangements is scary and frustrating. We bear the cost of Trump’s belligerence and suffer psychically as he swings from one unimaginable threat to the next. Meanwhile, insiders get to manipulate the mass media and the markets to further their authoritarian political goals and self-enrichment. This TACO party is proving to be extremely profitable for an elite few, but I’d bet you won’t be invited to it anytime soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his “State of the World” speech in January, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. The atmosphere was anything but friendly: Pentagon officials openly threatened the religious ambassador, asserting that the Catholic Church needed to get behind the Trump administration’s global whims due to the country’s military prowess.

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death, and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon.

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

The Vatican also rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Extinguish the fire immediately,” Ghalibaf warned. 

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

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

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian echoed Araghchi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosa Brooks: Good to be here, Greg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks: My pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bacon: What’s the divergence?

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

Bacon: I see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tharoor: Prime minister.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bacon: Yeah, very similar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perry Bacon: Hungary, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Bacon: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tharoor: I’m sorry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bacon: Do you use Twitter? Bluesky?

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

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

Tharoor: Anytime, man. Thank you.

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

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

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France.

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

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

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

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

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo canceled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

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

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

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

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

This story has been updated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call bullshit. The war has failed to achieve most of its goals, from installing a new regime in Iran to permanently ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapons program. Trump was left basically begging Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And polls suggest the conflict is the latest anchor on Trump’s already plunging poll numbers. So of course his aides want to distance themselves from the war in America’s most influential news outlet. But they want to do so anonymously to preserve deniability and avoid annoying the president or his base.

But we can’t let Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and other senior Trump administration officials off so easily. They have at every turn aided, abetted, and enabled a dictatorial president who constantly ignores national and international laws and casually decides to (try to) overthrow the leaders of other countries. They want the spoils of serving in the Trump administration, from prestigious posts now to potentially even bigger and more lucrative jobs in the future, including the presidency in the cases of Rubio and Vance. So they also need to own and accept the costs of serving with Trump. And right now, that includes being the architects of a stupid, unnecessary war.

The Times article is long, in part because it is trying to explain a very important and complicated decision. But it’s also long because it takes a lot of words to list all the misgivings about the war that Trump’s advisers supposedly had. Ratcliffe reportedly said in a White House meeting that included the president that Israel’s hopes of a less anti-Israel regime taking power in Iran are “farcical.” In that same session, Rubio said that Israel’s hopes of regime change were “bullshit.” Vance expressed similar doubts. The article depicts Wiles as worrying that the war could cause a big hike in gas prices, hurting Trump and Republicans in the midterm elections. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, reportedly said in a meeting of Trump and senior aides that attacking Iran would violate the president’s campaign trail rhetoric about keeping the United States out of new wars abroad.

The article includes several paragraphs about the private misgivings of three officials, in particular: Vance, Rubio, and Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vance was reportedly concerned about irritating the MAGA base and Iran taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. Caine outright predicted Iran would block the strait. Rubio is portrayed as having been broadly skeptical about the war and thinking that sanctions and other pressure tactics against Iran may be more effective.

Haberman and Swan are solid reporters, so I trust that some of Trump’s advisers had these doubts about the war and at times expressed them to one another and the president. But people should read this kind of piece with skepticism. From my years in journalism, including as a reporter at The Washington Post, I can tell you that these kinds of behind-the-scenes political stories usually don’t just emerge from reporters’ digging. Often, presidential advisers and those advisers’ various aides and underlings want to tell their side of the story, particularly if they aren’t quoted directly, meaning they can later claim the reporter got some detail wrong. Almost none of the Trump advisers in this piece did on-the-record interviews with the Times. So I read this story as both a historical account and an attempt at spinning.

We are now more than a month into the war. Trump’s advisers can see exactly what went wrong, such as the Strait of Hormuz being blocked. So these advisers (and their aides) can tell reporters, “I anticipated this problem,” and seem wise and prescient. Somehow, these advisers predicted exactly how the war could go wrong, but the president ignored them!

What we can’t tell is how emphatically they expressed those concerns, and how often. Or what concerns they expressed that didn’t turn out to be big problems. Broadly, since the war is going poorly, these advisers have a strong incentive to leak their prewar misgivings and downplay any pro-war comments they expressed privately. If a more America-friendly regime were now in power in Iran, this article would likely have been written differently (or would not have been published at all), because Trump’s advisers would have been less eager to distance themselves from the policy.

This piece is titled, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran,” but in truth it’s essentially, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran Over the Objections of His Top Advisers.” Wittingly or unwittingly, Swan, Haberman, and the Times have provided a massive platform for Rubio, Vance, and others to point the finger solely at Trump for a misguided war. This piece reads like the first draft of Caine’s memoirs, or how Vance will sound on the campaign trail if he is running in 2028 and trying to distance himself from this war.

But Trump advisers shouldn’t get to pass the buck so easily. Even if they expressed some private doubts about this war, they presented intelligence and military plans that moved it forward. None of them expressed public opposition. Even in a piece allowing them to spin their own narratives, only Vance told Trump directly in private that he opposed the war. And Vance of course has the most freedom to disagree—he is the one person in the administration Trump can’t fire.

The piece reads like a lot of the accounts of President Biden’s decisions to initially run for a second term and allow Israel to kill Palestinians on a mass scale after the October 7, 2023 attacks. A president can’t run for reelection or involve the U.S. deeply in a war without some of his advisers going along. But some of the books written about the Biden administration feature his advisers expressing doubts about his decisions that the president supposedly single-handedly overrode.

In all these cases, what these aides want to do is associate themselves with the successes of a president and pin all the problems on the commander in chief himself. But journalists and members of the public shouldn’t go along with that. No one is required to serve in a presidential administration. If they strongly disagree with a decision, they should quit. They can also express their doubts publicly and live with the consequences: a likely dismissal.

What they shouldn’t do is join an administration, willingly implement its policies, and then privately bash the president to reporters when something goes wrong. That’s not governing, it’s reputation laundering. It’s weak and gutless.

Usually, aides wait until after the president’s term or after they have left their posts to distance themselves from key decisions. It’s possible that Haberman and Swan are such excellent reporters that they simply unearthed these objections earlier than usual. But my guess is that Trump’s aides already know this war is a debacle and want to essentially announce, “It wasn’t me” as loudly and quickly as possible. But JD, Susie, and Marco—it was you. This is the Trump administration. You own all of his decisions, good, bad, and, in the case of this Iran war, catastrophic. Take responsibility for your actions.

“Iran ultimately understood—their ability to produce, to generate power, to fuel their terrorist regime—was in our hands,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth told reporters Wednesday, in response to questions about Trump’s threat. Hegseth insisted Trump’s vow to eradicate “a whole civilization” persuaded Iran that he could crush their ability to “export energy” and thus end the entire basis for the regime’s existence.

“That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said, ‘We want to cut this deal,’” Hegseth continued. This talking point has gone out widely: GOP Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a top target of Democrats, suggested that due to Trump’s “extreme rhetoric,” the Iranians “understand for once that they need to actually negotiate.”

But there’s a small problem with this spin. It’s that the Iranians were already negotiating with Trump before the war started. Trump largely sabotaged those negotiations, because he was talked into believing the war would be easy and deliver a quick burst of glory. Trump’s approach to the talks made success impossible—deliberately.

As The New York Times’ magnum opus on this reveals, Trump had decided to take the plunge (all that remained uncertain was the timing) weeks before those talks with Iran hit their critical phase. This was partly because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked Trump into believing the risks of war were manageable—that strikes could render the Iranian regime too debilitated to close the Strait of Hormuz (which proved disastrously wrong). U.S. intelligence officials disputed Israeli confidence about all this, the Times reports, but Trump brushed off these warnings—because he “appeared to think it would be a very quick war.”

The prewar talks with Iran were doomed because Trump shifted between objectives in a way that ensured that outcome. The core issue was supposed to be ending Iran’s capacity to develop a nuke. But the Times also reveals that Iran was prepared to make meaningful concessions on that front, yet Trump officials effectively decided only regime change was acceptable, ensuring war.

For Hegseth’s story to be true, Iran would have to be more willing to give Trump the concessions he wants than before, due to his mighty threats. But, while the war did badly degrade the Iranian military and kill many senior leaders, here’s what else we know: The regime is still there in more radicalized and brutal form. The strait is being reopened, but as Ben Rhodes notes, the regime’s control over it now appears tighter. The fate of Iran’s nuclear material remains as indeterminate as ever.

Will talks now get Trump a better deal than he might have gotten the first time? Maybe, but Iran seems emboldened by its survival to demand more this time. The points that Trump accepted as the basis for talks appear more friendly to Iran than before.

“Iran is at the table because Trump now appears willing to base negotiations on a wider range of Iranian demands,” Sina Toossi, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, told me. He cites Trump’s apparent willingness to entertain total relief from U.S. sanctions, continued control over the strait, and some form of uranium enrichment: “The civilizational threat did not factor into the ceasefire.”

So what did Trump’s threat—which would have been a massive war crime—actually accomplish? It’s exclusively negative. As Bill Kristol writes:

Trump’s war has further shaken any confidence our allies might still have in us. It will be seen as confirmation that Trump’s United States of America has become just another rogue nation in the international arena, if a less disciplined and cunning one than Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China.

Kristol is referring to the overall war’s impact, but Trump’s threat of civilizational erasure is also a factor in ensuring these outcomes. That the American president eagerly vowed to obliterate a nation of 93 million is bad enough. On top of that, the U.S. political system appeared utterly powerless to stop it—largely because one of our major parties revealed that it will not step up even when its leader threatens unthinkably massive war crimes and even genocide.

Brian Beutler points out that Republicans who wouldn’t challenge Trump’s maniacal designs got lucky that he blinked. Next time, they might not be so lucky—and neither might we. Indeed, it’s also worth asking what sort of dispiriting toll this glimpse of our profound powerlessness in the face of Trump’s madness will take on the millions of Americans who find the idea of their country threatening such wanton, indiscriminate destruction extremely troubling, which surely includes a lot of ordinary Republicans.

One can hope that this galvanizes millions into voting against the GOP in the midterms—and it probably will help—but translating this into serious checks against a rerun of this insanity is a tall order. That, too, is a painful realization to endure.

In a sense, Hegseth’s spin is doing us a public service. By insisting Trump’s threat drove Iran to the table, it should force a reassessment of why the original talks fell apart, why we went to war in the first place, and what Trump’s vicious, sadistic bluster actually accomplished. This is a story of failure all around, and the threats, too, accomplished only bad things. Which reveals another layer to this catastrophe, blowing another hole in Trump’s claim of victory.

That’s because the core story that Trump and Hegseth have told about this war is that it’s showcasing that American strength and power are supreme, unquestioned, and can accomplish literally anything. That includes the mere threat to unleash that power: Because the specter of American military violence and terror can make literally anyone do anything that Trump wills, maximal threats of annihilation are inherently good. Hegseth constantly preens about America’s superlative killing power with unnerving relish and bloodlust in order to tell that story.

But it’s taken a big hit. Yes, the war showcased awesome technological prowess. But that cannot accomplish literally anything Trump wants it to. Nor can threatening to rain it down on millions of innocent people with unconstrained brutality and savagery. Trump and Hegseth set out to prove otherwise, and at this too they failed miserably.

That second reading now looks to be the right one. Shortly before the Tuesday evening deadline, Trump announced that the United States and Iran had reached a two-week ceasefire and would be working on a potential peace deal. True to form, Trump boasted that he had won a massive victory and that the U.S. had “already met and exceeded all Military objectives.” Subsequent reporting—and the fact that Trump called Iran’s 10-point proposal “a workable basis on which to negotiate”—suggests something rather different.

Even if the U.S. agreed to just a few of Iran’s 10 demands, or even if the demands were significantly watered down, a peace deal based on that framework would lead to an unmistakable conclusion: The U.S. has lost yet another war in the Middle East. The reality may in fact be much worse. The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.

Trump has called the 10-point plan “not good enough,” but that’s a significant understatement. If adopted, it would give Iran full control over the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping channel that the country effectively closed to maritime traffic when the U.S. bombing began, sending the cost of oil and other goods skyrocketing. Iran has said it plans to charge $2 million per ship, a toll it would share with its neighbor Oman (before the war, it cost $0 to pass through the strait). The proposal would also allow Iran to enrich uranium for civilian use, lift all U.S. sanctions on the country, require the U.S. to swear off future attacks on Iran, and even force the U.S. to pay restitution for the damage caused by its bombing campaign. Oh, and the U.S. would have to pull its combat forces out of the Middle East entirely.

It is, in short, a plan that would greatly expand Iran’s regional hegemony and perhaps turn it into a genuine global power. Granted, any future deal isn’t likely to include all of these demands; some of them, like the full military withdrawal from the region, are obvious nonstarters. But all of these demands would have been nonstarters for the U.S. if Iran had proposed them before the bombing began. Now, however, they comprise a “workable” proposal. That alone suggests that Iran will emerge from this the war in a significantly stronger position than it was six weeks ago.

That is remarkable in and of itself. But it is hard to overstate just how big a catastrophe this is for the U.S. By asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has effectively negated one of the core aspects of American power: its use of naval power to ensure the safety of shipping lanes, thereby protecting the global economy. Iran has also made a fool of Trump, who can brag all he wants about “military objectives.” The fact is, Trump’s hubris cost thousands of lives, rattled economies around the world, and made the U.S. significantly weaker.

There are signs that the agreement is already fraying, however. Despite agreeing to a ceasefire, Israeli forces have not only continued to attack Lebanon but have done so with greater ferocity than at any point since that conflict began in early March. Iran, meanwhile, has also launched missiles at its neighbors, though it’s not clear if that was retaliation for the violation in Lebanon or simply the result of the fact its armed forces are extremely decentralized, meaning orders take a long time to reach low-level troops. On Wednesday afternoon, Iran released a statement accusing the U.S. of three violations: the attacks on Lebanon by its ally, a drone flying into Iranian airspace, and the denial of Iran’s right to enrich uranium. “In such situations,” the statement concludes, “a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable.”

Trump was never able to articulate a sensible argument for why the U.S. had to go to war with Iran, which allowed the Iranians to set the stakes of the conflict. Trump quickly found himself in a trap of his own making. Facing two very bad options (admit defeat or commit war crimes), he was obviously grateful to be presented with a third one (the 10-point framework). Some journalists are calling this an “off-ramp,” and that’s true in the sense that it may bring an end to this pointless, destructive war of choice. But it is almost impossible to imagine how Trump, by using Iran’s framework as the basis for a peace deal, can still somehow save face. This ceasefire, though, at least buys him a couple of weeks to figure out how he will spin this astonishing humiliation to his MAGA base.

This assumes, of course, that the ceasefire holds and Trump and Iran actually reach a deal. Trump is infamous for his two-week deadlines. It is very possible and perhaps likely that on April 21, we will find ourselves in exactly the same place we were in on Tuesday afternoon. Trump has already threatened genocide, which shocked even those of us who thought his words and deeds could no longer shock us. If the negotiations with Iran go poorly, he will likely escalate his threats in ways we can’t even imagine. Even the godless among us pray that he doesn’t act on them.

“Let me be clear: We still have objectives to complete, and we will achieve them—either through agreement or through renewed fighting,” Netanyahu said in a televised statement. “We are prepared to return to combat at any moment required. Our finger remains on the trigger. This is not the end of the campaign, but a step along the way to achieving all our objectives.”

His statement is sure to assuage the fears of warmongers complaining that the ceasefire will prevent the U.S. from killing more innocent Iranians.

This comes amid Iranian media reports of Iranian air defense activity and explosions in Tehran, Isfahan, and Kerman. Israel also launched an unprecedented wave of attacks in Lebanon, with 100 airstrikes in 10 minutes, injuring nearly 300 people.

“The conditions for a ceasefire between Iran and the United States are clear and explicit: America must choose either a ceasefire or the continuation of war through Israel; both cannot coexist,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on Telegram. “The world is witnessing the killings in Lebanon. Now the ball is in America’s court, and global public opinion is watching to see whether this country will fulfill its commitments or not.”

At a press conference, Trevor Hunnicutt, White House correspondent for Reuters, pointed out to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that air defenses in Iran had been activated, with explosions reported in cities across the country, including Isfahan, despite the ceasefire.

“Who is bombing Iran right now?” Hunnicutt asked Leavitt. Caught off guard, she initially stumbled before responding, asking if those reports were “as of a few minutes ago.” Hunnicutt said yes.

“Obviously, I’ll have to go back and check with the national security team. I’m standing out here with all of you. But I will do that, and we will get you an answer, OK?” Leavitt said, adding that while she couldn’t verify those reports, she wanted to check with the experts in the White House.

Q: Who is bombing Iran right now?

LEAVITT: Those reports just as of a few minutes ago? Obviously I'll have to go back and check. I'm not verifying them. This is a fragile truce. pic.twitter.com/lFdgVgLV7q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 8, 2026

“I would just say, and I would echo what the vice president said this morning, this is a fragile truce; ceasefires are fragile by nature. We’ve seen this with respect to the 12-day war with Iran and Israel last year,” Leavitt continued, referring to JD Vance’s comments in Hungary earlier in the day. “It takes time sometimes for these ceasefires to be fully effectuated, and one of the results of Operation Epic Fury is that we completely dismantled Iran’s command and control center, which makes it difficult for them to pass messages up and down the chain, and so we understand that.”

But Hunnicut wasn’t asking about Iranian strikes, but rather bombings in Iran, making Leavitt’s point about the Iranian chain of command moot. Israeli and American commanders certainly shouldn’t have communication issues, and the fact that Iran is still being bombed despite a ceasefire raises questions about who is violating it.

Israel continued to bomb Lebanon Wednesday, claiming that the country was not part of the deal (eventually with Trump’s acquiescence) despite Iran and mediator Pakistan saying otherwise. Is Israel still attacking Iran despite the deal, or is Trump promising one thing while doing another?

After Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday evening—one hour before his self-imposed deadline to destroy the country’s “whole civilization”—the details of a 10-point peace plan that the U.S. president called “workable” were revealed.

The peace plan included concessions that some saw as mighty kind to the Islamic regime that Trump has been verbally accosting for years. It includes a provision to lift economic sanctions on the country—not just by the U.S., but worldwide—and a $2 million toll to be imposed by Iran for each ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz. One version of the agreement distributed in Farsi even allows for Iran to continue enriching uranium. It all begs the question of why the hell the U.S. got involved in the expensive and deadly conflict in the first place.

Some of Iran’s foreign embassies took the time to boast about the favorable terms after the peace plan was revealed.

“Say hello to the new world superpower,” the Iranian Embassy in South Africa wrote on X.

“Bow down to the Iranian civilization,” the Iranian Embassy in India added, along with an AI-generated picture of Trump kneeling in front of a stone wall displaying heroes from Iran’s past.

Even some of Trump’s closest allies, such as war hawk Lindsey Graham and conservative commentator Laura Loomer, took to social media to criticize the deal.

“We didn’t really get anything out of it and the terrorists in Iran are celebrating,” Loomer fumed.

Trump’s mishandling of Iran is one for the history books. After the president was bamboozled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into striking a country that American intelligence officials said posed no threat to us, Trump declared multiple times that the war would be easily won. He also reportedly believed that Iran would not have the military capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Instead, Iran shut down the strait immediately after the U.S. began launching missiles in February, leading to the crippling of global trade and a deadly boondoggle that, despite Trump’s peacocking, will only lead to more unrest and death in the Middle East.

On Truth Social Wednesday afternoon, Trump expressed frustration that “Numerous Agreements, Lists, and Letters are being sent out by people that have absolutely nothing to do with the U.S.A. / Iran Negotiation, in many cases, they are total Fraudsters, Charlatans, and WORSE.”

“There is only one group of meaningful ‘POINTS’ that are acceptable to the United States, and we will be discussing them behind closed doors during these Negotiations,” Trump continued. “These are the POINTS that are the basis on which we agreed to a CEASEFIRE. It is something that is reasonable, and can easily be dispensed with.”

Meanwhile, Iran announced that it is once again closing the Strait of Hormuz due to Israel continuing to bomb Lebanon, and its Tasnim news agency, citing an unnamed source, said the country would withdraw from the ceasefire if the bombings continue.

Lebanon is a point of contention in the ceasefire, as Iran and mediator Pakistan say that it is included in the deal while Israel and Trump both say otherwise. Israel on Wednesday launched its largest wave of airstrikes on Lebanon since the war began, reportedly killing hundreds of people, even as Hezbollah announced it was halting attacks.

Iran has also included “acceptance of enrichment” for its nuclear program in the Farsi version of the ceasefire deal, but not in its English versions. Trump declared on Truth Social Wednesday morning that there “will be no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust.’”

All of this threatens to derail negotiations between Iran and the U.S., which are scheduled to begin in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Friday. Israel’s relentless bombing in spite of a ceasefire is not new; they have bombed Gaza at least 2,073 times since a ceasefire was declared for the territory in October. Will Trump, against his own nature, offer some clarity on this ceasefire deal and prevent Israel from sabotaging it?

Down south, a Georgia Democrat narrowly lost a house district Donald Trump carried by 34 points in 2024.

In all, Tuesday was an election night that bodes well for Democrats come midterm season.

In Wisconsin—a swing state that Trump won by less than a percentage point in 2024—liberal judge Chris Taylor crushed her GOP-backed opponent, Maria Lazar, by 20 points. It was about double the margin of victory that Susan Crawford, another liberal judge, had attained in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year.

Lest one think the Wisconsin Supreme Court is a nothingburger of a political entity, that 2025 race became the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history after Elon Musk funneled millions into backing the GOP candidate, Brad Schimel, in an attempt to flip what was at the time a 4–3 liberal lean. After Musk’s candidate lost, he quietly moved on to his other passions, such as being racist on social media and tax evasion.

Without a majority on the line this year, it was a less extravagant affair: $6.5 million was spent on advertising, compared to $85 million in 2025. (It should also be noted that Taylor greatly outspent Lazar.) Nonetheless, the margin of victory was surprisingly one-sided. Taylor even won the reliably Republican Ozaukee County.

In Waukesha, after a Republican mayor who declared himself an independent in 2024 decided not to run for reelection, Democrat Alicia Halvensleben bested Republican Scott Allen in a race decided by 2.4 percentage points. Trump had won the city by six points in 2024.

In Georgia, Shawn Harris was not as lucky as those up north; the Democrat lost by 12 points to Republican Clay Fuller for the House seat vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene. But in some ways, Harris’s performance was the most impressive of all. Trump won rural Chattooga County by 37 points in 2024, meaning Harris shifted the district a stunning 25 points to the left.

“The takeaway is this: If Democrats, independents, and Republicans can do this in a ruby-red district, the Democrats can win anywhere,” Harris said in his concession speech. “Nobody ever thought that we would ever be this close.”

In a statement Wednesday, a spokesperson for the committee said, “The Department of Justice has stated Pam Bondi will not appear on April 14 for a deposition since she is no longer Attorney General and was subpoenaed in her capacity as Attorney General. The Committee will contact Pam Bondi’s personal counsel to discuss next steps regarding scheduling her deposition.”

Five Republicans voted with every Democrat on the committee to issue the subpoena last month, only for President Trump to fire Bondi last week. Now her testimony before Congress seems to be in jeopardy. House Oversight Chair James Comer has remained silent on the issue, as others on the committee try to pressure him to still hold Bondi accountable.

“Now that Pam Bondi has been fired, she’s trying to get out of her legal obligation to testify before the Oversight Committee about the Epstein files and the White House cover-up,” said Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking member, in a statement. “She must come in to testify immediately, and if she defies the subpoena, we will begin contempt charges in the Congress.”

In a statement Wednesday, Republican Representative Nancy Mace said that Bondi was still required to testify.

“The subpoena requires Pam Bondi to appear for a sworn deposition regarding the Department of Justice’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates and compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Bondi’s removal as Attorney General doesn’t erase her obligation to testify and does not end Congressional oversight,” Mace posted on X.

Mace and Democratic Representative Ro Khanna sent a letter to Comer Tuesday urging him to reaffirm Bondi’s obligation to testify. But if the statement from the committee’s spokesperson is any indication, Bondi won’t have to answer under oath for how she has handled various scandals within the Department of Justice, including her handling of the Epstein files, the mass resignations, and how the DOJ repeatedly ignored court orders.

Vance was commenting on a flippant remark last month by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—who is currently beefing with Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—who suggested Ukrainian soldiers could show up at Orbán’s home to “communicate with him in his own language.”

“I wasn’t even aware that Zelenskiy said that he was gonna send private soldiers to the prime minister’s residence until yesterday.… Almost couldn’t believe it’s true, but it’s true. It’s completely scandalous,” Vance said while speaking at a panel at a Hungarian university as part of his diplomatic support tour for Orbán. “You should never have a foreign ‌head ⁠of government … threatening the head of government of an allied nation.”

JD Vance in Hungary: "You should never have a foreign head of state threatening the head of government of an allied nation. It's preposterous, it's unacceptable." pic.twitter.com/5Wk9zPUT6s

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 8, 2026

This comment is “preposterous.” Trump spent the first months of his second term doing exactly what Vance is warning about, threatening to fold the entire country of Canada—perhaps the closest U.S. ally—into the “fifty-first state.” This threat was so widely detested in Canada that it helped propel current Prime Minister Mark Carney to an election victory off pure spite.

Trump also threatened to annex Greenland for no real reason other than classic Manifest Destiny–style greed, and threatened to both bomb and invade Mexico against the will of President Claudia Sheinbaum, another crucial ally. And both Vance and Trump have threatened Zelenskiy on multiple occasions, even as he fends off an invasion from Russian President Vladimir Putin, an obvious foe.

Orbán, a longtime ally of Trump and the MAGA movement, is also a staunch opponent of Ukraine and Zelenskiy. Orbán is currently blocking a $105 billion European Union loan for Ukraine in response to what it claims was a targeted shutdown of the Druzhba oil pipeline, which carries Russian oil to Hungary and the rest of Europe. That opposition led Zelenskiy to make the private soldiers comment.

Both Orbán and Trump have made much more detestable statements toward allies than Zelenskiy. The vice president is trying to gaslight you.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham implored the Trump administration Tuesday to test the merits of the proposal via a congressional review, akin to the handling of the Iranian nuclear deal struck under former President Barack Obama in 2015.

“At this early stage, I am extremely cautious regarding what is fact vs. fiction or misrepresentation,” Graham emphasized, hours after Trump announced he was capitulating to Iranian demands.

In the final hour of Trump’s total annihilation deadline, the U.S. leader posted on Truth Social that the two countries had agreed to a two-week ceasefire and that the White House was amenable to a 10-point peace plan that Iran had offered the day prior.

Those points include various demands for an immediate end to the regional violence, including proposals for a permanent end to the war, guarantees that Iran and its allies would not be attacked again, an end to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a halt to all regional attacks.

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

Versions of the ceasefire plan distributed in Farsi—Iran’s native language—include an additional phrase not included in the English edition, specifying the “acceptance of enrichment” for Iran’s nuclear program.

It’s hard to see how the deal would offer any benefits to the U.S., though the final point undermines Trump’s rationale for the war entirely: The president’s primary interest in fighting Iran was to cripple the country’s nuclear program, stripping any potential for the country to create a nuclear weapon.

“Allowing this regime to enrich in the future would be an affront to all those murdered by the regime since this war started and would be inconsistent with denying Iran a pathway toward a bomb in the future,” Graham continued in a social media post Wednesday morning. “Many countries have peaceful nuclear power but do not enrich uranium. At a minimum, that should be the case for Iran.

“To those who say, Iran needs to save face by having a small enrichment program, I’m not remotely interested in providing face-saving cover to a regime that murders its own people, beats a 16-year-old girl to death for not wearing a headscarf appropriately, and is dripping in American blood,” Graham added.

During the conference, Luis Martinez of ABC News asked Hegseth whether his comments such as saying U.S. forces “will give no quarter” to Iran potentially put American lives at risk.

Thirteen U.S. service members have died since the Trump administration, without congressional approval, began bombing Iran on February 28. A Pentagon spokesperson told Time that 373 service members have been injured in the conflict, with five “seriously wounded.”

But Hegseth bristled at the idea that he might be at all responsible for the suffering.

“No!” he said. “I try to be nice up here, but you did listen to what I said, right? ... Of course, it’s ABC. Not a single thing we’ve done has put an American troop in more of a harm’s way. We’ve only set our troops up to harm Iranian military capabilities, which they’ve done to devastating fashion.”

Of course, starting what has proven to be a completely unnecessary war in the first place should make Hegseth and the rest of Trump’s cronies responsible for everything that happens there. Just as military commanders claim credit for their victories, they must also reconcile for their losses.

But Martinez’s question was about Hegseth’s comments while the war was still ongoing. In this respect, the defense secretary has frightened many with his extremist intonations.

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness,” Hegseth said during a March 26 prayer meeting, which he ordered to be held at the Pentagon. “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

At other press conferences, Hegseth has gloated that U.S. forces “are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be,” and that under his rule, the military does not fight “with stupid rules of engagement.”

It’s not a stretch to think that Hegseth’s bloodthirsty directives have led troops to be overly aggressive in the region, risking their lives in the process. His blatant dismissal of the rules of war also likely means Iran’s forces feel they have carte blanche to do horrible things to our own troops.

When a jet was downed last week, Iranian state media told civilians that they would receive a “prize” for hunting down the missing crew member and handing them in.

Even some of Hegseth’s fellow right-wing Christians, such as Tucker Carlson, have pushed back on his war of aggression. Carlson told ABC News shortly after the first bombs fell he thought the war was “absolutely disgusting and evil.”

The U.S. president agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran Tuesday evening, adding in a Truth Social post that he was amenable to a 10-point peace plan that political strategists have pointed out overwhelmingly benefits Tehran.

One point in the list of demands specifies “an end to attacks on Iran and its allies.” Yet despite the concession, Israeli airstrikes continued to rain on Lebanon overnight, marking the single largest attack on the country’s capital since the beginning of the war.

When asked Wednesday about the continued violence in the region by America’s strongest Middle East ally, Trump suddenly claimed that Lebanon was “not included in the deal.”

“Because of Hezbollah,” Trump told PBS Newshour’s Liz Landers. “They were not included in the deal. That’ll get taken care of too. It’s alright.”

But Iran did not interpret the arrangement the same way. Iranian media reported Wednesday morning that Tehran would pull out of the ceasefire agreement altogether if the attacks on Lebanon did not stop. Minutes earlier, state media had reported that the country was considering deterrence operations against Israel over the ceasefire violation.

When Landers asked Trump whether he was alright with Israel’s actions, the president claimed that “it’s part of the deal” and “everyone knows that.”

“That’s a separate skirmish. OK?” Trump added. “You gotta talk faster.”

The chief executive hung up the phone when asked if he regretted his Truth Social post about wiping out the entire Iranian civilization.

It was the influence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—and a pitch for the war delivered on February 11 in the White House situation room—that thrust America into the conflict, according to a New York Times report published Tuesday. U.S. military commanders advised Trump that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” but by that point, Trump had already been inspired to throw over Tehran’s theocratic regime.

It’s likely that Netanyahu continues to hold the reins. Last month, Trump told The Times of Israel that the decision to end the Iran war will be a “mutual” decision he makes with the Israeli leader.

A reporter asked Hegseth at a press conference Wednesday whether the U.S. was still encouraging the Iranian people to rise up against their government, and what the two-week ceasefire meant for that. Hegseth’s answer went against the administration’s claim that regime change has already occurred.

“Listen, I would love to see the Iranian people take advantage of this opportunity. They have been oppressed by the previous regime, and they’ll have a new opportunity with this regime. That remains to be seen. That was not our objective in this effort. They’re brave people, horrible things have been done to them,” Hegseth replied.

Reporter: Are you still encouraging civilians to rise up against the regime?

Hegseth: They have been oppressed by the previous regime and they'll have a new opportunity with this regime pic.twitter.com/7G58GpenuJ

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 8, 2026

President Trump and his senior officials have insisted for weeks that the regime ruling Iran has been changed following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Only Wednesday morning, Trump posted that Iran has “gone through what will be a very productive Regime Change!”

But Hegseth seemed to acknowledge in the press conference that he would like for the Iranian people to still rise up, in effect confirming that the ruling military and religious apparatus that controls Iran hasn’t changed at all. As the new, very shaky two-week ceasefire takes hold and negotiations between Iran and the U.S. begin in Pakistan, it will be interesting to see how the White House deals with Iran’s new rulers. Will it treat with them in good faith or blow up the chances for peace and take hostile action?

In a semi-incoherent post on Truth Social Tuesday evening, Trump called for a two-week ceasefire and suggested that he was amenable to Iran’s 10-point plan, a proposal that the country’s leadership offered the day before. But experts quickly noted that the peace deal was lopsidedly in favor of Iran.

Chief among the concerns was one major concession that would allow Iran to collect millions of dollars in tolls from ships that pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital tradeway in the region for oil and gas.

But never fear: “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it—also securing it from lots of other people,” Trump told ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl on Wednesday. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Political commentators did not agree with the president’s analysis of the new trade tariffs.

“Trump went from ‘we’re going to wipe Iran off the map’ to ‘maybe we’re going into business with them’ literally overnight,” wrote Bulwark founder Sarah Longwell.

“Are we gonna do joint ventures for tollbooths at all the major global straits—Malacca, Gibraltar, etc—or are joint ventures possible only if we have a costly war first with the littoral states?” wrote SUNY Albany political science professor Christopher Clary.

“Dude is insane. 25th amendment,” wrote former MS NOW host and Zeteo News chief Mehdi Hasan.

The strait has been closed since March 2. Situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, the waterway funnels approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments. In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day through the strait, accounting for about 7 percent of total U.S. crude imports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The ramifications of closing the choke point have been felt around the world. In the U.S., the price per oil barrel has exploded due to the strait’s closure, pushing gas over $4 per gallon in most states (in some areas of California, gas has leapt past $7 a gallon). Diesel shot up by 20 cents over the last week alone.

Trump has waffled on the strait’s significance to American markets. Last week, the president rapidly cycled through his opinions on the transit point, claiming in succession that he didn’t care if the strait remained closed and that he needed it reopened.

Iran has let very few ships pass through the channel, even for a fee, over the last five weeks.

“Iran has said that safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible in coordination with Iran’s armed forces and ‘technical limitations.’ What do you believe that means?” the Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olahan asked Hegseth at his Wednesday morning press briefing. “And then we’ve also heard reports that Iran has continued striking targets well into this morning. At what point are we beyond a grace period?”

“What we know is that Iran is gonna say a lot of things,” Hegseth replied. “What has been agreed to, what’s been stated is the strait is open.… As far as shooting, we were monitoring it last night, in real time—of course we are. Iran would be wise to find a way to get [a] carrier pigeon to their troops out in remote locations to know not to shoot, not to shoot any longer.”

“If they’re still firing ballistic missiles—” another reporter interrupted suddenly, referring to reports that Iran continued to attack Israel and Gulf countries Wednesday.

“Excuse me? Why are you so rude?” Hegseth replied, visibly annoyed. “Just wait, I’m callin’ on people … so nasty.”

Hegseth likely knows this, and responded to an honest question about a major sticking point in the ceasefire with a personal attack to avoid answering. But while he, President Trump, and the GOP try to spin this as some mastermind dealmaking victory for them, Iran seems to be continuing to do what it wants, at least for the time being. It’ll control the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian government will remain in place, and it may even continue to fire on Israel and the Gulf allies, as Israel too continues to bomb Lebanon.

Hegseth: Iran would be wise to find a way to get the carrier pigeon to their troops out in remote locations to know not to shoot missiles—we're prepared.

Reporter: THEY’RE STILL FIRING BALLISTIC MISSILES

Hegseth: Excuse me, why are you so rude? pic.twitter.com/4PMqMHX9qZ

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 8, 2026

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is denying that Lebanon is included in the deal, contradicting Iran, mediator Pakistan, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Lebanon was bombed relentlessly by Israel hours after the deal was announced, with strikes hitting the city of Tyre on the southern coast. Multiple airstrikes have hit Beirut, with Israel claiming to have hit 100 Hezbollah targets across the country in a span of 10 minutes.

Israel’s chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, said in a statement Wednesday, “We will continue to strike the terrorist organisation Hezbollah and seize every opportunity.”

“We will not compromise on the security of the [Israeli] residents of the North. We will continue to attack without pause,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, an oil refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island was bombed, with the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company saying that “safety and firefighting teams are controlling and extinguishing the fire and securing the facility.”

“Fortunately, no casualties have been reported so far due to the timely evacuation of employees,” the company said in a statement to the Mehr news agency.

The United Arab Emirates said that its air defense systems had to handle 17 ballistic missiles and 35 drones from Iran Wednesday, and the Kuwaiti military said 31 Iranian drones targeted its oil, gas, and water desalination facilities.

Meanwhile, Pakistan says Iran will be in attendance for talks in Islamabad Friday. The terms of the ceasefire deal state that the U.S. will pause its bombing campaign and that Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But will Israel’s insistence that it continue bombing (and occupying) Lebanon derail the whole thing? Will Trump seek to protect the deal and tell his friend and fellow war criminal Netanyahu to back off? He may have to if he wants the ceasefire to hold.

On Tuesday, after he threatened to kill “a whole civilization” and just 90 minutes before his deadline to reach a deal, Trump announced that he’d “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.” He credited positive talks with Pakistan and Iran for the agreement, citing Iran’s 10-point plan as a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” This was devastating news for some of the worst people in the MAGA-verse.

“The Islamic terrorist regime of Iran is now more legitimized and emboldened than ever before. Terrorists can’t be negotiated with. They can only be destroyed. The US doesn’t get anything out of this ceasefire that isn’t a ceasefire,” MAGA commentator, Zionist, and proud Islamophobe Laura Loomer wrote on X. “How many missiles did Iran fire into allied countries last night? A lot.”

“A ceasefire that leaves the IRGC in power isn’t peace. It’s permission,” self-described “MAGA Jew” Matthew Feinberg wrote on X. “Permission to regroup. Permission to rearm. Permission to do it all over again. That’s not a win. That’s a delay.”

“This is a cancer. If you don’t fully get rid of a cancer, it will grow back,” conservative Iranian American commentator Dr. Sheila Nazarian told News Nation Tuesday evening. “China will help, Russia will help, and we will leave a nuclear, fully stockpiled, more knowledgeable Iran for our children and grandchildren to deal with.”

The Truth Social comments (at least the few that weren’t bots) weren’t much better for Trump, either.

“I’m extremely disappointed in President Trump tonight. I don’t understand how you can possibly believe anything the IRGC says!!” one user replied to Trump’s announcement. “FUCK THAT!!!! END THIS FUCKING SHIT ALREADY!!! YOU CAN’T NEGOTIATE WITH FUCKING TERRORISTS FOR FUCKS SAKE,” said another.

This ceasefire is only temporary, and comes as the U.S. and Israel have already killed more than 3,000 civilians in Iran and Lebanon. And yet MAGA’s reaction demonstrates the constant whiplash Trump is oscillating between—from the genocidal Laura Loomer route to the “end to endless wars” route he ran on. Right now, both sides are unhappy.

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 threat to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely has prompted some surprisingly powerful pushback from his own former allies in the MAGA movement. Some have even suggested it’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. We’re recording this before the Tuesday night deadline that Trump imposed for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face total civilizational erasure. But whatever happens on that front, the conversation about Trump’s undeniable unfitness to serve as president has now been opened in a fresh way. The media is now covering this question. How do we keep it going? We’re talking about this with Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, who has a good new piece laying out that Trump is a madman who cannot remain in office. Jen, good to see you.

Jennifer Rubin: It’s lovely to be here.

Sargent: So just to reiterate, listeners will be hearing this after we find out whether Trump decided to wipe out a country of 93 million people. The Trump tweet that threatened this, as you all know, read as follows: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Jen, maybe by Wednesday morning, Iran will have made a deal with Trump involving his demand to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe the war will escalate, but either way, Trump’s conduct in this war, along with so much else, has revealed him to be absolutely unfit to be president. It sure took people long enough to figure this out, didn’t it?

Rubin: It sure did. And let’s be clear, the threat itself is a violation of international law. The threat of genocide is not allowed. So even if we don’t get the worst of the worst, having made the threat, he has put us in a position in which the United States is essentially threatening to do what we have condemned Russia for doing in Ukraine. And in invoking this apocalyptic religious kind of fervor, he has ironically mimicked the Islamic fundamentalism and translated it into his weird Christian white nationalist view of the world.

Sargent: Yeah, I think the fundamentalists turn out to be us, right?

Rubin: Yes, exactly. I’m sure the Iranians are scratching their head wondering what happened here.

Sargent: Well, let’s listen to some of these former Trump allies calling for Trump’s removal. Here’s conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asking: “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Yes, he used “25th Amendment” as a verb. And his guest offers an idea. Listen.

Alex Jones (voiceover): How do we 25th Amendment his ass?

Guest (voiceover):
The problem is to get the 25th Amendment is harder than impeachment. You have to get two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate.

Alex Jones (voiceover): So what do we do?

Guest (voiceover):
Tackle Trump and let him pretend he’s president and publicly report that he’s going through a health issue and have Vance take over. It literally needs to be something like that. It’s that bad.

Sargent: So Jen, I’m going to try to use this as a verb now. I think that 25th-amendment-ing his ass is in fact a good idea. What did you think of that?

Rubin: It is a good idea, but it’s also improbable to say the least. It would require JD Vance to show some real spine and statesmanship. It would require a majority of his cabinet to go along, and they are filled with deluded toadies. And ultimately he would need Congress and JD Vance to pull this off. None of that is happening. So I think it is important to raise it because I think there has to be a greater discussion of his mental unfitness, his emotional deterioration, which the legacy media has consistently refused to confront.

Sargent: We did have a few other MAGA types—former Trump allies—calling for removal in response to Trump’s threat. Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted this in response to Trump: “25th AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”

You know, Jen, Marjorie Taylor Greene has actually been very powerful in her criticism of Trump. The other day she called on everyone in Trump’s administration to stop worshipping the president and intervene in Trump’s madness: “I know all of you and him—he has gone insane and all of you are complicit.”

It’s true, he has gone insane. And it’s true, they are all complicit. Jen, I don’t think it’s a small thing that someone with as large a following as MTG said this. I think I can see the outlines of a large coalition behind removal. Let’s call it the 25th Amendment Coalition.

Rubin: Exactly. And obviously there are people like Tucker Carlson and the rest of them. I think this is what happens when you fall out of the cult. Suddenly everything becomes very clear. You’re willing to abandon your idolatry. You’re willing to assess his words as they are spoken or written. And that’s what’s happened with these frankly very fringe characters. So I don’t want to attribute a great intellectual breakthrough in terms of democracy or tolerance or rule of law, but at least they see Trump for what he is. They can at least now be truth tellers about who he is, how deranged he is, and how dangerous he is.

And my fear is if we do not wind up in an apocalyptic situation, everyone will reset and we’ll go back to normal. And the same kind of excuse-mongering and rationalization will take hold and Trump will get credit for not blowing up the world, as opposed to these people beginning to carry through on their constitutional obligations—the 25th Amendment, impeachment, simple oversight, simple control of the power of the purse and the power to declare war. How about starting there?

Sargent: Well, absolutely. And I think there’s a real danger of the whole world moving on past this.

Former Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci also joined the 25th Amendment train. He tweeted this: “Wake up. He is calling for A NUCLEAR STRIKE. Seek his removal immediately.” Now here again, we’re recording this before Trump’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Tuesday night. So we don’t know whether he’s going to obliterate Iran right now, but either way, I think it’s probable that he won’t use nukes. If he doesn’t use nukes, he’ll get credit for that, which is sort of deeply perverse in another way.

Rubin: Exactly. We are now reduced—and this is what Trump does, of course. He keeps slouching towards Gomorrah, as Judge Bork once said. This is the defining devious downward, that if he only kills thousands of people by targeting civilians illegally—he gets credit for that? That’s insanity. And this is how we got to where we are, by making excuses, by allowing Republicans to abdicate their common sense, decency, not to mention their constitutional oaths. So we’re now at the spot where the Pope and Marjorie Taylor Greene are on the same page.

Sargent: That’s basically the size of it. And Tucker Carlson, who had a really interesting way of talking about this as well. He was responding to Trump’s talk about bombing all of Iran’s power plants and bridges. Listen to Tucker here, courtesy of Aaron Rupar.

Tucker Carlson (voiceover):
It is vile on every level. It begins with a promise to use the U.S. military—our military—to destroy civilian infrastructure in another country, which is to say to commit a war crime, a moral crime against the people of the country. Those people who are in direct contact with the president need to say, no, I’ll resign, I’ll do whatever I can do legally to stop this, because this is insane. And if given the order, I’m not carrying it out.

Sargent: So Jen, Tucker isn’t quite invoking the 25th Amendment, but he’s suggesting that Trump was talking about giving illegal orders and urging people inside not to obey them because Trump is unfit is the strong implication from Tucker. Now here again, there’s the possibility of broad coalitional agreement. A number of Democrats have urged military officials not to obey illegal orders, just as Tucker did.

I want to hear that get louder. I want to hear more people out there—Democrats, maybe the occasional Republican, whatever former MAGA acolyte wants to join, I’m good. They all have to get out there and say, don’t follow illegal orders. You don’t have to do that. You cannot do it.

Rubin: This is why they went so nuts when those six Democratic congressmen and senators made the video saying exactly what you just said, because they want the military to be obedient to them to be docile, to simply salute and follow orders. That’s why Hegseth has fired a whole slew of JAG people while he has excused war crimes, while he has excused bad behavior, while he has advanced this view of war that the rules of engagement and the laws of international humanity are somehow flawed and a hindrance to us. That’s how we got to where we are.

Now, exactly as I wrote today and many others did, of course, this is right. The high brass, and frankly all the way down the chain of command, have an obligation not to commit genocide. In some sense, Trump made it easy because he clarified exactly what his goal is. He wants their civilization to die. That is genocide. There’s no excuse, there’s no rationalization that they can come up with now for carrying out orders to decimate civilian neighborhoods, power plants, infrastructure.

They clearly know what Trump’s intent is and they know what the results of that action would be. And there will come a time—maybe it will be a new set of Nuremberg trials, maybe it will be military discipline down the road—but there will be a time of reckoning where these people have to be held responsible for what they did and what they said. And they never should have crossed the line the first time when Trump ordered extrajudicial killings on the high seas. Had they said no then, we likely would not be where we are now.

Sargent: That’s a really important point. You’re talking there about the suspected or alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea. Trump has been just blowing them up with abandon. I think at this point it’s become such a regular occurrence that it barely registers anymore. But these are basically civilians and they are suspects who got no due process of any kind and were executed in international waters. That is illegal.

And by the way, just to go back to a theme we brought up earlier—and which Trump kind of gets graded on this curve—now that he went out there and he said, I want to erase a whole civilization, people are going to sort of move on and forget about the fact that he just talked about blowing up bridges and power plants, which itself is a war crime. You can’t blow up civilian infrastructure like that.

You wrote in your piece, which is really good, that the last tripwire—as you put it in this situation, the last sort of set of political guard rails that could possibly exist—may be the prospect of accountability later for people in the chain of command. You seem somewhat confident that there will be accountability like that. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but can you talk me into it? Nobody in the military seems all that worried about getting prosecuted or facing accountability for the executions in the Caribbean. I mean, we’ll see what happens in this situation, obviously, but do you think there will be accountability later?

Rubin: I do. And I think they’re kidding themselves if they think Trump is going to pardon everyone, particularly those people who have left their offices prior to the time Trump leaves. So they’re banking [on] what, a pardon? A pardon so broad that it extends not only to civilian criminal prosecution, but military justice? Really? That’s what they’re banking on? And how far down the chain of command is it going to be? Does it extend beyond the Joint Chiefs? What about the generals? What about the colonels? All the way down.

So if they feel comfortable leaving their subordinates to swing in the wind, they will continue to go forward. But at some point, they have to man up and be willing to quit, be willing to go before the national audience and say, enough, we cannot, we will not commit war crimes. And by the way, if you wanted an argument for throwing the Republicans out of power in both houses, it’s that they wouldn’t even stop him from committing genocide. That’s what toadies they are.

Sargent: That I think is basically not in doubt. And by the way, I will point out that some Democrats have come out and suggested that there will be prosecutions. For instance, Representative Ted Lieu had this amazing tweet. He tweeted this right at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said, “Eradicating a whole civilization constitutes a war crime. You must disobey that order. If you commit war crimes, the next administration will prosecute you.” And I’m going to read one more from Senator Ron Wyden: “Republicans who don’t stop him will have blood on their hands, and anyone who carries out an order to bomb civilian targets will be complicit in war crimes and will be held accountable.”

Jen, both of those Democrats said very clearly accountability is coming later under a future administration with a real attorney general. What do you make of it?

Rubin: I think they’re very serious. Whether that will be possible, what Trump will do in terms of pardons, we don’t know. But it is very important that they say that. And it would be awfully nice if some Republicans other than Marjorie Taylor Greene would echo that. Where is Mitch McConnell, the guy who said, we don’t really have to impeach and exclude him from office because the criminal law will take care of him? Where are the Republicans who are supposed to care about constitutional order and the rule of law? They’re nowhere to be seen. It would sure be helpful if they showed up one day.

Sargent: It sure would. Well, Jen, any closing thoughts on this? I have to say that I think that it’s heartening that we’re seeing even these whack-job MAGA voices come out and say the obvious, which is that Trump is fundamentally unfit for office. Again, I think that there’s actually the possibility of a coalition behind this idea. I don’t know how big it is. And as you pointed out, the practical hurdles to removal are immense. It’s not going to happen, obviously, it’s just not going to happen.

But the more talking about it, the better. The more voters are talking about it, the better. The more Democrats are talking about accountability in the future, the better. We’ve got to keep this on the burner. It’s got to keep going. That’s the basic bottom line here. We can’t have a backslide out of this. We’ve got to keep focus on it.

Rubin: Absolutely. And the fact that we may duck one disaster does not mean we should be blind to the next one and the one after that. That’s how we got to where we are—by excusing bad and increasingly crazy behavior and rhetoric. So perhaps this will be an inflection point. I certainly hope so.

I hope it will be so for voters when they consider who they trust to hold offices in November. But this has to be a wake-up call for all of us. Trump is a pathological narcissist. He has no idea what he’s doing. He’s got no plan. And he would come right up to—and maybe over—the brink of really cataclysmic war.

Sargent: Well, when folks listen to this, they will know more than we know now, Jen. I’m on the edge of my seat here, very literally. Jen Rubin, really awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Rubin: It’s always a pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much.

It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”

The strongest entries in the series are produced by an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iranian government accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.)

Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up.

“One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions.

Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.

From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.

About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination.

This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day.

At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.

Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.

These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people.

As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.”

After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it.

In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.

Congress doesn’t have to pay attention to this budget proposal. In fact, White House budget requests are often ignored. But they reveal where a president’s priorities lie, and this one shows how unserious Trump is as a champion of the country’s working class. Here are just five ways this proposal would hurt the working class if Congress takes him up on it.

Food Programs

Trump’s budget would roll back a 2024 rule that increased the amount of fruits and vegetables available to recipients, cutting current benefits by more than half. “By slashing the fruit and vegetable benefits and not ensuring sufficient program funding, this administration is taking healthy foods away from children and mothers most at risk for nutritional deficiencies,” Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association, said in a statement. The federal nutrition guidelines had prioritized increasing access to fruit and vegetables, but Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scrapped them in favor of protein, contrary to the latest nutrition science.

Trump’s budget would also cut other food benefits, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and summer and afterschool meals for kids. Working- and middle-class families rely on these programs at some point in their lives, and fully funding them would ensure more Americans have access to the kinds of whole, healthy foods that officials like Kennedy tout. Cutting them will cause more Americans to go hungry, especially as food prices continue to rise.

Assistance for Electricity Bills

A small federal program known as the Low Income Energy Assistance Program helps almost seven million families pay for heating and cooling costs. The program disproportionately benefits the elderly and disabled who live on fixed incomes, and can also be used in some states to weatherize old houses or prevent utility shut-offs in emergencies. Trump’s budget would scrap it entirely, promising to “instead support low-income individuals through lower energy prices and an America First economic platform.”

That promise seems especially laughable given that energy prices rose 7.1 percent last year and are likely to rise even more as the war in Iran, the disinvestment from green energy production, and increase in new data centers continue to raise energy costs.

Career and Technical Education

Career and technical education, or CTE, formerly known as vocational education, has undergone a renaissance in the past few decades. It was once considered a second-tier educational track where students were neglected, but a reinvestment and revival in CTE has helped many students access well-paying careers in trades while also providing an alternative path to college.

The Trump budget would advance plans to dismantle the Department of Education entirely, which would eliminate CTE funding and move it into the Department of Labor, something the administration has already tried despite legal challenges from Democrats. Advocates say it would return the program to the “bad old days.” CTE is meant to be a broad-based education program that empowers students no matter where their careers take them, but under the Department of Labor it risks becoming a more narrow, short-term, job-training pathway. That move would also pull money out of K-12 and community college systems that offer those programs now.

Grants for Rural and Minority-Run Small Businesses

Trump’s budget would eliminate special programs for small rural businesses and minority-owned entrepreneurs. It claims that the Small Business Administration already accomplishes these goals, and that targeting traditionally underserved populations is “woke” and “racist.”

It would cut the Rural Business Development Grant program, intended to help small programs with fewer than 50 employees and less than $1 million in gross revenues. In the past, these grants have been used to train young and organic farmers and build commercial facilities that can help farmers prepare and transport their products to market, among other programs, all of which benefit entrepreneurship in rural areas with few job opportunities. The budget also eliminates a loan guarantee program with similar goals. Because these programs are small and not often immediately profitable, it’s harder to get private funding for them.

The budget would also eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency, which has helped working-class Americans of color start or expand their businesses and helped diversify some fields, for instance bringing more women into construction trades. These populations were targeted for this special program because they’re disproportionately likely to struggle to get loans elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration claims that that mission is itself divisive and discriminatory. Together, these programs allow working-class Americans to build and create businesses in communities often overlooked by traditional financing. Without government investment, they could disappear.

Low-Income Housing Programs

A number of programs that aim to expand homeownership, both to people and communities, are on the chopping block. The budget would eliminate Community Development Financial Institutions, which bring financial institutions to communities that traditional banks ignore. They provide a range of financial services, including mortgages to low-income families buying their first homes. The Trump budget would also cut a program that has helped build more than 1.3 million affordable homes since 1992. And it would continue calling for a new Department of Housing and Urban Development policy to stop issuing rental assistance vouchers to new families.

Cutting these programs does not save the federal government much money, especially when compared to the increased defense and immigration spending called for elsewhere. It’s also not a new agenda. Republicans have been cutting the social safety net for decades, dismantling the federal government infrastructure meant to help people and leaving everyone vulnerable to the whims of the free market. For all the lip service Trump has paid to working-class Americans during his campaigns, this is just more evidence he’s always been a corporate-first Republican, serving the wealthy and the warmongering at the expense of everyone else.

Once upon a time, very few people got college degrees. About 6 percent of the population in 1950 had one (which itself, thanks to the GI Bill, was a remarkable high). College was, at some level, affordable, and by 2010 degree holders received a glorious 75 percent pay bump. And if you didn’t go to college, no sweat: Nondegree holders had plenty of options for work that paid OK, too—for instance, in skilled trades like electrical work or union jobs in hospitality.

Over the years, more and more people went to college, and today more than 50 percent of working-age adults have college degrees. Overall, they still make more money than people without college degrees. But after 2005, the ever-rising prospects for degree holders began to slouch. The job market for grads shrank, wages flatlined or backslid, and college got so expensive that the debt some people took on to get their degree almost permanently ate into their expected windfall. Degree holders had been promised the world, and a vaunted place in the professional or managerial class. Yet five years after graduation, only 55 percent of college graduates were employed in jobs that require a degree, according to a 2024 report. Many ended up working in the service industry. Caught in low-wage, often precarious jobs, some sought to form unions.

This is the basic story of decline told by Noam Scheiber in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. The book expands on the early reporting Scheiber did on Starbucks Workers United at his day job as the workplace reporter at The New York Times. In Mutiny, Scheiber reports in depth on multiracial, cross-class organizing campaigns at Starbucks, Apple stores, video game design studios, and among screenwriters for television. These campaigns were not entirely composed of college-educated people, but many of their participants certainly fit the bill.

The story of a highly educated yet disillusioned generation has been told repeatedly since roughly 2011, when Occupy Wall Street gave voice to the frustration of a struggling mass of college debtors, unemployed degree holders, and others. They have formed a vocal and enthusiastic base of support for left populists from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and have pushed for relief from crushing student loan repayments, as chronicled in works such as Ryann Liebenthal’s Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis. The workplace-organizing campaigns that Scheiber traces are particularly notable because, for generations, college-educated Americans did not tend to throw in their lot with unions. These efforts and their successes, he suggests, not only illuminate the changing fortunes of the college-educated; they also might open a new front to the labor movement.

Chaya Barrett, one of Scheiber’s central characters, has a story typical of her generation. Barrett, the daughter of two college graduates, grew up in Baltimore and attended Towson University. An Apple superfan since her tweens, in 2015 she began to work at the Apple store near her college. Like many people who enter the low-wage service industry in high school and college, she did not necessarily expect to stay in the sector forever. But Apple was slightly different from most retail jobs, in that it preached lofty ideals and hired workers for positions that didn’t require hard sales skills. When she asked if there would be sales goals and commissions, a manager replied the only goal was to make the customer feel “heard.”

It was almost as if Apple stores were made to absorb the precariously employed college graduates with few other options, offering them just enough prestige and high-minded ideals glazed with humanities-tinted language to distract from the reality that they were working in a mall. In a video advertising the opening of the first Apple store in Virginia in 2001, Steve Jobs brags that “literally half” the store was not devoted to sales but to learning. This was in the form of the Apple “Creatives,” who for the early period of the stores would teach one-on-one classes with customers about how to use their Apple products to make movies, produce music, and generally be creative. There were also the Apple Geniuses, who labored under images of Pablo Picasso and Amelia Earhart. Yes, they were simply tech support, but the company called them “Geniuses.” The motto, repeated in group meetings was, “We are here to enrich lives / To help dreamers become doers / To help passion expand human potential.”

“When Apple had first hired her in college, Chaya felt like she was joining a secret society and she couldn’t believe she was admitted,” Scheiber writes. And as she rose through the ranks, she was insulated from sales and worked as a “Creative” for many years, teaching classes. Even as she still had $50,000 in college debt and was living at home with mother, two sisters, and baby niece in Baltimore County, “Chaya hadn’t worried too much about take-home pay as long as her work felt elevated.”

But Apple was already in the process of de-elevating that work. Since Steve Jobs died in 2011 and Tim Cook ascended to the throne, Cook had been looking for ways to trim expenditures. He fixated on a “lean” manufacturing process that both cut inventory to a bare minimum and outsourced much of the work to contractors, so that the actual head count of Apple was as small as possible. While the number of people working in Apple’s supply chain was possibly millions across the world (one count has it at 1.5 million), the company only fully employed a measly 80,300 in 2013. Employees of Apple stores saw this change directly as the company began to increase the number of temporary employees working at the store, something that was once discouraged by management for the way it lowered the quality of the sales experience for customers. The head count at Barrett’s Towson store fell from as high as 140 in the late 2010s to just 80 employees in 2023.

The company also reduced its famously extensive training to the least it could get away with. In the early 2010s, Apple store workers would train in person in hotel conference rooms before ever getting to the floor and then be dramatically presented with their store uniform when they passed training. After a shake-up in the stores, that process was replaced with a “self-guided format in which employees clicked through a succession of screens,” effectively shrinking from a three-week process to one week. The effects of cutbacks became apparent in the rollout in 2024 of Apple’s virtual-reality product the Vision Pro, which turned into a debacle for employees. Apple wanted workers to memorize and follow a lengthy, complicated script for guiding customers through the process of putting on the augmented reality goggles, but gave workers scant time to figure it out. The company flew a handful of employees to Cupertino to learn and then expected those workers to train everyone else. The script was quickly abandoned, sales of the Vision Pro were anemic, and workers like Barrett were left feeling adrift from a company they once loved.

All this disillusionment provided reasons to form a union. Workers like Barrett fought for union recognition in 2022 at the Towson store, while Apple store workers in Kansas City, Missouri, St. Louis, and Tulsa also petitioned for a union vote. The movement for unions at Apple stores—as well as at Starbucks, Chipotle, and Trader Joe’s—crested amid widespread disenchantment with in-person work during the pandemic. After the peak of the crisis, bosses quickly abandoned virus-related safety protocols and required employees to return to normal. For Apple store workers, the jobs no longer had the “elevated” appeal that might have helped them ignore management’s blatant disregard for safety when management quickly disassembled the screens at the front of store that kept workers safe and separated from customers during the pandemic. Barrett and her co-workers won their union election and moved to bargaining a contract, a process that would drag on fruitlessly for years.

So why are unions now appealing to the college-educated? One possible reason emerges from the between-the-lines of Scheiber’s story. Many college grads assumed they would work in jobs that harnessed their passions and made the world a better place, as Apple often stressed it would. But when it became clear that the humanistic ideals were little more than window dressing, where would they turn for meaning in life? They found it at work, not as devotees to the company line but as union members. The union, for one of the over-credentialed Starbucks workers that Scheiber profiles, offers purpose and community in the process of organizing.

Another appeal of unions for the college-educated is the crumbling of the narrative that pushed people into universities: Upon close inspection, the story about college being an unimpeded good begins to look more like a fairy tale than a reality. Some people who go to college find stronger headwinds against the destination of upper-middle-class bliss. For Black people born in the 1980s, the lifetime value of a degree was “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in 2019. People who go to nonselective schools tend to do less well than those who make it into selective schools (which are also more expensive). And degree seekers who major in the humanities, rather than science or engineering, do a lot less well. A 2018 study found the chances of paying off a STEM degree with future earnings were about 90 percent, compared to 50 percent for a degree in the humanities.

This decline in prospects might explain why it is jarring when pundits from left to right portray college graduates as some over-entitled, pampered mass. People often talk about how, say, the Democratic Party has been warped to fulfill the needs of college degree holders. But it’s very likely that we are talking not about humanities majors, or graduates of massive state schools and for-profit colleges, or most nonwhite graduates like Chaya Barrett, who struggled to pay her bills while working at Apple after college. Instead, we’re using “college graduates” to mean the small minority of graduates of elite schools, or those with highly valuable engineering or business degrees. One of the useful things that Scheiber’s book does is correct this record. College graduates still have some advantage in economic life over those without a degree, but they, too, are facing extreme economic challenges.

Scheiber spends a lot of time in the present tense, analyzing the surface textures of these union campaigns themselves. The book serves up generous portions of the play-by-play of organizing and contract negotiations of workers at Apple, Starbucks, and even the resurgent United Auto Workers under the crusading president Shawn Fain. In one bargaining session with Apple workers, for example, we get the scoop on a plan to have the most placid union member sigh heavily and look upset at a bargaining session, with the hopes that the ruffling of this implacable member will strike a chord across the bargaining table with Apple’s management and lawyers. The negotiations and tactics are interesting, but they are similar to many organizing campaigns with or without the involvement of college-educated people: The company lawyers stonewall, as they do; the workers walk out and picket for a fair contract, as they do. The details don’t reveal much about the college-educated working class; the book could have easily been about the surprising rise and revolt of a new wave of service workers, because, in effect, that is what a lot of the book covers as it devotes most of the pages to the stories of Starbucks and Apple store employees.

What is missing is a robust historical analysis of how we got to where we are, which means the book often raises more questions than it answers. Questions like, why did college-educated workers not form unions in the past? How were they convinced that they did not have much in common with the rest of the working class? What exactly happened to those good-paying jobs? And, most importantly, who’s to blame?

In 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich attempted to explain why the college-educated saw themselves apart from the struggle of other workers. In their epochal paper on “The Professional-Managerial Class,” they theorized about an entirely new class that stood awkwardly between people who labored and the people who owned their labor. The professional-managerial class, or PMC, was composed of doctors, lawyers, nurses, scientists, middle managers, HR administrators, professors, and the like. As professionals, they entered careers that often required not only a college education but also licenses to practice. This licensing requirement (involving, for example, a bar exam or medical license) limited the number of people who could do the jobs, kept wages high, and protected a certain aura of above-the-fray expert status. Managers, the other half of the class, also tended to be college- and business school–educated.

As the Ehrenreichs theorized in the 1970s, the growing corporate state needed a class of people to manage not only the workplace but the rise of consumption, as the country weaned itself off an economy dependent on pure production. The experts of the PMC would administer this new world. New pathologies, unearthed by scientists and researchers, would need new products and services to soothe them, and those in turn needed to be expertly sold. The PMC, the Ehrenreichs wrote, “designed the division of labor and the machines that controlled workers’ minute by minute existence on the factory floor, manipulated their desire for commodities and their opinions, socialized their children, and even mediated their relationship with their own bodies.” Some of this, no doubt, fed into the relentless campaign to encourage people to consume a college degree.

In this comfortable position, as the PMC evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, many of these experts felt comfortable pushing back against the corporate demands for profit. College students protested the Vietnam War; social workers aimed to “end poverty” through radical work within and beyond the welfare system; crusading lawyers took on public-interest campaigns; and many professionals demanded that opportunities for marginalized people be opened in their fields. This gave rise to the perception of a slightly pampered activist liberal overclass that to this day is accused of running our college campuses, corporate boardrooms, and myriad nonprofits.

And yet, during this period, college degree holders were convinced—through the carrot of high wages and special Übermensch status of their jobs—that even though they, like the working class, relied on a wage or salary, they had little in common with the rabble. They did not need unions, and they generally did not organize in solidarity with those below them. With the realignment of the Democratic Party in the 1980s away from the New Deal core of the working class and toward the highly educated middle class, the professional-managerial class, the rise to power was complete. As Scheiber notes, approval of unions by college-educated people in the 1980s was uniquely low.

But then the same forces that had diminished working-class life throughout the twentieth century by outsourcing jobs, crushing unions, speeding up work, and holding down wages came for the professionals. Once-comfortable tenure-track professorial jobs were replaced with status-less adjuncts; once-independent medical practices and law firms were gobbled up by large corporate chains.

By the mid-2000s, things really fell apart. The cost of college education, a requirement for membership in the professional-managerial class, exploded, rising by 498 percent since 1986 (for comparison, consumer prices increased by 115 percent). Reliable, high-paying jobs for the highly educated elite disappeared, as law firms either automated research and review work or sent it overseas, and hospitals outsourced tasks such as “reading X-rays, MRIs and echocardiograms” to providers in India. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that “demand for workers with college degrees has declined since 2010.” That trend continued in the last decade: “In 2010, there were 1.2 postings requiring a college degree for every 1 posting that did not require a college degree. By 2020, it was 0.6 postings requiring a college degree for every 1 that did not.”

In 2013, the Ehrenreichs followed up on the fortunes of the PMC in their essay “Death of a Yuppie Dream.” “Those of us who have college and higher degrees have proved to be no more indispensable, as a group, to the American capitalist enterprise than those who honed their skills on assembly lines or in warehouses or foundries,” they wrote. “The old PMC dream of a society ruled by impartial ‘experts,’” they wrote elsewhere, “gave way to the reality of inescapable corporate domination.”

The result is a wave of organizing that includes people who once may have been members of the professional-managerial class but are no longer able to attain its sweet, lofty fruits. These people are the characters in Scheiber’s book, degree holders whose CVs boast rarefied fellowships, but who are nonetheless working at Starbucks and Apple. It would not be fair to say they are leading the charge, but it is notable that college-educated people are actively engaged in labor struggles as workers themselves, and their participation signals that the mass of people who are sympathetic to a more egalitarian and democratic system is growing.

The fate of the college-educated working class is probably worse than most people assume. In one darkly hilarious detail from Scheiber’s book, he notes in a chapter about “salts” (people who intentionally go to work at a company in order to promote unionization) that one of these college-educated salts at Starbucks is actually making his highest wage ever there. When Starbucks is the best-paying job you’ve ever had with a college degree, something is truly wrong.

It’s likely that the job market for college-educated people is only going to get worse. Firms can now use the threat or actual implementation of AI tools to eliminate jobs and heap more work on fewer people. Whereas 20 years ago law firms outsourced document review, now companies are automating the computer engineering and coding jobs that for a brief moment held out a promise of good, highly paid work. There was a prevalent narrative going for a while that “future-proofing” yourself with STEM skills would lower the risk of job loss, but that is clearly not the case. When you combine the Ehrenreichs’ analysis with Scheiber’s reporting and recent AI-induced job losses, the message is clear: If it is unrestrained, corporate greed will come for us all, eventually.

The CLCPA passed in 2019 amid global climate strikes and the determined efforts of local advocacy groups like NY Renews. Enacting the CLCPA put New York on track to significantly curb greenhouse gas emissions and align itself with environmental justice. Setting legally binding emissions reductions targets, the CLCPA upon passage was celebrated as the strongest climate law in the nation, and a mark of New York’s commitment to climate leadership. Now, amid unprecedented environmental deregulation—including the rollback of the “endangerment finding,” which allowed the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases, and a second withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement—the CLCPA is one of the last serious U.S. climate policies left standing.

Yet over the last few months, the CLCPA has fallen subject to an extremely high-stakes and last-minute attempt to substantially alter its core provisions.

The CLCPA seeks to lead New York into a green and equitable future by mandating that the state achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. As of this past January, New York had only progressed 25 percent toward meeting the nearer benchmark, and remained significantly behind on renewable generation, offshore wind, and energy storage goals. The Department of Environmental Conservation, under Hochul, failed to meet the deadline for issuing regulations to meet the law’s emissions reduction goals in 2024, leading to a lawsuit, in which an Albany County judge found that the state had violated the CLCPA.* After failing to meet the revised deadline of early February 2026, Hochul secured a longer extension via an appeal, essentially leaving her with two options: comply with the law or change it. This month, instead of choosing to pursue compliance, she specified how she would change it—by delaying the law’s deadlines and/or altering pollution accounting methods.

According to Hochul, whom fossil fuel and utility lobbyists have spent $16 million trying to influence since she became governor in 2021, the CLCPA’s targets, as currently written, are “costly and unattainable.” But the high costs Hochul cites aren’t inevitable—they reflect just one conception of how the targets might be implemented, by relying heavily on carbon pricing. Other and more comprehensive proposals have suggested changing and even scaling the CLCPA’s renewable energy and energy storage goals, in combination with measures such as strengthening labor standards and utility regulations along with zoning reform, while following the law’s original timeline. Further state leadership on renewable energy could also help save money for ratepayers, who are already being burdened with climate costs.

Whatever the underlying motivation, Hochul’s choice to roll back the law inevitably signals a concession to fossil fuel interests, which have spent millions seeking to lobby the governor since she took office in 2021. It is also a concession to the Trump administration, suggesting that the state will effectively succumb to a hostile environmental agenda and sit back and take the administration’s attacks on renewable energy development, rather than independently champion the clean energy economy that the administration is so desperate to foreclose. Lastly, it is a concession to climate doomerism and an act of pure nearsightedness, with long-term public health and safety costs. Not only New Yorkers, but Americans as a whole—and particularly young people—will suffer the consequences if the states leading the charge to protect our communities and the environment suddenly backtrack because of an authoritarian swing in the political headwinds.

What Governor Hochul should show New Yorkers and current or prospective Democratic Party voters nationwide is the determination, grit, and radical optimism needed to advance real and lasting climate solutions, many of which are well within reach. When the state has violated the CLCPA, the clear answer is to redress the violation—not to avoid violations simply by reducing the demands of critical climate legislation. Environmental justice, civil rights, and law groups, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and many more, agree: The governor should honor, not seek to dismantle or destroy, New York’s seminal climate law.

By remaining faithful to the CLCPA, Hochul can help protect New Yorkers’ constitutionally recognized human right to a healthy environment and public health, and set New York up to benefit in countless ways, including economically, from an energy transition. She can also prevent New York enduring the long-term risks of a failure to transition, including possible climate liability lawsuits and financial risks. These financial risks are considerable, as recognized by the state’s decision to restrict oil and gas investments for the Common Retirement Fund, and prospective. And if she reverses course and decides to honor the CLPCA, Hochul can inspire states across the country to take similar action and forge an effective, multistate resistance to the federal government’s anti-climate crackdown.

Hochul, slipping in the polls, is surely looking to shore up support ahead of the gubernatorial election in November. She would likely fare better by modeling the courage to defend hard-won policies and defend New Yorkers’ futures in a livable climate, rather than by undermining this critical work and punting serious climate action further down the road, when the damage from the crisis and the costs of combating it will only have grown. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent election after a grassroots campaign defined by big ideas like free universal childcare proved that New Yorkers want leaders who envision and will pursue real systemic change.

New Yorkers, particularly including young New Yorkers like myself, will remember this moment and what happens to the CLCPA. We will also remember which lawmakers spoke up in defense of robust climate action and which ones did not, or were willing to compromise on essential components of the CLCPA’s implementation. Likewise, we will remember which Democratic state party leaders stayed true to their promises of pursuing bold climate action and which ones sacrificed the agenda that has mobilized young people for their causes time and again, merely paying lip service to our existential cries. Americans, as well as elected officials and communities around the world, are paying attention to which course New York will pursue: offering the leadership we so desperately need to transform this existential crisis or retreating, reducing legal demands at the expense of people and the planet.

* An earlier version of this piece misstated the governmental body responsible for issuing regulations to meet emissions limits.

Pope Leo XIV described the U.S. president’s recent threats to obliterate Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable.”

“Today as we all know there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable,” Leo said Tuesday. “Here there are certainly questions of international law, but even more than this a question of morality for the good of people.”

Trump earlier Tuesday had pledged that Iran’s “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” unless the country’s leadership agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital tradeway in the region that only closed because of Trump’s intervention. He similarly promised to “blow up the whole country.”

Trump has repeatedly escalated his threats against Iran since Sunday, demanding that the country’s leadership either reopen the waterway or face total annihilation, highlighting various possible strike targets such as Iran’s power plants and bridges. The president said this despite the fact that carrying out this threat would constitute a war crime.

Leo referred to the conflict as an “unjust war” and said that the war is “continuing to escalate” with no clear resolution. It “is only provoking more hatred throughout the world,” he said, according to the Associated Press’s English translation of the pope’s comments, which were made in Italian.

But such a severe attack on Iran wouldn’t just be immoral—it would also violate the laws of war. Targeting noncombatants such as civilians and civilian infrastructure is a blatant violation of International Humanitarian Law. Exterminating a “whole civilization” would break several components of the Geneva Conventions, which the U.S. played a foundational role in creating nearly a century ago.

The pope urged people of goodwill to contact their local lawmakers to create pressure against the White House–led war effort. Leo emphasized that attacks on civilian infrastructure are “against international law” as well as a “sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction human beings are capable of.”

“We all want to work for peace,” the pope said.

Trump wrote on social media that Iran had the opportunity to act until Tuesday 8 p.m. Iran has so far rejected potential peace deals.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote on his personal social media website. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

Trump administration officials have already faced serious allegations of war crimes for their military operations in Latin America and Iran. In an article for our March issue that went to press before the Iran war began, I reported on Trump’s legal peril under international law at length. But the president’s latest post opens up him and members of his administration to something completely new: potential criminal charges for genocide.

Genocide has been considered a violation of international law for almost 80 years. During this time, genocide-related prosecutions have typically occurred through bespoke international tribunals like the ones created for the Yugoslav wars, the Khmer Rouge, and the Rwandan genocide. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has also had jurisdiction to prosecute genocide-related crimes since its establishment in 2002.

A federal law passed in 2002 on the eve of the Iraq War forbids the U.S. government from extraditing U.S. citizens to the International Criminal Court or cooperating with its investigations in any meaningful way. The law is colloquially known as the Hague Invasion Act because it gives freestanding congressional authorization for military operations to “use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release” of any U.S. soldier or official in ICC custody. It is meant to deter international law investigations into U.S. military operations.

International tribunals are not necessary to prosecute Americans who commit genocide, however. The Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987 criminalizes the act of genocide “whether in time of peace or in time of war” under federal law. Unlike ordinary crimes, genocide is carried out “with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Notably, there is no statute of limitations to this offense, meaning that anyone who participates in the offense could face prosecution at any point for the rest of their life.

The 1987 law applies to anyone who kills, injures, or permanently impairs people of those specific groups. One particular provision that is relevant to Trump’s threats applies to any efforts to “subjec[t] the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part.” Normally it might be difficult to prove a genocidal intent for a specific military strike. Trump’s threat to use U.S. military power to ensure that a “whole civilization will die tonight” removes that obstacle. He could only be clearer and less ambiguous if he wrote, “I will commit genocide tonight.”

Trump’s threats to target Iranian civilian infrastructure, if carried out, may already amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While the U.S. does not claim universal jurisdiction over acts of genocide, Trump’s potential actions would likely meet that threshold. The Justice Department’s Criminal Resource Manual, an internal tool for federal prosecutors, noted that the federal government has jurisdiction over genocide prosecutions if the offense is “committed within the United States” or when “the offender is a national of the United States.”

As an act, genocide is an ancient offense that can be found throughout human history. As a specific concept and criminal offense, genocide dates back to the post–World War II era. The concept gained attention after Nazi Germany murdered millions of people, including more than six million European Jews in the Holocaust, before and during the war.

Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who lost dozens of family members to Nazi murders, coined the term genocide before the war’s end to describe a crime that previously had no name. “It seemed incredible and intolerable that such crimes which long antedated Hitler—they go back to Rome’s destruction of Carthage, and in recent history to the extermination of the Armenians [after World War I]—should go unpunished,” he wrote.

World War II’s horrors prompted world leaders to seek new ways to constrain humanity’s worst deeds. In 1948, the United Nations adopted what became known as the Genocide Convention to criminalize it under international law. More than 150 countries have signed and ratified the treaty since then. While the Truman administration signed the treaty in 1948, the Senate did not vote at the time on whether to ratify it, meaning that it did not apply to the United States.

Final ratification would not come until fifty years later, and only thanks to the dedicated efforts of William Proxmire, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin. Proxmire had a reputation as a maverick who would sometimes mount quixotic campaigns for his personal causes. One of those causes was ratification of the Genocide Convention. For 19 years, he gave a brief floor speech almost every day that the Senate was in session to encourage his colleagues to ratify the treaty.

Forty years after the Genocide Convention was signed—and more than 3,300 floor speeches by Proxmire later—his fellow senators finally acted. The Senate approved the treaty in February 1986 by a vote of 86–11, easily crossing the Constitution’s required two-thirds margin. Two years later, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that incorporated the Genocide Convention into federal criminal law, saying that the law “represents a strong and clear statement by the United States that it will punish acts of genocide with the force of law and the righteousness of justice.”

Anyone who commits such an offense faces the death penalty or life imprisonment if convicted. The original Proxmire Act did not allow for capital punishment since many House and Senate Democrats at the time refused to vote for a law that would allow it. Congress changed course six years later with the omnibus Clinton crime bill in 1994, which specifically authorized the death penalty for genocide “where death results.” Under federal law, Americans can also be prosecuted for attempted genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide.

Federal prosecutors have not charged any defendant with genocide since the Proxmire Act’s enactment. Prosecutions under the federal implementation acts of international treaties are generally rare, which means they are often legally and constitutionally untested. In 2006, for example, federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania charged a woman who had tried to injure her husband’s mistress by smearing dangerous chemicals on her doorknob with violating the Chemical Weapons Implementation Act of 1998.

Some critics derided that case as an overzealous prosecution that could have been resolved more easily under Pennsylvania’s ordinary assault statutes. When the case reached the Supreme Court in 2014, the defendant also argued that it would be unconstitutional for Congress to undermine federalism by ratifying treaties that allowed it to prosecute crimes ordinarily left to the states. The justices ultimately avoided a ruling on that question by holding that the defendant’s actions simply didn’t fall within the statute’s scope at all, leaving the CWIA intact.

If Trump were to follow through on his threats that Iranian civilization will “die tonight,” either by destroying enough of its civilian infrastructure to indirectly kill large numbers of Iranians or by using nuclear weapons against Iranian cities, he could theoretically be prosecuted by a future Democratic administration for genocide. So too could anyone in the military’s chain of command who helped carry out Trump’s orders to erase a civilization so that it could “never … be brought back again.”

Trump might feel confident that the Supreme Court’s ruling two years ago in Trump v. United States would shield him from legal consequences. In the 2024 case, the high court held that presidents have absolute immunity for any action committed within their core constitutional powers. Some observers took this to mean that the president could not be criminally prosecuted when acting as commander in chief. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example, warned that the court had given presidents immunity for ordering the military to assassinate political rivals.

But the immunity ruling should pose no barrier to prosecuting Trump if he follows through on his threat on Tuesday night. First, and perhaps most importantly, “presidential immunity” is not a real thing. Chief Justice John Roberts and the other conservative justices made it up out of thin air. It has no basis in the Constitution, the common law, or two and a half centuries of American political tradition. Trump v. United States was plainly wrong the day it was decided, and it deserves no respect or adherence from any other figure in the American constitutional order.

Second, even if one were to concede that presidential immunity exists, there is no reason to think that it would extend to Trump’s actions. “The president is not above the law,” Roberts wrote. “But Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution.” Committing genocide is neither a “core presidential power” nor a “responsibility of the executive branch under the Constitution.” While Trump is the commander in chief, the president’s authority over the military is hardly exclusive. Congress retains the Article 1 power to “make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces,” among numerous other safeguards.

As Trump’s Tuesday night deadline nears, he and other administration officials face a stark choice. If they follow through on Trump’s threat, they would be opening themselves up to permanent and indefinite criminal liability for the rest of their lives. Any future presidential administration could charge them with conspiring to commit genocide for carrying out or assisting the president’s illegal orders. They would be unable to travel to Europe or other democratic nations without risking arrest and prosecution under international law. They may even face extradition to The Hague if Congress were to ever repeal the 2002 law and join the ICC—something that even a presidential pardon could not protect. Word to the wise: Anyone who bets that Trump can protect them from consequences forever will eventually lose.

“I am deeply grateful to my husband, Matthew, who never stopped fighting for me, and to our families and community who surrounded us with love, prayers, and support. Because of them, I am home,” Ramos said in a statement. “All I have ever wanted is to live with dignity in the country I have called home since I was a baby. I want to finish my degree, continue my education, and serve my community—just as my husband serves our country with honor.”

Just a few weeks after the couple were married, Ramos was arrested by ICE agents. The two were checking in at Fort Polk to begin the process that would allow them to live together at the base and earn military benefits. Ramos was then handcuffed, led away from Blank and her new parents-in-law, and taken to a building that Blank said “looked like an interrogation room.”

She had no criminal record.

Ramos was born in Honduras and is undocumented. She was issued a deportation order when she was 22 months old. But regardless of such orders, U.S. law allows undocumented immigrants who marry U.S. citizens to become eligible for permanent residency. After getting permanent residency, they can apply for citizenship.

The couple had even hired an immigration lawyer to assist them as they navigated the complicated citizenship process, before running into Donald Trump’s lawless goons.

“I knew she didn’t have status,” Blank said after Ramos was detained. “We were doing everything the right way.”

When they’re not milling around airports doing nothing, some ICE agents have been deployed to military bases around the U.S., mostly targeting relatives of military recruits when they show up on visiting days. Ramos’s case was the first reported instance of a military spouse being detained.

Thankfully, the couple is now reunited. The Trump administration has presumably realized it is a terrible look to be splitting up military families at a time when the U.S. is literally at war. Sadly, thousands of other families continue to be forced apart under Trump’s immigration policies.

New reporting from The New York Times on Tuesday provided key insight into what convinced Trump to go to war.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally attended a meeting at the White House on February 11, the Times reported, along with most top members of Trump’s Cabinet. The head of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, David Barnea, attended virtually.

Also present was the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the slimy businessman who has been a key negotiator in the Middle East since Trump’s reelection, despite not holding an official staff position in the White House.

Conspicuously absent was JD Vance, who was in Azerbaijan for a diplomatic visit. The Times reported that the meeting “had been scheduled on such short notice that he was unable to make it back in time.” But it’s interesting that the most supposedly antiwar figure inside Trump’s Cabinet wasn’t invited to the meeting that convinced the president to kickstart the conflict.

Netanyahu gave an hour-long presentation arguing that Iran’s missile program was weak and could be toppled by U.S. munitions, leading to an easy victory in the region, according to the Times. From there, the prime minister said, a new government could be installed by the U.S. and Israel.

Netanyahu’s speech reportedly worked in convincing the president that war was desirable—and Trump’s underlings, while they would raise a few objections in the coming weeks, fell in line.

“Even the more skeptical members of Mr. Trump’s war cabinet—with the stark exception of Mr. Vance, the figure inside the White House most opposed to a full-scale war—deferred to the president’s instincts, including his abundant confidence that the war would be quick and decisive,” the Times reported.

But since the U.S. entered the conflict on February 28, Iran has been anything but a pushover. The Strait of Hormuz has been shut off, crippling global trade, and America’s most expensive munitions are being wasted with little effect. Bombing around the Middle East is still ongoing, and Trump made his most worrying threat just this morning, writing that “a whole civilization will die” if the Iranian regime does not make a deal. If only any member of Trump’s Cabinet had a spine, maybe this bloody conflict could have been avoided.

The weekend rescue of a downed F-15 crew member stands as proof that America does not have “complete control of Iranian skies,” despite what Hegseth pledged last month. Nonetheless, Donald Trump has unquestioningly regurgitated Hegseth’s militaristic optimism to the nation, fueling concerns that the White House is knowingly feeding misinformation to the American people, reported The Washington Post Tuesday.

“Pete is not speaking truth to the president,” one administration official told the newspaper. “As a result, the president is out there repeating misleading information.”

On Monday, Trump acknowledged that the fighter jet had been struck by a heat-seeking missile. It was a “lucky hit,” according to the president’s assessment.

But the F-15 wasn’t the only U.S. aircraft that got hit last week. Iran also shot down an A-10 attack plane on Friday, though the craft was able to fly back to friendly airspace before its pilots evacuated the vehicle.

Kelly Grieco, a military analyst at the Stimson Center, explained to the Post that the loss of the fighter jet is what happens “when you have air superiority but don’t have air supremacy.”

“Our air superiority is limited geographically to the west and to south but also in terms of altitude,” Grieco said.

Last month, Hegseth claimed that Iran’s missile and drone programs were “overwhelmingly destroyed.” Iranian officials have since disagreed: The country’s new leadership told Pakistan Tuesday that not only did Tehran believe that it was winning, but the country still had tens of thousands more drones and missiles at its disposal.

That could boil down to a money and munitions problem for the U.S., which has so far struggled to combat Iran’s Shahed attack drones (which are very cheap and easy to produce) with anything other than the most expensive interceptor systems, such as Patriot interceptor missiles. (The military has so far requested to purchase 3,200 Patriot missiles for the 2027 fiscal year, costing just under $14 billion. The Navy requested hundreds more on Monday.)

Nonetheless, the Trump administration has lashed out at any attempt to hold Hegseth accountable for his unfounded comments on the war. In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell referred to criticism of Hegseth’s messaging as little more than “lies and propaganda.”

“Secretary Hegseth has provided the Commander-in-Chief with decisive military options to achieve our clear, scoped objectives: destroy Iran’s missile arsenal, annihilate their Navy, destroy their terrorist proxies, and ensure Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon,” Parnell told the Post. “The Washington Post is pushing a fake story of failure.”

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly also insisted that Trump “always had the full picture of the conflict.”

“Nothing has surprised him or our military planners, who were prepared for any possible contingency,” she said.

But the conflict is far from a success. The administration widely advertised that it planned for the war to last four to six weeks at maximum, but recent escalations have sparked concerns that the situation will devolve into yet another endless conflict in the Middle East. The war is currently in its sixth week.

Trump suddenly expressed a renewed interest in ending the war over the weekend, after fears emerged that the oil and gas crisis sparked by the fighting could hurt Republicans at the ballot box come November.

The president has demanded that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz—a vital tradeway for the region’s oil and gas—by Tuesday at 8 p.m., or face total annihilation. In a Truth Social post, Trump promised to commit war crimes, pledging that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” should Iran fail to reopen the waterway for trade. The country has so far rejected potential peace deals.

The White House is seeking $15 million from the National Endowment for the Arts to build the massive archway across from the Lincoln Memorial, NOTUS reports, citing a spending plan shared in the Office of Management and Budget database Tuesday. The plan contradicts Trump’s earlier promises that the arch, which is intended to commemorate the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, was going to be completely privately funded with leftover donations from his ballroom project.

At the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House Monday, Trump was carrying a picture of the proposed arch with him, and on Sunday, his motorcade drove slowly around the location where he wants the arch, Memorial Circle in Washington. Meanwhile, he skipped the Easter services he was slated to attend.

Even as a war he started rages on and the economy struggles as a result, Trump seems preoccupied with building monuments to himself. The construction of his beloved ballroom will dwarf the existing executive estate, has resulted in the razing of the White House’s East Wing, and will cost at least $400 million. And while he claims that it will be completely funded by donations, it, like the arch, could end up requiring government funds.

A federal judge ruled last month that construction on Trump’s ballroom “has to stop,” as the president acted beyond his authority to raze the East Wing. A group of veterans has also filed a lawsuit against construction of the arch, arguing that it not only requires congressional approval and an environmental review but would increase traffic and obstruct views of Arlington National Cemetery. But if Trump gets his way, by the time 2028 is here, he will have left permanent tributes to himself across Washington.

“President Trump has made no secret of the fact that he wants to see his perceived political enemies prosecuted,” a reporter asked Blanche at a Tuesday press conference. “So now that you’re in this position, how are you going to balance that relentless pressure with this administration’s promise to end the weaponization of this department?”

“First of all we have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now. And it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the president in the past has had issues with, and believes should be investigated,” Blanche replied, offering zero pushback to the notion that Trump is controlling the DOJ. “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.”

Under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Trump administration has used the DOJ to go after former FBI Director James Comey, Democratic Senators Adam Schiff and Mark Kelly, former national security adviser John Bolton, New York Attorney General Letitia James, every Democratic leader in Minnesota, and more. Each one of those people criticized Trump in some way, and nearly all of the DOJ’s attacks against them failed. And while DOJ criminal investigations are supposed to be free of White House influence, it seems clear that Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s lawyer in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, will continue to dutifully carry out Trump’s revenge.

“At his first press conference, Trump’s Acting AG says it out loud: The DOJ is there to target Trump’s political enemies,” the press office of California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote. “A disgusting abuse of power!”

Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick for acting head of the Department of Justice, was asked by a reporter Tuesday whether he would investigate the Strategy Group, a firm associated with Kristi Noem that received over $200 million in taxpayer money for an anti-immigrant ad campaign featuring the former homeland security secretary.

First reported by ProPublica, the Strategy Group is run by the husband of Tricia McLaughlin, a former spokesperson for DHS and underling of Noem. Instead of listing the name of the firm on the contracts, officials within the Trump administration covered their tracks by employing a subcontractor called Safe America Media, which had been founded eight days before it was granted the nine-figure contract.

The reporter noted that there have “been a lot of questions” around the firm.

“When you say a lot of questions, you mean you all have decided to write about it hoping that it generates something,” Blanche replied. He went on to call the proposed investigation a “speculative idea.”

It seems Noem, like other Trump-affiliated fraudsters, will escape scot-free.

Deflecting away from serious issues to attack the media is hardly a new strategy among Trump and his disciples, but Blanche doing it is particularly ironic given his boss’s insistence that his administration will deliver the biggest crackdown on fraud in American history.

In reality, Trump has no problem with fraud as long as it’s committed by the right people. Whether it’s Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel using government-owned jets as personal Ubers, Donald Trump Jr.’s work from within the suspiciously unregulated Kalshi and Polymarket, Eric Trump’s crypto company secretly receiving $500 million from the UAE in exchange for political capital, or Trump himself ripping off the American people for literally billions of dollars, the amount of fraud in America right now is indeed enormous. But its main perpetrators sit in the White House.

“Even wars have rules,” the U.N.’s official X account posted along with a link to its human rights office. “The Geneva Conventions protect civilians in conflict and help ensure assistance reaches those in need, without discrimination.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk issued a statement against “incendiary rhetoric” and warned that anyone who commits war crimes should face legal justice, strongly hinting at Trump without mentioning him by name.

“I deplore the tirade of incendiary rhetoric being used in the Middle East war over the last couple of weeks by all parties, including the latest threats to annihilate a whole civilisation and to target civilian infrastructure. This is sickening. Carrying through on such threats amounts to the most serious international crimes,” Türk said. “Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Anyone responsible for international crimes must be held to account by a competent court.”

Will any of this get through to Trump or his inner circle? Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already made clear his disdain for any restraint and his love for violence, calling for “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” Trump doesn’t have a problem with this, as evidenced by his outrageous threat and the fact that he seems to get his war news from a staff-prepared daily highlight reel of bombings in Iran.

If Trump sticks to his 8 p.m. E.T. deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and decides to follow through on his threat to bomb the country’s power plants, bridges, and other civilian infrastructure, the results could be catastrophic. That would no doubt be a war crime resulting in a humanitarian nightmare, in the eyes of not just the U.N. but many in the U.S. and around the world. The question is whether the White House or Republicans in Washington actually care.

On Tuesday, the House Freedom Caucus announced that they actually opposed the Trump-approved two-pronged plan to end the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. The plan, which House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader John Thune announced together last week, splits funding for DHS agencies like TSA from the more controversial funding for ICE and Border Patrol. They would later fund immigration enforcement through a reconciliation bill.

This was a notable concession to Democrats, and apparently has infuriated the most conservative Republicans in the House.

“We cannot leave ICE and CBP hanging with nothing but hopes and prayers that reconciliation 2.0 comes together,” the House Freedom Caucus wrote on X Tuesday. “That’s why we must use reconciliation to fully fund ALL of the Department of Homeland Security! We can tightly control this process with strict instructions to the various committees involved, so no one can sneak in unrelated garbage and distract us from our mission.

“We must provide robust funding for ICE and CBP, and it should be done with all of DHS in reconciliation 2.0. We can fund DHS for the rest of the President’s term to ensure Democrats can never again take our nation’s security hostage,” the statement continued. “We will never hand Democrats their ultimate prize: A defunded ICE, handcuffed CBP, and criminal aliens terrorizing our communities.”

“I will not fold on ICE or CPB,” said Freedom Caucus member Andy Ogles on X.

This internal revolt comes as Trump has demanded that DHS be funded by June 1.

JD Vance was apparently caught off guard Tuesday when a journalist informed him that Donald Trump had threatened to obliterate the entire Iranian civilization by 8 p.m. Vance was onstage in Budapest at the time, feet away from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The exchange began when a Washington Post reporter asked Vance if there had been any recent developments in the war that could inform a peace deal, reported The Daily Beast.

“I don’t—unless I have a text message from Steve Witkoff,” Vance said, referring to Trump’s Middle East envoy.

But as Vance pulled out his phone to check his notifications, it became clear that he did have an urgent notification from Witkoff.

“I do have a message from Steve Witkoff,” Vance acknowledged awkwardly.

“Wouldn’t you like to know the subject of this message?” Vance continued. “But no, uh, I need to read it first before I talk about it. But here’s, here’s … uh, what time is it in the United States right now?”

The uncomfortable lapse became even more unsettling when a Reuters reporter urged Vance to properly read up before speaking with the press about his apparently misinformed analysis of the war.

“I do think you have to read that text because we have reporting that the United States is striking some targets in Kharg Island,” she said. “You did say that the military objectives of this war have been achieved. So could you help us understand why the president is still threatening to attack every bridge and every power plant in Iran?”

Kharg Island is an export hub off the Iranian coast that handles roughly 90 percent of the country’s crude oil exports. The U.S. struck Kharg Island in March, when U.S. Central Command claimed that 90 targets on the island had been hit, including “naval mine storage facilities, missile storage bunkers, and multiple other military sites.”

U.S. officials said that they had struck the island again Tuesday morning, though they claimed that the U.S. did not hit any of Kharg’s oil facilities.

The attack occurred moments after Trump pledged that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” should Iran fail to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, another vital tradeway for the region. Iran has so far rejected potential peace deals. Iranian media responded just after 9 a.m. E.T., announcing through diplomatic channels that talks with the U.S. had stalled in the wake of Trump’s explicit threats. Shortly after, international paper the Tehran Times reported that “diplomatic and indirect channels” were not closed, after all.

Vance was supposed to be on “standby” and prepared to jump into peace talks with Iran should the moment arise, Politico reported Monday.

Nonetheless, Vance backed Trump’s explosive response to the rapidly devolving conflict Tuesday morning, telling the Budapest assembly that he hopes Iran makes the “right response” while emphasizing America’s need for free-flowing oil.

“The president of the United States is a man who recognizes leverage,” Vance said. “That if the Iranians want to exact a certain amount of pain, the United States has the ability to exact much, much greater pain.”

Drop Site News’s Julian Andreone compiled a list of the members of Congress calling to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which would deem Trump unfit for office and transfer power to Vice President JD Vance. If Trump does not agree to cede power himself, Vance and a majority of Trump’s Cabinet would have to independently decide to wrest control from him. Considering how subservient Trump’s Cabinet is, this will likely never happen. Regardless, the Democrats calling to invoke the Amendment are:

• Arizona Representative Yassamin Ansari
• Colorado Representative Diana DeGette
• California Representative Ro Khanna
• California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove
• Delaware Representative Sarah McBride
• Florida Representative Maxwell Frost
• Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez
• Maryland Representative Johnny Olszewski
• Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley
• Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton
• Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey
• Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar
• Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib
• Michigan Representative Shri Thanedar
• New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury
• Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee
• Texas Representative Julie Johnson
• Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan

The New Republic found a few more Democratic congress members not on Andreone’s list calling to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, who are:

• California Representative Doris Matsui
  
• Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy
• New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
• Washington Senator Patty Murray

The only congressionally affiliated Republican who has explicitly called for Trump’s ouster is Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from her duties in January. Prominent right-wing pundits Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Candace Owens have also suggested Trump is not fit for office.

This story has been updated.

Despite the fact that many of Trump’s former allies, as well as Democrats, think that he could be alluding to nuclear war or genocide, Republicans like Representative Jodey Arrington are saying, “Thank God we have a commander in chief that is not full of empty rhetoric, because we’ve delayed this inevitability for 50 years.”

“We’d have another North Korea,” the Texas representative told Fox Business only minutes after Trump made his genocidal threat, “save and except for President Trump, who is a man with a bias for action, and a man who presented with the facts that we have imminent threats, today and for our children’s future, is going to act even if it’s against his personal political interests. Thank God for President Trump and for the courage and political will to do what he’s doing.” 

Rep. Jodey Arrington on Iran: "Thank God we have a commander in chief that is not full of empty rhetoric, because we've delayed this inevitability for 50 years ... President Trump is a man with a bias for action. Thank God for President Trump and the courage and political will to… pic.twitter.com/r81jyDUHr9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2026

Representative Mike Lawler tried to claim on CNN that Trump wasn’t “really talking about ending a civilization.” 

“He is talking about the energy and civilian infrastructure, that’s what he’s talking about,” Lawler said to CNN’s John Berman, who emphasized that Trump’s message stated “never to be brought back again.”  

“He just means the bridges and the infrastructure?” Berman asked. 

Lawler paused and blinked for a few seconds, before trying to claim that “we’re talking about taking decisive action against Iran’s energy and civilian infrastructure. That is what the president is talking about. He’s not talking about obliterating innocent people.” 

BERMAN: The president is threatening a whole civilization will die tonight. You say he doesn't want to do it. Does being reluctant to end a civilization make it ok?

LAWLER: I don't think we're talking about ending a civilization--

BERMAN: So you don't believe the president's… pic.twitter.com/0Z93e9vBPk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2026

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have not commented, as of this writing, on Trump’s threat of apocalyptic violence, either to reporters or on their social media accounts. As Trump’s arbitrary 8 p.m. E.T. deadline approaches and a U.N. Security Council resolution to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was vetoed, is there any chance of a sensible solution? 

“I am hoping and praying that President Trump … [that] this really is bluster. I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure. I do not want to see that,” conservative Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson said on an episode of the John Solomon Reports podcast released Monday. “We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.” 

Sen. Ron Johnson: "I am hoping and praying that President Trump is, that this really is bluster. I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure. I do not want to see that. We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them." pic.twitter.com/upykUa3jeH

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2026

While this statement is stronger than that of most congressional Republicans, Johnson’s dreams of liberation have been all but deferred. On Tuesday, Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” 

While former MAGA acolytes like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones have criticized  Trump’s threats—even calling for his removal—Johnson is one of the few Republicans in Congress to voice a similar opinion. Other than him, Rand Paul has been the only Republican senator to try to rein in Trump’s war.

In fact, many Republicans spent their Tuesday morning doing incredibly unconvincing damage control.

“The new threat from the president is that a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. You say the president doesn’t want to do it. Does being reluctant to end a civilization make it OK?” CNN’s John Berman asked GOP representative and staunch Israel supporter Mike Lawler on Tuesday.

“I don’t think we’re talking about ending a civilization, the issue—”

“Do you say you don’t believe the president’s threat?” the host said, interrupting Lawler. 

“It is their energy infrastructure and their civilian infrastructure, including roads and bridges. That will cripple the Iranian regime and certainly their economy,” Lawler said, deflecting. “It is not something we want to do.… We are not at war with Iranian people, we want them to be free from this oppression and tyranny that they have lived under for 47 years. But if the president has to take necessary action to strike their energy and infrastructure, that is going to cripple the regime. 

“You don’t take him at his word that he will end a whole civilization?” 

“He is talking about the energy and civilian infrastructure,” Lawler replied.

“He said ‘never to be brought back again.’ He just means the bridges and the infrastructure?” 

“Again John, we’re talking about taking decision action against Iran’s energy and civilian infrastructure. That is what the president is talking about. He’s not talking about obliterating innocent people.” 

BERMAN: The president is threatening a whole civilization will die tonight. You say he doesn't want to do it. Does being reluctant to end a civilization make it ok?

LAWLER: I don't think we're talking about ending a civilization--

BERMAN: So you don't believe the president's… pic.twitter.com/0Z93e9vBPk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2026

This is sad and pathetic. We’re watching politicians trying to rationalize the president’s genocidal intent by arguing full-throatedly that he doesn’t actually mean it when he says, “A whole civilization will die tonight.” Trump has already bombed multiple civilian targets beyond bridges, including a school full of girls on the first day of the war. Why would we put anything past him at this point?

“Could there be a spiritual component to this?” Carlson said on The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday. “Is it just a conventional escalation ladder in a badly thought out war … [or] could it be something bigger? Is it possible what you’re watching is a very stealthy yet incredibly effective attack on what, from a Christian perspective, is the true faith: belief in Jesus?”

Carlson went on: “Is it possible that the president sees this in bigger terms? Sees this as the fulfillment of something? An elevation of some higher office beyond president of the United States?”

Trump responded in a typically petulant manner to Carlson’s comments on Tuesday morning. “Tucker’s a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on,” he told the New York Post’s Caitlin Doornbos. “He calls me all the time; I don’t respond to his calls. I don’t deal with him. I like dealing with smart people, not fools.”

Carlson, a former Fox News host, aggressively campaigned for Trump during both of his winning presidential bids; Trump even told reporters in 2024 that he was considering picking Carlson as his vice president. But since the president’s reelection, Carlson has soured on Trump on issues such as the Epstein files and, in particular, the war on Iran.

On Easter Sunday, Carlson described Trump’s expletive-laden threat towards Iran’s civilian infrastructure as “vile on every level.” In his Monday podcast, he also criticized the president’s frequent disparaging of Islam: “No president should mock Islam. That’s not your job. This is not a theocracy. We don’t go to war with other theocracies to find out which one is more effective. We are not a theocracy, and God willing, we never will be.”

With millions listening to his show each week, Carlson is undoubtedly the most popular figure within a Christian isolationist sect popular with young, online Republicans, and that is increasingly unhappy with the president.

In fostering this crowd, Carlson has cozied up to white nationalists and Holocaust deniers such as Nick Fuentes and James Fishback. This has led to bipartisan criticism (though not, notably, from Trump himself, who apparently prefers to bash Carlson only when he feels personally slighted). Some expect Carlson to launch a presidential campaign himself in 2028, and he hasn’t yet ruled it out.

Former assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner spoke at length about the issue on his podcast Justice Matters Monday, arguing that certain details spelled out in the filings—such as the national security additions intended to be built beneath the 90,000-square-foot dance hall—were so naïvely included that he wondered if Trump hadn’t picked up his “beloved Sharpie” to edit the documents himself before they were submitted to the judge.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s kind of curious that this public court filing is announcing not just to the American people, but to the world, including our enemies, exactly what kind of ‘top secret facilities’ this ballroom will contain,” Kirschner said.

“I find it impossible to believe that a legitimate, self-respecting Department of Justice attorney authored this garbage,” he continued. “It’s embarrassing. It’s an insult to the court. And more importantly, it’s an insult to the American people because that’s whose interests DOJ attorneys are supposed to represent.”

The filings make mention of planned bomb shelters, a hospital, a medical area, protective partitioning, and “top secret” military installations. They also clarify some of the building materials, which include missile-resistant steel columns, drone-proof roofing materials, and bullet-, ballistic-, and blast-proof glass.

The court filing is also riddled with typos and unconventional grammar choices, more akin to the president’s litany of social media posts than a judicial filing submitted by the DOJ. The first page is doused in exclamation points, improper capitalization, misplaced parentheticals, redundant synonyms for emphasis, rhetorical flourishes, and run-on sentences.

Trump’s idea to build a ballroom on the White House grounds larger than the executive estate itself has been riddled with problems and colored by lies since he first announced the project in July. Initially, Trump pledged that the development would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing.

Months later, his construction teams completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress, both of which were conveniently unavailable at the time due to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

The ballroom’s estimated price tag has been similarly difficult to nail down. Trump originally claimed that the project would cost $200 million, but a decision to tack on extra construction to the site doubled its expenses to $400 million. The new building will have 40-foot ceilings, be able to accommodate up to 1,000 seated guests, and would constitute 22,000 square feet of the 90,000-square-foot development, according to projections offered by East Wing ballroom architect Shalom Baranes in January.

Mullin floated the idea in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier Monday night, saying that he believes “sanctuary cities is not lawful.”

“Some of these cities have international airports. If they’re a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city? Seriously, if they’re a sanctuary city, and they’re receiving international flights, and we’re asking them to partner with us at the airport, but once they walk out the airport, they’re not going to enforce immigration policy?” Mullin said.

“So, you’re saying that big cities that are sanctuary cities that have a big airport, they might lose their customs?” Baier replied.

“Well, I’m saying we’re gonna have to start prioritizing things at some point,” Mullin said, blaming Democrats for shutting down Customs and Border Protection. “Who processes those individuals when they walk off the plane? I’m going to have to be forced to make hard decisions. Who’s willing to work with us and partner with us?”

Mullin: I believe sanctuary cities is not lawful. Some of these cities have international airports. If they are a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city? We need to have a really hard look at that.

Baier: So you are saying that big cities that… pic.twitter.com/UAJxWFZtZI

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 6, 2026

Such a move would be catastrophic for the busiest airports in the U.S., such as those in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and cause major disruptions in international travel. Several commentators on social media pointed out that this could tank the economy and would be catastrophic ahead of the World Cup this summer.

Removing customs processing from cities deemed hostile to Trump’s agenda would likely be met with immediate lawsuits and an outcry from most Americans, not just over the economic impact but also because people who don’t live near these airports often depend on them for connecting flights. If the security lines are bad at airports now with the partial government shutdown, removing customs processing would only make them exponentially worse. If this is how Mullin’s tenure at DHS is beginning, we’re about to see a whole new level of incompetence from the Trump administration.

But instead of sifting through clues to Trump’s “real” designs, let’s take him at his word, and ask a more basic question: What would actually happen on the ground in Iran if Trump did bomb its power plants? How bad an atrocity would this be? According to experts on war, energy, and foreign affairs that I interviewed, the answer is: much, much worse than you might think.

Trump’s threat has grown more unhinged over time. On Sunday, he rage-posted that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day,” adding: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” He then declared that Iran’s deadline to do his bidding will be eight o’clock on Tuesday night. In a subsequent interview, Trump snarled that Iran will “lose every power plant” in “the whole country.” Trump followed up early Tuesday with his most vile tirade yet, warning that if he doesn’t get his way, “a whole civilization will die.”

The specific vow to target “every” plant is critical. Because this (along with the threat of civilizational erasure) inescapably means bombing many plants that power the daily lives of Iran’s 93 million people, it leaves little doubt that Trump is threatening to violate international laws that prohibit the targeting of civilian-oriented infrastructure, as opposed to civilian sites used by the military.

“We’ve never had a U.S. president so proudly promise to commit war crimes,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. As Murphy noted, thousands would probably die in just the initial bombing of all of Iran’s power plants and bridges, which Trump is also threatening to destroy.

Over time, though, this could get even worse, and here we need to grasp a key distinction. University of Chicago professor Robert Pape, an expert on the use of force to realize political ends, notes that Trump has the choice of either bombing “transformers” at big plants or targeting their “generating hulls,” which are more central to their operation. The former, Pape says, would knock out power for several weeks (transformers can be repaired comparatively quickly), while the latter would disable power for six months or more (replacing hulls takes much longer).

That’s why an easy-to-miss nuance in Trump’s language is so alarming. On Monday, Trump said that his intent is to ensure that “every power plant in Iran will be out of business” and “never to be used again.”

That last clause suggests that Trump may have been briefed on the hull-destroying option—and may opt for it. To be clear, disabling power for several weeks would be bad enough. But doing it longer-term would constitute an unthinkable catastrophe. For six months at the very least, most Iranians would be without “everything that electricity depends on—the hospitals, the water, the refrigeration of food,” Pape says.

“Systematically destroying the generation hulls in the 10 largest electric power plants would almost surely lead to a major humanitarian disaster for tens of millions of ordinary Iranians,” Pape, author of a Substack called Escalation Trap, told me.

Put another way, knocking out Iran’s electricity in this fashion would do nothing less than disable the “support mechanisms of modern life,” Jeff Colgan, an expert on energy and foreign policy at Brown University, told me. “The consequences are going to be horrible for the people there.”

As it happens, we have a very recent—and very vivid—example of what this looks like. Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, points to Israel’s blockade against fuel entering Gaza, and the resulting shutdown of electric power there, which helped drive the health system toward collapse. Konyndyk cited the horrifying humanitarian crisis that ensued and noted that Trump’s threatened bombings could unleash a similar crisis in Iran—on a much larger scale.

“Electricity is the lifeblood that makes a modern society function,” Konyndyk told me, adding that bombing Iranian power plants that “support critical civilian services” could be tantamount to “destroying the conditions of life.”

At this point, it should be obvious that Trump’s threat isn’t primarily directed at the Iranian regime. It’s actually a threat to make life horrifically unlivable for everyday Iranians, with no reason to think this will pressure the regime itself. “Throughout history, this kind of bombing has never led people to oppose their government and only led to more fury against the air power attacker,” Pape told me, adding that Trump is threatening “a moral disaster for no strategic gain.”

Colgan, meanwhile, likened the situation to other specific times the United States has acted to starve countries of energy—such as Cuba. He pointed out that this has “historically” ended up “bolstering” regimes in power.

There’s an even darker element to all this. Even if we allow that threatening to plunge millions of Iranian civilians into “hell” would pressure the regime—which it probably won’t—it’s beyond heinous to use mass civilian suffering as leverage to begin with. Yet Trump isn’t just admitting to this tactic. He’s positively flaunting it.

“He’s not hiding that his design is to inflict maximum casualties and pain on civilians as a mechanism to try to topple the regime,” Murphy told me. What Trump wants for Iran, Murphy said, is for “people to die because they can’t access hospitals and can’t access clean water.”

Yet this is drenched in folly. As Murphy put it, if the United States is “openly and proudly targeting civilians,” they will “blame the people who are doing the bombing”—that is, us. “The consequences will be to push the people closer to the only entity protecting the people, which is the existing regime,” Murphy said.

Are military officials really prepared to carry out such orders? Edward Wong of The New York Times asked the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command if they would deliberately target civilian sites, and got no answer.

That’s unnerving in the extreme. Indeed, all of this should galvanize Democrats to get more vocal in warning U.S military personnel that Trump may be giving them a fresh round of illegal orders any day now.

As it is, Trump’s bombings of suspected drug-runners in the Caribbean are probably also war crimes. Congress has done nothing in response. Do you think that maybe—just maybe—this dereliction emboldened Trump to now threaten war crimes on a much vaster scale?

Also recall that when six Democratic lawmakers cut a video reminding military officials that they are not obliged to carry out illegal orders, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried (thus far unsuccessfully) to punish and prosecute them. Trump and his accomplices don’t want Democrats to tell service members the truth about their illegal orders. Democrats should do more of it.

“This is a really perilous moment,” Murphy told me. “If he is prepared to give an order to strike thousands of bridges and power plants, which will result in thousands of innocent Iranians dying, everybody in that chain of command has to think hard about whether they want to be part of the execution of that order.”

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social in perhaps his most abhorrent and disgusting statement since the start of the war five weeks ago. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

It’s unclear how God can bless the “great people of Iran” when Trump is threatening to kill their “whole civilization.” Multiple high-profile right-wingers have warned that Trump is close to using nuclear bombs, and even called for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment—in which the vice president, Cabinet, and Congress can declare a president unfit to serve.

“Wake up: he is calling for A NUCLEAR STRIKE,” former White House comms director Anthony Scaramucci warned. “Seek his removal immediately.”

In his show a day earlier, Tucker Carlson warned that someone in the White House needs to learn the nuclear codes to stop him. “If you work in the White House … now is the time to say, ‘no, absolutely not,’ and say it directly to the president. Military, now it’s time to say no, absolutely not, and say it directly to the president, no. In case you’re thinking about using some weapon of mass destruction against the population of Iran, in whose name we liberated Iran, we killed their religious leader for their benefit. Do you remember that? This was last month,” the former Fox News host said.

“Those people who are in direct contact with the president need to say, no, I’ll resign,” he continued. “I’ll do whatever I can do legally to stop this because this is insane. And if given the order, I’m not carrying it out. Figure out the codes on the football yourself because everything hangs in the balance right now. This is not hysteria, this is 100 percent real.”

“25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization,” former MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Green wrote on X following Trump’s threat. “This is evil and madness.”

Even Alex Jones weighed in.

“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Jones mused on his show Monday evening. After the president’s threat Tuesday morning, Jones posted, “WAR CRIME ALERT!!- Trump on Iran: ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people! Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!!”

These reversals are damning, and representative of a very real and growing schism between the neocons in Trump’s ear and the “America First,” “end to endless wars” crowd that makes up a significant portion of Trump supporters. And they’re right—what Trump is suggesting would have immediate, devastating impacts on the people of Iran, the Middle East, and the entire world for decades.

The president hinted at the scale of devastation that awaits the Middle Eastern nation via Truth Social post Tuesday morning, promising to completely annihilate one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations if Iran’s leaders refuse to give him what he wants.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

“However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?” he continued. “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

Trump has repeatedly escalated his threats against Iran since Sunday, demanding that the country’s leadership either reopen the Strait of Hormuz—a vital tradeway in the region that only closed because of Trump’s intervention—or face total annihilation, highlighting various possible strike targets such as Iran’s power plants and bridges. The president said this despite the fact that doing so would constitute a war crime.

Targeting non-combatants such as civilians and civilian infrastructure is a blatant violation of International Humanitarian Law. Exterminating a “whole civilization” would break several components of the Geneva Conventions, which the U.S. played a foundational role in creating.

Trump pledged on social media that Iran had the opportunity to act until Tuesday 8 p.m., but the president appears to have jumped his own timeline. By Tuesday morning, bombs were already raining on the nation’s railways.

Iranian media responded just after 9 a.m. EST, announcing through diplomatic channels that talks with the U.S. had stalled in the wake of Trump’s explicit threats.

Vice President JD Vance backed Trump’s response Tuesday morning, telling an assembly in Budapest that he hopes Iran makes the “right response,” highlighting America’s needs for free flowing oil.

“They’ve got to know, we’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use,” Vance said. “The president of the United States can decide to use them, and he will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct.”

It was not clear exactly which “tools,” capable of erasing an entire civilization, Vance was referring to.

The flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz was not an issue until Israel and the U.S. jointly attacked Iran in late February. In the weeks that followed, Iran sealed off the waterway, which funnels approximately one-fifth of all global crude oil shipments.

The ramifications of closing the chokepoint have been felt around the world. In the U.S., the price per oil barrel has exploded due to the strait’s closure, pushing gas over $4 per gallon in most states (in some areas of California, gas has leapt past $7 a gallon). Diesel shot up by 20 cents over the last week alone.

Trump has waffled on the strait’s significance to American markets. Last week, the president rapidly cycled through his opinions on the transit point, claiming in succession that he didn’t care if the strait remained closed, and that he needed it reopened.

The pressure to reopen the strait likely comes from his own party, which has become increasingly anxious over the economic fallout of the war. Republicans—particularly in vulnerable districts—have stressed that the war could wreak havoc on their election results come November.

That alone has amped up enough pressure on the White House to seek a near-immediate conclusion to the war, though it does not appear that Trump will have it.

The U.S. military, meanwhile, is already bolstering itself for another grinding Middle East conflict: last month, Politico reported that military strategists in U.S. Central Command requested the Pentagon supply support for their operations in Iran through at least September.

This story has been updated.

“America is a frontier nation, and the four brave astronauts of Artemis II are a modern-day, you really are modern-day pioneers, all of you,” Trump said, starting out with a congratulatory message. But then, he made things weird for one crew member. 

“And one of them happens to be a neighbor, you know who that is, right? You have a special person over there, a neighbor, and uh, we like our neighbor,” Trump continued. 

Trump forgets to respond when talking to the Artemis II crew, resulting in a long, awkward silence pic.twitter.com/0Ye9G42xUi

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) April 7, 2026

The “neighbor” in question happened to be Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, a member of the Canadian Space Agency. Trump can’t seem to be able to hide his feelings about the country, which he has antagonized by saying it should be the fifty-first U.S. state. Perhaps that’s why he couldn’t even bring himself to say the word “Canada,” even with a large Canadian flag clearly visible in the video feed from the crew alongside an American flag. 

Trump said he spoke to Canadian ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, whom he called a “very special person,” and Prime Minister Mark Carney, and only then did he even say “Canada,” claiming to have many friends there.  

“You have a lot of courage doing what you do, a lot of bravery, and a lot of genius. But they are very, very proud of you,” Trump said.

But after that, Trump went silent and the astronauts sat awkwardly during more than a full moment of silence.

“Yeah, I think we might have gotten cut off. It is a long distance.… Reception has been great,” the president said.

In the midst of an unnecessary war, a poor economy, and high gas prices, people around the world are looking at the Artemis II mission, which has brought humans further in space than ever before, as a source of inspiration. Does Trump see it that way, as well? 

“Urgent Warning to Users and Train Passengers in the Country of Iran. Dear Citizens, for the sake of your security, we kindly request that from this moment until 21:00 Iran time, you refrain from using and traveling by train throughout Iran,” the IDF Farsi account posted on X. “Your presence on trains and near railway lines endangers your life.”

Trump warned on Easter Sunday—and on the following day—that all bridges and power plants in Iran would be bombed if the country did not make a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday evening. But it appears that deadline wasn’t so firm, as bridges across the country are already being targeted. So far, bridges near the Qom, Kashan, and the Tabriz-Zanjan highway have all been struck.

The U.S. also bombed Kharg Island, a key oil export hub for Iran, overnight.

Now, according to the IDF, civilians can’t even take the train to travel within their own country. Remember when these people wanted to liberate Iranians?

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 now facing tough questions about his threats to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges. Speaking to reporters Monday, he lost it at one of them who asked about this, attacking his news outlet and ranting that his colleagues seem to want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This comes as another report says that Republicans may be reaching a “breaking point” with Trump over the war, which raises a question. If Trump seems ready to go through with his threat to carry out massive war crimes, will Republicans be willing to rein him in at that point? Probably not. And what would it mean if Trump can get away with war crimes without Congress raising a peep about it? We’re talking about this with one of our favorite analysts of this kind of thing, Columbia political scientist Elizabeth Saunders, who had a hair-raising thread on Bluesky about where we are. Elizabeth, good to have you on.

Elizabeth Saunders: I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to be here, but I seem to be only invited when things are truly terrible. So we have to stop meeting like this.

Sargent: Well, let’s start with Trump’s angry tirade. He was asked by a New York Times reporter about his threat to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges. And the reporter points out that this would violate the Geneva Conventions. And that triggered Trump. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure violate the Geneva Conventions and international law.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Who are you with?

Reporter (voiceover): I’m with The New York Times. Zolan from The New York Times—

Donald Trump (voiceover): Failing. The failing New York Times.

Reporter (voiceover): Are you concerned?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Circulation way down at the New York Times.

Reporter (voiceover): Are concerned that your threat to bomb power plants and bridges amount to war crimes?

Donald Trump (voiceover): No, not at all, no, I’m not. I hope I don’t have to do it.

Sargent: So it’s worth clarifying something here. Trump is threatening to bomb all power plants and bridges in Iran, as opposed to merely targeting ones that might be connected to military uses in some way. Elizabeth, threatening to bomb all power plants and bridges is a clear and unequivocal threat of a war crime, right?

Saunders: If he’s really threatening to bomb all of them or to bomb them indiscriminately, then yes, it would be a war crime. He sees it as an escalation from where we have been, which has been mainly—not exclusively, but mainly—targeting military targets, regime targets. Of course, there have been civilian casualties as well.

But in terms of intention, and declaring openly that his goal is to bomb as many bridges—he can’t literally bomb every power plant and bridge in Iran, it’s just too big—the fact that he’s saying that probably means it’s going to be indiscriminate. That is clearly a violation of the law of armed conflict, of basic morality. I could go on. I’m no expert in international law, but ... you don’t need to be to see that that is just horrifying.

Sargent: So Trump kept on ranting at that reporter. He went on for over a minute. It continued this way.

Donald Trump (voiceover): If you think it’s OK for people that are sick of mind, that are tough, smart, and sick, really sick, you know, from a policy standpoint, from any which way you want to say—mentally—these are disturbed people. If you think I’m going to allow them—and powerful and rich—to have a nuclear weapon, you can tell your friends at The New York Times, not gonna happen.

Sargent: Elizabeth, note how Trump lashes out at the reporter by suggesting that anyone who raises questions about war crimes being bad is somehow okay with Iran getting nuclear weapons. He seems to have simply just discarded the idea that his use of American military power should be bound or constrained in any way by international law, by concern about civilians, or anything. There are no limits here. Your thoughts on that?

Saunders: I think that this particular exchange—including the attack on The New York Times—it’s like we’ve reached some sort of Trump norm-busting singularity. There’s so many things that are wrapped up in this little exchange.

He’s denying that the press should have any right to ask basic questions. He’s attacking the press directly. He’s of course continuing to deny that there would be any problem with bombing these power plants indiscriminately. Throughout the press conference and in his statements over the weekend, he has continually said things about Iran not obtaining a nuclear weapon, when he promised that he’d obliterated Iran’s nuclear threat back in June.

Sargent: Punchbowl News had an interesting report that said this about Trump and the war: “We’re beginning to see tension and perhaps a breaking point with some Republicans.” For instance, Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah says he won’t support additional war funding without Congress formally voting on the war.

Elizabeth, I know it’s absurd to predict that Republicans will ever seriously break from Trump. But I will say this: The Punchbowl reporters are very well sourced inside the GOP and they’re pretty savvy people. I read this as Republicans sending up a flare of some kind that Trump can’t go much further here. Is that too optimistic?

Saunders: I don’t know if I would say it’s too optimistic. I would never bet on Republicans constraining Trump. But there are reasons to think that it’s more likely that he will follow through this time on his threats in a way that is a serious breach of everything that’s come before, and that will prompt some kind of Republican reaction. I doubt it will constrain him ahead of time, but if he does actually try to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age, it’s hard to imagine there’ll be no Republican pushback.

Sargent: Well, you had this great thread where you discussed how dangerous this moment truly is, getting at what you just said. You talked about how our institutions aren’t showing clear signs—or at least sufficient signs—of awareness of this.

Now look, one of these institutions is Congress. It’s beyond comprehension at this point that Congress is not stepping up here. Our lawmakers should have to go on record about this right now. They should have gone on record about the entire war. There should have been a vote authorizing or not authorizing Trump to go to war against Iran. I think it’s bad in and of itself if lawmakers are spared that act, spared of having to take a position on these things. Here they’re not holding any votes, and Trump is threatening war crimes on a mass scale.

Saunders: You’re absolutely right that the system should be producing authorizations to use military force—or votes on whether to authorize military force, votes that the president can lose. Certainly George W. Bush believed that was important in Iraq.

It is true that we ought to have Congress authorizing war, but the system we have evolved concentrates all the power in the president and we essentially delegate it to one person. And that’s the world we live in now. So as a political scientist, I agree with you, but also, we have to deal with the world we’re in now.

Sargent: Well, Elizabeth, just to sort of disentangle a few different things you said—one of them was really emphasized in your thread on Bluesky. I want to quote it: “This war may end up being the most devastating thing that happens to the U.S. and the world in the 21st century.” You got at that a little earlier in this discussion. Can you spell it out a little more for us?

Saunders: Well, I’m not one for hyperbole, but as I think about the effects already that this war has had on Iran and the civilians in Iran—that’s where I start. And clearly there will be casualties, further casualties for the U.S. military, and we can’t discount that. And then also in the Gulf. All these different Gulf nations. You are now talking about a further devastation of Iran through attacks on civilian infrastructure and in retaliation likely attacks on infrastructure all across the Gulf. Desalination plant attacks could result in a massive humanitarian disaster in the Gulf. And then you think about the price of oil and jet fuel and fertilizer, and that could end up impoverishing millions far from the battlefield.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine had some of those global effects, but this seems like it’s going to be worse. I mean, the oil and energy and economics people that I read—since that’s not my area—they definitely seem way more worried about this. In Asia, you already see signs of conflict over fuel. You could impoverish many millions with the cost of food, and farmers in the United States might be devastated. Even just the cost of living may reduce living standards in places like Europe, which have already been under strain.

So when you think about the global effect of what Trump is talking about and the likely retaliation it would invite from Iran—I mean, if he does this, that’s what they will do. The effect to me seems just beyond anything I can even wrap my head around. The Iraq War was absolutely devastating in so many ways. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is still devastating in so many ways. But the sheer number of things that will reverberate from this, on top of the immediate human toll and civilian toll from the fighting, is kind of unfathomable.

Sargent: So Elizabeth, does this mean that there’s really one way out for Trump? And that would be something like: Iran does climb down enough on the Strait of Hormuz to allow Trump to declare a victory? And if that doesn’t happen, what does Trump do? Does he actually go ahead with his threat? It’s a little hard for me to visualize what comes next, partly because the situation is just so awful.

Saunders: Yes, it is awful. As I said in my thread, this is part of why I am more terrified than I was in any of the previous national security crises since 2017 that Trump has been involved in. In part because in the previous crises, he may have said things and tweeted things, but there were forces bearing down on him that restrained him. Some of those were his advisors in the first term. Some of those were structural things. The geography of North Korea and South Korea is constraining in ways we could talk about another time.

In this case, Iran has the upper hand. It has no incentive to back down. It controls the Strait of Hormuz currently. The geography is punishing. As I think we’ve talked about before, it’s hard to imagine a way that you could divide that or share it. What incentive does Iran have to give up any control over that? It’s figured out a way to make money, to have leverage over the U.S.—who needs a nuclear weapon now? They have the Strait of Hormuz.

So it’s not clear that Iran will agree to something that Trump can declare victory over. Let’s leave aside that Israel might not agree to walk away if Trump decides to walk away. So then you’re into a situation where Trump would have to basically walk away and leave Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf nations and Israel are not going to like that. It’s a humiliating defeat.

So because of the geography—which is an immovable, brute fact; you cannot change that—this just means that there’s no place where you have an overlapping bargain that can satisfy Trump and satisfy the Iranians. The way that I know this is so horrible is that—there’s a theory in political science that involves a lot of game theory and math ... and it’s super technical, but it basically boils down to, Is there some basic way that these countries can agree?

When I hear people in the media talk about it, that’s how they talk about it. They literally say there’s no overlapping agreement that can satisfy both sides. That to me is—they’re talking in game theory models. They get it. Everyone gets it that there’s no way to move forward here to find a peaceful bargain that satisfies both sides.

Humiliation or escalation are kind of the ways out of that. And we’re not dealing with a rational actor in the U.S.—we’re dealing with someone who’s very angry and who got into this for reasons—we will probably be talking about it forever. I don’t see what Trump can do—his usual tactics of showing up and saying, I’m not going to invade Greenland and we’ve got a great deal. He needs other people to play ball with him on that in a way they just will not.

Sargent: So either Iran doesn’t give in and Donald Trump has to accept a humiliation that he can’t spin his way out of, or he reduces Iran to rubble and tries to drag it back to the Stone Age.

Saunders: Well, he doesn’t just try to drag it back to the Stone Age. He invites retaliation against the Gulf, against U.S. interests in the Gulf, against U.S. interests potentially elsewhere, and wrecks the global economy and the global food supply in the ways that we’ve talked about before.

And you can’t ignore Iran’s response in this. They’ve been quite rational in their dealings with Donald Trump since he pulled out of the JCPOA. They constantly calibrate their response. I mentioned this in my thread. They telegraph when they’re going to attack—before this war, they would telegraph when they would hit U.S. bases so that they could be evacuated and so forth. If he goes through with the threat he made over the weekend and reiterated today, they have no incentive to hold back. They don’t.

I cannot imagine what that will look like. But as I sit here on Monday afternoon, thinking about what’s going to happen when his deadline expires—other than kicking the can down the road, like extending the deadline further, which is just going to prolong the inevitable—I don’t see what the choice between the humiliation and the massive escalation is. I want someone to tell me I’m wrong.

Sargent: Well, hopefully Republicans will finally step up if and when it comes to this, but God knows we’ve been disappointed so many times before that there’s absolutely zero reason to expect it. Elizabeth Saunders, thank you so much for that grim assessment.

Saunders: Thank you. Please invite me on some time to talk about something happy.

Sargent: I will try.

But as with all things Trump—buyer beware. There is one key question that remains unanswered, and that is whether the Wall Street–friendly administration will do anything to limit fees that administrators can levy on potential customers. This question will determine whether the program will be an incremental, rational improvement to a flawed system or a Wall Street fee machine that predates working-class savings.

But first, a bit more about how the accounts will work. Any parent or guardian of a U.S. citizen under the age of 18 can sign up for Trump Accounts right now on their 2025 taxes.

The accounts will function similar to IRAs, with a few important exceptions. The funds cannot be touched for 18 years for any reason except the death of the child beneficiary, and all assets in the accounts must be invested in relatively low-fee index funds with at least a majority of the stocks in U.S. companies. Anyone can contribute an additional $5,000 annually to an account, including employers who can give up to $2,500 annually.

Once the beneficiary turns 18, a Trump Account can be affirmatively converted to a traditional IRA, which has its own rules for penalty-free withdrawals.

As an added incentive, the Department of Treasury will place $1,000 into any newborn’s Trump Account born last year through 2028. Over the past few months, myriad Wall Street titans—including Michael Dell of Dell Technologies; Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund; and Nicki Minaj, founder of the Barbz digital army—have pledged additional donations to various classes of American beneficiaries.

Brad Gerstner, chair and co-founder of Invest America, a nonprofit that has been consulting the Treasury on the accounts, pledged to give, as well. Gerstner also helms a hedge fund with the same Silicon Valley address as Invest America, according to nonprofit disclosures.

Invest America was the one that recruited Michael Dell to donate, according to Matt Lira, co-founder of the nonprofit. Invest America has also consulted with dozens of large employers on how to make matching contributions for their employees’ children.

At least since the Super Bowl commercial, over two million citizens have signed up for Trump Accounts, which are set to go live July 5.

But here’s where Wall Street fees could become a fait accompli. Once a family gets a Trump Account, the account will be held at the U.S. Treasury with a Wall Street firm handling back-office administration. However, the December proposed regulation also allows Trump Accounts to be “rolled over” to a different financial institution.

After months of speculation, Robinhood has been selected as the default administrator, according to Scott Colangelo, chairman and managing partner of Prime Capital Financial, a wealth management firm. Colangelo spoke with sources close to the deal, and Robinhood beat out at least one other major brokerage, Charles Schwab. Both brokerages pledged to match employee contributions to their children’s Trump Accounts.

Robinhood will partner with the National Design Studio, a Trump-created executive office, to create a “custom, white-label” app for the Trump Accounts, according to a Treasury Department announcement Monday. BNY will also help manage the initial accounts and design the app, the press release said.

In general, administrators would manage the Trump Account logistics, while asset managers would govern the index funds in the accounts. BNY is set to be the asset manager of the default index funds, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

Spokespersons for Robinhood and BNY did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Schwab declined to comment.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, mandates that index funds have a defined fee cap of 0.1 percent of the account assets in the index funds, but there is nothing in the law or proposed Treasury regulations capping administrative fees.

The OBBBA empowers the treasury secretary to choose the default administrator based on, among other things, “the costs imposed by the trustee on the account or the account beneficiary.” And Treasury has been negotiating with Robinhood to keep administrative fees low, Colangelo said.

But without formal rules, the government has no control over fees once the Trump Accounts are rolled over; nor does it have any power to limit charges imposed on the rollover itself. Moreover, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA, a powerful Wall Street lobbyist, wrote in a January comment letter that Treasury should specify that fees of all kinds can be levied on top of the OBBBA-limited index fund fees.

In similar types of accounts, administrative fees and commissions can be misleading, complex—and hidden. 529 plans, which are education-specific individual savings plans, can layer on monthly or quarterly flat maintenance fees, annual maintenance fees, enrollment fees, sales commissions, or administrative fees determined as a percentage of the plan’s assets. Index funds change their fees depending on the vehicle that they’re in, as well.

These fees can cut dramatically into account growth, particularly for smaller accounts. If an administrator were to charge a flat $25 annual administrative fee, for example, that could eat into 2.5 percent of growth on a $1,000 Trump Account. Meaning that if the fund only grows 3 percent annually, after the index fund’s fee, the administrator could take almost all of its growth.

IRA fees are so unregulated that employers cannot contribute to them in a compensation package, Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School, wrote in her 2024 book, Work Retire Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy.

But Brad Campbell, a partner at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, a K Street law firm, argued that competition for Trump Accounts will help keep fees low.

Administrators aren’t angling to make a lot of money off of these accounts, but instead see them as a chance to build relationships with potential future clients, Lira said. Invest America backs some limits on administrative fees, but the nonprofit won’t take a position on where the fee cap should be or whether it should be mandatory.

On Invest America’s website, Gerstner claims to have come up with the idea for Trump Accounts in 2020, but individual child savings accounts have been around at least since President Bill Clinton floated Universal Savings Accounts, or USAs, in 1999. In 2018, Cory Booker introduced a similar “Baby Bonds” idea that undergirded his failed 2020 presidential campaign. Gerstner did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Trump Accounts will expose millions of Americans to the stock market for the ostensible purpose of achieving a two-part goal: Create wealth for millions of Americans, and increase “financial literacy.” Trump Accounts could end up being a perfectly rational, individual savings vehicle, in line with many other perfectly rational, individual savings vehicles. It is possible to behave rationally in an irrational system.

That said, America’s irrational, individualized plan system has not helped with financial literacy, and it has led to worse outcomes than pooled vehicle systems. Because individual plans are small fish in a big pond, they have no negotiating power to lower fees. “Workers end up with an inferior, low-performing, and suboptimal account, paying high fees on amateur investment portfolios,” wrote Ghilarducci in 2024. Pooled pensions, in contrast, pay wholesale prices on investments, operate centrally, and their pooled risk opens them up to (potentially) higher-growth investments in the unregistered markets.

In the five decades when mostly union pensions were supplanted by individual workplace plans like 401(k)s, income and wealth inequality has skyrocketed to its worst in American history.

Two reforms passed under Trump 1.0 and Biden have created incremental improvements, including an underutilized pooling option, but the fundamental premise of individualized retirement needs systemic reform.

The reality is that wealthy people much more frequently use individualized retirement vehicles. But poor and working-class Americans aren’t using these vehicles because they lack “financial literacy.” They are not saving because they lack savings: Two-thirds of Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck, according to a 2025 PNC Bank survey.

While there is nothing wrong with learning about economics and finance at all (thanks for reading), financial literacy should not be a prerequisite to a dignified retirement. The idea that financial illiteracy is why working people cannot save enough for retirement should be treated for what it is: insult added to the injury of an unjust system.

Trump Accounts’ claims to help with financial literacy are particularly ironic, considering account trustees cannot even touch them for 18 years, much less diversify or pool them, both of which would be financially rational things to do.

There are better models for Trump Accounts. Connecticut recently created a pooled investment vehicle for its children that is managed by the elected state treasurer. The pooled vehicle model “helps spread out the risk and administrative management fees, simplifies program management, and ... it prevents another third party from getting their hands on it,” explained David Radcliffe, an associate professor at the New School who helped craft the legislation.

It should be noted that the Connecticut law includes a financial literacy program. Further, the Connecticut model is means-tested to Medicaid recipients, which means there is a benefits cliff.

We should also examine past returns. Imagine a financial savings program passed by an all-Republican government managed by private financiers with little legal oversight. The assets aren’t pooled, the savings aren’t guaranteed, and the investments that undergird them must be low-risk. The new program is designed to both create wealth and increase financial literacy.

That may describe Trump Accounts, but it also describes the Freedman’s Bank, the bank created by Congress in 1865 to serve formerly enslaved African Americans. Justene Hill Edwards’s book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank, details how the bank’s mostly white and wealthy trustees embezzled millions from the bank’s $57 million in deposits, forcing its closure after only nine years. Most newly freed slaves lost the majority of their savings, and much of the trustees’ “loans” were never repaid, much less with interest.

I bring Freedman’s Bank up not to directly compare it to Trump Accounts (for one, banks operate with leverage, and Trump Accounts cannot), but to note that none of these goals are new. The Trump administration should also remember how important it is to have sound oversight of private administration of public programs. The road to embezzlement is paved with good, unregulated intentions, and so far, good intentions are the only thing reining in the Trump Account fees that might cut into the promised proceeds of millions of customers looking for a way to save for their future.

Yet none of the Supreme Court justices appeared to even notice, much less care, as they entered the room and sat, never so much as acknowledging Trump’s presence. If the president intimidated anyone, it may have been his own solicitor general, D. John Sauer, whose raspy voice wavered as he began to make specious arguments about the intentions of those who had crafted the Fourteenth Amendment. Evidently, Chief Justice John Roberts was far from convinced. When Sauer contended, “We’re in a new world now … where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen,” Roberts rejoined, “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.” Laughter echoed throughout the chamber.

And there sat Trump. His glare had evidently failed to do the trick. As the justices questioned the ACLU’s Cecilia Wang, the attorney representing the opposition to Trump’s gambit to gut birthright citizenship, he walked out. It was the latest example of what has become a clear trend in his second term as president: No one of consequence is intimidated by him.

Attempts at intimidation—sometimes successful, often failed—have always been part of Trump’s modus operandi, dating back to early in his real estate career. The tale of 100 Central Park South is a telling example. After buying the rent-stabilized building in 1981, Trump menaced the tenants to get them out so that he might raze and replace it. His tactics included threatening them with eviction, ignoring a rat infestation, and shutting off the heat and hot water. Though at one point Trump paid out over half a million dollars to the tenants and agreed to government monitoring, the fight dragged on for decades.

Much of Trump’s intimidation strategy as a businessman—threatening lawsuits and using the media to level attacks—was influenced by his friendship with Roy Cohn, the notoriously pugilistic attorney and Communist-hunter. And Trump often doubles down on this strategy when he’s on the losing end of a fight. After his failed attempt to buy an NFL team in 1981, he bought the New Jersey Generals of the upstart rival USFL in 1983. He tried to use the team and the media coverage he’d garnered as leverage to buy an NFL team in 1984—and failed again. (He would later admit that he had no interest in owning a team filled with “low class, all third-rate players.”) Trump also sued the NFL, claiming it was an illegal monopoly. Here, he won: A jury ultimately awarded him the massive sum of one U.S. dollar. The USFL, bleeding money and exhausted from Trump’s constant feuds, folded in 1986.

But then Trump realized that he could control his public image even more by becoming part of the media. In 2004, he became the host of The Apprentice, a reality-TV competition show that sold the fantasy that Trump was a successful businessman rather than simply the spoiled scion of a real estate empire established by his much savvier father. Falsely claiming to be “the largest real estate developer in New York,” Trump relished the opportunity to intimidate contestants who had not been born with a silver spoon and the filial resources to survive multiple failures. In season 3, he asked contestant Michael Tarshi if he was stupid, called him “lazy,” and said that the difference between them was that Trump works hard. In a 2013 episode of Celebrity Apprentice, Trump remarked to the former Playmate Brande Roderick that “it must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

Over the course of 15 seasons, plus another eight for its celebrity spin-off, The Apprentice projected exactly the image of Trump that he desired—an image that endures in the minds of many millions of Americans to this day. Sitting in his leather wingback chair at the head of a shiny wood table, spotlighted in the show’s otherwise dimly lit “boardroom,” he cut a physically and mentally imposing figure. Before The Apprentice, Trump had been a loud and obnoxious playboy, no doubt; arrogant, yes, but not quite imperious. The show made him into a kingly figure: all-powerful and all-knowing. (“Nobody outthinks me,” he said in one episode. “Nobody.”)

Hollow as it was, this omniscient-bully act played well on TV—which proved just as true in politics as in entertainment. In his 2016 run for president, Trump dispatched the Republican field by publicly belittling his opponents at every turn, then tried to do the same to Hillary Clinton. In their second debate, following the emergence of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, Trump brought along several of Bill Clinton’s accusers and sat them in the audience to intimidate his Democratic opponent. But that’s largely forgotten today because of what happened later that evening: He stalked Clinton around the stage as she spoke, his chin raised high, attempting to loom over her.

This imperial glare became his signature as president, or one of them. An even odder mannerism is his aggressive handshake, which, like a country club test of masculinity, often involves tugging the person’s hand toward him and refusing to let go. It has led to some rather awkward situations. There was the famed “Handshake Showdown” with the newly elected Emmanuel Macron, during which Trump sought, rather literally, to exert pressure on the French leader; more such handshakes would occur between the men over the years. Other world leaders have been subjected to this puerile charade, as well. There was the extra-long lock with the late Shinzo Abe of Japan, several deeply analyzed grips with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and more recently his tug-of-war shake with the president of Paraguay, Santiago Peña.

These efforts seem silly, but Trump’s intimidation shtick can sometimes work, which is of course why he does it. During his first term, he continually pressed NATO allies to increase their defense funding. Recently they agreed to raise their military spending to 5 percent of their national income—a significant increase. His tariff threats may have been ridiculous and ultimately prove damaging, but they did lead to a series of deals as nations tried to avoid his wrath. While many educational institutions have fought back against his attempts to limit free speech on college campuses, some weak-willed and shortsighted universities, including Columbia, capitulated to him. Some of the country’s biggest law firms proved similarly weak-kneed.

More often than not, though, Trump’s intimidation act falls flat. This is largely because, despite the fact that so many alpha males see him as the top alpha—an image he continually promotes through nonsensical memes refashioning his flabby, overweight body as some sort of iron-fisted muscleman—in the end he’s all bark, no bite. Or, as some put it, Trump Always Chickens Out.

We see his true colors when it counts. During his infamous meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Trump not only failed to confront the Russian dictator about his nation’s interference in our elections, but he practically kowtowed to him, stating that he trusted Putin more than our own intelligence agencies. In his second term, Trump’s been louder and more demanding than ever, with rarely a day going by without him spewing vitriol and threatening someone or some nation. But it’s hardly made a dent. He’s repeatedly threatened Jerome Powell for not lowering interest rates, even ordering his Justice Department to open a bogus investigation to put the screws on the Federal Reserve chair. But the Fed has refused to do his bidding. Trump tried to bully Denmark into ceding Greenland, yet that just made that nation more determined than ever to protect the territory. He’s also tried to bully Canada, repeatedly calling Trudeau a “governor” and threatening the current prime minister, Mark Carney, with closing the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. And he’s gotten bupkis.

No one’s buying Trump’s routine any longer, but this is not to say that he isn’t still dangerous. He is, very much so—not because he’s an iron-willed titan but because he’s a foolhardy buffoon. He’s never been tough enough to admit defeat, like a real man would, so he’ll go to great lengths to deny his losses and cover up for his failures.

We’ve seen this in his war with Iran. As the U.S. fails to meet Trump’s stated objectives there, he’ll continue moving the goalposts. Though he initially promised the Iranian people freedom, he’s abandoned that promise of late, suggesting that somehow that goal was already achieved, even though the Iranians remain under the thumb of a vicious theocracy. So, no regime change after all. What about “ensuring” Iran will never get a nuclear weapon? Iran still has its stockpile of enriched uranium. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz, where maritime traffic flowed freely until the U.S. and Israel bombing campaign began on February 28, remains closed, and the global economic repercussions continue to worsen—indeed, the damage may be permanent.

Trump has given Iran a deadline of Tuesday night to reopen the strait. Otherwise, he wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, “you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH!” At the White House on Monday he added, “The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” But Iran’s leaders aren’t scared of Trump, and why should they be? He’s been giving such ultimatums and deadlines for weeks, to no avail. Iran has learned what’s now finally dawning on Americans, including even some Republicans in Congress: Trump’s will never matches his bluster, and his attempts at intimidation are merely the hallmarks of a weak, insecure, and overcompensating coward.

Perry Bacon: Good morning, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now. I’m joined today by AJ Bauer. He’s a professor at the University of Alabama in the journalism department, and we’re going to talk about his new book. The book is called Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press. AJ, welcome.

AJ Bauer: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me, Perry.

Bacon: So just in the broadest sense, give the thesis of your book.

Bauer: Yeah. So the book gives a broad overview based on the premise: where did conservatives start to believe that the media was biased against them and against their worldview? And whereas a lot of earlier projects will look to the start of right-wing media, let’s say with Fox News in 1996, or Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s, early 1990s—some go back even further to the founding of National Review in 1955.

I go back into the 1940s and really point to the origins of the conservative critical disposition toward the press during the McCarthy era and in the late 1940s. And so the book is a broad overview of the formations of the modern conservative movement with a kind of focus on their relationship and conflict with the press.

Bacon: And so when does your story start? And I guess the first idea is, well, talk about when does your story start. Let’s go with that first.

Bauer: Yeah, so it starts in the 1930s and ‘40s, actually, with a movement called the Progressive Media Reform Movement that’s chronicled by a great historian named Victor Picard. And that book is basically — or his book is basically — about this movement among the popular front liberals, progressives, leftists in the 1940s advocating for a fairer media environment, broadcast regulations, better journalism practices.

And during that time period there was a belief that basically the media was biased in favor of the right. Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal was fond of saying that 85 percent of the newspapers were against him. This is one reason why Roosevelt went and did his fireside chats, using the radio to circumvent the press.

What I ask is: there’s this perception in the ‘30s and ‘40s, widespread, that the media was biased in favor of the right. How do we get from there to the media being considered as biased against the right? And what I find is in the 1940s a series of different changes take place. One of these is a lot of left anti-Stalinists start drifting rightward, and they bring some of these structural media critiques with them as they go rightward. These are people like Eugene Lyons and Ralph de Toledano who literally are writing for left anti-Stalinist publications in the ‘40s and then by 1955 are working for National Review.

But I also argue that there was a kind of broader discursive shift that takes place, partly by the Second Red Scare, which is commonly known as McCarthyism. And so McCarthyism is a time period where a lot of progressive media reformers are redbaited and pushed to the margins of public life, which then creates an opening for the right to lay claim to that discourse in media criticism.

Bacon: And is the idea that the media is liberal invented by conservatives at this point? Or is it more—is that starting at this point, or do they actually believe that, or are they inventing it for political reasons? A little bit of both?

Bauer: There was concern during the kind of late ‘40s and early ‘50s by a lot of anti-communists that communists were using liberal—what was called fellow travelers—to spread communist messaging secretly, or, sub textually, right, over the airwaves. And that was basically a fraudulent belief, right? That was like not necessarily happening, at least not at the level that they suspected.

But nevertheless, there was some anxiety around it. But the bigger thing that’s happening in the 1930s and ‘40s that is probably more impactful here, right, is that a lot of conservatives—or I should say conservative ideas and beliefs were really unpopular. So in the course of my research, I was reading Reader’s Digest and I found an ad for a book called How to Be Popular, Though Conservative. And I argue that’s reflective of the broader tenor of the time period, that conservatives felt that their ideas were unpopular, conservative beliefs were not being spoken publicly.

Politicians weren’t rallying around them as much. And so there was a series of wealthy people—billionaires, in today’s parlance—who were basically [asking], how do we fix this? One of these important billionaires was H.L. Hunt, who was a famous oil man from Texas. And H.L. Hunt had this idea that the problem isn’t that people aren’t conservative. He believed that the public—around 60 or 70 percent of people—were conservative innately, but that they were afraid to say anything because it was so unpopular. They felt stigmatized by it.

So in 1951, he launched something called Facts Forum. And Facts Forum was a series of local discussion groups coordinated out of his offices in Dallas, Texas, that were designed to get local people discussing the issues of the day—debating what kinds of news they read and whether they trusted it or not, and that sort of thing. And this project was really difficult to scale. It ended up being fragmentary around the country, mostly aligned with Hunt and his associates and their friends as they spread throughout the nation.

And so he scaled this up by taking advantage of a new federal policy in 1949 called the Fairness Doctrine. Now the Fairness Doctrine is something that you and your listeners may be familiar with. A lot of liberals and progressives look back fondly at the Fairness Doctrine period, which is the late 1940s through the 1980s, as a period when the federal government required—over the radio and TV—coverage of controversial issues in a way that balanced both sides, right, that gave, in this case, liberals and conservatives equal weight.

So what H.L. Hunt does is he hires this guy Dan Smoot, who’s a former FBI agent and kind of vehement anti-communist. And Dan Smoot starts doing radio programs where he’ll give the kind of liberal side of an issue and it’ll be not very well articulated and boring. And then he’ll give the conservative side and it’ll be this kind of great oratory, really selling it, right.

Facts Forum becomes this kind of massive radio and television operation, partly because local broadcasters at the time had this new federal mandate and H.L. Hunt basically funded this programming that fulfilled that mandate but tilted it, or skewed it, to the right. And my argument in the book is that the origins of the kind of conflict between the press and the right start around Facts Forum.

So in late 1953 and early 1954, Ben Bagdikian—who later is a famous reporter for The Washington Post and later writes a book called Media Monopoly, a lot of progressive media reform people in the later 20th century familiar with him—he wrote an exposé in 1953–54 on Facts Forum for the Providence Journal. And in that he accused it of being a right-wing front, basically. This was a time period toward the latter stages of the McCarthy era, so people were familiar with what a front was, right—it was a kind of secret, clandestine operation, often by communists, to have something that isn’t nominally communist but tricks people into being so. And he accused Facts Forum of being a right-wing front, basically.

Now, at that point in 1954, Facts Forum shifts its emphasis toward critiquing the press. And so part of what I argue is, from these very early days—before National Review was founded in 1955—you’ve got this conservative grassroots media operation, Facts Forum, that gets into some trouble with the press and then creates this kind of conflictual relationship with it. And from there you start to see the beginning of the belief in liberal media bias.

Bacon: It’s probably obvious, but by the time Nixon is president, I think the critique of The New York Times and so on is out there. When does the mainstream media is too liberal—when does that start being said by Republican officials and politicians?

Bauer: Yeah, so you’re right that that it’s common to look to the Agnew speech, right, in 1969, where he goes against the television networks for their critical coverage of Richard Nixon’s speech about Vietnamization, turning the war over to South Vietnam. But that actually was the kind of third part. That was the thing that establishes the trend.

So among the right, the kind of first instance of the press targeting—or engaging in conflictual relations with the right—is the McCarthy era, culminating in not only McCarthy’s censure but also in Facts Forum getting tarred as a right-wing front. The second instance of that is 1964, which is the Goldwater campaign, which is a famous origination point of the modern conservative movement. William F. Buckley and a lot of his cadre of conservative activists—respectable conservative activists—put all their eggs in the Goldwater basket. Goldwater says a bunch of really outlandish things, gets very easily tarred by the Johnson administration as extreme.

And so Goldwater also blames the press for his loss in 1964—basically, the press for carrying LBJ, helping LBJ have his landslide, right? And so by Goldwater you’ve got—not just Goldwater isn’t, Nixon aren’t the first Republicans, right? Goldwater is really the first Republican, as well as McCarthy beforehand. And so if we take this kind of longer view of right-wing media and of right-wing media criticism, we actually see most of the 20th century—or at least from the ‘40s onwards—as being a period of the cultivation of disbelief.

Bacon: You mentioned National Review. So is there a parallel thing at the same time where they’re creating conservative media and also critiquing the liberal media? Are those happening at once, or are there periods where one starts and the other catches up? Or how does that… because now with today we have Fox News and we still have critiques of the press being liberal, but when does that sort of start?

Bauer: Yeah. And so in the book I look at this outlet that was a hyperlocal John Birch Society outlet in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s. And so part of what I argue is—so there’s a great book by Nicole Hemmer called Messengers of the Right that looks at William F. Buckley and Henry Regnery and Clarence Manion, the kind of respectable conservative movement folks.

And part of what Buckley does in the 1950s and 1960s—especially, primarily in the 1960s—is he tries to relegate the kind of Looney Tunes folks, right? So the John Birch Society, especially some of the more overt white supremacists, the Klan in the South, to the kind of margins of the right. He holds them at arm’s length or throws them under the bus, whatever parlance you want to use, right? And he doesn’t necessarily succeed in this.

And Buckley wasn’t totally against the Birchers—he basically goes against the leadership. But my understanding is Buckley’s mom was a Bircher, right? He was not necessarily going to get rid of all of these people. And so Buckley’s media strategy was twofold, right? He was critical of the media, right—he used the liberal media trope. But he also wanted to ingratiate himself and his movement with the media, right?

He wanted mainstream media—The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation—to consider conservatism and to consider National Review as a kind of respectable opposition. Somebody that they could engage with, right, not somebody that they could easily dismiss.

On the other hand, you have the John Birch Society, which created its own media operations—magazines like Review of the News and American Opinion, which are less commonly talked about today, but are still around. The John Birch Society still exists, right—it never was completely disbanded or anything.

But in the 1960s, while Buckley is doing this kind of two-step, right—yeah, critiquing the press but then trying to ingratiating himself—the Birchers were being actively targeted by the press. And so I argue in the book that the idea of liberal media bias, the critical disposition toward the press, really fosters at the grassroots outside of Buckley’s reach, partly because they’re the ones who are being adamantly targeted by the press at a time when the press is warming up to more respectable conservatives like Buckley.

And so the book shows how this plays out. But when you look at that Birmingham Independent, the kind of hyperlocal paper, they hated the press and they hated Buckley, right? They were like, all of these people are against us, basically. And they were obviously championing politicians like George Wallace, for example, who expressed a much more overt advocacy of white supremacy and segregation in the South.

Bacon: So you mentioned George Wallace. I was going to come to the ‘60s anyway. You mentioned the ‘60s. How does the Civil Rights Movement play into this whole—is that another, is that a big moment for the media’s too liberal? Cause the media does cover civil rights at times in a more “favorable” way.

Bauer: Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of those national news reporters were based at outlets in New York and Washington, D.C., or at outlets that were owned by chains based in the North—either Chicago or New York, or wherever it would be.

And so there was an active discourse in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, especially among white Southern editors who worked for papers that were in favor of maintaining the racial status quo in the South, who saw—basically these similar kind of discourse to the way that these folks talked about Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists as outside agitators—they also saw the press as a kind of outside agitator: people who were not from the South, who were coming down and reporting on the “problems” in the South in a way that wasn’t fully understanding of what the white supremacists at the time thought was the kind of natural harmony between Blacks and whites in race relations in the South.

And part of the kind of expansion of this idea of liberal media bias, especially within the South, happens during the ‘60s and during the civil rights campaign, partly because the Civil Rights Movement is leveraging media, right? It’s engaging in civil disobedience in order to attract cameras, to show off the horrors of white supremacy and Jim Crow. And those Southerners who wanted to maintain the status quo, right, saw the press as participating in that project.

Bacon: We talked about Nixon a little bit earlier. I used to work at The Washington Post. So talk about the role of Watergate in this because then you have the media on some level does push out a president, a certain way. And it’s a Republican president, obviously. So how does that play into this?

Bauer: Totally. So Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, all of the kind of press’s critical coverage of the war in Vietnam—and the fact that people, conservatives who are watching TV, were getting live reports about Vietnam and casualties in their television sets, right, as they’re watching TV.

And so the way to think about this is: throughout the 20th century, as you see all of the kind of conflicts that emerge, all the movements for social change—the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movements, queer liberation movements—as all of these developments are taking place in the 1960s, if you are a traditional white conservative American watching your evening news, watching Walter Cronkite, you are seeing an increasing gap between the world as you understand it—the kind of traditional Christian, nuclear family values— you’re seeing increasingly a disconnect between that and what you’re seeing on television.

And conservative politicians, Republicans like Nixon and Agnew, are able to leverage that disconnect, that gap between the perceptions of these individuals and what they’re increasingly seeing on television, right? And so rather than saying, oh, the world is changing, right, maybe I need to change too, you need to reassess the way I understand the world—these folks retrench, right? They say the media is skewing it, right, they’re biased against us. And that’s what’s actually convincing us that there’s a problem. Really, there’s no problem at all.

Bacon: So 1980 — we actually have, Goldwater is lost, but now the movement conservative has won the election. So I don’t actually remember: is Reagan very anti-press? Because I think part of the story about Reagan is he’s a master of imaging. He’s an actor, he’s a media manipulator. So is he very invested in this liberal media idea? I don’t actually remember.

Bauer: Reagan is like Buckley in the sense that he is the great communicator, right—in the sense that he is trying to—he’s not criticizing the press so much as he’s engaging in kind of jocular navigating of the press. But Reagan takes less of a lead here, actually, than another organization during the time—or a few organizations that helped get him elected.

So in the 1970s, there was a series of new organizations that emerge. Things like the Heritage Foundation, right, things like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. I talk a little bit about Eagle Forum in the book, but I’m only mostly focused on a group called Accuracy in Media. And so Accuracy in Media is created in 1969, just a few months before Agnew’s famous speech that tars the press. And basically throughout the 1970s, Accuracy in Media goes about demonstrating, here’s an example of liberal media bias, here’s an example, right—really ratchets up the kind of bias narrative throughout the 1970s.

Now, in the late 1970s, you have a person named Richard Viguerie, right, who’s still alive as far as I know. And he is a direct-mail pioneer for politics on the right. And so he starts cobbling together these different single-issue campaigns, right, in order to raise awareness and build support for what ends up being the kind of Reagan revolution in 1980. And Viguerie leverages this media criticism that’s rising by Accuracy in Media, even though they had a tense relationship at times—to basically say, don’t trust the press, we need to elect Reagan.

And so throughout the Reagan administration, Viguerie and Accuracy in Media and all these other organizations are still maintaining their critique of the press. But less so Reagan, right—Reagan has to do business with the press still. And so again, part of what you’re seeing throughout the history of the modern conservative movement is a kind of delicate balance between trying to win over the press, especially when you’re in a position of power where you need the press in order to convey your message—people like Goldwater failed at this, right, Nixon and Reagan—and then a constant grassroots mobilization against the press, not only to perpetuate that idea of liberal media bias, but because there was an earnest critical disposition toward the press among conservatives. It wasn’t just that conservatives were using this to tar the press—they earnestly believed it. And that’s part of the conceit of the book.

Bacon: I was going to ask that, because like today, if you go to a Donald Trump event, if you ask about the media, they’ll boo the media. When I’ve done this before, they will ask where your press pass is, they’ll say fake news. We’ve talked about elites, we’ve talked about politicians—was there a moment where the average—I don’t know, if it’s polling or what have you—but when did the average Republican voter take on this sort of anti-media identity? Because that’s pervasive now. When did that start?

Bauer: Yeah. And so I think that the book tracks the development of that identity throughout the course of the 1940s and onwards. But again, I argue that it really starts in the 1950s.

And so part of what the book argues is Facts Forum—that early 1950s organization—is really the first grassroots mobilization of the modern conservative movement. It wasn’t calling itself conservative yet, because again, H.L. Hunt was trying to call things “constructive” because he thought “conservative” was a bad brand, right?

But all of those people, or many of those people, who showed up to Facts Forum events, who listened to its programming, people who participated in it—they end up going on and consuming National Review by 1955. Some of them joined the John Birch Society by the late 1950s. And there is an institutional memory within the right, to the point that—and I write about this a little bit at the end of my book—I was raised conservative, I was raised listening to Rush Limbaugh as a kid in the 1990s, and I had a critical disposition toward the press, right?

And so the way that this works is: you’ve got folks in the 1950s who are engaged in conservative politics, you’ve got this critical disposition to the press, young people like William F. Buckley coming in the ‘50s and into the ‘60s, and they are told by the elders, right, oh, the press is going to come at you—this is the story of Joe McCarthy, right. And institutional memory within conservatism and within conservative identity, the press, the targeting and the animosity toward the press, is baked into that.

And this is one reason why I argue that it isn’t so much simply the press doing something that makes conservatives feel better, or appealing to conservative audiences in some kind of way—this is baked into conservative DNA. Not in a biological sense obviously, but in terms of what it means to be a conservative politically, as a political identity partly means having this critical disposition toward the press.

And that means that when they’re consuming legacy or mainstream media, they’re reading it against the grain, right. And then when they’re consuming conservative media, they’re feeling validated, right. And so that’s the dynamic that’s played out, especially in the post–Fairness Doctrine era, with the Limbaugh talk radio moment and then Fox News and et cetera—is, now conservatives have a whole array, right, an entire right-wing media apparatus that’s going to give them content that feels good to them, that is consistent with their worldview.

That doesn’t mean that’s all that they consume, though. They still do go and consume legacy or other media, but they do so in a way that gives them things to criticize, right, that gives them things that make them feel motivated to stick with their conservative media.

Bacon: We’ve gone from the ‘40s to the 1990s, really. In this period—when does the media start realizing, oh, we’re being demonized. When does the awareness on the other side come that we’re being demonized, we need to have a strategy to deal with that? I don’t actually have any idea.

Bauer: Yeah. So that’s a really great question—I talk about this in the book too. And so in the late 1960s, you mentioned Agnew’s famous speech, right? So Agnew gives this speech that says basically—Nixon gives a speech. This is his famous “silent majority” speech, by the way, where he says we’re going to be scaling back U.S. military operations in Vietnam, we’re going to be turning things over to the South Vietnamese.

Nixon’s approval ratings go up after that speech, actually—the public likes that speech because they’re tired of the war. But the pundits on television pan the speech, especially this idea of the silent majority, right—they criticize the rhetoric of Nixon. So Agnew comes out and says, hey, look, there’s this gap—the gap again, right—between popular perceptions, which is this kind of great silent majority of conservatives as they imagine it. Basically similar to how Agnew—or how H.L. Hunt imagined that, by the way, right, so back to the ‘50s.

But anyway, Agnew gives this speech. Now, some context: by the late 1960s, most Americans are getting most of their news from TV—that’s the primary source of news for most Americans. Now there’s an increasing amount of criticism of television, though, not necessarily from conservatives, but from media critics broadly speaking. The idea here was that television dumbs things down, that it’s “if it bleeds, it leads,” right—it’s creating a negative perception of things, right, that it is leading to a dumbing down of American discourse because of soundbites, right.

So all of the kind of conventional criticisms of television as a medium are really picking up in the 1960s. Agnew’s speech dovetails with those. And so what you see, interestingly, is in the immediate press response to Agnew’s speech, the press pans it—they say this is censorship, Agnew’s trying to use the federal government against the press, against television networks, this is untoward, right. But then if you look at Columbia Journalism Review, right, in early 1970—I think January 1970—they do a special issue that has a lot of critiques that say, look, Agnew’s wrong, the press isn’t liberal, right, this is absurd. But then you start to see people saying: what does he get right? There’s something about his critique that lands, right. It isn’t that the media is biased against the left or against Nixon, but there is something, right—there’s a lack of trust.

So what you start to see in the 1970s, among journalists and among scholars who study journalism, is an increasing concern with trust in journalism. So all these trust-in-journalism surveys, like Gallup and Pew, those start in the 1970s, actually. And so the question—or the kind of problematic—of trust in journalism starts in the ‘70s, as a result of not only right-wing press pressure but these other pressures that then cause them to actually consider those right-wing pressures.

The other thing that happens during this time period is you have something called the National News Council, which was a briefly lived press ombudsperson from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, was independent, and it was designed to basically hold the media accountable to the public—to rebuild those lines of trust between the public and the press. And so that was partly resulting from both of those dynamics, right—the critique of television as well as the critique of liberal media bias.

Now, the National News Council wanted to appear impartial—that was their whole purpose. At the same time, Accuracy in Media, this conservative watchdog group, saw them as an opportunity to basically launder the conservative critiques of the press through this kind of impartial National News Council. And the National News Council realized this at the time—I actually went to their archives, which are at the University of Minnesota, and internal memos and letters, they say, look, these Accuracy in Media guys are up to no good, we know that they’re going to try to use us, we’re worried that if we don’t go along with them that they’re going to tar us as liberal or leftist.

So in the early days, they try to carefully review Accuracy in Media critiques more closely than other critiques that get raised to the council. And the first few they actually approve, they say, you know what, Accuracy in Media is right. And so they ingratiate themselves with them.

Now, ultimately that doesn’t last for that long—nothing is enough for right-wing media critics—and that coalition and symbiosis kind of falls away ultimately. But part of what I’m arguing in the book is that it isn’t just that conservatives believe that the media is biased. If that was the case, then it wouldn’t really be a discourse, right—it wouldn’t be this whole thing that we all have to reckon with.

The problem is that journalists in the 1970s onward have started to look over their right shoulder,—that they’ve started to say, I’m liberal, maybe interpersonally—is that skewing my coverage in some way? And so part of what the book argues is that yes, this critique from the right is a crucial part of this, but another crucial part of this is this idea of balance or impartiality, which is an impossible ideal, right.

And so if you’re a journalist and you’re trying to live up to that impartiality or that objectivity norm, which is part of what professional journalists aspire to do—if you’re constantly being told from the right that your coverage is biased—over time, you’re going to start to listen to that, and you’re going to start changing and shaping your coverage in a way that ends up skewing and ratcheting that coverage to the right, so that they’re a little bit less loud in their criticism of you.

So this is one reason why the belief in liberal media bias persists: it becomes an effective tactic on the right for drawing the legacy media rightward.

Bacon: We were in the ‘80s. Let’s come to the ‘90s. Yeah. You made an allusion to Rush Limbaugh. I think Fox News is founded in ‘96, is that right?

And then Newt Gingrich is a political force at the same time. So talk about—are those three sort of one? Rush Limbaugh’s rise is a forerunner of conservative media, so is Fox News. They’re also critiquing liberal media on their programming. And Gingrich is a new movement conservative. How do those three fit together?

Bauer: Yeah. So one of the really important things that happens in the 1980s is the Reagan administration gets rid of the Fairness Doctrine. So the Fairness Doctrine, as I mentioned, is a policy from 1949 to 1987 that mandates balance over the airwaves—TV and radio.

Now, once you get rid of the Fairness Doctrine—so they get rid of it in ‘87—by ‘88 Rush Limbaugh gets hired by ABC Radio to go national, right. And so by the early 1990s Limbaugh has revolutionized AM radio and conservative right-wing media.

Now, what I argue in the book is this is a really important turning point, because for most of the 20th century—from the 1940s to the 1980s and ‘90s—you’ve got primarily a conservative media that is movement media. It emerges out of the movement and it is doing the bidding of the movement. Now, there are different components of the movement — the John Birch Society, William F. Buckley, et cetera—that have different kinds of subtle agendas, so the movement media isn’t always in lockstep, but it’s always serving a movement purpose.

Once you get Rush Limbaugh, Limbaugh has two logics, right? One is advancing conservatism and advancing the right—not necessarily movement conservatism. He actually didn’t identify as a movement conservative and didn’t emerge out of the movement, right—it’s his own version of conservatism that’s informed by the movement but is separate from it. But also Limbaugh is about making money—he’s entertaining an audience.

And so Limbaugh is making different calculations than a Buckley or somebody else. Now, interestingly, as he becomes the kind of leader of the opposition, right, in the 1990s—as Reagan retires and as Bush doesn’t get elected in 1992.

Bacon: Clinton does, yeah.

Bauer: Right. And so Gingrich is really—and I don’t really write about Gingrich in the book, we’re not really getting to that in the book—and kind of in the early ‘90s there’s a little bit of a recap at the end into the contemporary, but we skip over that ‘90s period. The ‘90s period is much more complicated, which is one reason why I don’t get into it in the book— because you see both these commercial logics and these movement logics fighting in and out and in play.

And in fact, I’ve got this telling moment in the book where Cliff Kincaid—who’s an activist for Accuracy in Media—Rush Limbaugh on his radio program talks shit about Cliff Kincaid, right. And Cliff Kincaid is irate about this. And he is going around to all his conservative movement buddies and he is saying, hey, help me get in touch with Rush, I need him to correct the record, he was wrong about me, blah blah blah. Rush Limbaugh’s like no, this guy’s a joke, right—he’s refusing to do it, right.

And part of what I argue in the book is like, this is the moment where the conservative movement really realizes that it’s created something that’s beyond its scope—that they’re no longer in control of the monster they’ve created at this point.

And I think that this dynamic, where you’ve got the conservative movement and these kind of media logics that are beyond their control, partly explains the emergence of Trump, right—who was not necessarily the conservative movement guy in 2016, right, they were into Rubio, they were into Cruz, there was a bunch of different people that they were rallying around.

Trump ends up winning partly because of Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart—ultimately Fox joins the team as well, right. And so this media logic versus the conservative movement logic is partly what allows Trump to capitalize on the kind of tensions between those different movement and media logics.

Bacon: Okay, we went through most of the history that you wanted to go through, so I want to ask questions that are not maybe as grounded in history. I guess first I want to go to—the book doesn’t hit the post-2000 period as much, but I want to ask: so I got into journalism in 2002, so by that point—I worked at Time magazine, I worked at The Washington Post—we, most of us, we discussed privately—I remember being at dinner once and somebody asked, who has voted for a Republican, and none of us had. And it’s an awkward thing.

And so my experience of the media has been an obsession with—we are all Democrats, we are very guilty about this, we must be biased, so we must—the Iraq War benefits from the Bush perspective, the media is obsessed with not proving they’re liberal, therefore they cover it credulously, and so on.

So that’s a period that I’ve experienced personally, when does that sort of sink in, that the journalism community is obsessed with this? Is there a historical part of this that you’ve analyzed or researched where my experience—with the journalism community being very obsessed with this by 2000 and up to now—is that in research as well?

Bauer: For sure. So again, that starts in the ‘70s, right? Yes. So you’re getting Accuracy in Media constantly accusing the press of bias. You’ve got Columbia Journalism Review and all of these journalism academic organizations that are starting to study the problem of trust in media, right? Upcoming young journalists who are going through those programs are learning, right, that, oh, the public doesn’t exactly trust us and we need to build trust. And again, that isn’t always coded as right-wing critique—it’s just, hey, now we need to be more aware of our audiences and trying to serve their needs and interests.

Now, there’s an important study that comes out in the 1980s, actually, by some conservative-leaning economists that look at—they do surveys, professional surveys of journalists, and lo and behold, they find that most journalists identify as liberal or had voted for Democrats, right. And so that becomes yet another moment in the 1980s that kind of raises this idea that the problem of liberal media bias isn’t necessarily just structural, right—which had been the premise of most of the early to mid-20th century. By the ‘80s, with that study, they say the structural bias happens because of individual, rank-and-file journalists and their biases. Now the critique here becomes: the people that own the media are primarily conservatives—or at least not like woke lefties or whatever.

But nevertheless, that becomes—as you experienced, I think—a really important aspect of journalistic subjectivity, the ability of a journalist to navigate their job. So you’re supposed to be objective and impartial, but in the back of your head, right, that you’re a liberal, or you voted for a Democrat once, or whatever it would be.

And so when you hear critiques from the right that you’re biased, you’re like, I’m not right-wing, so maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re onto something. Maybe I should listen to them. When you hear critiques from the left—if you’re already liberal or left personally—you’re like, no, I know I’m not that far.

And so again, there is a milieu thing here among journalists. And I do think it’s true that a lot of legacy reporters—they may not be like Democrats or leftists or something, but a belief in democratic pluralism, broadly speaking—that kind of curiosity drives people into the industry, I think.

I don’t think that necessarily skews the coverage, although I do think that the right is onto something—that if we have a sense of empathy in our reporting, especially nowadays—or they’re critiquing empathy—yeah, maybe that’s bias, if that’s the criteria they’re using, right.

And so again, the book is formally agnostic on this question of bias and whether it exists, because I think it’s the wrong question, right. The question is: what are the outcomes? What does the world look like as a result of our reporting? And is that view of the world accurate, right—is it true? Does it ring true to people or does it not? And if it doesn’t, then persuasion needs to be involved, right.

Bacon: Talk about that a little bit. So you think the question of whether—so you don’t—the question of is the media biased, you think, is the wrong question. What is the right question?

Bauer: I think the question is: what as a people do we want? Who are we as a people, right, and what are our goals, right—what do we desire, what do we think is the common good that we’re all endeavoring to build together?

I think that we lose that question oftentimes these days, right—we’re very much caught up in whatever’s trending, whatever Trump said on Truth Social yesterday is a constant call and response to whatever the latest thing that’s happened is, and there’s less kind of pausing and taking a moment to say: what are we doing here, right?

Why does it matter, for example, if whatever Kristi Noem’s husband, likes wearing large breasts or whatever—how are we getting distracted by things like this in the midst of a war that we are fighting? Our money is going to bomb people in Iran and we’re getting sidetracked on these kind of social media things, right?

Bacon: So the Noem thing is a hard one, but I guess the broad, the real question is: what you choose to cover is a decision.

And I guess the critique from the right might be: in 2020, the number of Black men in America killed by the police did not dramatically increase, but the media decided to cover that more. And the media could have chosen to cover aborted babies. So I think that’s the critique. And maybe on abortion rights and gay rights, the media probably covers them closer to the Democratic Party. We could talk about free trade, they might cover it a different way.

So I think that’s the reality — people are getting — the debate is: is the reality being skewed in a certain way? How do you view that?

Bauer: Yeah, so let me rephrase it a bit, right. The conservative worldview is one that believes that social hierarchies, cultural hierarchies are natural and inevitable—that racial hierarchies, gender hierarchies, sexual hierarchies, class hierarchies—that the world is as they imagine it, right, that’s the world.

Now the real world is far messier than that, right—there are way more genders than they choose to think or believe, there are way more forms of relating with one another in terms of race and sexuality and gender and all these sorts of things. So when a journalist reports on that, reports on the complexity of the world—which flies in the face of the very simple worldview that conservatism sustains—it’s inevitable that that complexity isn’t going to fit within that framework.

And so I think this is a really crucial difference between conservatives and journalists—also a difference between conservatives and liberals, I would say, is that journalists and liberals, for the most part, look out at the world and see the world as objective. And what I mean by that is not that they have the right view of the world—we all have complex and confusing views of the world—but the idea is that the world exists somewhere and you can go and measure it eventually and you can figure out its existence.

And then what you do is you measure the world that exists out there, and then you say, we’re going to tweak the things that we think are wrong with it, right—oh, income inequality, right, or homophobia, or whatever it would be—we’re going to make tweaks to the system in order to fix this thing that’s out there that’s causing a problem.

Conservatives have a view of the world in their heads that they then go and try to conform the world to that belief system, that idea. And those are two fundamentally different relationships to the world—one thinks the world exists independently of us and we’re engaging within it, and the other tries to transform the world into the vision inside its head. And so there isn’t so much a vision among journalists or the left for what the world ought to look like—it’s, this is what the world is, and then maybe we want it to be a little bit better, but it isn’t a full changing of what the world is, unlike the conservative worldview.

Bacon: We’ve mentioned the terms objectivity, impartiality, neutrality—these terms are all —I think The New York Times, the word they use now is “independent,” but we have all these code words in journalism. And your sense is these words are not particularly helpful.

Bauer: Totally. So I’ll give you a good example of an “independent” newspaper, which was the John Birch Society’s Birmingham Independent. They were literally advocating for white supremacy in Birmingham.

It was independent because the two local papers, the Birmingham News and the Birmingham Post-Herald, were owned by Northern chains, and they were still—not covering the Civil Rights Movement fairly or accurately, but they were doing so in a way that was not right-wing enough for the John Birchers, right. And so the Birchers were independent of that press.

So all of these things are relative, right, and to some degree in the eye of the beholder. And so we can get mired and bogged down in debates about: is it bias, isn’t it bias, is it independent, isn’t it independent, all this sort of thing.

I would rather have a conversation about what do we want from the world, right—what do we owe to one another as citizens of the same country, or as people of the same world, right. Those kinds of questions, I think, lend themselves to building bridges with people, right—figuring out what are the problems that we face as a people and as a world, and how do we resolve them together. Those are the kinds of conversations I want to be having, right.

We’re facing climate change and all kinds of horrific things—this is a moment where we need, not just in terms of the U.S. but across the globe, to come together and figure out how we can continue living together. That’s not where we’re at, unfortunately, and we get further from that every day.

Bacon: Your book is about conservatives critiquing the media. Was it helpful, in that 50-year period, that there was no sustained liberal critique of the media—that there was an imbalance here? Was that helpful to the Republicans, that the Democrats didn’t say much about the media?

Bauer: Absolutely. So I think that there were left media criticisms during this time period, right? If you look at the new left against the war in Vietnam. You look at the Black Panther Party—there are all kinds of left critiques of the media as well during this period. But those are relatively small in scale versus the kind of scale of the growing and burgeoning right-wing media and its increasing connection to the Republican Party throughout the course of the 20th century.

And part of what the book argues is—if you look during the Popular Front era, so this is the 1940s primarily—as the communists are aligned with liberals and progressives around issues of common concern: fighting the war against fascism in Europe, supporting the rights of Black Americans, and supporting organized labor. Those are the three kind of primary planks of the Popular Front.

There were a variety of different Popular Front media outlets, right, including one that I write about in the book that was called In Fact, which was a progressive, media-critical newsletter run by a guy named George Seldes that had a bigger circulation than The New Republic at the time, and bigger circulation than The Nation, right. So there were relatively large and influential left media in the 1940’s. Now the McCarthy era—that second Red Scare, the late ‘40s into the 1950s — most of those folks are pushed out of public life.

Now, people—George Seldes lived a long life. I think he died in like the 1990s or early aughts or something—I think ‘90s. So it’s not like these people disappeared. But their influence waned—they were no longer able to write for major outlets, they were no longer going on television news and being a pundit or a commentator, right.

And so the marginalization of the left in the late ‘40s and early 1950s—as well as the way that the Red Scare worked—wasn’t just targeting communists, it was targeting liberals who, during the Popular Front era, had allied with communists. And so part of what this did is it salted the earth for future left-liberal collaboration by sowing distrust between them.

Liberals were throwing their leftist comrades under the bus so that they could be saved and they could continue to persist within the public sphere. And so that tension still exists with us to this day. The conflicts between liberals and democratic socialists, or leftists, or whatever—to this day are still distorted. And the ability to bind together and find common interests to target together is still tainted by the sins of the second Red Scare—we’re still living with the consequences of that.

Bacon: As you were talking, I couldn’t help but think about—we’re not in the Red Scare, we’re not talking about communism. But I do think there was a period in the 2010s where someone like Ibram Kendi could be published in The New York Times and The Atlantic and people like that. And now those people have been pushed out, to some extent, of those kinds of publications. And some of that pushing out of the sort of “woke”—has been done by people who call themselves liberal. And that’s that tension that is still playing out in a similar kind of way, I feel like.

Bauer: Absolutely. And so I think that the anti-woke backlash is a Red Scare, basically.Now, don’t get me wrong— Ibram Kendi is not a communist.

Bacon: That’s what I was nervous about.

Bauer: But it’s the logic, right? It’s the same logic. It’s that there are people that are more radical, they are engaging in common cause with people who are more moderate or liberal, right, around issues that matter to them—in this case, against police brutality, or the whole Black Lives Matter movement, or MeToo. There were a variety of different movements that this was a reaction against. But the goal there was to, again, pull leftists and liberals apart, to engage in wedging.

Bacon: And to force the leftists out of the mainstream, in a certain sense.

Bauer: Totally. And a really important part of this was—part of the anti-woke crusade by Chris Rufo was an opposition to DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Now, there are lefty critiques of corporate DEI that are well-meaning and spot-on.

But Chris Rufo—and the right—knew that if you target DEI, this is going to create a wedge within the left, among some folks who are supportive of corporate DEI efforts as not ideal but at least something, right, and people who are critical of them. And so this is where you end up seeing on Twitter, right—lefty people, they’re like, I don’t know about this Chris Rufo guy, but he is right about DEI. No, he’s not. We don’t need to let them wedge us. But it did, unfortunately.

But I also think the important thing is—in the last several years, Gaza, I think, and the encampments around Gaza—Democrats were cracking down against that, right. And so again, if we’re thinking about the Red Scare as outside of the context of communism explicitly—more radical or leftist politics as seen as a specter, and the anxiety that that specter is getting closer and closer to the precious kind of mainstream liberal democratic order. Not only the right, but also the powers that be within the Democratic Party, who want to maintain their New Democrat kind of Clinton-era neoliberal thing—they see common cause with the right, actually, there. And keeping more lefty, more radical voices out of common cause with them.

Bacon: I guess last thing, what is the critique of the mainstream media from the right—it’s a little different than Nixon or Gingrich, I think. How does it sound today?

Bauer: I think the really big difference now is: throughout most of the time period I’m talking about, you’ve got legacy media where most people are getting their news and information. There wasn’t a whole—it’s what we scholars call a low-choice media environment, right? You’re going to watch your local television network, you’ll watch either ABC, CBS, or NBC, whichever anchor you think is more attractive, and then you’re going to read your local newspaper, right? Maybe you’ll subscribe to Time magazine or Newsweek, and the difference in discourse between those outlets was not that wide.

One might get a scoop here or there, but it was pretty consistent. You then had a small, nascent right-wing media. Now, if you were a conservative in the 1980s, you could listen to Rush Limbaugh, right—there was an option for you—but generally the broader, bigger media was going to all be skewed against you, in your perception.

Nowadays we’ve got a massive right-wing media industry that is just getting larger and is, through media capture, buying into those legacy outlets—CBS, CNN, presumably soon enough too. And so you’re seeing this massive right-wing media sector. You still have the legacy media sector, whose influence has waned significantly, is getting smaller and smaller—or not smaller in terms of audiences, perhaps, but smaller in terms of influence. And then you’ve got basically no, or very little, left media.

And so within the broader structure there is an asymmetry and that asymmetry is sorting throughout the entire system. And I’ll give you an example of this. The other day I was listening to NPR, right—National Public Radio—they were doing a segment, I think it was Morning Edition, on Candace Owens’s documentary about Erica Kirk which has a bunch of conspiracy theories and stuff like that.

Now I study this stuff for a living—like, my brain is ruined—so I have to know who Candace Owens is, I have to know who Erica Kirk is. Regular people don’t. But they do, right? Because the right-wing media is so large, it’s creating characters and soap operas and dramas, right, that are so captivating, that legacy media feels compelled to cover it as news too.

And so what we have now is—it used to be that if you wanted to avoid right-wing media, you simply didn’t consume it. Now you can’t avoid it. I don’t think that there’s any real way out of that, outside of building a broad and big left media to balance out that overall. And so, ironically, in a book that is critical of the idea of fairness and balance in journalism, and argues that those ideas and values in part give rise to the right—or are leveraged by the right to build that right-wing media apparatus—I do think that we need balance within the overall system now. And that doesn’t mean balance at the level of legacy media, although I will take that. But what I would like is: we need, infrastructurally, right, to build out a left media.

Bacon: You mean not The New York Times—you mean a real, left-leaning media, not MSNBC even, probably?

Bauer: Totally. But the way to think about this, though, is both, right? And that’s the way that the right thought about it. So the right was advocating for: we want a token columnist at The New York Times and we also want our own television network. You got to do both.

And so I think the left right now does have some kind of tokens here and there in mainstream legacy media outlets—occasionally, not at all—but doesn’t have that big apparatus yet. And so we got to build that apparatus—that’s really the lesson here.

Bacon: Okay. You have the book. Can you show it to people?

Bauer: Oh yeah, I got one here.

Bacon: Making the Liberal Media. AJ Bauer. And then—is there anything else you want to—we went on a while. Anything else you wanted to say, anything I missed? Anything you want to say?

Bauer: No, I really appreciate the opportunity. And yeah, I’m at AJ Bauer on all the apps, or all the different things, if you want to engage with me there. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Bacon: Good to see you. Thank you.

Bauer: Yeah, likewise. Take care.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

Conservatives attacking the mainstream as “liberal” and biased against them didn’t start with Donald Trump or even Richard Nixon. In his new book, Making the Media Liberal, author A.J. Bauer says conservative mobilization against the media first started back in the 1940s. The Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate were events that further entrenched the  chasm between the media and rank-and-file conservatives. Conservative activists and politicians seized on that tension and stoked it. They also developed right-wing media, from the National Review to Fox News. Bauer, a journalism professor at the University of Alabama, argues that the right’s parallel efforts reinforced one another. Casting the mainstream media as liberal created more demand for conservative news outlets; the conservative outlets kept up the drumbeat that the mainstream media is biased against conservatives. Bauer says that the right-wing media has become more powerful than conservative elites originally intended, helping elevate a candidate (Trump) of whom those elites were initially skeptical. Bauer argues that conservatives succeeded in both building a huge right-wing media ecosystem and pushing the mainstream media to cover conservatives more favorably. He says the left should create a similar ecosystem. 

These days, that’s nothing if not typical. The average cost of a new car in the United States is now more than $50,000—up 10 percent since last year, and roughly 44 percent over the last decade. Average monthly payments for buyers of new cars hover at $773; roughly 20 percent of buyers pay $1,000 or more each month. A record 23 percent of new-car purchases are being financed with loan terms that are 84 months or longer. As prices at the pump soar to more than $4 a gallon, in large part because of the Iran war, driving seems to get more expensive by the day. Over the last several months, meanwhile, U.S. automakers have written down tens of billions of dollars’ worth of investments in electric vehicles, and doubled down on their more profitable gas-powered trucks and SUVs. In other words, right at the moment it would seem there’s more reason than ever to invest in alternatives to gas-powered cars, the auto industry is doing anything but. What gives? 

The truth is that higher gas prices alone aren’t likely to prompt automakers to rethink their business models. That’s partly because the relationship between gas prices, buying habits, and automakers’ product planning isn’t exactly straightforward. While the spike in gas prices has prompted buyers’ interest in E.V.s to go up modestly, the people who can still afford to purchase new cars are generally wealthier, and relatively insulated from even sizable gas price fluctuations. Market surveys show that the customers buying larger trucks and SUVs like the GMC Yukon tend to make upward of $150,000 a year, said Alexander Edwards, president of the consultancy firm Strategic Vision. Those with annual incomes between $90,000 and $100,000 a year are considered “poor” among new car buyers, per Strategic Vision’s survey data of new vehicle owners; according to the Social Security Administration, average annual earnings in the U.S. are currently just below $70,000.

“For most of the folks who purchase large SUVs and trucks, their situation is they’re going to complain a lot about it, but they’re typically not going to change their behavior,” Edwards told me. Although buyers across income classes care a lot about gas prices, he said that it nevertheless ranks low (“thirty-seventh or thirty-eighth”) on the list of factors that go into purchasing decisions. Finally, thanks in large part to regulations, cars across the board—including trucks and SUVs—have gotten more fuel efficient. 

Multinational corporations, moreover, rarely turn on a dime. It would take  automakers years to change their product lineups. “It’s not a decision you’re going to make because gas prices are higher right now,” said Stephanie Brinley, associate director of AutoIntelligence at S&P Global Mobility. 

They may be especially reticent to return to segments where they’ve got a bad track record. Even with generous Biden-era subsidies to buy and make electric vehicles—most of which have now been rolled back by Congress—Detroit automakers struggled to turn a profit on them. Ford’s E.V. division lost $4.8 billion in 2025. Like its peers, Ford has accepted massive losses in order to refocus on its best-selling large gas-powered vehicles. GM reported a 55 percent decline in net income last year, after accepting $7.9 billion in charges related to the company’s pivot away from E.V.s. Stellantis, the Netherlands-based owner of Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler, took a $26 billion hit as part of its “strategic reset” away from electrification, and reported its first-ever annual loss last year. None of these manufacturers seem poised to reverse course on these extraordinarily costly decisions, or turn away from their biggest moneymakers in a rough year; overall vehicle sales were down 5.3 percent in Q1, driven by the rollback of E.V. tax credits, higher interest rates, and elevated vehicle prices. 

The bigger risk for automakers in the United States isn’t that new car buyers here will turn to E.V.s en masse—they probably won’t—but that a broader economic downturn could change the spending habits of their most important consumers. Detroit automakers have essentially placed their bets on the better-off segments of America’s so-called “K-shaped” economy, where the richest 10 percent of households are responsible for half of all spending. Any larger shifts in car companies’ approach, Brinley said, likely won’t be the result of rising gas prices; it would be the result of rising fuel costs making everything else more expensive too. If even richer consumers feel compelled to pinch pennies, they could start to sour on the pricier, tricked-out models that have become U.S. automakers’ bread and butter.  

Even before the war in Iran, people’s mounting concerns about affordability were already expected to put a damper on sales this year. And although car companies accordingly started talking more about affordability, they seem to have a somewhat warped understanding of that word. A statement from Ford about its Q1 U.S. sales—which declined by nearly 9 percent—boasted that the company’s “strategic shift toward high-margin SUVs like Expedition and Explorer” had “lifted its estimated retail market share” to 11.6 percent. Ford’s most “affordable” entry-level versions of the Ford Bronco and Maverick, the release states, sold well last quarter. But it’s a bit of a stretch to call these cars—which have an asking price of $40,000 and $28,000, respectively (i.e., before taxes and fees)—affordable.

U.S. automakers may not feel pressured to embrace electrification, but they could see declining returns on their strategy of selling very particular types of cars to very particular types of people (read: the rich). Other countries have not limited themselves in this way. In China, for instance, drivers have embraced a wide range of genuinely affordable, high-tech E.V.s made by brands like BYD, Geely, and Chery, which has racked up some 57,000 orders for its sporty new $8,500 QQ3. Even before the start of the war, battery-only vehicles accounted for 50 percent of auto markets in Thailand and Singapore, and about a third in China, Indonesia, South Korea, and Vietnam. As many of these countries face acute energy shortages, those trends seem poised to accelerate. Two weeks after the start of the war in Iran, a BYD dealership in Manila reported receiving two months’ worth of orders in just two weeks. As Bloomberg reports, showrooms in Bangkok and Auckland are similarly buzzy. 

In a sign of the changing times, BYD sold more cars than Ford globally for the first time last year. Detroit’s Big Three domestic automakers (Ford, GM, and Stellantis) today command less than 10 percent of global market share—down from nearly 50 percent in 1973. Over the last decade, they’ve pulled back from growth markets where they’ve struggled to make a profit, like China, which had been important lifelines for their balance sheets in the wake of the Great Recession. To be sure, the U.S. remains the world’s largest consumer market. Automakers here have made good money selling high-margin trucks and SUVs to wealthier buyers, and probably can for years to come. But experts say it’s only a matter of time before Chinese brands that are effectively barred from the U.S. now will be able to compete here too. That could cut into Detroit’s profits at home.  

“E.V.s do seem to be gaining hold outside the United States, and the Chinese are absolutely coming in in a big way in many of those markets,” Levenson said. “I think that’s the very big threat for the domestic three—not only will China eventually figure out a way to get into the U.S., but even if that doesn’t happen, [the domestic three] will become far more dependent on the U.S. market as China takes greater shares of sales in the rest of the world.” Similar troubles are already plaguing European and Japanese automakers, which are rapidly losing customers to Chinese automakers domestically and abroad.

General Motors’ longtime president Alfred Sloan built that company promising a “car for every purse and purpose.” Today, GM and other U.S. automakers are making cars for a fairly narrow range of both purses and purposes. As the current crisis drags on—raising the prospect of broader economic turmoil—that strategy could face its greatest challenge yet. 

President Trump’s war on Iran is the cause of the current crisis. Iran’s retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz to most trade has caused oil and natural gas prices to skyrocket, forcing countries to find creative ways to cut energy demand, and caused a fertilizer shortage that is certain to reduce crop yields around the world while also increasing the costs of agricultural goods. All of this comes as economic growth has slowed globally and governments have amassed record levels of debt.

And then, in a couple of months, we’ll likely have El Niño to contend with too. Welcome to the polycrisis.

That term, which was coined back in the 1970s, has gained popularity in recent years—thanks in part to Columbia professor Adam Tooze. Popularly, it’s sometimes seen as shorthand for “a lot of bad things happening all at once,” but that misses its real meaning. A true polycrisis is not a pile-up of unrelated calamities. Rather, it occurs when separate crises in different systems become entangled, feeding off each other and producing damage greater than the sum of their parts.

Consider fertilizer. The Persian Gulf region is a major producer of it, and roughly one-third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, both natural gas and sulfur are critical inputs for fertilizer production, and Persian Gulf supplies of these commodities have also been cut off. This has caused fertilizer plants in South Asia to shut down, while China, one of the world’s largest fertilizer suppliers, has restricted exports to protect its domestic market.

So global fertilizer prices are surging, just as the spring planting season begins across the northern hemisphere. Around the world, governments are scrambling to secure fertilizer supplies and concerns are growing about food security in developing countries and rising grocery prices in wealthier ones. Farmers have been advised to expect tighter supply and margin pressures. In the U.S, this has already resulted in the lowest planting of spring wheat since 1970.

Now add weather. Forecasts predict that 2026 will be one of the hottest years on record, as the concentration of human-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise. Extreme heat accelerates moisture evaporation from soil, aggravates droughts, and reduces crop yields. Worse, there’s an 80 percent chance that an El Niño will develop this year, altering global rainfall patterns and triggering droughts in some regions and floods in others. NASA estimates that El Niño harms crop yields on at least a quarter of the world’s farmland. And there is a 25 percent chance this will be a “super” El Niño, intense enough to cause globally catastrophic extreme weather.

Research shows a strong El Niño can have an impact on global food supplies that causes six million children to go hungry. But these calculations do not include a global fertilizer shortage. Climate stress with adequate fertilizer is challenging. Climate stress without it is an entirely different order of crisis.

Unfortunately, these two crises are largely locked in, and there is little we can do in the short term to prevent their collision during the 2026 growing season. Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopened tomorrow, it would take time to restore global supply chains. The seeds of the polycrisis have already been planted, both literally and figuratively.

Yet food is only one system facing a shock. The Iran war is upending global energy markets, driving inflation, and lowering economic growth around the world. And this is all occurring at a time when many countries are still burdened by record levels of public debt left over from the pandemic, something the International Monetary Fund has termed “the fiscal version of long COVID.”

Research shows that food price shocks can act as a “threat multiplier,” transforming existing political dissatisfaction into widespread violent uprisings. As evidence, a global food price crisis in 2007–08 and a similar spike in food prices in 2010–11 caused riots and political instability in many countries.

The pressures building this summer are broader than what we’ve seen in the past, and the political and humanitarian consequences will be severe. Our institutions were not built to manage interrelated crises. Defense ministries watch the Strait of Hormuz, agriculture departments track fertilizer prices, climate agencies issue El Niño bulletins, and Treasury officials supervise debt levels. Each institution monitors and tries to manage crises in a single system, but nobody is tasked with modeling and mitigating the consequences when apparently distinct crises converge.

An effective response demands an integrated playbook. Contingency plans for this summer’s harvests need to simultaneously account for fertilizer shortages and extreme weather. International coordination should extend to fertilizer allocation, not just oil reserves. A planned United Nations fertilizer coordination initiative is a strong start, but developing countries also need urgent help diversifying their fertilizer import supply chains. Humanitarian organizations must prepare for dramatically elevated demand for food aid, and donors need to mobilize now—not after the harvests fail.

In the longer term, the world’s multilateral system needs standing capacity to monitor how crises in different domains interact, so that we stop being repeatedly blindsided by cascading crises that careful analysis could have anticipated. This is what polycrisis analysis seeks to address. The goal is not to replace specialists but to develop the tools and foster the conversations that track risk interactions across silos before containable shocks compound into systemic breakdowns.

None of this is happening at the required pace. Around the world, farmers are preparing to plant while facing both drought forecasts and disrupted supplies of fuel and fertilizer. They’re on the front lines of this polycrisis right now, but soon we all may be embroiled in it.

The Trump administration wants to gut 9,400 workers from the 60,000-person agency, according to budget documents reviewed Monday by Reuters. 

The 2027 White House budget suggests small airports rely on private security screeners, instead of the TSA, and claims this change would cut 4,500 jobs.

“The airports that already use this program have demonstrated savings compared to Federal screening operations,” the White House budget documents stated. “The move would yield cost savings compared to Federal screening and begin reform of a troubled Federal agency.”

 Airports that used privatized security avoided longer lines caused by the partial government shutdown, but using private companies risks compromising traveler safety and has been condemned by union leaders. 

“It’s very important that people understand what privatization is,” Johnny Jones, secretary treasurer for AFGE TSA Council 100, told CNN.  “It has nothing to do with your security or your safety. It has everything to do with somebody making a profit.”

The Department of Homeland Security has also pitched ending staffing at exit lanes, which would cut another 4,800 jobs. 

Last month, Trump rejected a plan to pay TSA workers amid a partial government shutdown, because Democrats wouldn’t agree to fund the president’s reckless federal immigration enforcement. Republican lawmakers had also made efforts to stall funding TSA in order to continue the fight over immigration funding. 

Finally, last week, Trump signed an executive order to pay workers at the TSA, which has been hemorrhaging employees as paycheck after paycheck has gone unpaid, causing severe disruptions at airports across the country. 

Florida’s House Bill 1471 appears to be targeted at Muslim organizations in the state, and DeSantis said as much in a press conference before signing the bill, calling it a means to protect against “sharia law” and boost “public safety, our culture, and our security.”

“We don’t want money flowing to these groups that are appendages of terrorist groups,” DeSantis added, mentioning the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations by name. “We’ll do millions for public safety, millions for education but never one red cent for jihad.”

CAIR is an organization whose mission is to protect the civil rights of American Muslims, and is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with chapters in states all across the country. In a statement, the executive director of CAIR-Florida, Hiba Rahim, called out DeSantis for having “falsely labeled CAIR as terrorists without lawful authority or evidence” four months before in a different bill that was later blocked in court.

“This is not just about CAIR. This expanded and deeply flawed framework can attack any organization that dares to dissent,” Rahim said about the new law. “As Floridians, together, we’ll watch how this unprecedented law is enforced, and whether it is used or abused.”

References to sharia law in the bill could also prevent Muslim schools from receiving state vouchers if they are determined to be affiliated with a group labeled a terrorist organization. Conspiracy theories over sharia law have been a right-wing fixation for decades, with conservatives falsely claiming that Muslims are trying to set up a religious legal system.

The bill doesn’t include any method for oversight of how groups would be designated as terrorist organizations, either by the courts or by Florida’s legislature.

“There is no requirement for legislative approval,” Representative Rita Harris, a Democrat, said while the bill was being debated. “There is no independent judicial finding before the designation takes effect. There is no built-in meaningful oversight mechanism to ensure transparency or review. In our system of government, we do not place sweeping, labeling authority in the hands of a few executive officials without guardrails.”

The bill will likely face legal challenges over violations of the rights to freedom of speech and religion enshrined in the First Amendment, and may not survive in court. Islamophobia, on the other hand, seems to persist in American political discourse even as its mouthpieces are consistently exposed as bigots.

“We’re giving them ’til tomorrow. Eight o’clock, Eastern Time. And after that they’re gonna have no bridges, they’re gonna have no power plants. Stone Ages, yeah,” Trump said when asked about his weekend threat that he would launch a decimating attack if Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump: "We're giving them until tomorrow at 8 o'clock. And after that, they're gonna have no bridges, no power plants -- stone ages, yeah. Stone ages." pic.twitter.com/Khqqqd5gGn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026

Trump was then asked about what the Christian God would think of his war on Iran.

“You said, ‘Glory be to God in this conflict.’ Do you believe that God supports the United States’s actions in this war?”

“I do because God is good. And God wants to see people taken care of,” Trump said, speaking for God. “God doesn’t like what’s happening. I don’t like what’s happening.... I’ve ended eight wars.”

Trump: "God is good. And God wants to see people taken care of. God doesn't like what's happening. I don't like what's happening. I've ended eight wars." pic.twitter.com/CzOEGQHoYB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026

“You said that very little is off-limits in Iran as far as the targeting,” Politico’s Dasha Burns then asked. “Are there certain kinds of civilian targets, though, I’m thinking schools, hospitals, that you—”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Trump replied. “We have a plan—because of the power of our military—where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again. I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock. And it’ll happen over a period of four hours, if we want it to. We don’t want that to happen. We may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation.”

Q: Are there certain kinds of civilians targets like schools or hospitals that are off limits?

TRUMP: I don't want to tell you that. We have a plan where every bridge and power plant in Iran will be decimated by 12 o'clock tomorrow night pic.twitter.com/Rqt4qSr2Lj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026

This violent ultimatum doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s constant rhetoric suggesting that the war is all but won, and that the Iranian government is on its last legs. Trump’s war has already killed over 1,600 Iranian civilians. His threats would destroy vital routes and plunge thousands more into darkness, resulting in even more death and suffering.

Speaking at a press conference Monday, Trump repeatedly threw around the slur while bragging about his relationship with Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s reclusive authoritarian leader.

“Do you notice, he said very nice things about me. He used to call Joe Biden a mentally retarded person, OK? So, don’t tell me about your stuff,” the president said. “[Of] Joe Biden, he said, ‘He’s a mentally retarded person.’ He was so nasty to Joe Biden, it was terrible. But to me—he likes Trump.”

Trump: "You know who else didn't help us? South Korea didn't help us. We've got 45,000 soldiers in South Korea to protect them from Kim Jong Un, who I get along with very well. He said very nice things about me. He used to call Joe Biden a mentally retarded person." pic.twitter.com/l7BqskXLu0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026

It doesn’t appear that Kim Jong Un ever referred to Biden as “mentally retarded.”

In 2019, North Korean state media labeled Biden an “imbecile” and a “fool of low IQ” after the former president criticized Kim as a “tyrant.”

But Trump has not been immune to North Korea’s name-calling, either: He was previously labeled a “dotard,” meaning someone who is slow and old. His supposedly cozy relationship with Kim has only become more strained since he reentered office.

Trump’s comments came amid a winding rant complaining that other countries had not helped to reopen the Strait of Hormuz (which only closed because of Trump’s decision to attack Iran).

Trump’s inability to stay on topic, or recall specific details, speaks to his increasingly apparent cognitive decline. The president’s retreat to childish attacks against his former political rival mirrors his ongoing temper tantrum meant to threaten Iran into allowing trade to resume through the region.

Trump described the location as if it was from a movie, saying “you could call it central casting if you were doing a movie for location” and calling it “probably the toughest area of Iran.”

Trump: "This was central-- this was right-- you would call it central casting if were doing a movie, for location." pic.twitter.com/NtyieAkgCP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026

Later, Trump’s account of the late-night mission was barely coherent, as he mentioned how a rescue plane was on a “farm without a runaway” with “wet sand.”

“And it eats planes alive, and we’re waiting, and we’re saying, ‘I hope that one can land and take off.’ And they came in like magic, boom, boom, boom, one after another, it was like genius, so impressed by that,” Trump said.

“They came in so fast and so hard, and these guys knew exactly what to do. ‘Let’s go, come on, get in, let’s go,’ bwah,” Trump raved, miming a plane taking off. “They came one after another, not at the same time. They don’t want to come at the same time. They had to come right after each other. They didn’t have any room. There was barely any room to land. Tiny little patch of very wet earth and sand.”

Trump: They're waiting out on this farm without a runway. Wet. Crummy soil. Sand. Mostly sand, wet sand. And it eats planes alive, and we're waiting. And we're saying, I hope that one can land and take off. And they came in like magic, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after another.… pic.twitter.com/tf8ZDDpcyG

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 6, 2026

Trump appeared so desperate to sell the rescue mission as a movie that he nearly spilled state secrets in the process.

“How many men did you send together, approximately, to the operation?” Trump asked Gen. Dan Caine in the middle of one of his rants.

“Uhhh, I’d love to keep that a secret,” Caine replied.

“It was hundreds,” Trump replied, laughing. “He’s pretty good. Is he central casting?”

Trump’s words and actions in recent years have led many, including medical professionals, to believe that he is experiencing cognitive decline, and this wasn’t even the first such instance of the day. In the morning, alongside someone in an Easter Bunny costume, he told a crowd of children at the White House for the annual Easter Egg Roll that “we have the greatest military, the most powerful military in any place in the world. You saw what happened with Venezuela.”

As the president seems to get worse and worse, will anyone of consequence—Republicans in Congress, the president’s Cabinet, or members of his family—try to rein him in for the good of the country?

In the midst of a sprawling, nonsensical speech at the White House Monday, the president claimed that the government was going to hunt down the identity of the government employee who first revealed there was a second airman lost in Iran.

“But these two extraordinary rescues—because there were two, and as you probably know we didn’t talk about the first one for an hour. Then somebody leaked something—which, we’ll hopefully find that leaker. We’re looking very hard to find that leaker,” Trump said.

“They basically said, ‘We have one, and there’s somebody missing.’ Well they didn’t know there was somebody missing until this leaker gave the information,” Trump continued.

Trump’s plan, however, apparently depends on expecting the countless news outlets that reported on the search and rescue mission to give up their sources.

“We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security, give it up or go to jail.’ And we know who and you know who we’re talking about. There’s some things you can’t do,” Trump said.

An F-15 fighter jet was downed by Iranian fire early Friday. It was immediately understood when the plane went down that there were two crew members aboard. Each F-15 jet is manned by two crew: a pilot and a weapon systems officer.

The pilot of the two-seater aircraft was rescued later that day, but the search and rescue operation for the injured weapon system officer stretched until Sunday, when they were miraculously rescued from a crevice in the Iranian mountains. Iranian forces were also rushing to locate the fallen U.S. soldier, even placing a bounty on the crew member’s head.

Trump further suggested Monday that Iran’s bounty was the fault of the American media, who he claimed should not have revealed any information about the missing crew member.

The president did not share any names as to the leaker, the journalists, or the media outlets that he believed had publicized the story. But after his comments, some members of the press pointed toward Fox News and The Washington Post for being among the first to land the scoop.

Yet those media companies were not the only ones to report that one member of the military had been unaccounted for after the initial rescue on Friday: Reuters also reported at the time that just one of the aircrew had been rescued. Hours later, the outlet reported that a search and rescue was underway.

Other journalists jumped to claim the scoop, even after Trump’s threat. Amit Segal—an Israeli journalist with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—said on his Telegram chat later Monday that he was the first to report the story.

“As you may recall, this was first published here,” Segal wrote.

Segal has previously claimed that Netanyahu offered him a ministerial position in 2022. It is not clear what impact Segal’s potential arrest would have on U.S.-Israeli relations.

Yet when asked directly about it, Segal wavered. Speaking with the New York Post’s Caitlin Doornbos, he backpedaled his initial bravado, specifying that he’s “not sure” if he was the first to report the story.

“And anyway—I will protect my sources,” Segal said.

This story has been updated.

Hegseth made an appearance at President Trump’s briefing Monday regarding the two U.S. fighter pilots who were extracted from Iran after being shot down on Friday.

“One downed airman evaded capture for more than a day, scaling rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy. When he was finally able to activate his emergency transponder, his first message was simple, and it was powerful. He sent a message: ‘God is good,’” Hegseth said. “In that moment of isolation and danger his faith and fighting spirit shown through.”

“You see, shot down on a Friday, Good Friday. Hidden in a cave. A crevice, all of Saturday. And rescued on Sunday, flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. A pilot reborn, all home and accounted for, a nation rejoicing. God is good,” Hegseth continued, laying it on incredibly thick as if writing the script to his dream Taylor Sheridan movie.

Hegseth: One downed airmen evaded capture for more than a day, scaling, rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy. When he was finally able to activate his emergency transponder, his first message was simple: God is good

Shot down on Good Friday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was… pic.twitter.com/fu0NALBCv9

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 6, 2026

The frequency in which Hegseth injects his rabid, militant brand of Christianity into any public event is exhausting. The pilot who went down was not like Jesus Christ. He was sent to the Middle East to either surveil or bomb infrastructure and civilians alike. And it’s hard to understand why the very first message he sent out while trapped in a crevice while being hunted by Iranians was “God is good,” and not “HELP ME!!!” immediately followed by coordinates.

After crossing illegally through the U.S.-Mexico border near El Paso, the girl was removed from her mother’s custody and placed in a foster home by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Five months later, the girl was returned to the custody of her father, a legal permanent U.S. resident, and he learned that his daughter had allegedly been abused by another child in the same home.

The young girl’s father had tried repeatedly to reunite with his daughter, but his efforts were stalled as the government told him it couldn’t make an appointment to take his fingerprints. “She was so long in there,” he told the AP. “I just think that if they would have moved faster, nothing like that would have happened.”

A caregiver in the foster home discovered that the girl’s underwear was on backwards, and the girl told her she’d been abused multiple times, causing bleeding. The girl underwent a forensic exam and an interview, and the findings were reported to law enforcement. The older child who’d committed the abuse was removed from that foster program.

The girl’s father told the AP that he was simply told there had been an “accident.”

“I asked them, ‘What happened? I want to know. I’m her father. I want to know what’s going on,’ and they just told me that they couldn’t give me more information, that it was under investigation,” the father said.

Lauren Fisher Flores, the attorney representing the young girl, said, “To have your child abused while in the government’s care, to not understand what has happened or how to protect them, to not even be told about the abuse, it is unimaginable.

“Children deserve safety and they belong with their parents.”

Fisher Flores said that legal intervention helped prompt the processing of the father’s sponsorship application.

The Trump administration has dramatically increased the burden for families hoping to facilitate the release of children placed in ORR’s custody. Sponsors now face stricter documentation requirements and even risk arrest themselves. In 2025, the average number of days a supposedly “unaccompanied” child spends in ORR’s care jumped to 117 from 30.

The Trump administration has taken thousands of children into custody. At the end of February, there were more than 2,300 children in ORR’s care, and roughly 300 placed in foster care.

The San Antonio Express-News reports that Gonzales, when he was first running for Congress in 2020, pestered one of his campaign aides for nude photos and sex. The woman, who asked the Express-News to keep her identity secret, said that she declined Gonzales’s entreaties, even though he asked her for nude photos more than 12 times in three days and met her twice at her home at night to discuss work.

The woman, who worked as the political director for Gonzales’s 2020 congressional campaign but now volunteers for GOP nominee Brandon Herrera, said she approached the newspaper after she heard about his affair with staffer Regina Santos-Aviles in 2024 and its tragic aftermath, sharing the messages with the Express-News. Gonzales had begun the affair after pressing Santos-Aviles for “sexy pics” and describing his favorite sexual positions.

The two would spend time together at another staffer’s cabin in Uvalde, Texas, and one day after Gonzales won his election primary in May that year, Santos-Aviles revealed the affair to the rest of the office. That led to a downward spiral for her, as meetings she set were canceled, Gonzales stopped his regular travels to Uvalde, and her husband became aware of the affair.

Santos-Aviles began taking antidepression medication, and in August, attempted suicide but survived. The next month, though, she set herself on fire and died the next day. Gonzales didn’t attend her funeral. Last month, under pressure from House Republican leadership over the scandal, Gonzales announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection.

“He obviously pursued, pursued, pursued [Santos-Aviles] like he did with me,” the former campaign staffer said to the Express-News. “I never took him serious.… It wasn’t until this poor girl died that I thought, ‘No, this guy is pure evil.’”

“This behavior needs to stop,” she added.

The country’s leadership rejected a ceasefire Monday by way of Pakistani mediators, despite Donald Trump’s imminent threats to raze the nation to the ground.

Iran’s ideal proposal consists of 10 clauses, which include ending regional conflicts, lifting sanctions, reconstruction of the nation, and securing protocols for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, reported Reuters.

The rejection follows efforts by Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff, who were reportedly on the phone “all night” with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir, a source told Reuters.

Trump set a Tuesday night deadline for Iran to agree to a deal with regard to reopening the Strait of Hormuz to international oil trade, promising practically every form of violent retaliation should the country’s leadership refuse to do so.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted to Truth Social on Sunday.

Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” he added.

In another post to his social media platform, Trump wrote: “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time.”

Situated between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, the strait funnels approximately one-fifth of all crude oil shipments. Most of that oil is moved toward China or India. In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day through the strait, accounting for about 7 percent of total U.S. crude imports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The price per barrel has exploded due to the strait’s closure, pushing gas over $4 per gallon in most states (in California, gas in some counties has leapt past $7 a gallon). Diesel shot up by 20 cents over the last week alone.

But beyond the dollars and cents, the war has cost the lives of more than 2,000 people in Iran, including dozens of political leaders, according to Al Jazeera. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have also been killed in the war, and more than 300 have been wounded.

“So today is a very special day. It’s a day where we celebrate Jesus. It’s a day where we celebrate religion,” Trump said Monday morning at the White House Easter Egg Roll, his voice devoid of enthusiasm. He then went on his usual spiel about how the U.S. is doing better than ever, before pivoting to the war on Iran and the rescue of two downed American fighter jet pilots.

“I just wanna say we have a great military. We have the greatest military, the most powerful military in any place in the world. You saw what happened with Venezuela,” Trump continued, referring to the illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The crowd cheered. “Our warriors are the greatest fighters on earth,” he added.

Then more rambling about eggs, fake news, the Easter decorations, and how we’re “the hottest country in the world.”

Only Trump could turn what’s meant to be a short, sweet speech about Jesus Christ and the meaning of rebirth and resurrection into a speech about himself and the destruction he’s imposing across the globe. Especially while someone in an Easter Bunny costume is standing there like JD Vance at the State of the Union.

Trump's speech for the White House easter egg hunt: "I just want to say we have a great military. We're the most powerful military anyplace in the world. You saw what happened with Venezuela, and it's an honor. I built it in my first term and I didn't know I would be using it so… pic.twitter.com/9mvjO51bdX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026

Buried in the FBI’s 2027 budget request to Congress was a request for funding efforts to implement the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), a national security strategy targeting supposed anti-American activity on the left that Trump signed in September, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Sunday. The FBI requested funding for the recently created NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, which brings together personnel from across 10 agencies working “to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.”

What exactly are they looking for? Well, anything they disagree with.

“Commonly, this violent conduct relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government (USG); extremism on migration, race, and gender. And hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” the budget stated.

According to the FBI, publicly expressing beliefs as banal as a critique of capitalism are now considered precursors for domestic terrorist activity.

Under NSPM-7, the Trump administration aims to target community organizers and protesters on the left. “Domestic terrorists exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications,” the budget stated. “They use these platforms to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”

The FBI requested $166.1 million and 328 positions, including five attorneys and 130 special agents, for its counterterrorism activities in the coming fiscal year, including plans to “implement National Security Presidential Memorandum / NSPM-7 requirements.”