Franklin Foer | The Atlantic

The Quintessential Trumpian Sport

2026-04-07T11:21:11-04:00

This summer, Donald Trump will complete his conquest of the American right. He will force the movement to submit to the very thing that it finds most abhorrent: soccer.

One curious biographical fact about Trump is that he likes the game. He began following it in his 20s. Years later, his son Barron further stoked this enthusiasm. In the past year, Trump has invited the greatest living players, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, to the Oval Office, even though he has argued that neither of them measure up to the Brazilian virtuoso Pelé. Trump’s fandom puts him at odds with the pundit Ann Coulter, who once declared, “Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.” Last year, the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld joked, “In Europe they call it football, in the United States they call it soccer, everywhere else they call it homosexuality.” (At least I think this was a joke.)

However alien the world’s most popular sport might seem to many of the president’s boosters, Trump’s relationship with soccer is not a contradiction of his politics but an expression of them. The game is a playground for Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern potentates, and Latin American strongmen—his people. The underlying corruption of FIFA, which runs the World Cup, makes the organization a willing accomplice in his quest for self-glorification. With the world’s attention fixed on stadiums in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Trump will seize the opportunity to reap the tribute he craves: the genuflection of supplicants, the accumulation of spoils.

The reasons for the right’s disdain for soccer are, in their way, principled. Whereas baseball and American football are indigenous to the United States, soccer is viewed as a cosmopolitan imposition—beloved by immigrants and elites, backed by multinational corporations eager to blend the world’s largest economy into a global market. Just over a decade ago, Coulter wrote, “I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s ‘Girls,’ light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton.”

[Franklin Foer: A spectacle of scoundrels]

But Trump is not a child of the American right. He is a creature of Studio 54 New York. During his early years on the make, in the 1970s, soccer was the glamour game. A new professional league seemed poised to bring the sport to a mass American audience. Pelé came to play for the New York Cosmos—short for Cosmopolitans, as if to prove soccer skeptics’ point. The Brazilian genius arrived thanks to then–Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a lifelong soccer enthusiast, who told Brazil’s foreign minister that preventing Pelé from coming to New York wouldn’t be in his country’s interest. Giants Stadium would sell out for glimpses of the soccer star’s late-career virtuosity. “I was a young guy, so I came to watch Pelé and he was fantastic,” Trump told one interviewer last year.

Whereas some MAGA stalwarts think of soccer like a smelly French cheese that they never want to see in their kitchen, Trump covets its presence. He knows that the strongest of the strongmen have presided over the World Cup, a tradition that extends back to Benito Mussolini hosting the 1934 edition of the tournament. In 2018, Vladimir Putin watched games from a thronelike seat high above the center circle in Moscow. In 2022, Qatar allegedly sprinkled cash all over the world in order to host the World Cup, then moved the games to November because playing in its summer heat might have killed players.

Because the World Cup is the ultimate bread-and-circuses spectacle, they hoped that their hospitality might lead the world to look past their crimes—Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Qatar’s sponsorship of Hamas, their shared contempt for human rights. By pampering guests from the global elite—media, sponsors, heads of state—they intended to launder themselves into respectability.

Of all the corners of the international community, FIFA is the organization best suited for Trump’s realization of his dreams because it is entirely at ease making concessions to power. In 1973, it allowed a World Cup playoff game in Chile to proceed in a stadium only recently used by the Pinochet dictatorship to execute and torture its foes. (When Chile’s opponents, the U.S.S.R., refused to play, Chile was awarded the win by forfeit.) In the years since, FIFA has become a complex, highly lucrative patronage system, led by men who trade bribes for votes, who tend to award World Cups to the countries with the fewest ethical qualms about the process. The system was so rotten that the FBI indicted nine FIFA factotums in 2015—but that was another era.

Once the United States sought to propel FIFA away from the muck, but now it’s happily frolicking in it alongside them. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, has become a fixture of Trump world—a regular at Mar-a-Lago, a guest at the inauguration last year, an attendee of the first meeting of the Board of Peace. (According to The Athletic, Infantino has visited the Oval Office more than any head of state during Trump’s second term.) Even though FIFA has a well-appointed office in Miami, it now rents space in Trump Tower. “Our success is your success,” Infantino told Eric Trump at the announcement of that deal. When the president brooded over the Nobel Peace Prize he will never receive, Infantino invented the FIFA Peace Prize for him. The merging of interests is so complete that Rudy Giuliani’s son, who runs the White House’s World Cup Task Force, described the event unveiling the World Cup bracket as the “MAGA-FIFA World Cup Draw.”

[Tom McTague: The Qatar World Cup exposes soccer’s sham]

We already have a sense of how Trump will turn the World Cup into a celebration of himself. Last year, the United States hosted an expanded version of FIFA’s Club World Cup Championship—featuring professional clubs, not national teams—explicitly billed as a dress rehearsal for this summer. At the final, Trump, like Putin before him, sat in a large chair in the center of the stadium, flanked by Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, who were then Cabinet officials managing the mass deportation of some of America’s biggest fans of the sport. When Chelsea won the tournament, Trump took the stage to present the trophy—and then simply never left, lingering through the celebration. He seemed to slip one of the winner’s gold medals into his jacket pocket.

More than 20 years ago, I wrote a book called How Soccer Explains the World, about how the sport was the purest distillation of globalization. The last chapter was about how the United States, which had unleashed Hollywood and Silicon Valley on the world, had never quite succumbed to the world’s game. While I was optimistic that soccer would triumph, I wasn’t creative enough to imagine that it would be the handiwork of an American president who prided himself on his cultural chauvinism.

The presidency was never enough for Trump. That’s why he has always dreamed bigger. When he created his Board of Peace, he said that it would supersede the United Nations. With the World Cup, he gets five weeks to cosplay as president of the planet—stepping into a spectacle that transfixes the world. Whatever their objections to his presence, the soccer-mad audiences will overlook them, as he turns the world’s game into a festival of MAGA.

How Soccer Explains the World has been republished this week with a new foreword.

Trump Is Betraying Iran’s Pro-Democracy Protesters

2026-03-19T06:00:00-04:00

In January, Donald Trump uttered the most idealistic words of his presidency. As protesters filled Iran’s streets, he told them, “Help is on the way.” How well they heard him through the regime’s internet blackouts is unclear, but his message was that their sacrifice might be worth it—that the world’s most powerful man was backing them.

Those protesters now have good reason to feel betrayed. Before the Islamic Republic began murdering their fellow pro-democracy demonstrators by the thousands, Trump barely lifted a finger to support them. This month, soon after he launched strikes in the name of ousting the regime that committed these atrocities, he told the protesters, “When we are finished, take over your government.” But he quickly retracted any such notion by suggesting that he would happily strike a deal with a faction of the existing regime. In other words, Iranian democracy was never really the point. Then, on Friday, he dismissed the protesters’ chances of overthrowing the regime. “I think that’s a big hurdle to climb,” he told Fox News.

[Anne Applebaum: Everyone but Trump understands what he’s done]

When Trump thought protesters might triumph, he made them extravagant promises. After it became clear that they weren’t going to quickly overthrow the mullahs, he treated them as disposable allies. His offhand commentary casts doubt on their prospects—potentially demoralizing the very people he once claimed to champion—and he has dismissed alternatives such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah. By refusing to apologize for accidental strikes against civilians, he has bolstered the regime’s claim that the United States doesn’t really care what happens to the Iranian people.

The failure to nurture a democratic Iranian opposition is a bipartisan legacy of American foreign policy. Barack Obama kept his distance from the Green Revolution of 2009, when Iranians poured into the streets to protest a stolen election. Haunted by the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup that toppled Mohammad Mosaddegh, he avoided encouraging the protesters or promising them support. (To be fair, a faction of the opposition avowedly didn’t want American support, because the regime used the specter of it as a pretext for crushing dissent.) When he began negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, he seemed to believe that pressing the regime over human-rights abuses would only hinder diplomacy. He squandered an opportunity to bargain for guarantees that might have protected Iranian civil society or at least given activists a measure of hope.

Presidents would not have needed to search hard for a better way. In Communist Poland, the CIA quietly supplied the Solidarity movement with money and the tools of underground communication—fax machines, printing presses, computers—channeling them through the AFL-CIO and the Vatican. In Czechoslovakia, Radio Free Europe broadcast dissident manifestos back into the country after the regime suppressed them. None of this prevented Ronald Reagan from brokering major arms-control agreements with the Soviets. All of it patiently undermined the Warsaw Pact from within.

Where past administrations have been negligent in extending a hand to the foes of the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration has zealously dismantled the machinery that the United States once used to support democratic movements abroad. His administration gutted Voice of America, placing 1,300 employees on leave. It has spent the past year trying to strangle the National Endowment for Democracy, the government-funded foundation that bankrolls the sinews of civil society in authoritarian states—independent newspapers, labor unions, and human-rights monitors. It also proposed eliminating the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights and dismissed career officials who worked on that portfolio as “left-wing activists.” Courts have in some cases attempted to stay the administration’s hand—on Tuesday, for example, a judge rejected the administration’s attack on VOA and ordered staffers to return to work by next week—but the damage will not be easily undone.

This campaign to raze the federal bureaucracy has also undermined the cause of Iranian regime change. Kari Lake, who oversees the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America, boasted about the efficiencies gained after reducing the agency’s Farsi-language broadcasting—from round-the-clock programming to sometimes as little as 30 minutes a day. According to news reports, she also refused to authorize the use of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty transmitters capable of broadcasting into Iran at the height of the January protests (a claim that Lake has contested). When the United States attacked Iran last June, she was forced to recall several dozen VOA Persian-service broadcasters whom she had placed on administrative leave. When the conflict simmered, many of those staffers were put back on leave. Given Trump’s hostility to civil society and the free press at home, he was never going to sincerely promote them abroad.

[Read: What is Kari Lake trying to achieve?]

Iran should have been the next chapter in the democratic revolutions that ended the Cold War. Over the decades, protesters keep returning to the streets, knowing they may end up hanging from a noose or lying in a mass grave. By defying their tormentors, they advance American interests and what we once called American values. Yet they have been treated as pawns for decades, and now Trump has toyed with their hopes, raising expectations he never intended to fulfill, urging them to risk their lives, then admitting, in so many words, that he never meant it. If regime change is the only lasting solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, then American foreign policy should begin and end with the people willing to risk their lives to change it.

The Obvious Is Taking Its Revenge on Trump

2026-03-11T09:09:11-04:00

In the least charitable—and probably accurate—view, President Trump went to war with Iran out of a delusional faith in himself. He believed that the worst-case scenarios that have deterred past presidents from attacking Iran wouldn’t come true for him, because he is Donald Trump.

In the most charitable—and probably accurate—view, the president had reasons to believe that all of the catastrophic warnings about the most hair-raising consequences of an attack wouldn’t come to pass this time. The 12-day war, which Israel and the United States fought last June, demonstrated that they could strike Iran without provoking catastrophic retaliation. Having endured that assault on the country’s military infrastructure, and then wave after wave of protest by its own citizens, the Islamic Republic was isolated and weak. So why shouldn’t Trump exploit that fragility to land a death blow against a murderous adversary?

I could nearly convince myself of these arguments, except that almost no other foreign-policy question has been studied harder over the past 20 years or so than the likely effect of U.S. military strikes on Iran. The many years spent pondering and preparing for a potential attack on Iran are the reason that the first days of the war were, for the most part, a bravura display of American power. Yet all of that study also pointed out the risks: spiking oil prices, the spread of violence throughout the Middle East, civilian casualties of the sort now evidenced by an apparent U.S. missile strike near an Iranian elementary school. When past presidents balked at the possibility of war with Iran, they weren’t just dodging a hard choice; they were deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral. Nobody should be shocked that the expected is now coming to pass.

To begin, there’s geography. Just 35 miles across at its narrowest, the Strait of Hormuz links the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world and is surrounded on three sides by Iran. One-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied-natural-gas supply passes through an Iranian turkey shoot. Fighting for its survival, Iran has the capacity to choke fossil-fuel markets by launching sporadic attacks on passing tankers, enough to deter companies and their insurers from justifying that risk. A hard fact of geography was always going to be a hard fact of war.

[Read: What Iran might do when it has nothing else]

Another daunting obstacle to victory is the nature of the Iranian regime, a theocracy that celebrates martyrdom and has spent its entire history preparing for what it considers an inevitable war with the United States. Every time protests fill public squares, I allow myself to believe that the terrible government in Tehran will crumble. But its willingness to kill to survive is the biggest obstacle to its toppling. And Trump intervened after the regime killed tens of thousands of its most determined foes. Calling for revolution after the revolution has been crushed is belated timing, to say the least. Perhaps the Trump administration will succeed in further weakening Iranian authoritarianism—the attacks will certainly set back the country’s already struggling economy—so that after the bombs stop falling, regime opponents will rush into the streets. But, thus far, decapitating the regime has succeeded only in replacing one Ayatollah Khamenei with another. By all accounts, the son is no less fanatical than his father and believes with theological certainty that the most brutal means justify his righteous ends.

Because airpower isn’t likely to dislodge the regime, the crucial question was always going to be “How does this end?” The lesson that the Trump administration seemed to learn from the failed planning for postwar Iraq is that planning isn’t worth the effort at all. When asked what comes next, Trump can manage only several contradictory answers, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. But the most plausible of these answers is that the administration finds a faction in the government willing to cut a deal favorable to the United States, an Iranian version of Delcy Rodríguez—the Venezuelan official who quietly negotiated her government’s survival after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro. Such an outcome would undercut every promise that Trump made to protesters about help being on the way. It’s hardly encouraging that the administration doesn’t have a plausible candidate for this job after nearly two weeks of conflict—and that the existing regime hasn’t begun suing for peace, even though it’s fighting for survival.

By trumpeting unachievable objectives—unconditional surrender, regime change—as his war aims, Trump has given his enemies the opportunity to claim survival as victory. He’s left himself with no evident end point to what he recently called a “short-term excursion.” If he had wanted to weaken Iran’s ballistic-missile threat—a worthwhile aim—he could have focused U.S. strikes on launchers and production sites. Much as he did after attacking Iranian nuclear facilities last year, Trump could have declared that limited goal and walked away a victor a few days later. Or he could have allowed Israel to carry out attacks, with U.S. support, which might have limited fallout in the Gulf. If he wanted to topple the regime, he could have helped organize and support the opposition, nurturing and supplying the movement to better equip it to succeed. Instead, Trump ignored the obvious and went to war. Now the obvious is seeking its revenge.

The Ruthless Benevolence of a Great Editor

2026-02-26T13:03:22-05:00

At the age of 30, I became an editor. On my first day, while I was at lunch, a colleague tossed a photocopy of an essay onto my office chair, with a passage underlined. She’d highlighted a quote from a letter that Harold Ross, the founding editor in chief of The New Yorker, wrote to Katharine White, who ran the magazine’s fiction department: “An editor’s life is certainly a life of disappointment.”

My colleague presented me with that morose aphorism because she wanted me to know that I was crossing a bridge. No longer would I be the one generating the words. Now my work would be to sublimate the ego: to squeeze the best writerly selves out of staff members, to give them ideas, to kill their infelicities and rescue them from their errors, to soothe and to prod, often in the same breath.

After several years, I realized that wasn’t me. I missed my own byline, the ability to prosecute arguments that were my own property. What I lacked was the gift of self-effacement. This week brought the death of the most elegant practitioner of self-effacement I’ve ever known.

Ann Godoff, the founder of Penguin Press and the editor of Ron Chernow, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pynchon, would have despised this obituary. More than any publisher of her generation, she consistently made best sellers out of prestige titles. But for all her gifts for marketing, she abhorred seeing her name in the newspaper and went to great efforts to prevent it from happening. As far as I know, in a famously leaky industry, she never talked with the press, even off the record. She avoided book parties as if the gossip and small talk absorbed at them might malignly implant in her lungs. She cared passionately about the aesthetic of book jackets; less so about her own self-presentation. During the decade I worked with her, I so craved her approval that I always thought twice before expressing my gratitude, for fear that it might be received as the inauthentic palaver she detested.

[Read: How Toni Morrison changed publishing]

Just after I graduated from college, I remember first hearing writers trumpet the name Ann Godoff. One of the great clichés about book publishing is that editors are too busy lunching, too obsessed with marketing, to ever touch the words on the pages that they put between covers. But Ann was famously fastidious. She signed up only authors who could hold her full attention. Even though that attention felt beyond my reach, I began to desperately want to work with her.

Almost 20 years later, I sent her a draft of the first book of mine that she would publish—about the existential threat posed by Big Tech. She invited me to lunch at a sushi restaurant in Tribeca. Yoko Ono was at the next table. In the middle of the meal, she unsheathed a memo, single-spaced and sprawling across two pages. Sentences were crossed out and adjectives inserted with a pen. She pushed her glasses to the tip of her nose and began to read.

During my own editing stint, I came to understand writers as prisoners of their own minds, pressed up against the bars of the words they have already committed to the page. Writers suffer from a cognitive impairment that limits their ability to see flaws in their prose.

At our lunch, Ann told me, “You need to swing harder.” I had wanted to artfully meander into my arguments, but the structure I deployed deflated my thesis—at least, that’s what she was graciously implying as I piled up husks of edamame on my plate. “Write two paragraphs at the beginning of each chapter, where you spell out your argument,” she said. It felt like counterintuitive advice. She wanted the “nut grafs”—journalistic parlance for the early part of the piece that drives home the theme—to bludgeon the reader before I let them get comfortable in their easy chair.

Our lunch was a dream sequence out of a Maxwell Perkins biopic. But I wasn’t sure about her instructions, which rejected every piece of conventional wisdom I had ever absorbed about structure. Because she was Ann Godoff, I didn’t push back. I went home to give it a shot. After a week of revising, her memo began to acquire the force of revelation. With that one instruction, she transformed the tone of my book; everything snapped into place.

[Read: The bigger the publishers, the blander the books]

Although Ann abhorred attention, she wasn’t a recluse or an introvert. She loved the telephone. I could call her without scheduling time, and she would pick up. Ann didn’t know writers just by their work. She loved hearing about my most recent interview with a politician; she wanted to know what I thought might happen in the next election. Because she listened so closely, she began to understand me better than I knew myself. She would call with ideas for my next book project and muse about the arc of my career, the type of relationship that she wanted me to develop with readers. The fact that she thought about my future was insanely flattering, but also deeply motivating. I wasn’t producing a commodity in a transactional relationship. I was her writer, under her meticulous stewardship.

The essence of editing is ethics; it’s the act of caring for the expression of the thoughts of another as if they were your own. For one book cover, she went through 37 different proposed designs before settling on the one she felt best conveyed the spirit of the project.

I would call Ann with anxieties about my manuscripts and she would allay them. “I’m afraid I’ve written a hagiographic section,” I told her. “Don’t worry. I kill hagiography for fun,” she replied, which would have made me fear for how she might have edited this essay. One of her authors, the poet Mary Oliver, once wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Ann Godoff’s rigor was love.

MAGA’s Jewish Intellectuals Helped Create Their Own Predicament

2026-01-15T06:00:00-05:00

At a Turning Point USA conference in December, the podcaster Ben Shapiro delivered a speech that was hailed as the sort of moral stand one rarely encounters in the age of polarization. Confronting the right’s surging anti-Semitism, he denounced two of its most popular peddlers—Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens—by name. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event the day before, Shapiro had called for “ideological border control,” a purge of the haters from the movement.

It was a brave foray into intramural politics, but also a damning self-indictment. Not so many years ago, Shapiro was guilty of the very thing he now decries. The Daily Wire, of which he is a co-founder and part owner, hired Owens in 2020. Even before she arrived, there were signs of where she was headed: “If Hitler had just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine,” she had told a crowd in London in 2018. Shapiro’s company ignored that and subsequent warnings. When Kanye West went on an anti-Semitic tear in 2022, Owens rushed to his defense: “It’s like you cannot even say the word ‘Jewish’ without people getting upset.”

That incident was the moment for border control. Shapiro refused. “We allow disagreement at The Daily Wire,” he said, “even when I think that some of my colleagues are wrong.” No wonder anti-Semitism crept toward the movement’s mainstream.

For a time, it was possible for the Jewish intellectuals of MAGA—a small but influential set of podcasters, columnists, and theorists—to minimize anti-Semitism in the movement. But it’s now so ubiquitous and so noxious that even they can’t ignore it. Joel Pollak, the former editor in chief of Breitbart News, wrote on X in December that, until a few months before, he would have happily sent his children to a Turning Point USA event. Not anymore. “Now: why would I send them to one more place where Jewish kids have to defend who they are and what they believe?”

[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of American Jews is ending]

But Pollak, Shapiro, and others were delusional in denying the problem for so long. They built careers inside a movement animated by fantasies about “globalists,” suspicions of hidden hands, and a yearning for national purity—an ideological combination that has never been particularly healthy for Jews. They lent their prestige to it anyway, certain that the hateful rhetoric was meant for someone else. Now that it has landed directly on them, they want credit for noticing the stench.

No case is sadder than the Israeli American political theorist Yoram Hazony—a Princeton and Rutgers graduate who ran a conservative think tank in Jerusalem, but saw Trump and the American right’s bubbling hostility toward classical liberalism as his chance to break out on a larger stage. In 2018, he published The Virtue of Nationalism, not a flame-throwing manifesto so much as a homely defense of nationalism as the natural way to organize a polity—an argument he traced back to biblical times.

Hazony didn’t just write about the revolt against liberalism; he became one of its leading impresarios. He convened regular gatherings of what he called the “National Conservatives,” a melange of theocrats and populists, and grasped for a new coalition that might provide the bedrock ideology of right-wing political parties throughout the Western world. Rising Republican politicians including J. D. Vance and Josh Hawley headlined these conferences, which, for several years, were the hottest tickets on the right.

Under the National Conservative banner, the right was swerving from classical liberalism to nationalism, away from the most American of American ideas: that the United States is held together by a creed rather than a bloodline. Hazony’s movement didn’t merely sneer at “wokeness”; it sneered at the pluralist project, articulated movingly by George Washington himself, that enabled Jews to flourish in the U.S. in the first place. Say what you will about the Enlightenment; at least it emancipated Jews.

While Hazony projected a mild image, his conferences were bombastic. When my colleague David Brooks attended one in 2021, he walked away gobsmacked by the “callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.” His dispatch from the conference was titled “The Terrifying Future of the American Right.”

Jewish history supplied a pretty good preview of what that terrifying future might look like. Four years after Brooks attended Hazony’s conference, it has unmistakably arrived. Each week brings a new instance of anti-Semitism moving from the internet’s febrile periphery into the conservative movement’s mainstream. A leaked text chain from the New York Young Republicans included the line “Great. I love Hitler.” Tucker Carlson, arguably the movement’s most popular personality, hosted Holocaust deniers on his show. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, rose to Carlson’s defense by dismissing the host’s critics as a “venomous coalition”—language that echoed old insinuations about a Jewish cabal pulling the strings. (Roberts eventually apologized.)

When Hazony convened the National Conservatives in September, he felt obliged to address the matter of surging anti-Semitism. He told the crowd that he’d been “pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people” online. Then he made what would surely count as one of the most naive statements ever offered at a political conference, at least if it could be judged sincere. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right,” he said. “I was mistaken.”

But contained in his speech were clues that perhaps he wasn’t as surprised as he claimed to be. For years, he said, he had defended his comrades against accusations of anti-Semitism. “It makes you really popular,” he said. “Everybody is really grateful: I’m the guy who defended them against absolutely false, ridiculous accusations of anti-Semitism.”

What did this long history of loyalty buy MAGA’s Jewish intellectuals? Several days after Shapiro addressed the Turning Point USA conference, Vance took the same stage. Because of all the attention Shapiro’s speech had received, Vance was compelled to address his concerns. But when the time came to evict Holocaust deniers and conspiracists from the movement, Vance chose a different path. He rejected “purity tests,” telling the crowd, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.” Vance spectacularly failed Shapiro’s moral test. And yet, Shapiro said nothing critical in response. He stayed silent, and evidently chose to preserve his relationship with the Republican Party’s heir apparent. In other words, Shapiro failed the moral test he himself wrote.

[Yair Rosenberg: J. D. Vance’s bad answer to an anti-Semitic question]

Despite all their bellyaching, the Jewish intellectuals of MAGA still hesitate to wage civil war or break ranks. After wringing his hands about anti-Semitism on the right, Hazony turned around and defended Roberts as he was besieged by accusations of anti-Semitism: “I’ll never forget how the jackals circled, sniveling for blood,” Hazony said. Sniveling is an interesting choice of words, given all the feeble excuses that Hazony has made for his allies.

The Purged

2026-01-11T14:00:00-05:00

Photographs by Dina Litovsky

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The purge began late Friday night, four days after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Seventeen inspectors general—internal watchdogs embedded throughout the federal government—received emails notifying them of their termination. Three weeks later came the Valentine’s Day Massacre: the ousting of tens of thousands of federal employees with little discernible pattern, across agencies and across the country. By April, entire departments—the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—had been gutted.

Workers the administration couldn’t fire were coerced into leaving on their own. Toxicity became HR policy. Employees received an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” It offered eight months’ pay to anyone who resigned, and no assurances of job security to those who stayed. A follow-up email encouraged them “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” At the end of Trump’s first year back in office, roughly 300,000 fewer Americans worked for the government.

That number understates the destruction. When Trump anointed Elon Musk to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, he did so in the name of clearing out mediocrities and laggards. The bureaucracy does harbor pockets of waste and paper-pushing positions that could easily be culled. But the administration showed little interest in understanding the organizations it was eviscerating. Any sincere attempt to reform the government would have protected its top experts and most skilled practitioners. In fact, such workers account for a disproportionate share of the Trump-era exodus. Many of them accepted the resignation package because they possessed marketable skills that allowed them to confidently walk away. The civil service thus lost the cohort that understands government best: the keepers of its unwritten manual, the custodians of institutional integrity.

Grover Norquist, one of the chief ideologists of modern conservatism, used to fantasize about drowning the government in the bathtub. The Trump administration has realized that macabre dream—not merely by shrinking the state, but by poisoning its culture. It has undone the bargain that once made government careers attractive: lower pay offset by uncommon job security and a sense of professional mission.

The American government grew in bursts of reform, crisis, and optimism—not from the sketching table of an engineer but from the rough contingencies of history. The outraged response to a 1969 oil fire on the Cuyahoga River catalyzed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The failure to prevent the September 11 attacks gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security. This accidental architecture was part of the federal government’s genius. It nurtured corners of national life—declining industries, obscure sciences—that a management consultant obsessed with optimization could never properly value. It embodied the wisdom, as well as some of the imperfections, of American history. For all its flaws, the American state was a source of national greatness and power: It ushered in an age of prosperity and discovery; it made everyday existence safer and fairer. It deserves, at the very least, the dignity of a proper burial.

In the late 19th century, as the American government took on its modern form, a single word captured the spirit of the enterprise: disinterestedness. The duties of civil servants, who remained in their chairs as presidents came and went, were supposed to transcend patronage and partisanship. Their professional obligation was to present facts and judgments that reflected an objective reality—not to flatter the preferences of the administration in power.

The nascent American state aspired to become a branch of science. It measured; it mapped; it studied. After its founding, in 1879, the United States Geological Survey recruited scientists and experts from Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Harvard. Using the most advanced techniques, it tracked river flow to forecast floods and to irrigate the arid West. It charted mineral belts in the Appalachians and the Rockies, which supplied the raw materials for industrial growth.

In the earliest decades of the 20th century, the National Bureau of Standards established common definitions for such basic measurements as the volt and the ohm, making it possible to build and trade at scale. The Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled data on wages, prices, and productivity that became the basis for economic prediction. The U.S. Weather Bureau allowed farmers to foresee storms.

The spirit of disinterestedness became the foundation for a regulatory state. Armed with scientific studies, the government could intervene to prevent disasters, protect consumers, and guard against recessions. Out of that faith in expertise arose the Federal Reserve and the Food and Drug Administration. Granite and marble buildings proliferated across Washington, D.C., housing a growing constellation of university-trained specialists. In their research and reports, they described what became the shared American reality.

The flaws in this system were obvious enough, at least in retrospect. Data points might be objective, but the decisions drawn from them were not. Handing power to experts—on the assumption that they alone were qualified to exercise it—sometimes bred insular arrogance. When the Army Corps of Engineers built levees on the lower Mississippi, it inadvertently magnified the devastation of the floods it had intended to prevent. Federal policies encouraging farmers to plow the prairie led to the ecological catastrophe known as the Dust Bowl. Those tendencies, many decades later, fueled the rise of Ronald Reagan, who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”

Yet regulators also prevented immense human suffering. Before the advent of the modern state, the economy convulsed with financial panics roughly every 20 years. After the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation were created in the 1930s, confidence replaced chaos. Generations passed without bank runs. American markets became the safest bet on the planet.

At the dawn of the 20th century, American medicines were often laced with alcohol, opiates, or narcotics. Thanks to the FDA, those potions were gradually replaced by pharmaceuticals tested for safety—snake oil gave way to science.

The postwar era brought more triumphs. Following the arrival of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1970, which mandated crash tests and new safety features, fatality rates from car accidents were cut by more than 70 percent. After the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971, workplace fatalities fell by nearly 70 percent. The state smoothed the roughest edges of the market; it tamed intractable dangers; it made American life more livable.

In the vernacular, the federal government is synonymous with Washington. That conflation obscures the fact that roughly 80 percent of its workforce is stationed outside the District of Columbia. Still, there’s no denying that Washington contains the densest concentration of civil servants—and the story of that caste is a morality tale.

In the 1970s, Washington was a city distinctly devoid of flash. Even its most powerful denizens drove beat-up Volvos; its dandies shopped at Brooks Brothers. The elegant houses of Georgetown were ostentatiously weather-beaten. The children of wealthy law-firm partners and humble bureaucrats attended the same schools.

But beginning in the late 20th century, lobbying became a boom industry. Those law partners, who sold their ability to influence policy, began raking in seven-figure salaries. A gap in wealth—and lifestyle—started to separate the lawyers in private practice from the civil servants. They lived in different neighborhoods, shopped at different stores, sent their kids to different schools.

That high-end lifestyle was seductive, and it attracted many government workers who wanted a beach house of their own. But the surprising thing, really, was how many preeminent experts—scientists, intelligence analysts, economists, even lawyers—stayed in their government job for the entire arc of their career.

They stayed because the work allowed them to accumulate new skills, to test themselves in crises, to solve novel problems. At its best, government work supplied the rush of being in the arena, a sense of professional purpose—a higher meaning than most jobs can muster.

Until the purges of the past year, the U.S. government housed an unmatched collection of experts, capable of some of the greatest feats in human existence. The achievements of this corps bear legendary names: the Manhattan Project, Apollo, the Human Genome Project. These aren’t just gauzy tales from the past. After the National Institutes of Health helped sequence the genome, it funded research that turned that knowledge into pioneering medicines with the potential to treat hundreds of rare diseases. It kept refining technology to make those treatments more affordable—and those therapeutics have dramatically improved survival rates for illnesses, such as pediatric leukemia and spinal muscular atrophy.

Under Trump, the expertise capable of such achievements has begun to vanish. His administration isn’t simply committed to shrinking government; it sees career officials as the enemy within, an entrenched elite exploiting its power and imposing its ideology on the nation. Its demise is not collateral damage but the imperative. What took generations to build is being dismantled in months, and with it goes not just expertise but what remains of the shared American faith in expertise itself.

Bureaucrats extol their ethos of service. They describe government work as a calling. Thirty percent of federal workers are military veterans who sought to extend their patriotic devotion into civilian life. Even those who never passed through the armed forces cast their career choices in similar terms. A generation of bureaucrats, now in the prime of their career, entered government after September 11. They were moved to emulate the commitment of the first responders they saw on television. They felt an obligation to serve.

Donald Trump has betrayed those workers. By describing them as a hostile force, he’s questioned their patriotism—and robbed the sense of mission from their work. Employees who signed up to serve a transcendent national interest, who understood their duty as being to the American people, now find themselves instructed to follow the whims of a corrupt, narcissistic leader.

What’s been lost isn’t just a sense of purpose, but a body of knowledge—a way of making the machinery of the state function. Early-20th-century bureaucrats may have aspired to govern as if they were practicing science, but the reality is something more like craft. The American state, a product of compromises, is tricky terrain to master. Organizations duplicate one another; agencies are overseen by political leaders who arrive with minimal understanding of the workplace they will manage. Succeeding in such an environment requires savvy veterans who have learned how to operate such an unruly machine and can model how to do so for fresh-faced co-workers. By wiping out many of the bureaucracy’s most experienced practitioners, Trump has severed the chain that allowed one generation of civil servants to pass on the habits of effective government to the next.

Some of Trump’s firings have drawn attention, such as the peremptory dismissal of C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of hundreds of military officers who have been removed alongside civil servants. But for the most part, the crumbling of the American state has unfolded as a quiet catastrophe. Bureaucrats are the definition of anonymous. Their prestige suffers because it is conflated in the public’s mind with long lines at the DMV, fastidious building inspectors, parking tickets—the stuff of local functionaries. So much of the civil service is devoted to long-term national flourishing—preventing disease, safeguarding financial markets—that its achievements go unappreciated.

The toll of the purge will become clear only gradually. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service loses the biologists who track bat populations, vulnerable species can no longer be rigorously protected. When bat populations dwindle, insects proliferate. Farmers will likely compensate by deploying insecticides, which government studies suggest can do significant prenatal harm. Government, too, is part of a delicate American ecosystem—as it erodes, crises that lay bare its indispensability will multiply.

Capturing the magnitude of the destruction is an almost impossible task. Statistics can convey the scale, but only individual stories reveal what has actually vanished, the knowledge and skill that have been recklessly discarded. The damage will ripple through every national park, every veterans’ hospital, every city and town.

Over the course of four months, I interviewed 50 federal workers, both civilian and military, who were either fired or forced out—who took early retirement or resigned rather than accept what their job had become. I wanted to understand how their time in government came to such an abrupt end and, more than that, to understand the career that preceded their departure. When The Atlantic asked their former agencies to comment, many declined, citing the privacy of personnel matters. In the name of protecting these workers, the government refused to defend the decisions that had upended their lives. What follows is their story—a portrait of the void that will haunt American life, a memorial to what the nation has lost.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Micaela White

Senior Humanitarian Adviser

United States Agency for International Development
2009–2025

By the beginning of 2025, there was a famine in Sudan, which meant that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. government dispatched Micaela White to the scene. She was America’s fixer of choice. Over her 16 years working for USAID, she was sent to manage the humanitarian response to catastrophes in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. Through street savvy and force of will, she could make the awful a little less so.

When White was brought into a crisis, she was usually granted official power to lead what is called a DART: a Disaster Assistance Response Team. Her improvisational skills were legendary. As a 29-year-old, she arrived in Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010 and took over an airfield in Port-au-Prince. Using a card table, she ran air-traffic control, prioritizing the arrival of search-and-rescue teams and turning away cargo planes carrying aid, which the broken nation wasn’t ready to accommodate. She said she worked until her feet were so swollen and bloody that she couldn’t remove her boots; she slept in a baggage cart; she lost 15 pounds. She imposed order on a chaotic situation so that humans could be quickly extracted from the rubble.

In 2011, White traveled to Benghazi with the envoy J. Christopher Stevens, who was later murdered in a terrorist attack. On that mission, she survived a car bombing of her hotel. She also managed to hire boat captains willing to transport food into the starving eastern half of Libya. Her persistence occasionally irked her superiors back home, like the time she assumed control of the Syrian DART without telling them that she was pregnant.

Averting mass starvation in Sudan didn’t require White to secure scarce resources. She said that when she arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, to oversee the effort, the United States had already purchased more than 100,000 tons of wheat and food products. But American officials struggled to deliver that aid to Sudan. White’s job was to find a pathway to get the supplies into the country. It soon became clear, however, that her most pressing challenge wasn’t the regime in Khartoum, but the administration in Washington. Trump had signed an executive order freezing USAID’s programs, a prelude to the agency’s dismantlement.

Over the next months, White watched as efforts to combat famine stalled. The administration barred her from communicating with the aid workers the U.S. had contracted with to operate inside Sudan. White was left with a handful of local staff, but then the administration stopped paying for their housing. White let some of them sleep in her hotel room—she amassed a $15,000 bill, which she paid with her personal credit card. (The government eventually reimbursed her.) DOGE cut off access to her email and her computer, but for some reason she could keep working on her iPhone.

American officials had managed to transport a stockpile of seeds to the country. But because the Trump administration had halted USAID programs, the agency could no longer fund the distribution of the seeds. White frantically tried to persuade European donors to take them before the stockpile spoiled. Eventually, Washington ordered her to return home. Thirty hours after landing in the U.S., she was fired.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Eric Green

Director, National Human Genome Research Institute

National Institutes of Health
1996–2025

In the years since landing a man on the moon, the greatest technological achievement of the American state has been the Human Genome Project—the mapping of the 3 billion building blocks of DNA. The project was international, but its central node was at the NIH. Eric Green, a physician and a scientist, was involved in the project from the start, and after it concluded, he became the head of the American genomics effort. Green’s accomplishment was to help make sequencing technology—once an enterprise that cost hundreds of millions of dollars—cheap enough for the average patient, enabling diagnoses of rare diseases. Under his leadership, the National Human Genome Research Institute advanced a revolution in medicine and a new understanding of cancer, because genomics could be used to analyze a tumor and suggest a treatment that might curtail its growth. On March 17, the Trump administration forced Green from his job, the first of five NIH-institute directors it removed. A Health and Human Services official told The Atlantic that “under a new administration, we have the right to remove individuals who do not align with the agency’s priorities.”

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Corina Allen

Tsunami-Program Manager

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
2024–2025

The nation’s tsunami-warning-system technology, much of which was created in the 1960s, was overdue for modernization. Corina Allen was overseeing its upgrade, which would have expanded its reach to newly discovered fault lines and improved its ability to anticipate flooding. She was fired on February 27, 2025.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Demetre Daskalakis

Director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
2020–2025

A New York City physician and health official who got his start during the AIDS epidemic, Demetre Daskalakis communicated risk and allocated scarce resources—experience that enabled him to coordinate the national response to mpox. He resigned in August.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Wren Elhai

Foreign Service Officer

Department of State
2011–2025

To connect with citizens in his diplomatic posts, Wren Elhai joined a Russian bluegrass band, played fiddle in a Pakistani rock group, and entered a Central Asian–folk-music competition. After taking leave to study tech policy at Stanford, he helped build the State Department’s new cyberspace and digital-policy bureau. He was preparing to deploy to Senegal when he was fired, along with more than 200 other Foreign Service officers on domestic assignment. Because of ongoing litigation, these firings have been temporarily blocked, and Elhai and other officers are on administrative leave.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Brian Himmelsteib

Senior Foreign Service Officer

Department of State
2004–2025

On track to become an ambassador, Brian Himmelsteib served in Singapore and Laos while raising a son who uses a wheelchair. He returned to Washington in May so his son could undergo kidney surgery. Like Wren Elhai and other Foreign Service officers on domestic assignment, he was fired. While on administrative leave, he decided to retire from the Foreign Service.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Jason Robertson

Regional Director of Recreation, Lands, Minerals, and Volunteers

U.S. Forest Service, Department of Agriculture
2013–2025

Jason Robertson oversaw ski resorts and oil-and-gas operations across the Rockies, ensuring that private interests used public lands responsibly. He took a voluntary-resignation package in April, part of an exodus of roughly 4,000 Forest Service employees.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Melissa Rivera Pabón

Social-Media Specialist

Consumer Product Safety Commission
2023–2025

When the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled an unsafe product—a potentially dangerous crib, batteries that could catch fire—Melissa Rivera Pabón posted the alert in English and Spanish. After she was fired, the office was down to one social-media specialist, who didn’t speak Spanish. A single mother of three, Rivera Pabón has struggled to find a full-time job.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Nadia Ford

Presidential Management Fellow

2023–2025

Nadia Ford’s mother is a teacher, and her father works for Customs and Border Protection. She wanted her own career in service and applied twice to join the two-year Presidential Management Fellows program, which recruited recent graduates with advanced degrees and cultivated them for leadership. The fellowship placed her in a small office in Health and Human Services devoted to promoting “healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood.” She had never heard of the office before, but began to think of its work as her calling. The programs it funded seemed to address some of the core causes of social misery: One of them counseled fathers just released from prison; another taught anger management to young couples. Trump signed an executive order killing the Presidential Management Fellows program on February 19, 2025. Ford was fired several months later, along with hundreds of other aspiring civil servants.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Liz Oyer

Pardon Attorney

Department of Justice
2022–2025

The presidential pardon is the Constitution’s ultimate extension of grace. Liz Oyer believed it should not be reserved for cronies and donors. She visited prisons to explain how inmates could apply for clemency; at the Justice Department, her office then vetted the petitions. But the Trump administration had other designs. It asked her to assemble a list of convicts whose criminal history prevented them from owning firearms, so that the attorney general could restore that right. An associate deputy attorney general instructed her to add the actor Mel Gibson, who had a domestic-violence conviction, to the list. Because he hadn’t undergone a background check, as everyone else she’d recommended had, Oyer balked. Her hesitance marked her as disloyal, and she was fired on March 7. (When asked for comment by The Atlantic, a DOJ official pointed to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s comments from several months earlier, in which he disputed Oyer’s version of events and called her allegations “a shameful distraction from our critical mission to prosecute violent crime, enforce our nation’s immigration laws, and make America safe again.”)

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Jeff Cohen

Mission Director, Indonesia

United States Agency for International Development
2005–2025

There is no manual for soft-power diplomacy. Jeff Cohen’s education began when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia. With USAID, he served in the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Afghanistan. He became adept at improvising programs that burnished America’s prestige. During Cohen’s last assignment, in Indonesia, where he oversaw a staff of 150, he persuaded a mining company and a church charity to help launch an initiative to fight childhood malnutrition. He ran projects to save forests and to stop tuberculosis. This wasn’t just a display of American beneficence: Cohen was acutely aware that he was competing with Chinese diplomats in a global battle for hearts and minds. On March 28, the Trump administration dismantled USAID, erasing more than 60 years of development expertise.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Bree Fram

Colonel

Space Force
2021–2025

As a kid, Bree Fram dreamed of becoming an astronaut. After 9/11, she joined the Air Force and deployed to the Persian Gulf, where she tested new technologies to protect convoys from improvised explosive devices. That assignment led to her specialty: managing teams that built novel systems. (One came up with tools that could be used to take over an attacking drone, forcing it to fall from the sky.) The military kept sending Fram back to school, and her advanced degrees piled up. When the Space Force was created, she drafted its blueprint for acquiring the technologies of the future and ensured that new initiatives didn’t get smothered by bureaucracy. Her mission was cut short by a biographical fact: Fram is transgender. Upon arriving in office, Trump barred from service anyone who did not identify with their birth gender.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Paula Soldner

Food Inspector

Food Safety and Inspection Service, Department of Agriculture
1987–2025

Just before Paula Soldner graduated from the University of Iowa, her mother handed her an application for federal employment. Two weeks later, she was inspecting a plant where eggs were processed for industrial bakeries and military bases. Eventually, she began working in slaughterhouses and factories that turned out sausage, bratwurst, and pork hocks, scanning for unhygienic practices that might spread disease to the nation’s kitchens. Soldner grew accustomed to the sight of blood—and to retreating to the locker room to wash animal innards off her uniform. A fierce advocate for her union, she was elected chair of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals. In April, she accepted the Trump administration’s offer of early retirement—as did many of her colleagues. According to the government’s own data, as of March, the Food Safety and Inspection Service had lost about 8 percent of its workforce.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Peter Marks

Director, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research

Food and Drug Administration
2012–2025

Peter Marks was a driving force behind Operation Warp Speed—a name he coined—leading the FDA’s review of COVID‑19 vaccines at an unprecedented pace. Before entering government, he had been a clinical director at Yale’s Smilow Cancer Hospital. At the FDA, he surmounted regulatory roadblocks to advance gene and cell therapies, and helped create the Rare Disease Innovation Hub to spur treatments for often-overlooked conditions. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over Health and Human Services, his office asked Marks for access to a database tracking vaccine safety; he agreed. But Marks refused to give Kennedy’s team the ability to edit the data, which made his ouster inevitable. An HHS official told The Atlantic that Marks “did not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard” and that he therefore “had no place at FDA.”

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Elijah Jackson

Information-Technology Specialist

Food and Drug Administration
2012–2025

In the Navy, while serving in the Persian Gulf, Elijah Jackson lost one hand and part of a finger on the other. Doctors diagnosed him with PTSD. But he came from a military family in southern Georgia, and he still felt the tug of duty. Eventually, Jackson landed at the FDA, where he worked in an office managing IT contracts, procuring the data tools that scientists used to evaluate drug safety. By closely monitoring contractors’ sloppy billing habits, he said, his office saved nearly $18 million in a year and a half. On April 1, that office was eliminated. According to Jackson, more than 50 employees, who managed $5 billion in contracts, were reduced to two part-timers. A Health and Human Services official said in a statement to The Atlantic that “under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, the Department has taken significant steps to streamline operations” at the agency.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Crystal Huff

Prosthetic Clerk

Department of Veterans Affairs
2024–2025

When Crystal Huff, a Navy vet, went to pick up a back brace at a VA clinic in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2023, a woman at the front desk treated her with rude indifference. Offended, Huff lodged a complaint with the patient advocate’s office. A few weeks later, a supervisor at the clinic called to discuss the incident. Despite the circumstances of the call, he found Huff to be warm and loquacious. “I need someone like you, with your personality,” he told her, urging her to apply to fill a vacancy.

A year after that, Huff began as a clerk in the clinic’s prosthetics department, a misleading name: The department supplied wheelchair ramps, nebulizers, and ice packs as well as artificial limbs. She issued the equipment and arranged for it to be installed.

Huff, a Christian, aspired to a life of service. When she arrived at work, a gaggle of vets usually awaited her. During her time in the prosthetics department, she never met an ill-tempered one. In fact, she sometimes found candy and other small tokens of gratitude on her chair.

None of that goodwill, however, insulated her from DOGE. Because she had been on the job less than two years, she was fired last February, along with other federal employees classified as “probationary.” According to Huff, when she received her next paycheck, it was for $1.68, an apparent accounting error. Not long after, a judge stepped in to rescue her job, quickly ruling that the administration didn’t have the authority to fire probationary workers en masse. In March, Huff returned to the clinic.

On April 4, the VA offered employees the chance to voluntarily resign, which would allow them to be paid their full wages until September 30. Because she no longer considered the government a reliable employer, Huff accepted. In June, she left the VA, as did three other workers in her 12-person department.

But she said that when she checked her bank account, she found that the government had severely underpaid her again. After a week of frantic phone calls, Huff heard from a woman in HR, who informed her that her file indicated that she had been “terminated.” What does that mean? Huff asked. Despite having accepted the voluntary-resignation offer, Huff had been fired, and nobody had bothered to tell her or explain why. The severance she’d been promised would never arrive, and Huff was barred from federal employment for the next three years.

To pay the bills, she began delivering groceries, but the work was not enough to prevent her from falling three months behind on her mortgage.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Merici Vinton

Senior Adviser

Internal Revenue Service
2023–2025

No agency embodies government dysfunction like the IRS, where employees still type in data from paper tax returns. Merici Vinton, orphaned at 11, grew up on a remote ranch in Nebraska. After working on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, she met reformers passionate about using technology to improve government. She was a lead architect of Direct File, a free website that allowed Americans to file taxes—or claim refunds—without hiring an accountant or buying software. She was initially hopeful about the arrival of DOGE, thinking it might hasten the pace of IRS reforms. But when it became clear that Direct File was going to be scrapped and her colleagues working on modernization were dismissed, she resigned on March 11.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Mamta Patel Nagaraja

Associate Chief Scientist for Exploration and Applied Research

NASA
2001–2025

Mamta Patel Nagaraja’s parents, immigrants from Gujarat, India, owned a motel on the edge of a small Texas town. As a girl, she would help her father with repairs, foreshadowing a career in engineering. An internship set Nagaraja on a dream path at Johnson Space Center. She trained astronauts. She wore a headset in Mission Control. She helped design a rescue vehicle for the International Space Station. After returning to school for a Ph.D. in bioengineering, Nagaraja eventually moved to NASA headquarters. As an associate chief scientist, she helped guide experiments that exploited the manufacturing possibilities of space, where weightlessness allows for the precise fabrication of pure metals and silicon. She worked with a team that was building an artificial retina, on the cusp of entering clinical trials, and another that was creating carbon fiber in its strongest form. The Trump administration eliminated the Office of the Chief Scientist on April 10.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Mark Gross

Chief, International Migration Branch

Census Bureau
2019–2025

A demographer by training, Mark Gross was charged with estimating the number of people leaving and entering the country each year—the data he and his team produced tracked international migration down to the county level. Their numbers partly determined how federal funds were distributed. He resigned in the fall.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Ryan Hippenstiel

Field Operations Branch Chief

National Geodetic Survey
2016–2025

The Earth is never still—its axis wobbles; storms redraw shorelines—which throws maps and GPS data out of sync. Ryan Hippenstiel sent surveyors into the field to measure those subtle changes, preventing ships from running aground and keeping navigation systems accurate. He accepted a voluntary-resignation package in April.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

David Pekoske

Administrator, Transportation Security Administration

Department of Homeland Security
2017–2025

A three-star Coast Guard admiral, David Pekoske brought stability to an agency plagued by leadership turnover and boosted pay for TSA employees, which lifted the agency’s sagging morale and stemmed the attrition of airport screening officers. The Trump administration fired him on Inauguration Day.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Tom Di Liberto

Public-Affairs Specialist/Climate Scientist

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
2023–2025

When models predicted El Niño or La Niña climate events, Tom Di Liberto sounded the alarm. He briefed city planners, private utilities, and officials from the National Security Council so they could prepare for the coming deluge or drought. When the Trump administration fired him, he was two weeks short of the seniority that would have saved his job.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Rebecca Slaughter

Commissioner

Federal Trade Commission
2018–2025

Rebecca Slaughter pushed the FTC to crack down on companies that exploited personal data without meaningful consent. In his bid to rob agencies of their independence, Trump took the unprecedented step of firing Slaughter in March, along with the other Senate-confirmed Democratic member of the bipartisan FTC. (Slaughter has sued, and her case is pending before the Supreme Court.)

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Ashley Sheriff

Chief Strategy Officer, Office of Public and Indian Housing

Department of Housing and Urban Development
2020–2025

Ashley Sheriff led a team that rewrote the decades-old safety code for public housing so that it limited toxic mold and reduced the risk of catastrophic fires. She resigned in March.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Paul Osadebe

Attorney

Office of Fair Housing, Department of Housing and Urban Development
2021–2025

Paul Osadebe immigrated to Texas from Nigeria at the age of 4. His life’s goal was to become a civil-rights attorney. At HUD, he wrote regulations that made it easier to bring housing-discrimination suits; he prosecuted cases using new authority granted by Congress to protect victims of domestic abuse living in federally funded housing. When the Trump administration froze hundreds of fair-housing cases and reassigned lawyers in his office to other divisions, Osadebe and three of his colleagues submitted a whistleblower’s complaint to Senator Elizabeth Warren. He also gave an interview to The New York Times describing how the department was shirking its legal obligation to protect civil rights and filed a lawsuit demanding that the department reinstate him to his old job. On September 29, he was told that he was being placed on administrative leave because he had disclosed “nonpublic information for private gain.” The outcome of his case is unresolved. Osadebe spoke with The Atlantic in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the government.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Karen Matragrano

Deputy Chief Information Officer

Department of the Interior
2005–2025

Karen Matragrano oversaw the Interior Department’s $2 billion portfolio of information technology, including systems tracking oil-and-gas revenue that Interior collects. When DOGE began operating in her department, it wanted unfettered access to the payroll system—which would have allowed it to circumvent HR procedures and privacy protections. Rather than comply with DOGE’s demand, Matragrano resigned. Her dissent proved futile: After her departure, DOGE gained access to the system.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Ruslan Petrychka

Chief of the Ukrainian Service

Voice Of America
2007–2025

Ukrainian broadcast news has never had a reputation for ethical rigor. Oligarch-owned networks tailored their reporting to serve their benefactors’ interests. Ruslan Petrychka, a veteran of Kyiv media who immigrated to Washington, D.C., made it his mission to model objectivity in the reports he produced in his native language for Voice of America. After Russia’s invasion in 2022, Petrychka’s service became indispensable. On highly watched Ukrainian-TV programs, his reporters would explain the American political system—without conspiracy, without exaggeration. On March 14, Trump ordered the dismantling of Voice of America’s parent agency.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Michael Lauer

Deputy Director for Extramural Research

National Institutes of Health
2007–2025

In 2024, the NIH spent $38 billion sustaining research across universities and hospitals. Michael Lauer oversaw that money with a relentless commitment to transparency: Grantees who once buried results had to post them within a year of completion. Lauer also set up systems to probe sexual-harassment complaints in research labs, and to flag undisclosed foreign ties. He retired after Health and Human Services officials attempted to demote his boss and the Trump administration tried to freeze grants he oversaw.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Michael Feinberg

Assistant Special Agent in Charge

Federal Bureau of Investigation
2009–2025

Michael Feinberg was on a path to becoming the FBI’s top Chinese-counterintelligence investigator, the culmination of a career studying Beijing’s spy network in the U.S. Early in his career, the government had paid for him to study Mandarin for four summers at Middlebury College. Feinberg had begun to decipher the Chinese playbook. He’d helped build cases against espionage schemes, including a racketeering and trade-secret case against the tech giant Huawei (which is still awaiting trial). But on May 31, his supervisor told him that he faced demotion because of his friendship with the agent who helped lead the 2016 Russia-interference probe. (They went to rock concerts together and argued over the relative merits of New Order and Joy Division.) Rather than accept the demotion, he resigned.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Adam Cohen

Director, Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces

Department of Justice
2018–2023; January–March 2025

Adam Cohen earned his stripes as a prosecutor at the end of the cocaine boom in Miami, where he began learning the structure of transnational criminal organizations—and how to dismantle them. For more than five years, he led a team of more than 500‑plus prosecutors and 1,200 agents at the DOJ. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche abruptly fired him in March.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Shernice Mundell

Health-Insurance Specialist

Office of Personnel Management
2024–2025

Nearly 2 million current and former postal workers, along with their family members, rely on the federal government for health insurance. Shernice Mundell, an Air Force veteran, was the person they called when they felt that their claims had been unfairly denied, or when they were simply lost in the thicket of fine print. But because she was a relatively new hire, Mundell was considered a probationary employee. That technicality sealed her fate: On February 13, 2025, she was swept out as part of a mass termination.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

David Boucher

Director, Infectious-Disease Preparedness and Response

Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, Department of Health and Human Services
2015–2025

On the other side of the world, a terrifying unknown illness begins to spread. A functionary in an African health ministry has a premonition of a pandemic. There used to be a default protocol for such moments of crisis: call David Boucher.

Boucher is a scientist, but he acquired the skills of an operator, someone who could rouse turf-conscious bureaucracies and nudge them to act as one. Within hours of that first call, he would mobilize the government to rummage through what he calls “the nation’s medicine cabinet”—all the stockpiled vaccines, drugs, and diagnostic equipment; all the treatments in clinical trials. If there was a plausible match, Boucher would arrange to ship it as soon as possible—getting on the phone with commercial couriers, alerting the ministry of health to what was coming and how to use it. The goal was containment: stop the spread of a disease before an outbreak became unmanageable, and before it could reach our shores.

To avoid the fumbling that tended to slow the government’s response to crises, Boucher built systems. During the Ebola outbreak in 2018, he chaired a working group that allowed scientists and health officials to update one another regularly. And after that emergency receded, he was the lead author of a pandemic-preparedness plan that would have developed vaccines, tests, and medicines for every known viral family. (Congress opted not to fund it.)

Mostly, Boucher careened from crisis to crisis. After Ebola came COVID, mpox, H5N1, and a string of more anonymous flare-ups. During COVID, as part of Operation Warp Speed, he led HHS’s negotiation of contracts with the pharmaceutical companies that the government had commissioned to develop vaccines.

The administration never pushed Boucher out; several officials even pleaded with him to stay. But after 10 years, he concluded that his job was no longer tenable, given the ethos and orientation of the administration. In late March, he resigned.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

MaryAnn Tierney

Regional Administrator

Federal Emergency Management Agency
2010–2025

Soon after MaryAnn Tierney graduated college, catastrophe became her calling. She went to work for New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. On 9/11, she arrived at the World Trade Center just after the first plane struck and was in the lobby of an adjacent building when the first tower started to collapse. In the months that followed, she helped coordinate the removal of rubble from the site. Over 15 years at FEMA, Tierney directed responses to hurricanes and floods and oversaw the rebuilding of homes and communities. From her office in Philadelphia, she also managed planning for presidential inaugurations and other major events in Washington, D.C. Tierney was serving as FEMA’s acting deputy administrator when she resigned on May 9 to protest what she described as the White House’s reckless scaling-back of the agency.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Ila Deiss

Immigration Judge

Executive Office for Immigration Review, Department of Justice
2017–2025

While Ila Deiss was a prosecutor in San Francisco, colleagues praised her judicial temperament. When she saw the Justice Department advertising an opening for immigration judges, she applied and soon had a gavel of her own. The work was draining, often requiring her to set aside heartbreaking stories of good people fleeing bad situations in order to apply the law, which meant that they would be deported. Yet Deiss also reprimanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyers for disrespectful treatment of immigrants, and the agency lodged a formal complaint against her. On July 17, she was fired without explanation.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Peter Garrett

Director, Center for External Affairs

National Cancer Institute
2013–2025

Peter Garrett oversaw the hotline that helped patients find clinical trials, and he ran cancer.gov, which drew up to 100 million visitors a year. His office counteracted pharmaceutical spin and translated government data into clear language that reflected scientific consensus. Garrett retired in May. By then, the administration had fired most of his office. He once led about 90 staffers; he said two remain.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Jeffrey Hall

Deputy Director for the Office of Health Equity

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
2005–2025

Jeffrey Hall’s job was to determine whether public-health initiatives were reaching historically underserved groups—not just Black and Latino Americans, but rural white populations, too. His office was eliminated.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Melody Joy Fields

Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division

Department of Justice
2023–2025

Melody Joy Fields investigated police departments whose officers had abused the mentally ill. She co-wrote a report on a Mississippi town where police systematically arrested poor Black residents for minor offenses and then fined them to fund the department. When the Trump administration began assigning her colleagues to cases that had no connection to the office’s historic mission, Fields resigned.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Greg Reiner

Director of Theater and Musical Theater

National Endowment for the Arts
2015–2025

With a pool of grants that topped out at just $6.5 million, Greg Reiner nourished American theater in venues far from Broadway. He funded playwriting classes for inmates in a Kentucky prison, backed productions for disabled actors in Denver, and supported early development of a then-fledgling idea: a hip-hop musical about the nation’s first Treasury secretary. After the Trump administration announced plans to shut down the NEA in May, Reiner took a voluntary-resignation package.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Elizabeth Poole

Children’s Environmental-Health Coordinator, Region 5

Environmental Protection Agency
2010–2025

In early 2025, Milwaukee discovered that lead paint had poisoned at least four students in its public schools. Elizabeth Poole said that she was ready to descend with tests and guidance, but the Trump administration forbade her team from working on the crisis, an allegation that the EPA disputes. In March, she resigned.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Nick Hand

Program Technologist, Enforcement Division

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
2023–2025

Trained as an astrophysicist, Nick Hand used his expertise in data science to investigate the payment service Zelle for allegedly failing to protect consumers against fraud—an investigation that the Trump administration dropped. He resigned in the spring.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

David Maltinsky

New-Agent Trainee

Federal Bureau of Investigation
2009–2025

After 10 years assisting investigators working on cybercrime cases, David Maltinsky earned an appointment as a special agent in April—a promotion that required 19 weeks at the FBI Academy, in Quantico, Virginia. In week 16, the bureau fired him for an “inappropriate display of political signage” in his previous Los Angeles office. The signage was a rainbow flag—Maltinsky is gay—the same flag the government flew outside L.A.’s Wilshire Federal Building during Pride Month in 2021. When the Trump administration came to power, a colleague had complained about the flag. Maltinsky says that his supervisor and the L.A. office’s legal counsel had assured him that there was no issue, and that his supervisor had told him to keep it in plain view. When he explained this to the officials assigned to fire him, they sat in silence. Maltinsky has sued the bureau, claiming that his termination was illegal.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Ejaz Baluch Jr.

Senior Trial Attorney

Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice
2019–2025

When Ejaz Baluch Jr. graduated college, he taught middle school in one of the poorest pockets of West Baltimore. The job was exhausting, and it provoked a question: How could such inequality persist? Baluch began studying to become a civil-rights lawyer. After a clerkship, he joined the Justice Department’s Honors Program; several hundred idealistic lawyers had applied, and Baluch was one of five accepted to the Civil Rights Division. He was assigned to investigate systemic discrimination in the Baltimore County Police Department’s recruitment practices. In 2021, Baluch helped negotiate a settlement that reshaped how the city hires new officers.

Soon after Trump’s inauguration, the acting associate attorney general announced that the Civil Rights Division would freeze its litigation. In April, Baluch was reassigned to the Complaint Adjudication Office, which he had never heard of before. It looked like Siberia, compared with his old office. He temporarily avoided that move because he had volunteered to join the administration’s investigation of campus anti-Semitism in the University of California system. But he knew that he couldn’t in good conscience work on that project after Trump appointees implied to him and his colleagues that the findings should be treated as a foregone conclusion. Rather than sacrifice his integrity, Baluch accepted a job at a nonprofit in Baltimore at half his government salary.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Gregg Bafundo

Lead Wilderness Ranger, Naches Ranger District

U.S. Forest Service, Department of Agriculture
2017–2025

A Marine Corps veteran, Gregg Bafundo rescued climbers from cliffs in northern Washington State and evacuated a heart-attack victim stranded on a trail. When wildfires would sweep Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, his job was to scout for at-risk wildlife, then join the fire line. Bafundo was terminated; of the five members of his crew, none remains in their job.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Katerina Herodotou

Senior Policy Adviser, Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Department of Homeland Security
2017–2025

Officials often failed to identify human-trafficking survivors with potential eligibility for asylum, until Katerina Herodotou rewrote questions used to screen for them. She was fired on May 23.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Ana Vaz

Fish Biologist, Southeast Fisheries Science Center

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
2024–2025

Using government models that forecast ocean conditions, Ana Vaz worked to protect the viability of grouper, snapper, and other species in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Fishing communities trusted Vaz; her science helped sustain the marine life they depended on. After she was fired in April, she moved to Brazil to work for a nonprofit funded by that country’s ministry of science.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Susan Miller

Central Intelligence Agency

1985–2025

At 25, Susan Miller went undercover in Moscow in the thick of the Cold War, mastering the art of giving KGB agents the slip. Before she turned 30, she was tapped to be station chief in Vilnius, Lithuania, followed by posts in Israel, the Czech Republic, and Malaysia. Eventually she led the CIA’s counterintelligence unit—making her its chief spy catcher—a job that required her to investigate Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. After retiring in 2024, Miller continued training agents as a contractor. But she said that her investigation into the election earned her the enmity of the Trump administration, which stripped her of her security clearances in August and terminated her relationship with the agency.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Mike Gordon

Assistant U.S. Attorney

Department of Justice
2017–2025

Mike Gordon was folding laundry in his home office on January 6, 2021, when the television filled with images of rioters besieging the Capitol. Months later, he earned a coveted spot on the DOJ task force charged with bringing the insurrectionists to justice. A former high-school teacher, Gordon had a knack for commanding the attention of easily distracted audiences. He became the department’s closer in the highest-profile January 6 trials, notching a perfect conviction record. Eventually his bosses in Tampa, where he was based, recalled him to handle white-collar prosecutions. But even his winning record for the United States, and the high esteem of his superiors, couldn’t protect him. Attorney General Pam Bondi dismissed him without warning in June, apparently for the sin of prosecuting those who’d attempted to overturn the 2020 election; he sued the administration in July, alleging that he was the target of politically motivated retaliation.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Michael Missal

Inspector General

Department of Veterans Affairs
2016–2025

During a long legal career in private practice, Michael Missal developed a specialty in internal investigations. CBS hired him to probe the anchor Dan Rather’s specious reporting alleging that George W. Bush had received preferential treatment during the Vietnam War. Bankruptcy courts deployed him to dissect the collapses of WorldCom and New Century Financial Corporation. In Missal’s nearly nine years as the VA’s in-house investigator, his office issued 2,500 reports and 10,000 recommendations, saving billions of dollars. He led the inquiry that uncovered a nursing assistant who’d murdered seven veterans with insulin injections. At one point, his office was pursuing more than 1,000 criminal investigations. Missal was one of the 17 inspectors general Trump fired four days into his second term. A federal judge later found that Missal and seven others had been unlawfully fired, but did not reinstate them.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Brendan Demich

Engineer, Pittsburgh Mining Research Division

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
2012–2025

Brendan Demich’s ancestors descended into the coal mines of western Pennsylvania and rarely emerged whole. A great-grandfather lost a leg; a grandfather contracted black lung; an uncle survived a cave-in, his pelvis crushed.

At an early age, Demich resolved to spare others that fate. For a high-school project, he shadowed a researcher at the Pittsburgh Mining Research Division, a government lab devoted to developing new techniques for preventing explosions, collapses, and lung disease. That division offered him a summer internship, and then, after he studied engineering in college, a job.

Mining is far safer now than it was in 1910, when the government first began studying how to keep miners alive. But it remains lethal work, and the division employed many of the world’s foremost experts in mine-safety research. It housed an acoustic chamber, which allowed for research into hazardous noises; it kept a test mine, where scientists could ignite controlled explosions.

Demich belonged to a unit that sought to improve the training of the rescuers who respond to mine disasters. By law, companies must field their own rescue teams, almost always composed of miners themselves, who know the tunnels’ moods and weaknesses. Training sessions unfolded in high-school gyms or on football fields, where scraps of paper on the ground symbolized likely hazards. But Demich and his fellow researchers theorized that technology could offer a better way.

His unit developed a virtual-reality simulation that let miners practice the careful steps of rescue—deploying gas readers to track methane, probing roofs to test their strength. In the headset’s glow, they could rehearse, so they would be ready to act in a real emergency.

By early last year, the software was ready, and Demich was in the final stages of collecting data that confirmed its effectiveness. But it might not ever be deployed, because the research division is part of Health and Human Services, and the department’s secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., effectively closed the office in April. He fired Demich, along with many of the nation’s other mine-safety-research experts; they are now on administrative leave, thanks to a judge’s order, while a lawsuit challenging the legality of their firings wends its way through court. Because Demich’s employment status is unresolved, an unauthorized conversation with a reporter could become grounds for retaliation. He spoke with The Atlantic in his capacity as vice president of his union, not as a representative of the government.

Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic

Yael Lempert

Ambassador

Department of State
1998–2025

Fluent in Arabic, Yael Lempert served as one of the Iraq desk officers before the war began there in 2003 and co-wrote the prophetic memo “The Perfect Storm,” which detailed the risks of an invasion. Despite her misgivings, she deployed to Baghdad to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, and over the next two decades rose to the rank of career minister—the second-highest tier of the Foreign Service. As U.S. ambassador to Jordan, home to 2 million Palestinian refugees, she soothed the government’s anxious response to the Gaza War and facilitated the transport of humanitarian aid from Jordan to Gaza. At the turn of every administration, ambassadors ritualistically resign from their posts. Those resignations are ritualistically rejected. To Lempert’s surprise, her resignation was accepted on January 20, 2025, with no explanation. Without a diplomatic post, she remained a Foreign Service officer, albeit one whose employer didn’t seem to especially want her. Despite having successfully served in the first Trump administration, she concluded that her career had reached a dead end. In August, she resigned from the government.

J. D. Vance Fails a Simple Moral Test

2025-12-23T06:00:00-05:00

On Sunday, J. D. Vance was presented with the simplest moral test: denounce commentators who traffic in medieval blood libels, who deny the Holocaust, and who endlessly harp on evil Jewish cabals.

The test was forced on the vice president. By the time he addressed the Turning Point USA conference this past weekend, it had turned into a referendum on latter-day Father Coughlins who have acquired substantial and growing audiences on the right. Among them is Candace Owens, whose YouTube channel has 5.7 million followers. She argues that there is a powerful, secret sect within Judaism practicing pedophilia. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, who has 16.8 million followers on X, has shared his microphone with an unabashed fan of Adolf Hitler and with historians who minimize the Nazi dictator’s evil.

[Yair Rosenberg: What J. D. Vance—and many others—miss about American anti-Semitism]

Their noxious theories about Jews became the defining question of the Turning Point confab. The podcaster Ben Shapiro denounced the anti-Semites. That prompted Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Donald Trump, to cast Shapiro as a “cancer.” By conducting their argument in public, the two sides—those who criticize anti-Semitism and those who tolerate it—were essentially begging Vance, the headliner of the event, to render a verdict.

When presented with the simplest moral test, Vance failed. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other,” he said, as if anti-Semitism were just one more woke fixation.

Strains of anti-Semitism have long festered on the American right. But in the second half of the 20th century, leaders of the Republican Party and the intellectual guardians of the conservative movement attempted to keep bigotry out of the mainstream. That’s one reason William F. Buckley Jr. used his magazine, National Review, to foil the rise of the John Birch Society in the 1960s; it’s why the GOP establishment rallied to stop Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign—and instructed elected officials to denounce the neo-Nazi David Duke. Even in Trump’s first term as president, the party eventually stripped the Iowa representative Steve King of his committee assignments after he defended the terms white nationalist and white supremacist. This wasn’t an unblemished record of containing far-right views, but it was an effective one.

[Read: The talented Mr. Vance]

Trump has always struggled to denounce anti-Semitism, whether asked to comment on Kanye West or the tiki-torch carriers in Charlottesville. But that always seemed a product of his vanity; he couldn’t stand to speak ill of acolytes. Vance’s refusal or inability to denounce anti-Semitism is more craven—and therefore more disturbing. He’s clearly made the calculation that anti-Semites are part of the Republican Party’s base, and he can’t afford to shunt them to the side as he plots his own presidential bid. So he’s welcomed them into the mainstream of the coalition.

Not that long ago, the right dabbled in imagery that reeked of anti-Semitism but refrained from fully indulging it. Populists such as Bannon railed against “globalists” and cast the financier George Soros, who is Jewish, as the shadowy force behind the demise of white Christian civilization. This was vile stuff, but it was also coded—and it gave Republican politicians and commentators, at least those who would rather avoid anti-Semitism, enough latitude to ignore or dismiss it.

But hatred for Israel is now firmly planted on both sides of the political spectrum, and it has provided the anti-Semites on the right with cover to recycle dark theories about the Jews. Angry rants about Israel have curdled into broad conspiracy theories about powerful cabals that control American life—and theories about the maladies of the Jewish religion.

Through heavy-handed intimation, Owens and Carlson have blamed Israel for the murder of the Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk. According to this delusional version of events, Kirk upset Jewish donors with his questions about Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza. To tamp down his powerful voice, people “sitting around eating hummus,” in Carlson’s telling, ordered his assassination. In this story, all of the classical hallmarks of anti-Semitism converge: big-money bankers with dual loyalties to a bloodthirsty state, making a martyr of a Christian saint.

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

The fervor with which Owens pursues this theory doesn’t just indicate a febrile mind. It likely suggests that she’s struck algorithmic gold. As she has taken her anti-Semitic turn, her audience has grown, which suggests that it likes what it is hearing, so she keeps feeding it, transforming an ancient hatred into start-up success.

Over the past few months, arguments that would have once been roundly denounced have found traction within the movement. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts backed Tucker Carlson after he hosted the unabashed anti-Semite Nick Fuentes on his podcast; Roberts attacked Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition.” (Ultimately, he apologized for a video he released supporting Carlson.) Megyn Kelly, once the face of Fox News, has resolutely refused to say a negative word about Owens and Carlson. At the Turning Point conference, she accused Shapiro of trying to “excommunicate” heretics. This is the way the culture operates: Ideas travel from the fringe to the acceptable because gatekeepers give their winking assent to views they lack the courage to espouse themselves.

A dark chapter of American history is repeating itself. In the late 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Michigan, used his radio broadcasts to blame Jews for the plight of the American worker. His sermons inspired organized gangs that roamed the New York City subways shouting “Kill the kikes” at elderly Jews and barged into synagogue services in Washington Heights.

By failing to denounce anti-Semitism, Vance has emboldened its adherents to flaunt their prejudices more openly, to dehumanize Jews with greater abandon. He told the Turning Point audience that he doesn’t want to “impose any purity tests” when, in reality, he was granting license to those who celebrate the most murderous purity test of all time.

CBS and CNN Are Being Sacrificed to Trump

2025-12-22T08:43:00-05:00

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The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize.

This is one of those moments in Donald Trump’s presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death knell for democracy somehow fails to elicit the outrage it deserves. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, whose coverage Trump views as hostile to his administration. So he is abusing the government’s merger-approval power in order to insist that the next owner of the venerable outlet mold its journalism to his liking.

[Read: The apocalyptic potential of the Netflix–Warner Bros. Deal]

Such coercion isn’t just the product of Trump’s brazen indifference to procedural restraints; it’s possible because the underlying business of the media has become terrifyingly vulnerable to coercion. Recent history is a study in false promise. After the explosion of cable and the internet in the 1990s—technologies that promised radical decentralization—the media sector reconsolidated. Google and Meta devoured the advertising market that once sustained journalism: The United States now has just three newspapers that provide deep, authoritative national coverage; local outlets have closed by the thousands. Six television streaming services command nearly 90 percent of the audience—and, no matter which bidder Trump favors, those six stand to become five.

That tendency toward consolidation always posed a danger: As the number of competitors shrinks, an aspiring authoritarian can far more easily commandeer the system. But the specific architecture of modern media conglomerates creates a unique fragility. Many are burdened by debt; all are subject to government regulation. These companies are not just concentrated—they are compromised. Their weaknesses tempt them to submit to the undemocratic whims of the president.

Even if a small and shrinking fraction of the country watches cable news, Trump is a member of that cohort of aging, politically obsessed couch potatoes. And he is unmistakably fixated on how he is portrayed on those networks, especially CNN. That’s a fact that David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount, has exploited in his bid to acquire Warner Bros. According to The Wall Street Journal, Ellison conveyed to Trump that he would overhaul the network if the president allows him to buy it.

It wasn’t a hollow promise. Ellison—the son of Larry, the founder of the software giant Oracle and a Trump supporter—was already building a media empire that is more sympathetic to the president, or at least less hostile. After he bought CBS earlier this year, he installed new leadership to propel its news division rightward.

The early signs are ominous. Last week, Trump complained on Truth Social that 60 Minutes was treating him “far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before.” On Sunday, CBS suddenly pulled a 60 Minutes segment about Trump’s policy of deporting people to an infamous prison in El Salvador. The story, according to correspondence reviewed by The New York Times, had been fully vetted and was ready to air. Bari Weiss, the new head of the news division, said that she wanted producers to add context to the piece. Regardless of whether Ellison shares the president’s politics, he has an incentive to crush CBS’s independence and similarly renovate CNN, because the ultimate success of his conglomerate hinges on Trump blessing his bid for Warner Bros.

Not that long ago, media conglomerates weren’t nearly so politically pliable. When Katharine Graham ran the Washington Post Company, she controlled a local monopoly, whose fate did not hinge on regulatory favor. That insulation—not merely her sense of civic duty—is what enabled the Post to defy Richard Nixon’s efforts to suppress the Pentagon Papers. Even when Nixon allies challenged the broadcast licenses of her company’s television stations during the Watergate era, Graham could resist shareholder pressure to bend. Her family owned a special class of shares, so it retained control of the company. And television was a secondary asset, not the foundation of the company’s health.

A large chunk of today’s conglomerates lack that insulation. Their profit margins are thinner. They scrape for growth in stagnant markets. In newer markets, they face brutal competition: With the exception of Netflix, streaming has yet to prove itself as a stable replacement for the businesses it cannibalized.

Survival, therefore, is contingent on consolidation. Having acquired Paramount, David Ellison understood that owning a giant conglomerate wasn’t enough to create a viable competitor. His company still lacked the audience, the library depth, and the global footprint to vie with the likes of Netflix, Disney, or Amazon for dominance of the streaming market. Paramount could never grow enough organically, because subscriber growth has slowed across the industry. That left one path: buying scale. The whale that is Warner Bros. Discovery—one of the last conglomerates with a massive vault of beloved shows—is not a vanity purchase, but a business imperative.

Because the modern media conglomerate is so dependent on mergers, it is uniquely dependent on the state, which has the power to approve or nix them. That means the industry is uniquely dependent on Donald Trump.

During the first Trump administration, the president blustered about his desire to block Time Warner’s merger with AT&T—and his Justice Department set out to fulfill his wishes in court. (Trump’s disdain for CNN, then part of Time Warner, was reportedly the basis for his opposition.) But the judiciary deemed the deal perfectly legal.

The days when corporations could turn to saviors in robes feels like another era. The whole system, including the courts, can no longer be counted on to provide a buffer against Trump. Over the past several months, Trump has transformed once-independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission into extensions of his will. (And the Supreme Court is likely to lend its imprimatur to this power grab in the Trump v. Slaughter decision it will hand down next year.) Those agencies were created, exuding the ethos of the Progressive era, with a simple mandate: to make technocratic decisions that transcend partisanship. That is why they were required to be bipartisan in composition. Strip them of that independence, and regulatory approval becomes something closer to royal favor.

Media conglomerates have internalized the new reality. Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, demanded that broadcast companies “take action” against Jimmy Kimmel as retribution for views the administration deemed noxious; he was picking at a vulnerability. Nexstar, a company that owns more than 200 local stations, was in the process of buying Tegna, which owns 64 of them. To expedite the FCC’s approval of its deal, Nexstar seemed to preemptively do Carr’s bidding by pulling Kimmel’s show from the ABC stations it owned. (Nine days later, it restored the show.)

Even a behemoth like Disney has little leverage—it has its own difficulties to surmount. The golden days of ESPN raking in profit from cable bundling and Marvel scoring box-office hits are over. Having bought Comcast’s stake in Hulu, Disney is now under immense pressure to prove to its shareholders the wisdom of its streaming bet. Furthermore, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis threatened to eliminate the autonomous “improvement district” that had long allowed Walt Disney World to govern itself, he exposed the parent company’s vulnerability to regulators. All of that breeds an instinct to genuflect before Trump—which Disney did when it paid his presidential library $15 million to settle his defamation suit against ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Given the declining reliance of traditional media outlets today, this might seem like an antiquated concern. But the crisis of democracy is a crisis of information—citizens make bad decisions, in part, because they are starved of the facts. And it can get worse.

[Anne Applebaum: America’s future is Hungary]

A portion of the media will travel down the Hungarian path as Trump follows the example set by Viktor Orbán, who forced the transfer of outlets to his allies, effectively blunting a source of opposition. But the greater risk is that conglomerates simply give up on news entirely. Comcast has already shed MSNBC, dumping the network, now called MS NOW, into a spin-off composed of fossilized cable channels. Even before Netflix and Paramount began circling Warner Bros., it developed plans to similarly maroon CNN in a castaway company, isolating it from the parts of the empire better poised for growth. Journalism has become the epitome of a high-risk, low-return proposition—one that conglomerates seem to prefer expunging from their portfolios.

The grim reality is that as American media shrinks, Trump’s coercion yields an outsize return. When Jeff Bezos neutralized The Washington Post’s editorial page—after Trump threatened his other commercial interests—he didn’t just quiet a single outlet; he neutered the institutional voice of one of the three remaining national newspapers. And if Trump succeeds in remaking or destroying CNN, he won’t just be wounding a network. The president will have effectively dismantled one of the two cable-news networks that covers him skeptically. And the nature of his temperament is that when he scouts a weakness, he keeps striking at it. If Trump gets his way with CBS and CNN, he will turn to fresh targets, until everyone in the kingdom submits.

The ‘Filthy Little Slum Child’ Who Remade the American Right

2025-12-18T06:00:00-05:00

Norman Podhoretz’s friends—there were no dissenting voices among them—warned him not to publish Making It. Lionel Trilling, the high priest of the New York intellectuals, told Podhoretz that his reputation might never recover. Daniel Bell urged him to append a coda retracting the whole thing, as if the book were a literary prank. They regarded the text—a confessional memoir in which Podhoretz asserts that “many men” masturbate before sitting down to write—and its argument, an apologetic defense of his pursuit of fame and money, as evidence of an unmoored mind.

The book was published in 1967. As it turned out, those friends accurately anticipated the hostility that would flow its way, and how its publication would send Podhoretz into a kind of internal exile on the Upper West Side. But they misjudged the literary merits of the book. Like the book’s subject, ambition, Podhoretz’s prose burst from the pages. His slashing judgments of his peers—a style that one of his friends described as “the emperor has no scrotum”—were, in turns, self-serving and bravely honest. And despite the book’s flaws, and mostly because of them, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Podhoretz’s memoir chronicles the first chapters of a life that ended this week at the age of 95. What his friends misunderstood, and his enemies could never see, was that Podhoretz was both a political intellectual and a literary invention. He was one of the greatest magazine editors of the 20th century, an ideologue who remade the American right, and a self-invented character with profound flaws—someone whose biography can be read as a novelistic tale of the Golden Age of American Jewry.

[Franklin Foer: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

The first chapter of Making It starts, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.” A high-school teacher, who called him a “filthy little slum child,” began the invention of Norman Podhoretz. She saw the potential in this son of a milkman, whose Yiddish accent needed correcting, and cultivated him with trips to the Frick and the Met, to elegant restaurants that served nonkosher food.

Teachers kept spying potential in the brash young Jew. Two venerable literary scholars of the mid-century—Trilling at Columbia and F. R. Leavis at Cambridge—encouraged their protégé to live a life of letters. In his mid-20s, his byline graced the pages of the Partisan Review and The New Yorker. Intellectually, he came of age in the 1950s, when, as he said, “Jews were culturally all the rage in America.” Podhoretz was too young to experience the Jewish dalliance with socialism; he never felt the sting of social exclusion. The doors of the literary establishment swung wide open for him.

In fact, during those years after World War II, the Jewish literary establishment was barely distinguishable from the American literary establishment—to the point that a little magazine called Commentary, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, became that era’s most formidable journal of ideas. In 1960, at the age of 30, Podhoretz was anointed its editor.

During his early reign, Podhoretz was a patron of the intellectual left. Probably no other American magazine, beyond those targeted toward a Black readership, was as full-throated in its support for the civil-rights movement. (Podhoretz’s characteristically quixotic and unintentionally revealing intervention was called “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” in which he admitted his own racism and suggested that intermarriage was the solution to America’s most profound social ill. Rabbis denounced him from the pulpit for it.) Whereas Commentary was founded in the spirit of Cold War liberalism, Podhoretz’s magazine ran essays skeptical of containment, hostile to the war in Vietnam. He published James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt. Even though it never fully joined the New Left, it anticipated it—and briefly served as its fellow traveler.

Like his erstwhile friend Norman Mailer, Podhoretz wrote with uncomfortable intimacy about his personal flaws. He was alert to every slight, eager to shove down rivals, and unable to resist the temptation of a biting quip. Podhoretz made enemies as if they were a biological necessity. (He eventually wrote a memoir called Ex-Friends.) Allen Ginsberg had been a friend of his at Columbia during their undergrad days, but Podhoretz attacked the poet and his fellow Beats in an essay called “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” At a gathering at Mailer’s, Ginsberg accosted Podhoretz and called him a “dumb fuckhead.”

Enmity emerged as the master narrative of Podhoretz’s life. After the hostile reception to Making It, he began to turn against the New York intelligentsia. This wasn’t just wounded pride. Like other Jewish intellectuals, he felt a deeper attachment to Israel after the Six-Day War—and felt betrayed by his old friends on the left who began to denounce the Jewish state as a colonial outpost. In 1972, he voted for Richard Nixon, and Commentary was well on its rightward path.

Along with Irving Kristol—another gifted magazine editor—Podhoretz began to self-consciously identify as a leader of a movement of disillusioned liberals who had been mugged by the reality of the Great Society’s failures. The socialist Michael Harrington branded the group with the epithet neoconservative, which it wore as a badge of honor. Neoconservativism exuded Podhoretz’s sense of enmity. His magazine became a scourge of the left-wing intelligentsia that it once nurtured, an organ of Kulturkampf.

Much of this cultural commentary, filled with nasty insinuation, makes for difficult reading. Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, wrote an unapologetic attack on gay culture called “The Boys on the Beach.” The magazine’s writing about AIDS, which dismissed the epidemic as “overstated,” is a stain on its reputation that can never be wiped away. In the 1970s and ’80s, the magazine’s signature essays on crime and “the culture of poverty” disdainfully depicted Black people as the source of their own misery, deploying gross generalizations and the crudest stereotypes. In pompous prose, deploying dubious sociology, Commentary mounted a highbrow defense of base prejudices.

Gore Vidal, who liked to smear Podhoretz with anti-Semitic innuendo, wrote, “But tact is unknown to the Podhoretzes. Joyously they revel in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals, trying, always, to outdo those moral majoritarians who will, as Armageddon draws near, either convert all the Jews, just as the Good Book says, or kill them.” (Vidal and Podhoretz were meant for each other.)

But Commentary accomplished something rare in intellectual history: It published essays that actually changed the world. It articulated a muscular foreign policy that presented the United States as the world’s lonely guardian of democracy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote one of these essays, “The United States in Opposition.” Henry Kissinger found it so compelling that he persuaded Nixon to appoint Moynihan ambassador to the United Nations. Ronald Reagan later gave Jeane Kirkpatrick that very same perch because of her Commentary essay “Dictatorships & Double Standards.”

[From the January 2026 issue: The neocons were right]

That Podhoretz became a chief theorist of the American right is itself a triumphalist tale, or at least it seemed that way for a time. At the beginning of the 1960s, the John Birch Society was ascendant; anti-Semitism was ubiquitous in the conservative movement. Yet here was that “filthy little slum child” having lunch with Reagan in the Cabinet Room; here was the publication of the American Jewish Committee being read with Talmudic care by evangelical intellectuals and Wall Street tycoons. (The AJC formally dissociated itself from Commentary in 2007.) But in the age of Tucker Carlson, Podhoretz’s victory feels ephemeral. Commentary has slipped from the place it once occupied in right-wing discourse; anti-Semitism has crept back into conservatism. Although his fellow neoconservatives became Never Trumpers, Podhoretz never broke ranks. He was an apologist for MAGA until the end.

A strange facet of nostalgia is that we begin to think fondly of our enemies—although Podhoretz may never have succumbed to such a weakness. For much of my life, I would throw his essays across the room in anger; I despised his snideness and felt trolled by his attacks on liberals. “Podhoretz,” I would angrily mutter. But now, amid the triumph of populism on the right, I’m wistful for much of the intellectual world he created—in which literary style mattered and a writer’s persona was their greatest creation. Podhoretz didn’t just journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan; he spent 60 years making sure that no one forgot he was there.

Why the Gulf Monarchs Shower Trump With Gifts

2025-11-30T06:00:00-05:00

When Benjamin Franklin left Paris in 1785, after nearly nine years as the American emissary to France, King Louis XVI presented him with a parting gift. The token exuded the rococo extravagance of the ancien régime: a portrait of the monarch, surrounded by 408 diamonds, held in a gold case. It was frequently described as a snuffbox, a term that hardly captures its opulent nature; the item was likely far more valuable than anything Franklin owned.

Under the Articles of Confederation—the document governing the still-fragile republic—Franklin could keep the gift only with the explicit permission of Congress, which it reluctantly granted. But the gift unsettled the country. The Constitution, written two years later, barred federal officeholders from accepting any gift, payment, or title from a foreign state without Congress’s explicit consent. The Founders feared that European monarchies would seek to control the new country by showering it with gifts, which would undermine its capacity for self-government.

Until Donald Trump, no U.S. president had ever yielded to royal temptations from abroad. But in his second term, Trump has discarded that old inhibition in its totality. Since 2022, the Trump family has been promised hundreds of millions of dollars—in the form of investments, real-estate licensing deals, even an airplane—from Gulf monarchies and the business entities they control.

[Read: America has never seen corruption like this]

During his second term, and especially during Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s recent visit to Washington, Trump has rewarded his benefactors with sweeping geopolitical favors. Their huge investments in his family’s businesses are hard to describe as anything other than the spectacular subversion of American sovereignty, wherein the nation’s foreign policy reads as a thank-you note to the president’s biggest financial boosters.

Really, Trump is adopting the governing style of his backers. In the Gulf states, hardly any distinction exists between public and private interests; the royal family governs the state and dominates the economy. They oversee sovereign-wealth funds, control the largest companies, and treat nominally private enterprises as instruments of royal policy. When a Gulf developer or investment vehicle pays Trump—or licenses his brand—it is not a private commercial transaction. It is a political act: a foreign monarch using his wealth to cultivate influence, dependence, and favor.

In a monarchy, a ruler governs in part through beneficence—binding subjects through appointments, indulgences, and other blandishments. That this model might be applied to American officeholders was the gravest threat to the republic: Leaders enriched by a foreign monarch cannot be trusted to act independently. When a leader is financially entangled with foreign regimes, it becomes impossible to discern their motives: Are they acting out of conviction, or obligation? That uncertainty was precisely what the Framers sought to banish.

The timing of Trump’s deals with the Saudis tells a disturbing story. Before he became president, he never managed to break into the kingdom’s real-estate market. But during his first term, he proved his worth. He stood by MBS after the Saudi leader ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump backed the kingdom and its Emirati allies during their blockade of Qatar in 2017, despite the fact that the United States maintains one of its largest military bases there.

The Trump family was rewarded for its demonstrations of loyalty. In 2021, Jared Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law, who was a top adviser during his first term—sought a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund for the private-equity firm he was creating. The Saudi fund’s professional advisers warned that the fledgling Kushner firm’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” But the crown prince controls the fund’s board, and the board overruled the professionals.

Then, after Trump announced that he was running to reclaim the presidency, the Saudis began to shower him with real-estate deals. In 2022, Dar Global—the international arm of a Saudi developer that is routinely described as having “close ties” to the royal family—contracted with the Trump Organization to manage a hotel and golf course in Oman. Two years later, the company unveiled a Trump Tower in Jeddah, followed by plans for a Trump Plaza in the city. The pattern was unmistakable: The Saudis were licensing the Trump name for a series of lavish mega-projects in places such as Riyadh, Dubai, Doha, and the Maldives.

The Trump family has become enmeshed in Saudi investment deals to an extent possible only with the crown prince’s approval. But have these entanglements actually corrupted American foreign policy? As the Founders understood, that question drifts into the murky realm of motives—always difficult to parse and almost impossible to prove.

American foreign policy was already becoming pro-Saudi long before Trump arrived for his second term. Although Joe Biden came into office vowing to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for killing Khashoggi, he softened his stance over time and pursued a grand bargain: Saudi normalization with Israel in exchange for Israeli movement toward a two-state solution. That shift didn’t stem from personal enrichment or private dealings involving the Biden family; it emerged from geopolitics. Biden did not want Saudi Arabia drifting into China’s orbit. And Iran’s growing menace ensured that any American administration—whatever its ideological priors—would be pushed toward cooperation with Riyadh, which stands among Tehran’s most committed regional adversaries.

[Listen: The most corrupt presidency in American history]

But Biden sought to extract substantial concessions as he deepened the alliance: not just Saudi diplomatic recognition of Israel but also assurances that the kingdom would keep the dollar at the center of its financial system. His administration pressed Riyadh to curb its brutal intervention in Yemen.

In his first months back in office, Trump has delivered the defense protections that Biden merely dangled before the Saudis. Last week, he even designated the kingdom a “major non-NATO ally.” He signed an executive order pledging to defend Qatar against any attack, not long after that country gifted him a $400 million airplane. (Technically donated to the Pentagon, the plane will be transferred to Trump’s presidential-library foundation no later than January 2029.) At Riyadh’s urging—“Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” Trump said—the president lifted sanctions on the new Sunni-led government in Syria. And to burnish the image of his family business’s financial benefactor, he once again excused the murder of Khashoggi. Yet he has extracted almost nothing in return—aside from vague promises of Saudi investment in American firms, commitments the kingdom has every incentive to make regardless of American favors. This is exactly the kind of one-sided arrangement the Constitution was written to prevent: a republic bending toward the preferences of a foreign monarch whose wealth has seeped into the president’s private dealings.

What the Founders feared as an existential threat to the republic is now unfolding in plain sight. The anxiety they enshrined in the Constitution is being flouted with barely any disguise. The Founders understood that the nation’s immune system needed to reject even the smallest, most seemingly innocent foreign attempts to influence American politics. The president is ceding American sovereignty to a foreign monarchy, and there’s hardly any price to be paid.

Donald Trump’s War on Reality

2025-10-22T11:48:51-04:00

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Donald Trump’s rise tracks the decline of that thing we once agreed to call reality. He cemented his place in the popular imagination with the advent of reality television, a genre that promised authenticity, even as the supposedly unscripted scenes were carefully manipulated by producers. On The Apprentice, which debuted in 2004, Trump was the embodiment of a culture just beginning to blur the line between what was real and what merely looked like it was.

In his second term as president, Trump—now with the help of artificial intelligence—is completing the revolution that made him. Over the weekend, he posted a video of himself piloting a fighter jet that dumps excrement on protesters. The clip was cartoonish, meant to amuse his followers and outrage his adversaries. This might seem like an ephemeral bit of trollish fun, but it is an example of an alarming pattern. Trump is provoking an epistemic collapse—cultivating the sense that every shard of once-dependable evidence is suspect. He is ushering in an era of distrust and confusion, in which the president molds perception to serve his own interests.

The deepfake is the most disconcerting frontier of the AI revolution. Fabricated clips are rendered with such precision that they can make anyone appear to say or do anything. This technology stands to upend a basic assumption of modern life. For more than a century, humans have treated film as the ultimate proof of reality, the mechanical witness that doesn’t lie. Deepfakes exploit the instinct to trust what we see, counterfeits capable of warping emotion and implanting lies.

Fueled by his own delusions of grandeur—and the dark fantasies of revenge that animate him—Trump delights in doctored videos. During his first term, he tweeted footage spliced to exaggerate Nancy Pelosi’s verbal stumbles. In his 2024 campaign, he shared an AI-generated image that suggested that Taylor Swift had endorsed him. And last month, he posted a fake clip of Chuck Schumer declaring, “Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke, trans bullshit.”

The president of the United States has legitimized deepfakes as a tool of political communication. His followers have taken the cue. Last week, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans released an AI-produced ad depicting Schumer speaking words that had appeared in a press report—not in any actual footage.

As deepfakes become the common currency of social media, citizens will justifiably begin to harbor doubts about any piece of video they encounter. But those doubts won’t yield discernment. They will simply provide another justification for the confirmation of ideological bias. Partisans will accept video footage when it upholds their preconceptions; when it does not, dismissing it as potentially manipulated will become standard practice.

[Jessica Yellin: The awkward adolescence of a media revolution]

Members of Trump’s administration are already deploying this tactic. Earlier this week, Politico revealed text messages attributed to Paul Ingrassia, the president’s choice to lead the Office of Special Counsel, in which the nominee admitted to having a “Nazi streak” and unleashed a torrent of racist vituperation. (Ingrassia ultimately withdrew his nomination.) When confronted with the messages, his lawyer didn’t deny their authenticity outright but instead implied that they might have been fabricated by AI.

That claim is baseless, but the strategy isn’t. The public has largely lost faith in traditional arbiters of truth—mainstream media, religion, academia—and many citizens have cocooned themselves in the comfort of filter bubbles. Now they’ve begun to disagree about the most basic facts of shared existence, including the outcomes of an election.

At the beginning of the century, when The New York Times reported the scandalous behavior of a politician, leadership of both political parties would assume the allegation’s truth, even if Republicans might have grouched about the paper’s liberal bias. When the government released an employment report, the nation roundly regarded it as an objective reading of the economic weather.

But Trump is attempting to dismantle those institutional underpinnings of reality. In the 20th century, the federal government became the nation’s most trusted producer of facts. It tracked the economy, the spread of disease, and countless other indicators that allowed businesses to plan and citizens to make informed choices. Trump is shattering that tradition of disinterested empiricism, bending even the information generated by the government to his will. That’s why he has fired officials—such as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics—who are in charge of producing objective data, and moved to replace them with loyalists. Agencies once meant to measure reality now risk becoming instruments that manufacture it.

[Nancy A. Youssef: The last days of the Pentagon Press Corps]

Trump is also taking steps to stifle the traditional media, which, however imperfectly, still strives to offer an objective account of events. Leveraging the government’s power to reject mergers, he pressured Paramount, CBS’s parent company, into settling a spurious lawsuit over an episode of 60 Minutes. His administration has sent a message to corporate media that an adversarial stance toward the president will carry financial risk. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has imposed such onerous restrictions on the press corps that reporters have effectively been expelled from the building, an effort to prevent them from producing the kind of independent reporting that might puncture the administration’s self-serving version of events.

Years ago, Trump’s most prominent ally in Silicon Valley offered a prophetic vision of this world. Elon Musk has entertained the idea that human existence is really just a computer simulation—a virtual realm so convincingly rendered that everything becomes malleable, that reshaping the world is merely a matter of rewriting a few lines of code. To adherents, this vision is not a nightmare but a kind of liberation. Truth can always be revised. Manipulation is the most basic fact of life. And Trump has assumed the role of the master programmer.

The Existential Heroism of the Israeli Hostages

2025-10-13T06:00:08-04:00

In Eli Sharabi’s first hours of freedom earlier this year, a social worker led him to a room stocked with shampoo, toothpaste, and soap. In Gaza’s tunnels, he had gone months without bathing; now he could scrub off the grime of captivity. He had sustained himself through his 491 days as a hostage by picturing the moment when he would rush into the arms of his wife and daughters. But the tunnels had sealed him off from the world. Standing in daylight, he learned that Hamas had murdered his loved ones in their home’s safe room on October 7. The social worker hovered as he showered and changed, to protect Sharabi from himself.

Today, the last of the living Israeli hostages were liberated after more than two years—and their release has liberated the Israeli psyche from its fretful obsession with their fate. Having invested themselves so deeply in the hostages’ story, Israelis greeted the moment as an ecstatic conclusion that helps justify the terrible toll of their nation’s longest war.

The hostages’ release is, indeed, an epochal moment, one that may not end the war in Gaza but will certainly redirect its course. I, however, find myself thinking more about the intimate details of what the hostages have experienced. I filter the possibilities not just through Sharabi’s recollections, which ultimately tell a story of extreme perseverance, but also through what I know about my own grandfather, who escaped death during the Holocaust by hiding in barns and forests. Although he tasted the sweet fruits of survival—marriage, children, a new life on a new continent—his mind always doubled back to what he lost. The Nazis murdered his first wife and daughter. Survival was torment, and he ultimately lost the will to live. He killed himself in the grocery store that he owned in Washington, D.C.

[Read: How Trump pushed Israel and Hamas to yes]

How does a human being survive two years of torment? And how do they make sense of their life once they resume? Within months of his release, Eli Sharabi summoned the courage to ask these questions of himself in a short book, Hostage. The manager of a kibbutz roughly two miles from Gaza, Sharabi was dragged from his home, away from his English-born wife and his daughters, ages 16 and 13. “A sea of people who start thumping my head, screaming, trying to rip me limb from limb,” he remembers.

Arriving in Gaza, his captors first confined him to a home belonging to a family, where children did homework and women cooked as Hamas operatives watched over him and a Thai worker, also kidnapped on October 7. During this initial chapter, they were fed well and sometimes even able to feel the Mediterranean breeze through an open window.

What he feared most was the prospect of being hauled underground—a fate described by Gilad Shalit, a hostage seized by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006 and depicted by Israeli television with enough detail to implant nightmares. In the network of passageways, rigged with booby traps, there was no hope of rescue or escape. “Please, God, not a tunnel,” Sharabi kept praying.

On the 52nd day of his captivity, his captors led him into a mosque, opened a trap door, and ordered him to begin climbing down a ladder. For the first and only time in Gaza, Sharabi contemplated suicide. “There’s always a choice,” he told himself. “There. Is. Always. A. Choice.”

The tunnels felt boiling hot, and Sharabi stripped to his underwear to cool himself before his guards wrapped shackles around his ankles. Eventually, they led him to a makeshift prison cell, which he shared with three other hostages. At first, his captors fed him twice a day. But as the war progressed, that dwindled, sometimes to a moldy pita or biscuits, while he could smell the meals that they cooked for themselves. Malnutrition weakened him. He had spells of dizziness and his belly caved inward.

When he needed to use a toilet, he would ask for permission. But Hamas minders would make him wait for as long as an hour. The toilet itself brimmed with sewage, a stench that permeated his room and never dissipated. Eventually, the bathroom and then his room itself were crawling with worms, which inhabited his toothbrush. For one stretch of captivity, he went eight months without seeing the light of the sun.

To taunt the hostages, captors would loudly play video clips of October 7 on their iPads, and the noises would echo down the corridors into their room. The captors would tell them, You’ve been abandoned by your government. He couldn’t have known it, but that accusation carried a whiff of plausibility. Members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet sometimes described hostages’ families, advocating fervently for a deal to release them, with disdain. At a Knesset committee meeting, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the families, “We hear you too much,” before ordering guards to clear them from the room. For the settler-led faction within the government, the release of the hostages wasn’t the ultimate war aim. They were a distraction from the goal of resettling Gaza, of reclaiming biblical Israel.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump’s plan to finally end the Gaza war]

But those fantasies have been foiled, at least for the time being. The hostage deal that the Israeli right worked to undermine has happened. And after the liberated cleanse themselves, as Sharabi did, they will sit for their first television interviews and recount the rituals that allowed them to persist.

Sharabi has described being thrown into a makeshift cell with other hostages, including a young man named Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The unavoidable fact about him was that he had lost his arm on October 7, and his fellow hostages couldn’t stop staring at the remaining nub. Conversation soon turned to the very subject of life itself. Hersh quoted something he’d learned from the writings of the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: “He who has a why”—a purpose for living—“can bear any how.”

Unlike Sharabi, some of the hostages had already surmised that they had lost their families in the massacre, shattering the most compelling why of them all. Yet that didn’t diminish their will to live. Despite being secular, they found solace in listening to an observant hostage, the son of a rabbinical scholar, recite the Jewish grace after meals. Like Odysseus, they trained their minds to relentlessly focus on home. “There is no more regular Eli,” Sharabi told himself in his first days in Gaza. “From now on, I am Eli the survivor.”

[Read: The cruel calculus of Palestinian grief]

That he clung to optimism in the face of despair wasn’t inevitable. As my grandfather’s biography suggests, there are other outcomes. So it’s worth celebrating these examples of existential heroism when they are in full view.

This weekend, on the cusp of the release of the last 20 living hostages in Gaza, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner stood in the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, dubbed Hostages Square, to address a jubilant throng. He called the hostages’ release the end of a nightmare. In reality, the nightmare never ends; trauma that endures for generations is the surest outcome of this war. But we also know that the hostages are going home, living proof that hope can persist even in the darkest hole.

Israel’s Last Chance

2025-08-04T08:00:00-04:00

When Hamas bulldozed its way across the Gaza fence on October 7, 2023, it hoped to eventually provoke the opprobrium that’s now flowing in Israel’s direction. Launching its carnival of murder, rape, and kidnapping, the group wagered that it could bait its enemy into moral blunders that would discredit it in the eyes of the world.

That vision is now unfolding as mass hunger engulfs the Gaza Strip, and images of starving children crumble American support for Israel. The fact that Hamas ignited this chain of events, and that it could end the war if wanted to, does nothing to absolve Israel of its primary role in the food crisis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government bears responsibility for policies that are now depriving Gazans of adequate nourishment and may soon kill them in staggering numbers. It was his cabinet that imposed a blockade on Gaza starting on March 2. The measure was eventually reversed under international pressure. Still, the subsequent damage was a deliberate choice, because even after Israel lifted its siege, it further limited the ability of the United Nations to distribute relief.

[Read: Food aid in Gaza has become a horror]

Israel executed these policies in the name of achieving Netanyahu’s implausible goal of “total victory.” Food, in his government’s analysis, had become a weapon used by Hamas to sustain its fighters, reward loyalty, and replenish its armaments through black-market profiteering. The United Nations, Israeli officials believed, was at best excessively tolerant of terrorists in Gaza. By wresting control of aid distribution from the world organization, Israel hoped to cut Hamas off from one of its last remaining sources of power.

But the policy has failed on its own terms. Hamas is no closer to surrendering or releasing hostages than before Israel embarked on its campaign of deprivation. A movement animated by theological fervor—and strengthened by the spectacle of civilian suffering—cannot be starved into submission. And now that the toll of hunger is becoming so clear, Israel has an obligation to reverse course as quickly as possible.

When there is hunger, the blazingly obvious solution is food. Humanitarian groups have a cliché for what’s needed in Gaza: “flooding the zone” with food. That would require Israel to lift restrictions and bureaucratic impediments that it has imposed on the UN agencies it loathes.

Flooding the zone is not just a humanitarian imperative; it is a strategic one for Israel. The food crisis is alienating bedrock allies in the U.S. Congress. When Israel launched its response to the atrocities of October 7, with the goal of dismantling Hamas, I considered the war just and necessary. But international law prohibits some tactics in order to protect the innocent and to prevent the perverse exigencies of conflict from disfiguring the soul of the warrior. Even if Israel is prepared to endure international isolation, allegiances it once considered unbreakable won’t survive famine. By flooding the zone, Israel would be rescuing itself.

Just before Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza in early March, a cease-fire prevailed. During the calm, the price of flour—the clearest indicator of a population’s nutritional access—plummeted from about $135 for a 25-kilogram sack to just $14 in February. The United Nations, along with the nongovernmental organizations that it coordinates, imported more aid during that period than at any point in the previous eight months: 295,120 tons in total. Although this was hardly a cornucopia, the surge of food and medicine averted large-scale starvation.

The role the United Nations played in this effort wasn’t unusual. In major humanitarian crises caused by war—for example, in Sudan and Ukraine—the UN serves as the primary mechanism for coordinating the care of civilians displaced by conflict. In Gaza, its role ran even deeper: For decades, the UN had provided not just emergency relief but also the basic infrastructure of daily life—education, housing, food.

Even as Israel and the UN collaborated on the movement of trucks and the flow of aid, they regarded each other as hostile entities. Israel had legitimate reasons for suspicion. For years, schools administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza used textbooks glorifying violent resistance. After the October 7 attacks, Israel published intelligence showing that 12 UNRWA employees directly participated in the massacre. To many Israelis, the agency’s very existence affirmed a long-standing belief that the UN reflexively condemns Israel while overlooking Hamas’s genocidal rhetoric.

[Photos: Gaza’s starvation and chaos]

On March 2, the Netanyahu government made a calculated decision to blow up this system. It didn’t just block the entry of all goods, including food. That move preluded a string of policies that seem intended to permanently push the UN out of Gaza.

By summer, Israel had refused to renew the visas of top officials at three UN agencies operating in Gaza. (These officials had publicly condemned Israel’s obstructionism, voicing accusations of genocide, collective punishment, and political sabotage—rhetoric that infuriated Israeli leaders.) Aid groups navigated a growing tangle of permits and bureaucratic impositions that made the UN’s relief efforts in Gaza unworkable. New restrictions gave the government the right to demand the names and contact details of Palestinian staffers and ban any group whose employees have questioned Israel’s existence as a Jewish, democratic state.

To replace the UN presence, Israel worked with the Trump administration to hastily design a new system to feed Gaza. Where the old international agencies were run by technical experts and experienced professionals, the new system was concocted by management consultants and private security contractors under the aegis of a newly created nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Where the UN had tried to address the full spectrum of civilian needs—medicine, sanitation, nutrition—the GHF largely focuses on food, distributing boxes and bags in just four sites, all in areas fully controlled by the Israeli military, none of them in northern Gaza. This plan transgressed fundamental principles that guide humanitarian work, and the UN announced that it wanted nothing to do with GHF.

The result was predictably disastrous. Hundreds of Palestinians were shot while mobbing soldiers during chaotic food distributions. Whatever the faults of the UN, it remains the world’s most capable relief agency. And in Gaza, it had a network of warehouses, bakeries, and kitchens and a pool of local employees. Flooding the zone is simply not possible unless Israel restores the visas of international-aid workers and allows them to operate without the labyrinthine restrictions currently paralyzing their work.

A primary impediment to providing ample food is epistemic closure. That is, many Israelis simply don’t believe the warnings of famine, because they doubt the veracity of the evidence. They say that the UN has a history of predicting catastrophes in Gaza that never come to pass. But this time is genuinely different. The price of a sack of flour, which by the end of May had skyrocketed to about $500, tells the story. And although intermittent shortages do not always lead to famine, the nature of a prolonged crisis is that it grinds down the resilience of both the human body and entire communities.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the head of Refugees International, who oversaw disaster relief for the Obama administration, told me: “In the early months of the war, if you cut off all the food, people are starting from a place where they’re still healthy. They still have money and resources. They have assets they can sell. There are still stockpiles of food. So there’s a lot more of what we in humanitarian terms would call a ‘coping mechanism.’” But those mechanisms, he said, are now gone.

That’s true not just for the recipients of aid but also for those delivering it. Relief networks rely heavily on Gazans to move and distribute food. “Like on an airplane,” Konyndyk said, “you put on your own mask before helping others. That applies here. We need to stabilize the aid providers in order to enable them to scale up the operation.”

[Read: The corrupt bargain behind Gaza’s catastrophe]

The thoroughfares that would carry food to the hungry are in no better shape. Sixty-eight percent of Gaza’s roads are damaged, according to the UN, and will require Israeli engineers to regrade and pave them. (Israeli crews have made roads passable on multiple occasions over the course of the war.) David Satterfield, a longtime American diplomat who coordinated the distribution of aid in Gaza during the Biden administration, told me that the continued warfare has “just physically disrupted the ability of aid implementers to get their stuff to warehouses, from warehouses to distribution points.”

As hunger deepens, trucks navigating these roads become ever more vulnerable to mobs desperate to plunder the contents. Crowds descend to loot out of fear that waiting in line means getting nothing. Humanitarians call this “self-distribution.” There is no functioning government to secure the convoys. Even if Gaza were inundated with food, the looting would likely persist—until the supply became so reliable that people stopped fearing it might vanish.

Every image of a child with protruding ribs is both a human tragedy and a propaganda victory for Hamas—and proof of how a just war badly lost the plot. I believed in Israel’s casus belli. I don’t believe in this. No justification can redeem the immorality of a policy built on deprivation. As Gaza braces for the worst, Israel still has a narrow window to correct its course. By flooding the zone, Israel has one last chance to redeem itself.

How NASA Engineered Its Own Decline

2025-07-28T06:00:00-04:00

In the beginning, there was the name. A prophet guided Errol Musk to bestow it on his eldest son, or so he claimed. The seer was Wernher von Braun, a German engineer and an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Though von Braun had built missiles for Hitler and used concentration-camp prisoners for manual labor, the U.S. government recruited him, and eventually brought him to a base in Alabama and tasked him with sending men into orbit, then to the moon.

Von Braun had always dreamed of venturing deeper into the galaxy. Back in 1949, before he emerged as the godfather of the American space program, he spilled his fantasies onto the page, in a novel titled Project Mars. He described how a new form of government would take hold on the red planet: a technocracy capable of the biggest and boldest things. At the helm of this Martian state would sit a supreme leader, known as the Elon.

Whatever the truth of this origin story, Elon Musk has seized on von Braun’s prophecy as his destiny. Since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, his business decisions and political calculations have been made with a transcendent goal in mind: the moment when he carries the human species to a new homeland, a planet millions of miles away, where colonists will be insulated from the ravages of nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI, and all the unforeseen disasters that will inevitably crush life on Earth. Far away from the old, broken planet, a libertarian utopia will flourish, under the beneficent sway of the Elon.

This sense of destiny led Musk on October 5, 2024, to a Trump rally in western Pennsylvania. Wearing a gray T-shirt bearing the slogan OCCUPY MARS, Musk told the crowd that Trump “must win to preserve democracy in America.” Thanks to their alliance, Musk briefly achieved powers that few unelected Americans have ever possessed. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, he demolished large swaths of the federal government and began to remake the infrastructure of the state. For a few erratic months, he assumed the role of the terrestrial Elon.

Five months into Trump’s second term, Musk’s inflated sense of his place in history clashed with the ego of his benefactor, the relationship ruptured, and each man threatened to ruin the other. Musk vowed that his spaceships would no longer carry Americans, or the supplies that sustain them, to the International Space Station. Trump threatened SpaceX’s federal contracts, reportedly worth $22 billion. Weeks later, they were still bludgeoning each other. In July, Trump mused that he might deport the South African–born Musk, who in turn impishly announced that he would bankroll a new third party.

Both men are likely bluffing. Musk still needs the U.S. government to fund his grand designs. And the U.S. government very much needs Elon Musk.

Last year, 95 percent of the rockets launched in the United States were launched by SpaceX. NASA was a mere passenger. Musk has crowded low Earth orbit with satellites (nearly 8,000) that are becoming indispensable to the military’s capacity to communicate and the government’s surveillance of hostile powers. Even if Trump had pushed to dislodge Musk, he couldn’t. No rival could readily replace the services his companies provide.

[Read: American spaceflight is now in Elon Musk’s hands]

That Musk has superseded NASA is a very American parable. A generation ago, NASA was the crown jewel of the U.S. government. It was created in 1958 to demonstrate the superiority of the American way of life, and it succeeded brilliantly. In the course of landing humans on the lunar surface, NASA became the symbol of America’s competence and swagger, of how it—alone among the nations of the Earth—inhabited the future. NASA’s astronauts were 20th-century cowboys, admired in corners of the world that usually abhorred Americans. The Apollo crews traveled to the heavens on behalf of “all mankind,” a phrase that appeared both in the act that created NASA and on the plaque left on the moon by Apollo 11. Even NASA’s engineers, with their skinny ties and rolled-up sleeves, became the stuff of Hollywood legend.

The rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. In his novel, Project Mars, he imagined humans traveling to the red planet. (Evening Standard / Getty)

NASA was born at the height of liberalism’s faith in government, and its demise tracks the decline of that faith. As the United States lost confidence in its ability to accomplish great things, it turned to Musk as a potential savior, and ultimately surrendered to him. This isn’t an instance of crony capitalism, but a tale about well-meaning administrations, of both parties, pursuing grandiose ambitions without the vision, competence, or funding to realize them.

If the highest goal of policy is efficiency, then all the money that the government has spent on SpaceX makes sense. Even the company’s most vituperative detractors acknowledge its engineering genius and applaud its success in driving down launch expenses (unlike many defense contractors, SpaceX largely eats the cost of its failures). But in the course of bolstering Musk, in privatizing a public good, the government has allowed one billionaire to hold excessive sway. With the flick of a switch, he now has the power to shut down constellations of satellites, to isolate a nation, to hobble the operations of an entire army.

Because of Musk’s indispensability, his values have come to dominate America’s aspirations in space, draining the lyricism from the old NASA mission. Space was once a realm of cooperation, beyond commercial interests and military pursuits. Now it is the site of military brinkmanship and a source of raw materials that nations hope to plunder. The humanistic pursuit of the mysteries of the universe has been replaced by an obsession with rocket power. Musk wants to use his influence to impose the improbable endeavor of Mars colonization on the nation, enriching him as it depletes its own coffers. In the vacuum left by a nation’s faded ambitions, Musk’s delusions of destiny have taken hold.

NASA’s golden age emerged from fiasco.

John F. Kennedy campaigned for president promising a “New Frontier,” but he didn’t really care about satellites or astronauts. Just before he launched his campaign, he confided to one scientist over drinks in Boston that he considered rockets a waste of money. A few years later, during a conversation recorded in the White House, he flatly admitted, “I’m not that interested in space.”

But by the third month of his presidency, Kennedy was drowning in humiliation. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets hurled the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—or Gaga, as the international press adoringly called him—into orbit for 108 minutes, the first human to journey into the beyond. The New York Times hailed it as evidence of “Soviet superiority.” The impression of American incompetence deepened five days later, when a CIA-backed army of exiles botched an invasion of Cuba, a misadventure immortalized as the Bay of Pigs.

In his desperation to redirect the narrative, Kennedy abruptly became an enthusiast for the most ambitious plan sitting on NASA’s shelf. On April 21, shortly after his proxy army surrendered to the Communists, Kennedy suffered a bruising press conference. In response to a question about the relative inferiority of the American space program, he riffed, “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.”

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on his way to becoming the first man to orbit the Earth (Bettmann / Getty)

A month later, Kennedy delivered an address to a joint session of Congress that more formally launched the Apollo program. Even then, he did so harboring private doubts about the price tag, perhaps stoked by the fact that his own father considered his promise to land an astronaut on the lunar surface by 1970 an appalling act of profligacy. Joe Kennedy fumed, “Damn it, I taught Jack better than that.”

When Kennedy voiced his ambitions, he stumbled into tautology: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” He charged the American government with executing an engineering task more difficult than any other in human history, for no higher reason than to prove that it could be done. That was the animating spirit of “New Frontier” liberalism.

From the vantage of the present—when public faith in government is threadbare—it is staggering to consider the heedless investment Americans allowed Washington to make in a project with little tangible payoff, beyond the pursuit of global prestige in its zero-sum contest with the Soviet Union. At its peak, Apollo employed a workforce of about 400,000. The lunar program cost an astonishing $28 billion, somewhere north of $300 billion in today’s dollars.

On Kennedy’s own terms, Apollo was a world-historic triumph. The legendary NASA chief James Webb and his deputies helped create a whole new philosophy for running immense organizations: systems management. NASA simultaneously micromanaged its engineers—knowing that an unwanted speck of dust could trigger catastrophe—while giving them wide latitude to innovate. Complex flowcharts helped coordinate the work of dozens of teams across academia, corporations, and government laboratories. Despite using untested technologies, NASA achieved a near-perfect safety record, marred only by the 1967 fire that killed three astronauts in their capsule as they prepared for the first crewed Apollo mission. Even then, NASA’s relentless culture kept pushing toward its goal.

Unlike the Soviets, who attempted to dictate public perceptions by manically managing the images of their exploits, NASA made the risky decision to allow its project to unfurl on live television. The Apollo voyages made for the most gripping viewing in the history of the medium. By one estimate, a fifth of the planet watched Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk live, an especially astonishing number given the limited global reach of television in 1969.

The space program then was a projection of prowess and self-confidence. “Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched,” Lyndon B. Johnson wrote in his memoir. “If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged.” Apollo was a model for planned social change and technocratic governance—the prototype for tomorrow.

The savviest bureaucrats are hitmakers. Years before Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon, NASA had begun prepping plans for a sequel to Apollo. Only after the enchanted moment of the lunar touchdown did the agency meet with Vice President Spiro Agnew to unveil the next phase of America’s future in space. On August 4, 1969, 15 days after Armstrong’s giant leap, NASA pitched the Nixon administration on its vision of sending humans to Mars.

To nail the presentation, NASA brought von Braun, its most celebrated engineer, to do the talking. After all, they were selling the vision he had sketched in his novel decades earlier. By 1982, NASA said, it hoped to land on Mars in two nuclear-powered planetary vehicles, each carrying six crew members.

But in NASA’s moment of glory, von Braun and his colleagues couldn’t restrain themselves. They added items to their wish list: a lunar base, a space station, and a shuttle that would transport humans. Pandering before the ego that NASA needed most in order to realize its request, von Braun said he wanted to send Richard Nixon into orbit as part of the nation’s celebration of its bicentennial, in 1976.

Agnew loved it. Nixon did not. He must have despised the thought of shoveling so much money into a program so closely associated with the blessed memory of his old nemesis John Kennedy. Besides, the moment of boundless technocracy was over, doomed by deficits and a sharp swerve in the public mood. During the unending debacle of Vietnam, the public had lost faith in grand ventures dreamed up by whiz kids. Meanwhile, civil-rights leaders railed against the diversion of major expenditures away from social programs. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni popularized a term that captured the rising sourness: moon-doggle.

At a moment when Nixon was hoping to retrench, NASA proposed a program with an annual cost that would eventually rise to $10 billion, carried out over more than a decade—an expense far greater than Apollo’s. Von Braun and his colleagues had badly misread the room.

President Richard Nixon and the Apollo 13 crewmen on April 18, 1970. Nixon took a dim view of funding a trip to Mars. (Heritage Images / Getty)

In the end, Nixon agreed to give NASA an annual budget of just over $3 billion, and he scythed away every component of the plan except for the space station and the space shuttle, which was a reusable system that promised to limit the costs of space travel. But a shuttle traveling where? As Apollo wrapped up its final missions—and even three of those were canceled—NASA no longer had a clear destination.

Many of the leaders who carried the agency through the space race, including von Braun, began to depart for the private sector. During Apollo, government engineers had been omnipresent, stationed in the factories of its contractors; they mastered details. That changed in the shuttle era, with its constricted budgets and diminished expectations. Instead of micromanaging contractors, NASA began to defer to them, giving aerospace corporations greater sway over vessel design. In fact, it allowed them to own the underlying intellectual property for the vehicles and their component parts.

Because the contractors understood the minutiae and they didn’t, NASA officials grew reluctant to push for innovations, paralyzed by the fear that they might be blamed for a contractor’s mistake. A bureaucratic mindset took hold, first slowly, and then more dramatically after the Challenger disaster, in 1986. Freeman Dyson, the visionary astrophysicist, drew a devastating distinction between the “paper NASA,” largely a figment of memory and pop culture, and the “real NASA,” the sclerotic organization that rose in its place. Those criticisms were both legitimate and somewhat unfair; in the shadow of crewed spaceflight, which garnered attention and prestige, NASA pursued advances in robotics and astrophysics, such as the Galileo mission to Jupiter. But without a human on board, those accomplishments lacked the romance of NASA’s golden age.

In the summer of 2001, Elon Musk sat in a Manhattan hotel room, fired up his laptop, and browsed NASA.gov. He had just returned from a party on Long Island. On the ride home, he’d told a friend, “I’ve always wanted to do something in space, but I don’t think there’s anything that an individual can do.”

Musk was plenty rich and plenty bored. After a short stint as the CEO of the company that became PayPal, he was ousted by its board, although he remained its largest shareholder. He had bought a Czechoslovakian military jet, which he’d spent hundreds of hours flying, but that hardly held his attention. He was in search of his next thing.

Musk grew up a fan of science fiction, steeped in the extraterrestrial fantasies of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The reality of space exploration, however, wasn’t a subject that he’d studied closely, until he scanned NASA’s site and had a revelation.

He assumed that he would read about impending missions to Mars. “I figured it had to be soon, because we went to the moon in 1969, so we must be about to go to Mars,” he told the biographer Walter Isaacson. But no such plan existed, so he decided that it was his mission to push humanity forward.

The thought made Musk something of a cliché. Space is a magnet for rich dilettantes and—more than a sports car or yacht—the ultimate expression of wealth and power. Because space travel is ingrained in our culture as the hardest human endeavor, demanding immense resources, it commands cultural respect. For Musk—who had been bullied by both his schoolmates and his father—space offered the possibility of seizing the world by the lapels and announcing his greatness. A classic revenge fantasy.

Musk wasn’t wrong about the diminished state of NASA. Remarking on the grim persistence of the space-shuttle program, Neil deGrasse Tyson said that NASA’s flagship vessel “boldly went where man had gone hundreds of times before”—135 times, to be precise. These missions were essential to the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, but never ventured beyond the familiar confines of low Earth orbit. Even as Russia was losing the Cold War, it was winning the final chapters of the space race, fielding a program that was better conceived and more active. Indeed, when Musk first pondered launching rockets, he went to Russia in hope of buying used ones; this entailed sitting through vodka-drenched meals with apparatchiks hoping to bilk him. In the end, he concluded that it was cheaper to make his own. In 2002, he founded SpaceX.

Musk was a salesman, determined to make Washington turn its head—and sink cash into his start-up, housed in a suburban–Los Angeles warehouse, which was just beginning to cobble together its first rockets. In 2003, he trucked a seven-story rocket to D.C. and parked it outside the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. Soon enough, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave him several million dollars to help grow SpaceX. In 2006, NASA awarded him $278 million for the first installment of a new program called Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. He received these grants even though SpaceX hadn’t successfully launched a rocket. (Musk and the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

For years, NASA had leaned on the same old set of big contractors: Northrop Grumman, Rockwell, Boeing. These were stodgy firms, anchors in the military-industrial complex, codependent on the government, with their own bureaucracies. Their projects tended to swell in cost and underperform. NASA officials knew these organization’s failings and were desperate to reverse them. The shuttle program was scheduled for imminent retirement, but what would replace it? There was still a space station floating in low Earth orbit, with astronauts awaiting resupply.

At the dawn of the 21st century, disruption was the magic word, incanted by investors and fetishized in the media. It was only a matter of time before the government began chasing the same trendy idea, betting that a new group of entrepreneurs would arrive on the scene to create companies that would shatter all the old models.

In 2010, Barack Obama canceled Constellation, George W. Bush’s program for returning to the moon. NASA was getting out of the business of owning spaceships and rockets—instead, it would rent ones owned by private firms. When Obama visited the Kennedy Space Center to announce this change in direction, he viewed one of Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets, which was sitting on a launchpad. Photographers captured the young president and the budding billionaire strolling together, a passing of the torch to Musk.

Although he isn’t usually generous with sharing credit for his successes, even Musk admits that the Obama administration rescued SpaceX. Burning through cash and crashing test rockets, his company was nearing collapse. But the change in policy opened a reservoir of funds for him. At SpaceX’s bleakest moment, which Musk also describes as “the worst year of my life,” NASA awarded it a $1.6 billion contract to carry cargo to the International Space Station. In his state of relief and jubilation, Musk changed his computer password to “ilovenasa.”

Of all the emerging firms in the age of commercial spaceflight, SpaceX was the most deserving of success. Musk had an eye for engineering talent, and he preached an audacious vision, which attracted young idealists. Impatient, he questioned truisms and cut costs with unrelenting intensity, even if it meant buying a tool on eBay to align a rocket.

Despite its strengths, SpaceX couldn’t triumph in this new age, because the idea of commercialization was inherently flawed. There wasn’t a market for rocket launches, asteroid mining, or spacesuit design. For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a limited budget: the U.S. government. That realization ultimately prodded Musk into another line of business. In 2015, he created Starlink. His rockets would launch satellites into orbit to supply Earth with internet service, a far more lucrative business.

Starlink turned SpaceX into a behemoth. Because SpaceX was constantly launching rockets—and not just for NASA—it kept gaining invaluable new data and insights, which allowed it to produce cheaper, better rockets. Because nothing is more exciting to an engineer than actually launching things, the company drained talent from its competition.

Musk’s goal wasn’t to achieve the banal status of monopolist. “The lens of getting to Mars has motivated every SpaceX decision,” Musk told Isaacson. When he created Starlink, he did so because it would supply him with the capital to build rockets powerful enough to carry humanity to Mars.

Musk, who describes himself as a “cultural Christian,” is not an especially religious person. But his imagination is fixed on the end of days—the possibility of an “extinction event”—because his childhood experiences push his adult anxieties in the direction of the catastrophic. In South Africa, he came of age amid the decaying of the apartheid state, which had once promised to safeguard his racial caste. His family, like his society, was fracturing. When he was 8, his parents divorced. He now recalls his father as a monstrous figure. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” Musk once told Rolling Stone. (Errol Musk told Rolling Stone that “he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone,” and later said that his son’s comments were about their political differences at the time.)

Given this turbulence—and the paucity of reliable authority in his early life—it’s hardly surprising that Musk would fear the worst. He found refuge from the world’s harsh realities in the pages of sci-fi novels. But visions of apocalypse are the genre’s elemental motif, and the fiction he devoured often magnified his dread.

Musk sought out works that offered both cause for despair and a vision of transcendence. Those Asimov novels featured hyperrational heroes, many of them engineers, who saved humanity by building space colonies where civilization could begin anew. Musk borrowed his self-conception from these protagonists.

From an early age, the colonization of Mars became Musk’s idée fixe. At various points, he has described his companies as contributing to that overarching mission. Tesla’s Cybertrucks are vehicles that could be adapted to traverse the Martian terrain; its solar panels, a potential energy source for a future colony. He has even reportedly claimed that his social-media platform, X, could serve as an experiment in decentralized governance—testing how a Martian outpost might use consensus as the basis for lawmaking, because he envisions a minimalist government on the red planet.

At SpaceX, Musk’s employees have begun sketching the contours of life on Mars. One team is designing housing and communal spaces; Musk has already named the first Martian city Terminus, after a planetary colony in Asimov’s novels. Other teams are developing spacesuits tailored to the planet’s harsh environment and exploring the feasibility of human reproduction there. (When The New York Times reported on these teams, Musk denied their existence.)

No engineering challenge in human history rivals the audacity of making Mars a place humans can call home. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, calls it a “fixer-upper” planet, a hilarious understatement. Mars’s atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide and laced with nitrogen, among other elements and a smattering of toxins. Temperatures can plunge to –225 degrees Fahrenheit. My colleague Ross Andersen once memorably described what would happen to a human body on Mars: “If you were to stroll onto its surface without a spacesuit, your eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds.” Even with a suit, protection would be tenuous: Cosmic radiation would seep through, and Martian dust storms—filled with abrasive, electrically charged particles—could bypass seams and seals.

[Read: To get to Mars, NASA might finally need to hire explorers]

These impossible conditions are compounded by Mars’s distance from Earth. Launches are feasible only about once every 26 months, when the planets’ orbits align to minimize travel time and fuel requirements. Even then, it takes roughly eight months for a spacecraft to reach Mars, making it exceedingly difficult to resupply a colony or rescue its inhabitants.

When challenged about these mortal dangers, Musk is disarmingly relaxed, and has said that he himself would make the journey. “People will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States,” he told Isaacson. “But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in March 2025. (Manuel Mazzanti / NurPhoto / AP)

To warm the planet, he proposes detonating nuclear bombs over Mars’s poles, which he claims could induce a greenhouse effect—an idea he relishes, perhaps as a troll. SpaceX once sold T-shirts bearing the slogan Nuke Mars. According to a top scientist at the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, it would take more than 10,000 nuclear-tipped missiles to carry out Musk’s plan. Even Wernher von Braun’s fictional doppelgänger, Dr. Strangelove, might have winced at such breezy talk of thermonuclear explosions.

President Kennedy was also willing to take absurd risks in pursuit of cosmic ambition, invoking the Cold War imperative to “bear any burden.” But he did so to demonstrate national greatness. Musk is seeking to spend trillions—and risk human lives—to demonstrate his own. Because his reality emerges from fiction, Musk is untethered from any sense of earthly constraints. His sense of his own role in the plot emerges from his desire to leap into myth.

Musk’s fixation on Mars also functions as a kind of ancestor worship, echoing a family mythology of flight from decline. In 1950, his grandfather Joshua Haldeman left Canada for South Africa in search of a freer society—one he believed could withstand the collapse of Western civilization. Haldeman’s doomsday rhetoric railed against Jewish bankers and “hordes of Coloured people,” whom he claimed were being manipulated to destroy “White Christian Civilization.” In the rise of apartheid, he saw not repression but redemption, a last stand for the values he held sacred.

[Read: Elon Musk’s anti-Semitic, apartheid-loving grandfather]

Like his grandfather, Musk is obsessed with staving off civilizational collapse. He does not voice his fears in openly racist terms—instead framing them in the language of freedom and survival—but he is fixated on the notion of a gene pool with diminishing intelligence. “If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad,” he told the biographer Ashlee Vance. His rhetoric is provocative, but slippery enough to avoid outright extremism.

Over years of statements, social-media posts, and interviews, however, a pattern has emerged: Musk sees Mars not merely as a lifeboat but as a laboratory—an opportunity to reengineer humanity. On a new planet, far from Earth’s chaos and constraint, he imagines a society remade in his own image.

This belief is rooted in a kind of technological social Darwinism, the idea that evolution can be steered, or even upgraded, by engineering. It’s how he describes an animating premise of Neuralink, the company he co-founded that is developing brain-computer interfaces that aim to merge human cognition with machines and effectively create a species of cyborgs.

The same spirit infuses Musk’s obsession with procreation, and he’s doing his part. He now has at least 14 children, by The Wall Street Journal ’s count, with four biological mothers. In his worldview, apocalypse and salvation converge: Either we become a race of engineered brilliance, or we vanish, and Mars is the greatest opportunity for remaking humanity. In a sense, it follows a classic pattern of migration. The bold depart in search of opportunity, while those who remain face extinction. Survival becomes a test of worth. Those who stay behind will, by their inaction, mark themselves as unfit for the future.

Once settlers arrive on Mars, Musk has suggested that life forms—possibly including humans—might be bioengineered to survive the planet’s harsh environment. In one interview, he noted that humanity has long shaped organisms “by sort of selective breeding.” Humans, he intimated, could be bred like cows. He’s reportedly prepared to supply his own genetic material to the effort. Sources told the Times that Musk has offered to donate his sperm to help seed a Martian colony (which Musk later denied).

Using a concept borrowed from Asimov’s fiction, Musk says that Martian colonists will serve as “the light of consciousness.” They are humanity’s last hope, the counterweight to a dark age that could follow Earth’s destruction. But what’s dark is his vision of abandoning Earth and investing the species’ faith in a self-selected elite, one that mirrors Musk’s own values, and perhaps even his traits. The idea is megalomaniacal, and is the antithesis of the old NASA ideal: for all mankind.

In the earliest hours of a spring morning, I drove across a Florida causeway, through a nature reserve filled with alligators and wild boars, to hallowed ground: Launch Complex 39A, once a stage for NASA’s majesty.

More than half a century ago, Apollo 11 began its ascent to the moon here. During the space race, it was perhaps the most exciting place on the planet, poised between glory and disaster: 11 Apollo missions lifted off from here, followed by 82 space-shuttle launches. NASA framed 39A for the television era: an enormous American flag fluttering at one end of the horizon, a giant digital countdown clock at the other. Even now, a weathered CBS News sign hangs on a small cinder-block building with a perfect view of the site—the same spot where Walter Cronkite once narrated liftoffs in his authoritative baritone.

By 2013, the launchpad had become an expensive, unused relic, but because of its presence on the National Register of Historic Places, it couldn’t be torn down. Musk coveted the site, as did his longtime competitor, Jeff Bezos. But at the time, Bezos didn’t have a rocket capable of flying from 39A. SpaceX won the rights to lease the launchpad for the next 20 years. The old theater of American dreams now belonged to Musk.

I arrived at 39A to watch the launch of Falcon 9—SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, the height of a 20-story building—which would help deliver cargo to the International Space Station, circling in low Earth orbit. There’s no alternative to the Falcon 9, and there’s no rival to SpaceX. For the time being, the company is the only domestic entity, public or private, with the capacity to deliver crew and cargo to the space station.

Lyndon Johnson once said that “control of space means control of the world.” In his day, space was a way to project national strength to a global audience through displays of technical superiority. Today, it has become a domain of warfare, alongside land, sea, and air. Modern combat operations rely on space-based systems that guide munitions, coordinate communications, and spy on adversaries. Without dominance in orbit, terrestrial forces would be deaf, blind, and largely immobile. In 2019, then, the Pentagon created the Space Force as the sixth branch of the military.

If space is power, then Musk’s role is badly understated. It’s no longer accurate to call him merely the world’s richest earthling. The United States is now dependent on him in its quest to command space. Through its Starshield division, SpaceX provides space-based communication for the U.S. armed forces; its satellites can reportedly track hypersonic and ballistic missiles and extend the government’s surveillance reach to nearly every corner of the globe. In April, the Space Force awarded SpaceX a majority of its contracts for a batch of national-security missions over the coming years.

Some of this work involves agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office, placing it within the penumbra of classification. The true extent of the government’s reliance on SpaceX is largely obscured, rarely scrutinized, and only loosely regulated. Yet the dependency is undeniable. If Musk were to withhold support—out of principle, pique, or profit motive—the government could find itself stranded. None of SpaceX’s competitors yet possesses the capability to replace it. (A Space Force spokesperson said that it relies on “a number of industry partners,” including SpaceX, and continues to seek “to broaden the diversity of potential vendors,” adding that the Department of Defense “exercises rigorous oversight” of its contracts. The spokesperson also denied claims that SpaceX’s satellites track missiles.)

The war in Ukraine has offered a chilling glimpse of the risks posed by Musk’s role as interstellar gatekeeper. In the early days of the invasion, SpaceX rushed to supply Ukraine with Starlink terminals, helping to replace communications systems debilitated by Russian cyberattacks and advancing troops. It was a noble gesture and a strategic boon. Ukrainian forces, empowered by the new technology, coordinated scrappy, asymmetrical tactics that blunted Russian advances.

But Musk’s commitment soon wavered. In September 2022, SpaceX denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, effectively blocking a planned strike on Russian naval forces in Sevastopol. (Starting that fall, Musk began speaking with Vladimir Putin at length, according to the Journal, troubling the U.S. intelligence community.) In the months that followed, the company imposed new geographic limits on Starlink’s use, restricting its application in areas where Ukraine might otherwise target Russia’s vulnerabilities. Musk framed the move as an act of prudent restraint that would help avert World War III. But it also exposed an unsettling reality: Ukraine’s battlefield operations were subject to the discretion of a single person. “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” he posted on X. “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

Musk’s preeminence marks a profound shift in the history of American political economy. During the Cold War, the military-industrial complex was driven by corporations that operated as handmaidens to the state. They had outsize influence, but remained largely bureaucratic, gray-flannel institutions—cogs in a sprawling, profitable machine. Musk is different. Years of hagiographic media coverage and his immense social-media reach birthed legions of fanboys and nurtured a cult of personality. His achievements command awe.

Photo-illustration by Fernando Pino¹

In the damp Florida night, I stood on a sandbank and trained my eyes on Launch Complex 39A as the countdown clock ticked toward zero. And then, without the benefit of Cronkite’s narration, I watched the Falcon 9 violently part the darkness, with a payload bound for the space station. A few minutes later, a light appeared in the sky: The reusable rocket was returning home. Majestic and imperious, it cast a warm glow over the palm trees.

For a moment this spring, Musk’s grand ambitions seemed like they might buckle. In Washington, it had long been assumed that Musk and Trump would turn on each other. When it finally happened, the spark, fittingly, was NASA. Musk had pushed to install his friend Jared Isaacman as head of the agency—a move that stank of cronyism. In 2021, Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur, had paid SpaceX millions to chase a childhood dream of flying to space. That deal soon led to a friendship, and eventually, his company owning a stake in SpaceX itself.

[Read: MAGA goes to Mars]

When Trump soured on Musk, he struck where it hurt most. Annoyed after learning of Isaacman’s past donations to Democratic campaigns, the president withdrew the nomination on May 31. Musk received the move as one in a string of betrayals and erupted online, warning that the Jeffrey Epstein files would implicate Trump and that the president’s spending bill was a “disgusting abomination.” The clash soon shifted to space. Musk threatened to decommission the spacecraft resupplying the International Space Station; Trump blustered that he would order a review of SpaceX’s government contracts.

Yet for all the rancor, there is no sign that SpaceX has actually suffered. Trump and Musk have dismembered the federal bureaucracy, but its old tendencies are still prevailing; the apparatus clings to the vendors that have delivered results. Even as Trump raged, Washington’s dependence on Musk was growing. In June, a Space Force commander said that SpaceX will play a crucial part in the MILNET program, a new constellation of 480-plus satellites. Reportedly, the Pentagon will pay for it; the intelligence community will oversee it; Musk will run it.

In its proposed 2026 budget, the Trump administration moved to bankroll Musk’s deeper ambitions, albeit with a fraction of the gargantuan sum required. Trump has proposed spending $1 billion to accelerate a mission to Mars and fund the design of spacesuits, landing systems, and other technologies that would make a voyage feasible.

The money spent on human space exploration will be pried from NASA’s other programs, even as the agency’s total budget is set to shrink by nearly 25 percent and its workforce by one-third. To fulfill Musk’s cosmic destiny, the administration is gutting NASA’s broader scientific mission—the thing that NASA does best. (When asked about this shift, a NASA spokesperson described “leading the way in human exploration of our solar system” as the agency’s “core mission,” and added that it is “contributing to a competitive market that will increase commercial innovation.”) Human spaceflight has floundered for decades, haunted by its inability to replicate its greatest achievements and whipsawed by changing presidential priorities. And the importance of astronauts to the enterprise of exploration, which was always questionable, has further diminished as the quality of robots has improved.

At the same time, and without attracting the same kind of fanfare, NASA continues to display extraordinary acumen in science; its research initiatives are arguably the most profound ventures in all of government. They address the greatest mysteries in the universe: How did life begin? Are we alone in the cosmos?

The government—so often viewed as a soul-sapping bureaucracy—has helped supply answers to these most spiritual of questions. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Cosmic Background Explorer provided empirical support for the Big Bang theory. In 2020, after the OSIRIS-REx probe reached the asteroid Bennu, it collected a sample from a type of primordial projectile thought to have delivered life’s building blocks to early Earth. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA helped determine the age of the universe, affirmed the existence of dark energy, and extended humanity’s gaze into distant galaxies and black holes. By capturing light from galaxies as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, one of NASA’s telescopes has effectively peered into the universe’s distant past.

For all of Musk’s mockery of NASA’s supposed lack of ambition, the agency had already mounted a daring campaign to explore Mars—albeit with robots, not settlers. Over the decades, it sent a fleet of rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance) to wander the plains of the red planet, drilling into rock and searching for ancient traces of water and life.

NASA’s lenses point inward as well as outward. Its satellites have documented the melting of the polar ice caps and the destruction of forests, alerting humanity to the planet’s precarity. Unlike the technological spin-offs NASA often touts to Congress to justify its existence, these discoveries aren’t fleeting breakthroughs in applied engineering. They are the path to humanity’s self-knowledge—discoveries that private firms will never pursue, because their value can’t be monetized.

Put differently, Trump’s budget is a cultural document. It reflects a shift in public values. Not so long ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan shaped how Americans thought about space. He did so through elegant books and his television series, Cosmos, which reached an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide. At its core, his project was to extol the virtues of the scientific method, which requires and promotes skepticism and humility—a way of thinking that could help society resist the lure of authoritarianism. He exuded wonder, a value he hoped to cultivate in Americans, and harkened back to the humanism of the Enlightenment, which was unfussy about the boundaries between philosophy and science.

Every time I see Musk, I think of Sagan—because Musk is his opposite. He is a creature not of science but of engineering. He owes his fortune to the brute force of his rockets, and the awe they inspire. There’s nothing humble about his manner. Rather than celebrate the fragile, improvised nature of human existence, Musk seeks to optimize or overwrite it—in the name of evolution, in pursuit of profit, in the vainglorious fulfillment of his adolescent fantasies. Where Sagan envisioned cooperation, Musk embodies the triumph of the individual. Where Sagan cautioned against the unintended consequences of technology, Musk charges headlong into the next disruption. That rush will eventually sweep away many of the old strictures confining him.

For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has mulled missions to Mars and never mustered the political will to fund one. Elon Musk is doing just that. SpaceX is planning to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars—neither funded nor formally sanctioned by NASA—in late 2026, timed for planetary alignment.

Musk himself pegs the odds of hitting that 2026 window at 50–50. His history of theatrics and unmet deadlines suggests that those odds may be overstated. But this is more than bluster. He is building the most powerful rocket in human history, testing it at a relentless pace, and forcing it toward viability through sheer will. However speculative his timelines, they point to a plausible destination: the day when Musk escapes the gravitational pull of the U.S. government.

The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity’s loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator. What was meant to be a partner became a force of domination. The master lost control. And so begins a new part of the tale: a dystopian chapter written in the language of liberation.

* Lead image sources (clockwise from bottom left): NASA; Corbis / Getty; Gianluigi Guercia / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Alex Brandon / AP

¹ Image sources: NASA; Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Bill Ingalls / NASA / Getty; Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty; Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post / Getty

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “The Man Who Ate NASA.”

Zelensky Learned the Wrong Lesson From Trump

2025-07-27T13:30:00-04:00

Volodymyr Zelensky built a mythic reputation as a lonely bulwark against global tyranny. On Tuesday, the president of Ukraine signed that reputation away, enacting a law that gutted the independence of his country’s anti-corruption agencies just as they closed in on his closest political allies, reportedly including one of his longtime business partners and a former deputy prime minister. To justify the decision, he cloaked it in an invented conspiracy, insinuating that Russian moles had implanted themselves in the machinery of justice. This is a scoundrel’s playbook.

Despite the ongoing war, Ukrainians swamped the streets of Kyiv in protest of their president’s betrayal of democracy, forcing Zelensky to introduce new legislation reversing the bill he had just signed into law. It was a concession of error—and possibly an empty gesture, because the new bill is hardly a lock to pass the legislature. That Zelensky brazenly weakened Ukraine’s anti-corruption guardrails in the first place shouldn’t come as a shock. They were erected only under sustained pressure from the Obama administration as part of an explicit bargain: In exchange for military and financial support, Ukraine would rein in its oligarchs and reform its public institutions. Over time, the country drifted, however unevenly, toward a system that was more transparent, less captive to hidden hands.

But in the Trump era, the United States has grown proudly tolerant of global corruption. In fact, it actively encourages its proliferation. Beyond the president’s own venal example, this is deliberate policy. Brick by brick, Donald Trump has dismantled the apparatus that his predecessors built to constrain global kleptocracy, and leaders around the world have absorbed the fact that the pressure for open, democratic governance is off.

[Anne Applebaum: Kleptocracy, Inc.]

Three weeks into his current term, Trump paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—loudly declaring that the United States wasn’t going to police foreign bribery. Weeks later, America skipped a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s anti-bribery working group for the first time since its founding 30 years ago. As the head of the anti-corruption group Transparency International warned, Trump was sending “a dangerous signal that bribery is back on the table.”

For decades, the U.S. did more than prosecute bribery cases; it tried to cultivate civil-society organizations that helped emerging democracies combat corruption themselves. But upon returning to the presidency, Trump destroyed USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace, dismantling the constellation of government agencies that had quietly tutored investigative journalists, trained judges, and funded watchdogs.

These groups weren’t incidental casualties in DOGE’s seemingly scattershot demolition of the American state. Trump long loathed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which he described as a “horrible law,” an animus stoked by the fact that some of his closest associates have been accused of murky dealings abroad. Crushing programs and organizations that fight kleptocracy meshed with the “America First” instincts of his base; the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon abhor the export of liberal values to the world.

From the wreckage of these institutions, a Trump Doctrine has taken shape, one that uses American economic and political power to shield corrupt autocrats from accountability. Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, has been a prime beneficiary. Just as he was preparing to testify under oath, Trump denounced the prosecution as a “political witch hunt” and threatened to withhold U.S. aid if the trial moved forward. Given Israel’s reliance on American support, the threat had bite. Not long after Trump’s outburst, the court postponed Netanyahu’s testimony, citing national-security concerns.

Trump acts as if justice for strongmen is a moral imperative. No retaliatory measure is apparently off limits. To defend his populist ally in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces charges related to an attempted coup, Trump revoked the visa of Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice overseeing the case. Last month, Trump threatened to impose 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian steel, aluminum, and agricultural exports to punish the country for Bolsonaro’s prosecution.

This is hard-nosed realism, not just ideological kinship. To protect himself, Trump must defend the rights of populist kleptocrats everywhere. He must discredit the sort of prosecution that he might someday face. That requires recasting malfeasance as perfectly acceptable statesmanship.

[Listen: The kleptocracy club]

By stripping anti-corruption from the moral vocabulary of American foreign policy, Trump is reengineering the global order. He’s laying the foundation for a new world in which kleptocracy flourishes unfettered, because there’s no longer a superpower that, even rhetorically, aspires to purge the world of corruption. Of course, the United States has never pushed as hard as it could, and ill-gotten gains have been smuggled into its bank accounts, cloaked in shell companies. Still, oligarchs were forced to disguise their thievery, because there was at least the threat of legal consequence. In the world that Trump is building, there’s no need for disguise—corruption is a credential, not a liability.

Zelensky is evidence of the new paradigm. Although his initial campaign for president in 2019 was backed by an oligarch, he could never be confused for Bolsonaro or Netanyahu. He didn’t enrich himself by plundering the state. But now that Trump has given the world permission to turn away from the ideals of good governance, even the sainted Zelensky has seized the opportunity to protect the illicit profiteering of his friends and allies.

Yet there’s a legacy of the old system that Trump hasn’t wholly eliminated: the institutions and civil societies that the United States spent a generation helping build. In Ukraine, those organizations and activists have refused to accept a retreat into oligarchy, and they might still preserve their governmental guardians against corruption. For now, they are all that remain between the world and a new golden age of impunity.

Columbia Protected Its Funding and Sacrificed Its Freedom

2025-07-24T15:45:58-04:00

Exhausted and demoralized, Columbia University agreed last night to pay the Trump administration $221 million in exchange for peace. By early next week, it will deposit the first of three installments into the U.S. Treasury, as part of a settlement that ends the government’s investigations into the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from discrimination. By paying tribute to the administration—and making other concessions aimed at shifting its campus culture ideologically—Columbia hopes to ensure that research grants will begin to flow again, and that the threat of deep cuts will be lifted.

In the context of the administration’s assault on American higher education, Columbia will feel as if it has dodged the worst. A large swath of the university community, including trustees who yearned for reform of their broken institution, may even be quietly grateful: When past presidents attempted to take even minor steps to address the problem of campus anti-Semitism, they faced resistance from faculty and obstreperous administrators. Ongoing federal monitoring of Columbia’s civil-rights compliance, arguably the most significant component of the deal, will almost certainly compel the university to act more decisively in response to claims of anti-Jewish bias.

[Franklin Foer: Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem]

Columbia’s decision to settle is understandable, but it’s also evidence of how badly the Trump era has numbed the conscience of the American elite. To protect its funding, Columbia sacrificed its freedom.

The settlement is contingent on Columbia following through on a series of promises that it made in March, when the Trump administration revoked $400 million in grants. The university agreed to install a vice provost to review academic programs focused on the Middle East to ensure they are “balanced.” It also pledged to hire new faculty for the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

As it happens, I agree: Many of Columbia’s programs espouse an unabashedly partisan view of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and more faculty at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies would be a welcome development. The fields that will receive scrutiny have professors with documented records of bigotry. Columbia has long nurtured a coterie of activist academics who regard Israel’s very existence as a moral offense. Some have been accused of belittling students who challenged their views—and their example helped shape the culture of the institution. In time, students mimicked their teachers, ostracizing classmates who identified as Zionists or who simply happened to be born in Israel. After October 7, 2023, life on campus became unbearable for a meaningful number of Jewish students.

[Rose Horowitch: Anti-Semitism gets the DEI treatment]

But in the government’s ideological intervention into campus culture, a precedent has been set: What Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls “a roadmap for elite universities” is a threat to the free exchange of ideas on campuses across the country, and abuse of that map is painfully easy to contemplate.

In part, many people at Columbia have shrugged at the settlement’s troubling provisions regulating the ideological composition of academic departments because the university already announced those steps in the spring. But it’s chilling to see them enshrined in a court document—signed by the university’s acting president, Claire Shipman, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi and two other Cabinet secretaries.

The university’s deal with the Trump administration “was carefully crafted to protect the values that define us,” Shipman said in a statement. The settlement contains a line meant to allay critics who worry about the loss of academic freedom: “No provision of this Agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university admissions decisions, or the content of academic speech.” If the government doesn’t like whom Columbia hires, it can raise its concerns with a mutually agreed-upon “monitor” named Bart Schwartz, a former prosecutor who worked under Rudy Giuliani during his tenure as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who will ostensibly render a neutral verdict. Schwartz’s ruling, however, won’t be binding. And if the government remains dissatisfied with Columbia’s conduct, it reserves the right to open a new investigation.

But Shipman’s protestations of independence ring hollow. The university has already agreed, under duress, to alter the ideological contours of its faculty. And even if I happen to support those particular changes, I can’t ignore the principle they establish. The tactics now being used to achieve outcomes I favor can just as easily be turned toward results I find abhorrent. That’s the nature of the American culture war. One side unearths a novel tactic; the other side applies it as retribution.

The Trump administration is likely to take the Columbia template and press it more aggressively upon other schools. It will transpose this victory into other contexts, using it to pursue broader purges of its perceived enemies. There’s no need to speculate about hidden motives: Both Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have been explicit about their desire to diminish the power and prestige of the American university, to strip it of its ability to inculcate ideas they find abhorrent. They are trying to tame a profession they regard as a cultural adversary. “This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far-left-leaning professors,” McMahon told Fox Business.

Universities are desperately in need of reform. The paucity of intellectual pluralism in the academy undermines the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge. Failure of university trustees and presidents to make these changes on their own terms has invited government intervention. But the government has a new toehold in faculty rooms, not just at Columbia but at every private university in the country.

Can This Man Save Harvard?

2025-07-18T06:00:00-04:00

Updated at 12:45 p.m. ET on July 21, 2025

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The email landed at 10 minutes to midnight on a Friday in early April—a more menacing email than Alan Garber had imagined. The Harvard president had been warned that something was coming. His university had drawn the unwanted and sustained attention of the White House, and he’d spent weeks scrambling to stave off whatever blow was coming, calling his institution’s influential alumni and highly paid fixers to arrange a meeting with someone—anyone—in the administration.

When he finally found a willing contact, he was drawn into aimless exchanges. He received no demands. No deadlines. Just a long conversation about the prospect of scheduling a conversation.

Garber wanted an audience because he believed that Harvard had a case to make. The administration had been publicly flogging elite universities for failing to confront campus anti-Semitism. But Garber—a practicing Jew with a brother living in Israel—believed Harvard had done exactly that.

In the spring, Garber had watched Donald Trump take aim at Columbia, where anti-Israel demonstrations the previous year had so overwhelmed the campus that the university canceled the school’s graduation ceremony and asked the New York Police Department to clear encampments. In early March, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal funding to the school and said that it would consider restoring the money only if Columbia agreed to dramatic reforms, including placing its Middle East–studies department under an auditor’s supervision.

Ever since William F. Buckley Jr. turned his alma mater, Yale, into a bête noire, the American right has dreamed of shattering the left’s hegemony on campus, which it sees as the primary theater for radical experiments in social engineering. Now the Trump administration was using troubling incidents of anti-Jewish bigotry as a pretext to strip Ivy League adversaries of power and prestige.

The administration’s demands of Columbia impinged on academic freedom. But from Harvard’s parochial vantage point, they were also oddly clarifying. Whatever had gone wrong in Cambridge—and Garber’s own university faced a crisis of anti-Jewish bias—it hadn’t metastasized like it had in Morningside Heights. Harvard had disciplined protesters, and Garber himself had denounced the ostracism of Jewish students. Whichever punishment the administration had in mind, surely it would fall short of the hammer dropped on Columbia.

[Franklin Foer: Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem]

That was Garber’s frame of mind when the late-night ultimatum arrived: Submit to demands even more draconian than those imposed on Columbia, or risk forfeiting nearly $9 billion in government funding. Even for Harvard, with a $53 billion endowment, $9 billion represented real money. The email ordered the university to review faculty scholarship for plagiarism and to allow an audit of its “viewpoint diversity.” It instructed Harvard to reduce “the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” No detail, no nuance—just blunt demands. To the Trump administration, it was as if Harvard were a rogue regime that needed to be brought to heel.

Trump’s team was threatening to unravel a partnership between state and academe, cultivated over generations, that bankrolled Harvard’s research, its training of scientists and physicians, its contributions to national security and global health. Federal funds made up 11 percent of the university’s operating budget—a shortfall that the school couldn’t cover for long. Stripped of federal cash, Harvard would have to shed staff, abandon projects, and shut down labs.

Yet the message also offered a kind of relief. It spared Garber from the temptation of trying to placate Trump—as Columbia had sought to do, to humiliating effect. The 13 members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, agreed unanimously: The only choice was to punch back. The university’s lawyers—one of whom, William Burck, also represented Trump-family business interests—wrote, “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Soon after Harvard released its response, absurdity ensued. The Trump administration’s letter had been signed by three people, one of whom told Harvard he didn’t know the letter had been sent. The message, Garber realized, may have been sent prematurely. Or it may have been a draft, an expression of the White House’s raw disdain, not the vetted, polished version it intended to send.

But the administration never disavowed the letter. And over the next three months, the president and his team would keep escalating.

On Memorial Day, I met Alan Garber at his home, a 10-minute walk from Harvard Yard. One of the perks of leading Harvard is the right to reside in Elmwood, an imposing Georgian mansion that befits a prince of the American establishment. But Garber had declined the upgrade, choosing instead to remain in the more modest home provided to the university’s provost. When he took the president’s job last year at 69, after 12 years as provost, he agreed to a three-year term; he didn’t want to uproot his life.

I was surprised he found time to talk. It wasn’t just a national holiday—it was the start of the most stressful week on a university president’s calendar. Graduation loomed on Thursday, with all its ceremonial burdens: the speechifying, the glad-handing, the presence of the school’s biggest donors.

Garber led me into his living room, undid his tie, and slouched into a chair. A health-care economist who also trained as a physician, he carries himself with a calm that borders on clinical. Even an admirer such as Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, describes Garber as “meek in the way he sounds.” He is the opposite of bombastic: methodical, a careful listener, temperamentally inclined to compromise. But after Harvard’s feisty reply to the administration, Garber found himself cast a mascot of the anti-Trump resistance.

This was surprising, because in his 18 months as president, Garber has positioned himself as an institutionalist and an opponent of illiberalism in all its forms: its Trumpian variant, yes, but also illiberal forces within his own university, including those concentrated in the divinity and public-health schools, the hot centers of extremism after October 7, 2023.

[Rose Horowitch: What Harvard learned from Columbia’s mistake]

As provost, Garber rarely voiced his concerns about the emerging zeitgeist. And the lesson of Larry Summers—the Harvard president overthrown in 2006, in part for his criticisms of the campus left—suggested that challenging the prevailing politics might doom a career, or become an unhappy headline. So instead of acting on his convictions, he largely kept them to himself. He played the part of loyal deputy, helping presidents—Drew Faust, Lawrence Bacow, and then the hapless Claudine Gay—execute their chosen policies, which included robustly defending affirmative action and expanding the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus. In 2019, when university administrators modestly defied progressive orthodoxy by denying tenure to an ethnic-studies professor, they sparked a sit-in and a controversy covered in the national press.

During Garber’s time as provost, he told me, he developed a nagging sense that the campus was losing its capacity for difficult political conversation. As the social movements of the day—Black Lives Matter, #MeToo—took root, he grew alarmed at the tendency of students to demonize ideological opponents. Self-censorship was shutting down debates over race and identity even before they began. “The people arriving at Harvard as first-year students over time found it more and more difficult to speak about controversial issues,” he said. Israel was a subject that seemed to buck that trend, because it elicited such noisy displays of passion. But those paroxysms of anger frequently entailed calls for boycotting intellectual enemies and the social exclusion of contrary voices—adding to the broader problem of closed-mindedness on campus.

Garber’s first major appointment as president signaled a symbolic break. He elevated law-school dean John F. Manning, a former clerk to Antonin Scalia and one of the few prominent conservative voices at Harvard, to the position of provost. Manning’s rise represented more than token inclusion: Garber has quietly begun exploring a broader initiative to expand conservative representation among tenured faculty, in an effort to cultivate a more pluralistic ethos on campus.

Even as Harvard sits on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks from the right, Garber has turned inward—willing to engage with Harvard’s harshest critics and to admit that even bad-faith attacks sometimes land on uncomfortable truths. He’s treated the university’s crisis as an opportunity, leveraging the looming threat of Trump to make changes that would have been politically impossible in less ominous times. The leader of Harvard, bane of MAGA, agrees with much of the underlying substance of the MAGA critique of higher education, at least when stripped of its rhetorical froth and fury. He knows that elite higher education is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, one that is, in no small measure, of its own making, because it gives fodder to those who caricature it as arrogant and privileged.

[Franklin Foer: Trump has found his class enemy]

On June 20, Donald Trump used Truth Social to declare his willingness to strike a deal with Harvard—an opening that any devoted institutionalist would have no choice but to seize, however narrow the path to an acceptable deal. Now Garber is gambling that he can reconcile two immense and opposing burdens, each tugging at his conscience: the imperative to protect the enormous research engine that sustains Harvard’s excellence, and the obligation to preserve academic freedom in its fullest form.

Despite his technocratic impulses and his centrist temperament, Garber has been drawn into a struggle for power, forced to make choices that will shape not just Harvard’s future but that of all the venerable, if flawed, institutions that Trump is targeting.

Garber was never meant to be one of the most consequential presidents in Harvard’s history. In fact, he wasn’t meant to be president at all. When the university began its search to replace Lawrence Bacow, in 2022, Garber indicated that he didn’t want to be considered. He was ready to disappear from university leadership.

Anyway, an aging white man didn’t fit the brief. Harvard was preparing to defend itself in the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the university would argue the legality and necessity of affirmative action on behalf of American higher education. It was a last stand for race-conscious admissions, likely a doomed one given the composition of the Court, and Harvard was eager to telegraph its commitment to diversity. When the Corporation chose Gay in December 2022 to become Harvard’s first Black president, Garber intended to stay on just long enough to ease the transition.

Then came October 7. While Hamas militants were still killing families and abducting civilians from Israeli kibbutzim, a group called the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee released a statement blaming the “Israeli regime entirely” for the murder of Israelis. Thirty-three student organizations—including the campus chapter of Amnesty International and the Harvard Islamic Society—co-signed a declaration that didn’t just blame Israel; it appeared to rationalize slaughter. The statement was posted before Israel had launched its war in Gaza, and it was swiftly and ferociously denounced—especially by Jewish groups, but also by lawmakers—as evidence of pervasive anti-Semitism at the university.

On October 8, Garber visited Harvard Hillel with Gay. For Garber, this wasn’t just a supportive gesture. He’d been raised in an observant family in Rock Island, Illinois. During his senior year of high school, he studied at a yeshiva in Chicago. As a university mandarin at Harvard, he treated Hillel as a spiritual anchor—the place where he often joined the daily minyan.

Now, in the rawness of the moment, Garber heard directly from Israeli students about the ostracism they had long faced at Harvard. “They might sit down at dinner with a group of students who didn’t know them and have a very pleasant conversation,” he told me. “And when the other students learned that they were Israeli, the other students would ignore them or shun them completely. Or they’d get up and leave. This is a particularly corrosive form of discrimination.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: The real Harvard scandal]

For years, Garber had worried about how hostility toward Israel was becoming established on campus. The problem wasn’t criticism of Israeli policy; it was the shunning of Israeli people, who were punished for their national origin. Zionists were treated as pariahs unworthy of inclusion in the Harvard community. No other religious commitment or national identity was socially radioactive in this way.

Whatever empathy Garber might have felt that night didn’t surface in Harvard’s official posture. Critics accused the university of reacting to the October 7 attacks with silence—a jarring absence, given its habit of weighing in on tragedies such as the killing of George Floyd and the invasion of Ukraine. Former President Larry Summers, who said he was “sickened” by the student statement, described himself as “disillusioned” by Harvard’s nonresponse. Only then, after a rush of similar criticism, did the administration issue a statement lamenting “the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend” and “the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.”

Facing pressure to say more, Claudine Gay followed up with a second message the next day: “Let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities”—a formulation tacitly conceding the proliferation of doubts. More than 100 faculty members, including Summers, signed a letter accusing her of drawing a false equivalence between Hamas’s rampage and Israel’s initial response. On October 12, Gay released a short video, in which she tried again: “Our University rejects terrorism—that includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”

As Gay flailed, pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across campus. At a “die-in” outside the business school, protesters surrounded an Israeli student who was filming on his phone and physically removed him from the demonstration. (Two were later charged with assault and battery, though the court granted them pretrial diversion in exchange for undergoing anger-management training, performing community service, and taking a Harvard course on negotiation.) Some of the university’s big donors recoiled at what was happening in Cambridge. The Wexner Foundation announced that it was severing ties with the university. Billionaires followed, including Len Blavatnik, the owner of Warner Music, whose foundation had gifted $270 million to the school.

At that moment, a lifetime of bureaucratic training left many university presidents ill-equipped for managing inflamed passions. But Gay, new in the job, seemed more hamstrung than most. On December 5, she testified before the House Committee on Education & Workforce, alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. In response to a question from Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna and Trump supporter, Gay refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s policies on bullying and harassment. Her over-lawyered, emotionally inert answer became infamous: “It depends on the context.” Garber, seated just behind her, was a bystander to catastrophe.

Five days after Gay’s testimony, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and a co-author, Christopher Brunet, published allegations of plagiarism in her dissertation. In most cases, she had sloppily neglected to cite sources; Rufo, reaching, declared that “racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.” Initially, the Corporation’s instinct was to defend Gay against what it saw as a coordinated attempt by the right to bully her from office.

But over winter break, members of the Corporation began to absorb just how much damage the past months had inflicted on Harvard’s reputation. As The New York Times later reported, Penny Pritzker, the chair of the Corporation, phoned Gay in Rome, where the beleaguered president was vacationing with her family. Pritzker asked the only question that mattered: Was there still a path forward? Gay understood that there wasn’t.

As she prepared to resign, the Corporation had nowhere to turn but Garber, who agreed to serve as interim president. “I basically had to say yes,” Garber told me. Harvard needed a stabilizing hand, someone who could keep the school out of the headlines and deflect the waves of crisis.

[Rose Horowitch: The worst job in America]

As Garber absorbed the reality of his unexpected role, he began to imagine something more than caretaking. He had one last chance in his career to help Harvard confront the illiberalism that he had come to consider the underlying cause of its crisis. Perhaps a placeholder—someone with no designs on permanent leadership and a willingness to take political fire from faculty and students—would have the freedom to address the ideological rigidity that stifled classroom discussions and led smart people to shun heterodox opinion.

In part, his convictions were rooted in nostalgia for his undergraduate days at Harvard, which he remembers as a citadel of intellectual seriousness. His reverence for genius stretched back to his childhood in Rock Island. His father, a liquor-store owner, moonlighted as a violinist in the local orchestra. When virtuosos came to town, they often ended up at the Garber dinner table. As a teenager, he found himself seated across from the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

When he arrived at Harvard, he carried that same sense of awe that he felt at those dinners. His parents, true to type, hoped he’d become a doctor. But he quickly fell under the spell of the economics department, packed with future Nobel winners. In a graduate course on labor economics, he met Summers, who became a lifelong friend. Unwilling to disappoint his parents or abandon his new passion, Garber chose both paths: He became a bicoastal graduate student, earning a medical degree at Stanford while pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard. He taught health-care economics at Stanford for 25 years—also founding research centers and practicing medicine—before returning to Harvard as provost.

His peers who studied the byzantine American health-care system often passed through Washington. But politics didn’t suit Garber. His instincts weren’t ideological. That same apolitical disposition shaped his campus life. He never fought Harvard’s battles with the fervor of a culture warrior; temperamentally, Kulturkampf was alien to him. As provost, he developed a managerial style that was therapeutic—patient in meetings, attuned to grievances. Faculty called him for intimate medical advice; his leather doctor’s bag sits on a shelf in his office. Sublimating his ego, he tended to the institution and never hesitated to carry out programs that he might have pursued differently, if he were the one in the president’s chair.

Yet gradually, and almost despite himself, Garber began to share some of the right’s critiques. The debates over race and identity on campus lacked the spirit of openness that he remembered from his own undergraduate bull sessions. “If you didn’t know where somebody stood on a controversial issue, when I was a student, it didn’t matter,” he told me. “You could still talk about it.” Garber had come to believe that a deepening culture of self-censorship was eroding the conditions that allowed excellence to flourish.

His critique isn’t a broadsided attack on DEI, but it brushes against it. As Harvard welcomed more students, many of them students of color who were the first in their family to attend college, the school shielded them from the discomfort of hurtful arguments. “There was a lot of deference to students who didn’t want to hear certain messages,” Garber told me. In his view, Harvard’s culture had tilted toward emotional safety, at the expense of intellectual risk. The harder task—teaching students to withstand ideas they disliked, to probe disagreement without retreat, to stay in relationship across political divides—had gone neglected.

As president, Garber launched a series of task forces to study the state of intellectual inquiry on campus. A university-led survey revealed that nearly half of the students, faculty, and staff—45 percent—felt uneasy sharing their views on controversial topics in class. Many feared that a stray opinion might trigger social reprisal. Some admitted to shaping their coursework to mirror what they presumed were their professors’ ideological leanings, not in pursuit of truth, but in search of a higher grade.

The faculty had its own theory of what had gone wrong. Professors lamented that undergraduates were pouring more ambition into their extracurricular activities than their coursework. Students were skipping class with impunity. Instructors, wary of backlash in end-of-semester evaluations, responded by easing workloads and inflating grades. (At Harvard, the problem is referred to euphemistically as “grade compression,” not inflation.) Rigor, central to Harvard’s identity in Garber’s day, had become a liability.

This academic neglect only deepened the culture of self-censorship. One task force—the Classroom Social Compact Committee—noted a subtler but equally corrosive failure: “Students are not learning how to ask clarifying questions (including the important ability to acknowledge that they are confused about something).” Harvard, in other words, was routinely failing at the most basic task of liberal education: cultivating minds capable of independent thought. “If we can’t address that deeper cultural malady,” Garber told me, “we will never be fully successful as a teaching institution or as a research institution. Because in order to be successful in teaching, learning, and research, you need to be open-minded.”

These problems were immune to quick fixes. As interim president, Garber pushed through one major change: prohibiting the university from issuing official pronouncements on political events. Harvard also changed its undergraduate application, adding the prompt “Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue.” But otherwise, Harvard remained stuck—mired in protest, and drifting ever further from the ideal of open inquiry that Garber hoped to restore.

On April 22, 2024, Harvard suspended the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s privileges as a student organization because it had helped to stage a protest that transgressed university rules. Two days later, activists pitched tents in Harvard Yard, joining the wave of encampments happening on campuses nationwide. For Garber, the timing was perilous: The protesters had seized the ground where commencement was set to unfold in just a few weeks.

Precisely what a college could actually change in Gaza wasn’t clear. But with Harvard’s $53 billion endowment and political influence, it was a protest target that made at least some strategic sense. Calling on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, protesters cast Harvard as a handmaiden to genocide—which meant they cast its president that way too.

Activists circulated a poster showing Garber as a devil, horned and seated on a toilet. It didn’t take a degree in medieval iconography to recognize anti-Semitic caricature. When the symbolism was pointed out, organizers quietly took the image down. Garber himself wasn’t especially rattled. But the episode gave him license to describe himself as a target of bigotry—and in the vernacular of campus politics, that granted him the moral authority of lived experience. He now had the platform to speak more forcefully about anti-Jewish bias and link it to what he saw as deeper institutional failings.

Soon after taking office, Garber had announced the creation of two parallel task forces—one focused on anti-Semitism, the other on anti-Muslim bias. Some critics dismissed the pairing as a false equivalence. But the symmetry reflected Garber’s hope that dialogue and debate were the best mechanisms for defusing charged disagreements. The two task forces submitted joint progress reports to the Corporation. To serve on both, Garber appointed the political theorist (and Atlantic contributing writer) Danielle Allen, who has long argued that universities have lost, and must recover, the habits of intellectual pluralism.

At the core of the crisis, Garber believed, was Harvard’s retreat from open inquiry. That retreat had created pockets of ideological orthodoxy—most notably at the divinity school, where the religion-and-public-life program hosted events in the spirit of “de-zionization,” including an inaugural webinar in which a speaker described “a specific Jewish sinfulness.” In Harvard Yard, that same rhetoric echoed in protest chants—“Zionists not welcome here”—a slogan that branded certain students as unworthy of civic participation. Garber gave an interview to The Harvard Crimson condemning that slogan. “There’s a disappointing level of ignorance among people who have very, very strong views,” he told me.

Engaging across political differences, in the spirit of open inquiry, wasn’t just Garber’s slogan; it was his strategy for easing campus tensions and rebuilding trust. When angry emails landed in his inbox, he responded quickly and graciously. He persistently engaged Harvard critics, including high-profile donors such as Mark Zuckerberg and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Members of the Harvard Corporation watched Garber preside over a fraught gathering of donors, a room thick with grievance and ready for combat. Garber managed to calm the room, by robustly and empathically acknowledging their gripes. “Everyone came back and said, ‘Wow, this is the right man at the right moment,’” Shirley Tilghman, the former Princeton president and then a member of the Corporation, told me. Inside the board, a consensus was quietly forming: Harvard didn’t need another presidential search.

Still, for weeks in the spring of 2024, the protest encampment in Harvard Yard was a crisis Garber couldn’t fix. He heard troubling reports of harassment. Protesters had hoisted a Palestinian flag outside University Hall, one of Harvard’s most iconic buildings. When a university worker lowered it, a demonstrator chased the person down and attempted to reclaim the flag. Garber felt as if he had no choice but to authorize a police sweep to dismantle the encampment. But in a final gambit, he sent a message to the protesters: He would meet with them to discuss the endowment—though divestment from Israel was off the table. He wouldn’t promise amnesty. But he would expedite their disciplinary process, allowing them to learn their fates swiftly and move on with their lives. The students accepted. By the thinnest of margins, Garber was spared a violent confrontation.

Some of the protesters later complained that they felt hoodwinked, after misinterpreting his promise of speedy justice as a grant of leniency. By May 23, the day of commencement, 13 students had been barred from receiving their diplomas. When Garber appeared on the dais in his ceremonial robes, he was roundly booed, as attendees chanted, “Let them walk.” Nearly 500 faculty and staff signed a letter denouncing the punishments for their “unprecedented, disproportionate, and arbitrary manner.” Later that month, on Alumni Day, an animal-rights protester dumped glitter on Garber’s head. “It’s fine,” he said, after brushing himself off. “I could use a little glitter.”

Then, as summer break dissipated the tension, the Corporation and the Board of Overseers made their decision. On August 2, it announced that Alan Garber would become the 31st president in Harvard’s 387-year history.

Far in advance, it was clear: The 2024 election posed a grave threat to the status quo in American higher education. Trump-style populists thrilled at the prospect of humbling elite universities. Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, once said, “The professors are the enemy.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis treated his public universities accordingly, banning critical race theory; weakening tenure protections; commandeering New College, a quirky liberal-arts school that has since become a showcase for conservative pedagogy. In Wisconsin, lawmakers insisted that the state’s flagship university, in Madison, install a professor of conservative thought, funded by the elimination of a program to recruit faculty members from underrepresented minority groups.

To fend off Trump, universities recruited Republican fixers, hiring K Street friends of Trump and lawyers from the right flank of Big Law. Harvard brought on Robert Hur, the Republican prosecutor who’d investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. And it hired William Burck, who’d represented many Trump White House figures during Robert Mueller’s Russia probe—and who continued to advise the Trump family as an outside ethics counsel. Burck was well practiced in brokering back-channel deals involving the White House; in one that he’d helped hatch, the law firm Paul, Weiss promised to do pro bono work on behalf of the president’s favored causes.

For someone as preoccupied with brand names as Donald Trump, though, Harvard would be too tempting a target to pass up. When musing in early April about the prospect of cutting the university’s funding, Trump said, “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

On April 14, three days after the late-night email from the Trump administration, Harvard learned that the government wasn’t bluffing. Its professors began receiving stop‑work orders on government contracts. On May 6, the National Institutes of Health terminated grants tied to research on antibiotic resistance and pediatric AIDS. On May 12, the Department of Defense canceled a bioweapons‑related study, and the Department of Energy pulled support for research on subatomic particles. None of these eliminated programs had anything remotely to do with anti-Semitism.

Harvard has some short-term cushion; this spring, it began to sell $1 billion in private-equity assets. But real austerity isn’t far off. Roughly 80 percent of the endowment is legally bound to specific purposes and inaccessible for plugging budget holes. Cuts have already begun. The Kennedy School has laid off staff. As a symbolic gesture, Garber gave himself a 25 percent pay cut—and more than 80 faculty members donated 10 percent of their salaries to cover shortfalls.

The extremity of Trump’s demands forced the university to protect itself by any available means. It sued the administration to restore its funding, even as it hoped that it could persuade the president to relent. By resisting Trump, Harvard further provoked him. “They want to show how smart they are,” the president fumed in the Oval Office in May. To punish this impertinence, the administration kept devising new ways to inflict pain on the institution.

In short order: The Department of Education demanded records of all foreign gifts. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened a civil‑rights investigation into alleged discrimination against white, Asian, male, and straight applicants. The White House accused Harvard of collaborating with the Chinese military. On Truth Social, Trump demanded the names of Harvard’s international students—then signed a proclamation barring them from entering the United States. Trump publicly vowed to revoke Harvard’s tax‑exempt status and instructed his sons to cut ties with William Burck. And his administration instigated a process to strip Harvard’s accreditation.

[Rose Horowitch: Trump’s campaign to scare off foreign students]

As I watched Trump’s fusillade, I thought back to 2019, when I reported on Viktor Orbán’s campaign to close Central European University, in Budapest. Orbán harassed the university using legal fine print, imposing onerous new requirements, grinding the school down until it fled to Vienna. That story had once felt extreme. But even Orbán never dared anything as heavy-handed as what Trump is doing to Harvard.

When I raised the subject of the Trump administration, Garber grew reticent. There were things he couldn’t discuss, given that Harvard was slogging through negotiations with the White House. That the university would seek a settlement is understandable. A presidential vendetta is all-consuming: Will international students be allowed to enter in the fall? Will crucial research projects survive? Without a deal, Harvard is placing its future in the hands of the courts—hardly reliable bulwarks these days.

Harvard wants to convince the administration that punishment is unnecessary because it has already taken meaningful steps to address the heart of the White House’s critique. The university removed the leadership of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It expanded harassment policies to include anti-Israeli bias, suspended programs at the public-health and divinity schools that leaned too far into activism, and increased kosher food offerings. In April, it renamed the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—now the Office for Community and Campus Life. It is contemplating a new academic center where conservative and free-market ideas might flourish.

[Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun]

In normal times, even one of these moves might have caused a revolt. And some objections to Garber’s policies do seem to manifest themselves in bureaucratic obstinacy. For instance, Harvard deans have been slow to implement recommendations of his anti-Semitism task force. But having been cast as a figure of resistance, Garber has earned the political capital to pursue his agenda. At commencement this May, he received a sustained ovation. In a Crimson survey, 74 percent of arts-and-sciences faculty expressed satisfaction with his leadership—far higher marks than the Corporation received.

That capital isn’t infinite. Garber has ventured into dangerous territory, negotiating with a White House that doesn’t care about the details—only the imagery of submission. That places him in an excruciating dilemma. He must protect careers, research, and the basic quality of academic life, while also avoiding any precedent that could lead to a broader collapse of liberal institutions. He can push for a settlement that formalizes changes that he’s already made—and maybe even helps him implement additional reforms—but will face intense pressure from the administration to trade away Harvard’s independence.

Garber is the quintessential liberal institutionalist in an age when such figures are faring poorly. His reverence comes from his own experience—how Harvard lifted him from Rock Island; how it placed him in classrooms alongside future scientists and economists whom he regards as the smartest people on the planet; how, even as a member of a once-excluded minority, he felt entirely at home. Although Garber knows that many Jews at Harvard no longer feel that same sense of belonging, he is also achingly aware of the irony—that he is a Jewish university president defending his institution against enemies who present themselves as protectors of his people.

Garber also knows that the place he loves so deeply has grown widely disdained, a symbol of arrogance and privilege. To save Harvard, to recover its legitimacy, he must succeed in both of the campaigns that he is waging in defense of liberalism. If Harvard fails to conquer its own demons, or if it fails to safeguard its own independence, then it will have confirmed the harshest critiques leveled against it, and it will stand no chance of ever reclaiming the place it once occupied in American life.

This article previously misstated the nature of bureaucratic resistance to Alan Garber's anti-Semitism task force. Although Harvard deans have been slow to implement the task force's recommendations, they have not missed deadlines for reports mandated by it, according to a university spokesperson.

Trump Has Found His Class Enemy

2025-04-13T06:00:00-04:00

Even the educated mind, or perhaps especially the educated mind, is skilled at deflecting harsh realities. That’s why so many white-shoe lawyers have failed to publicly support their colleagues in firms that President Donald Trump has targeted. It’s why universities have barely fought him in court, even as he has butchered their funding. Law partners and university presidents like to talk their way out of problems, and they apparently believe that they can ultimately evade the fate that befalls those who resist Trump. They assume that he merely craves gestures of submission—and that once obeisance has been paid, he will move on to his next target.

That, however, underestimates the social revolution that the Trump administration is trying to unleash. Its goal isn’t just to shatter a few institutions. It intends to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.

The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age. Back in the 1990s, as the group began to emerge in its current form, the liberal economics commentator Robert Reich hailed its members as “symbolic analysts”—people who identify and solve problems by thinking through ideas rather than via physical labor. A decade later, the urbanist Richard Florida put forth an even more triumphalist term: the “creative class.” That is, its members had the academic training to master the complexities of a globalized economy, the intellectual skills to conquer the digital world.

[John Bolton: The only question Trump asks himself]

Not so long ago, the upper-middle-class Americans who exemplify the PMC would have filled the ranks of both parties. But beginning in the 1990s, professionals began migrating in large numbers to the Democrats. Many affluent people with a cosmopolitan outlook were repelled by the GOP’s social stances and drawn to the economic moderation of politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

As the group made this partisan turn, the right zeroed in on the PMC as the enemy within. Conservative populists didn’t just disagree with the PMC’s political preferences; they accused an institutional elite of conniving to extend its own power. By inculcating a worldview hatched on university campuses—call it progressive or “woke”—this elite hopes to assert its dominion over the rest of society. It masquerades as the purveyor of science and objectivity, but it really is a hegemonic caste.

Animosity to the PMC is a propulsive force in Trump’s second term. Rather than merely replacing its ideological foes—by installing its own appointees in federal agencies—the administration is bent on destroying their institutional homes, and the basis for their livelihood. That’s the lesson of the Department of Government Efficiency. In short order, DOGE has engaged in mass firings—sweeping attacks on the civil service as an autonomous bastion of power. The administration has moved to uproot the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy that sprawls across corporations and nonprofits. Although the federal government cannot crush entire universities and law firms outright, Trump has attempted to undermine their business models. The administration has eliminated many of the grants that fund research at major universities—and Republicans in Congress have proposed taxing these institutions’ endowments as well. Trump has stigmatized law firms by reprimanding them in executive orders, signaling to clients and potential clients that these firms will always be at a disadvantage in dealings with the government.

In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize.

When Donald Trump first entered presidential politics, his attitude toward the elite was comically inconsistent. One lobe of his brain equated Ivy League degrees with intelligence. “I went to Wharton School of Business,” he once said. “I’m like, a really smart person.” He would extol his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a Harvard man. But another lobe of his brain processed the world in the blunt dichotomies of populism: The elites were shafting the people; the globalists were lining their pockets at the expense of real Americans; there was a “swamp” and a “deep state.”

[Franklin Foer: The good son]

The American right’s version of populism has always been the product of a divided mind. In the 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr., a Yale graduate and the child of an oil magnate, famously quipped , “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

But the ideological roots of the Trump administration’s campaign against the PMC can be traced back decades further. In the 1930s, the political theorist James Burnham was a disciple of the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Burnham absorbed Trotsky’s core complaint with the Soviet Union: that it had been hijacked by a clique of bureaucrats who tended to their own interests at the expense of society, and had veered from the righteous path.

Accepting that critique of the Soviet state set Burnham on a path of apostasy. In 1940, he broke ranks with Trotsky, rejected socialism altogether, and turned rightward. But in the course of his conversion, he retained a strain of his former idol’s old analysis. Nearly everywhere he turned, he saw the danger of a domineering bureaucratic caste, even in the United States, the heart of the free-market economy.

In his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that within the American corporation, power actually resided with managers, the experts who mastered the sprawling, technically intricate means of industrial production, not with the men who owned companies. The same dynamic held in government. It was bureaucrats, not members of Congress, who determined the path of democracy. The bureaucrats were an authoritarian cabal in the making.

The book became an unlikely hit, selling more than 100,000 copies. Burnham’s critique of the managerial elite also became a canonical text for young conservatives such as Buckley. Over time, Burnham’s idea thrived and morphed to keep pace with the zeitgeist.

Thanks to the Baby Boom, universities were exploding by the late 1960s, creating a huge new professoriate. Thanks to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the federal bureaucracy was expanding too, creating an army of social workers, government lawyers, and economists. Society showed the influence of what Irving Kristol described as “the new class.” To Kristol, an intellectual who had followed Burnham’s trajectory from Trotskyism to conservatism, this new class seemed nefarious because it showed little interest in making money. Instead, it craved power and exploited progressive ideas as a guise for achieving it. By Kristol’s account, the new class leveraged its control of the media, the academy, and the government to implant its self-serving ideas in the nation.

[Matthew Cooper: Why the left should miss Irving Kristol]

Conservatives weren’t the only ones who perceived the power of the PMC; indeed, the term professional-managerial class was popularized by the liberal intellectuals Barbara and John Ehrenreich. But arguments such as Burnham’s and Kristol’s have made a deeper impression on the modern right than on the left. As conservatives gained control over the levers of government, especially in the George W. Bush administration, an ever more overt disdain for expertise guided policy, as the White House eschewed opinions emanating from CIA analysts and mainstream economists. By 2016, Peter Thiel, the Trump booster and Silicon Valley investor, was fuming that America was now “dominated by very unelected, technocratic agencies.” During Trump’s first term, American Affairs, the most rarefied of the MAGA-adjacent outlets, ran essay after essay about the pernicious power of the professional managerial class. But the theories of new class and managerial caste didn’t truly become the guiding ideology of the state until the second Trump term.

In the battle between the warring lobes of Trump’s brain, his sense of grievance ultimately prevailed. Subjected to media criticism and legal investigations during his first term, he not only raged against his PMC adversaries but also began to fantasize about exacting retribution against them.

To the right’s own intelligentsia, two major developments that gathered force during Trump’s first presidency seemingly vindicated Burnham as a prophet who foresaw how the PMC would flex its power. One was the institutional embrace of left-wing identity politics. Corporations had spawned whole new bureaucracies devoted to DEI. Workers at Google, Nike, and The New York Times prodded the owners to shift politically in a progressive direction, ousting employees who allegedly held retrograde opinions on race and gender, propelling firms to promote minorities and invest in Black businesses. The PMC was flexing the power it had clawed away from corporate overlords.

The other development was COVID-19. At the behest of public-health authorities, societies ground to a halt. The shutdown exposed the entitlements of life in the PMC, whose members holed up in their homes, streaming movies and baking bread, as others exposed themselves to the disease in the course of packing meat and delivering groceries. The opinions issued by the likes of Anthony Fauci became the basis for a new gripe: that arrogant experts were using a once-in-a-century pandemic as a pretext for stifling reasonable policy debate and exerting their own control over the country.

Many titans of Silicon Valley, not just Thiel, were attracted to this critique, although they were arguably members of the PMC themselves, or at least had attended elite universities and frequented fancy conferences in mountain resorts. But they resented how the underlings in their own companies forced them to adopt progressive politics as corporate policy. And as engineers, who believed in the gospel of tinkering, they never considered themselves card-carrying members of the PMC establishment.

Elon Musk, for one, adopted a Burnham-like disdain for the PMC as a business plan. When he took over Twitter in 2022, he laid off 80 percent of the workforce, including the Trust and Safety Council and a chunk of the company’s content moderators. As the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez put it, Musk was taking a stand against “the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise elsewhere dominates.” Not only did he treat this caste with disdain; he implied that it was doomed to the dustbin of history, because its members’ functions could be so easily subsumed by artificial intelligence. A shared hatred of the PMC drew Musk to Trump, and the Twitter purge foreshadowed Musk’s approach in government.

[Rumman Chowdhury: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]

Even before Musk attached himself and his fortune to Trump, MAGA types were making bold plans for the wholesale eradication of the PMC from American institutions during a second Trump term. Contempt for the “unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class” was a dominant theme of Project 2025, the playbook produced by the Heritage Foundation.

The attack on the PMC has proceeded with astonishing velocity. Thousands of federal employees have been fired since Trump’s inauguration, and many others have fled oppressive workplaces of their own accord. Once-thriving institutions—the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Voice of America, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to name a few—have been either eliminated or reduced to ineffectual nubs of their former selves. Hatred for the PMC burns so intensely that it becomes the justification for sacrificing research into cures for cancer and ignoring accumulated expertise about the workings of the economy.

In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia—what the Communist Party of China memorably deemed the “stinking ninth” class. Although Trump’s purges have been tame by comparison, there are parallels. Like Trump, Mao wanted to create manufacturing jobs in the homeland. Defying expert opinion and shunning economic common sense, Mao launched his Great Leap Forward—a disastrously unsuccessful policy of rapid industrialization—in the late ’50s. During that period and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, he resorted to scapegoating his own PMC, especially the professoriate and other cultural elites. (“Better red than expert” was a rallying cry.) His minions subjected its members to public humiliation and horrifying violence; the state exiled members of the urban bourgeoisie to the countryside for reeducation.

It’s a stretch to imagine such a scenario unfolding on American soil. But voices in MAGA are floating versions of these ideas. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told Tucker Carlson that fired federal workers could supply “the labor we need for new manufacturing.” That is reeducation, Trump-style.

The lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that purging the PMC culminates in economic stagnation at best. In the aftermath of Maoism, social distrust flourished; anti-intellectualism resulted in historical amnesia and conformist thinking. Even if the United States avoids those outcomes, the global economic turmoil that has followed Trump’s tariff announcements hints at the perils of banishing and stigmatizing expertise. This is the dark reality of the Trump project—a vision far more comprehensive, and therefore far more corrosive, than an autocratic president’s mere thirst for vengeance.

Chuck Schumer Is Cautious for a Reason

2025-03-21T05:00:00-04:00

When I walked into Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment, he was puttering around in his socks. This wasn’t household policy, the 74-year-old Democratic Senate minority leader assured me, so there was no need for me to shed my shoes. But, as a gesture of hospitality, he asked, “Do you mind if I keep mine off?” I didn’t seem to have any actual say in the matter, and so minutes later, we were lounging on the L-shaped sofa in his study, as he discoursed on the color of the walls—call it terra-cotta—that he told me he really likes, but his wife, Iris, doesn’t.

He had invited me over because there was a hole in his schedule. This was supposed to be the week that he embarked on a multicity tour for his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning. The launch was going to be his literary bar mitzvah, where he would bask in the glory of publication. Schumer had poured himself into the project, forcing himself to write intimately about his career, his faith, and his actual bar mitzvah, an event that had come to feel like an omen. Then, as now, the outside world trampled his big moment, and Schumer disappointed loved ones at the very moment he hoped to reap their praise.

As he tells the story, he was scheduled to become a man, in the eyes of the Jewish community, on November 23, 1963—a case of terrible timing, because Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president a day earlier. Even though nobody was in the mood to celebrate anything, his family plowed ahead with the event. And in front of a mournful congregation, Schumer choked. He humiliatingly fumbled through his Torah portion and had no fun at the party that followed. His abiding memory of the day is his father arguing with the caterer to recoup the costs for the after-dinner drinks that never were served.

[From the April 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

Similarly inopportune timing has wrecked the launch of his book. Days before its publication, he announced that he would be supporting a Republican continuing resolution that would prevent a government shutdown. The decision was wildly unpopular with his party’s rank and file, who accused him of squandering the Democrats’ last remaining source of leverage over the Trump administration.

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocked him: “Senator Schumer, no disrespect, but you are a disgrace to Jewish stereotypes about financial negotiation.” Outside Schumer’s Park Slope apartment, on seemingly every mailbox and street sign, there were posters with his photo that read, Missing Backbone … If Found Contact Charles Schumer.

Schumer’s security team began to track specific threats against him. They worried that the furor over the shutdown would create a wave of protests that would test their ability to safeguard him. So Schumer accepted advice that he postpone his tour for a more placid moment in the indeterminate future.

With newfound time on his hands, Schumer and I began to kibitz. He splayed on his sofa, tucked his stocking feet under his knees and propped his head on his hand, striking a Cleopatra pose. He badly wanted to talk about his neglected book and not the continuing resolution. But I began to realize that the two subjects were, in fact, woven together. The book is unintentionally a political self-portrait. Schumer’s Jewish identity is at the core of his beliefs: that the viability of public institutions should be defended at all costs; that the fragility of Jewish existence, and of democracy, demands that he resist emotionally satisfying gestures, if they ultimately risk damaging those institutions.

Few American politicians are more unmistakably Jewish than Chuck Schumer. Soon after he joined the House of Representatives in the early 1980s, he recalls in the book, a woman in Queens rushed up to him: “You have more courage than any of the other members of Congress.” Schumer didn’t just take the compliment. He wanted to know why she was lavishing him with such praise. “You’re the only one who had the courage to wear a yarmulke,” she told him. To disabuse her of that idea, he bent down to show her “the appetizer-plate-sized bald spot”—his words—that she had confused for a skullcap.

Despite the expectations Jews might have had for him, he didn’t define himself that way. He told me, “I was always proudly Jewish, but I never emphasized Jewishness. When I ran for the Senate, I was really worried. How would these upstate people react to me?” (Perhaps he need not have worried; he defeated the incumbent, Alfonse D’Amato, after an only-in-New-York controversy over whether the Republican senator had called Schumer a putzhead, a riff on the Yiddish slang for penis.)

Decades passed, and his cautious attitude didn’t change. But then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, and Schumer felt a new sense of responsibility. No Jew in American political life had ever held the power he then possessed. (The Democrats held a majority in the Senate, so he was running the chamber.) Witnessing the outpouring of anti-Semitism on the left, which focused its harshest criticisms on Israel rather than Hamas, Schumer felt compelled to fully embrace his identity, in all the ways he’d historically resisted.

His decision to expend so much time talking about anti-Semitism didn’t please his aides, who urged him to steer clear. On the political merits, his staff had valid arguments. Schumer planned on chastising the left, attacking members of the party he led. He writes that he was determined to make a fervent case for Israel, despite that country’s diminishing popularity among die-hard Democrats. He recalls telling himself, “You are no great Jewish sage or scholar, you are no King Solomon or Maimonides or Elie Wiesel, but for better or for worse, you are here, and you ought to try to do some good.”

[Read: Trump’s crocodile tears for the Jews]

What’s interesting about the book was that writing it didn’t just inspire him to more strongly identify himself as a Jew, but also prodded him to consider the Jewish roots of his approach to politics. (Full disclosure: At several points in his book, Schumer approvingly quotes an essay I wrote about Judaism in America.)

He began to think back to his time as a student at Harvard, in the late ’60s. Even though he protested against the Vietnam War, just like his classmates, he didn’t like how they took over buildings in the name of the movement. In the book, he recalls, “I was never going to be on the side of the radicals. I was going to take my own path and try to work through the system and get results, even if it meant compromise and concession from time to time.”

Schumer’s recollections of that era mirror his current difference of opinion with his base over the government shutdown. “Even if I failed and they shut me down and some of them told me I was a sellout,” he writes, “I would try to convince them to seek progress with me on the issues we both cared about. It was more of a human principle and less of a political one.”

When I brought up this passage, he told me that this human principle grew subconsciously, at least in part, from his Jewishness. Schumer viewed the preservation of American institutions as a matter of Jewish preservation, because those institutions were equipped to protect religious minorities. They were the source of America’s exceptional tolerance of Jews: “One of the great things about America is we’ve always had these norms, and we don’t want them broken,” he said, “because they protect all Americans, but particularly Jewish people, who have been so subject to problems and vilification through the centuries.”

In the past few weeks, many of the American institutions he reveres, and the constitutional system designed to insulate them, have come under intense pressure that they might not withstand. And, apropos of Schumer’s book, Trump has created conditions for anti-Semitism to flourish. The president has surrounded himself with a disturbing collection of appointees with records of repeating old canards about Jewish power.

As Schumer explained the president’s attitude toward Jews, he told me a story that he’d left out of the manuscript: After Trump came to office in 2017, he invited congressional leaders to meet with him. “There’s a spread in the White House, and the first thing he says to me is, ‘Chuck, have a pig in the blanket. They’re kosher.’ First, I’m not sure they were kosher. Second, what was he thinking? He’s a Jew.” (I reached out to the White House for comment on this anecdote and have not yet heard back.)

Trump, in his autocratic mode, seemingly ascribed himself the power to determine what’s kosher and not. And more than that, he’s determined that he has the ability to determine who’s a Jew and not. Last week, he bizarrely declared that Schumer “is not Jewish anymore.” In the words of the president of the United States, “He has become a Palestinian.” (“Don’t tell my mother,” Schumer told me in response.)

The president was assuming a posture that rarely ends well, in which the regime separates the good Jews from the bad ones. By deeming them religious reprobates, the regime is signaling that they are the acceptable ones to abuse.

Does Schumer’s institutionalism have the fortitude to resist Trump? When he voted to prevent the government shutdown, he was acting not just on instinct, but on intelligence gleaned from Republican sources, who told him that the administration was baiting the Democrats into shutting down the government. The White House had a plan for how it would use the cover of a shutdown to accelerate its assault on the government, while pinning blame for the crisis on the Democrats.

But Schumer was also acting on instinct. As he remembers the radicals at Harvard, he says, “I saw how their zeal and fury led them to be not only demeaning to other students but disruptive, which was ultimately counterproductive. They turned too many people off.” In the end, he was right, and they were wrong. The backlash against antiwar protest helped doom ’60s liberalism, ending the Great Society and stalling the advance of civil rights.

As I sat with him on the sofa, I received an alert from Axios: “Schumer faces growing House Dem calls to step down.” But he seemed unfazed. “The higher you go on the mountain, the more fiercely the wind blows,” he told me. “The only way to protect yourself from these fierce winds is to have your own internal gyroscope. That’s what motivated me in how I voted.” The same instinct motivated him back at Harvard, he said. “I hated the Vietnam War, but I felt there was a right way.” He was now lying on his back, his feet propped up, the knot of his tie dangling at his torso, a man either oblivious to the revolt brewing against him or at ease with his own political choices.

Columbia University’s Anti-Semitism Problem

2025-03-17T06:00:00-04:00

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In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester, Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war.

Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.

Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country’s founding.

But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30 minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow.

In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them.

But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.”

After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing.

Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.

Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears.

Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.

It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.”

Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society, addresses students at Columbia University in May 1968. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

And in an attempt to suppress political views it dislikes, the administration authorized the unlawful detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an alumnus who helped organize campus protests, and sent federal agents to search two dorm rooms. Another graduate student, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fled to Canada rather than risk apprehension. The Trump administration’s war on Columbia stands to wreck research, further inflame tensions on campus, and destroy careers—including, in a supreme irony, those of many Jewish academics, scientists, physicians, and graduate students whom the administration ostensibly wants to protect.

Trump’s autocratic presence unbalances every debate. But just because his administration is exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism does not mean that anti-Jewish activism is not an issue at Columbia. Somewhere along the way, one of the nation’s greatest universities lost its capacity to conduct intellectual arguments over contentious issues without resorting to hyperbole and accusations of moral deficiency.

On Israel, the issue that most sharply divides Columbia, such accusations took a sinister cast. Jewish students faced ostracism and bullying that, if experienced by any other group of students on campus, would be universally regarded as unacceptable. It was a crisis that became painfully evident in the course of the war over Gaza, but it didn’t begin with the war, and it won’t end with it.

The story of American Jewry can be told, in part, by the history of Columbia’s admissions policy. At the turn of the 20th century, when entry required merely passing an exam, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began rushing into the institution. By 1920, Columbia was likely 40 percent Jewish. This posed a marketing problem for the school, as the children of New York’s old Knickerbocker elite began searching out corners of the Ivy League with fewer Brooklyn accents.

To restore Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic dominance, university President Nicholas Murray Butler invented the modern college-application process, in which concepts such as geographic diversity and a well-rounded student body became pretexts to weed out studious Jews from New York City. In 1921, Columbia became the first private college to impose a quota limiting the number of Jews. (In the ’30s, Columbia rejected Richard Feynman, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, and Isaac Asimov, the great science-fiction writer.) Columbia, however, was intent on making money off the Jews it turned away, so to educate them, it created Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, a second-rate version of the Manhattan institution.

Only after World War II, when America fought a war against Nazism, did this exclusionary system wither away. When I attended Columbia for four blissful years, a generation or so ago, the school was a Jewish wonderland, where I first encountered the pluralism of American Jewish life. I became friends with red-diaper babies, kids raised in Jewish socialist families. I dated an Orthodox woman who had converted from evangelical Christianity. Several floors of my dorm had been nicknamed Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof; they had kosher kitchens, and on the Sabbath, the elevators would automatically stop on each of those floors. I studied Yiddish with a doyenne of the dying Yiddish theater and attended lectures with Yosef Yerushalmi, one of the great Jewish historians of his generation. At Columbia, for the first time in my life, I felt completely at home in my identity.

I also imbibed the university’s protest culture: I briefly helped take over Hamilton Hall in the name of preserving the Audubon Ballroom, the Upper Manhattan site of Malcolm X’s assassination. Columbia wanted to convert the building into a research center. The leader of our movement, Benjamin Jealous, who went on to head the NAACP, was suspended for his role; I was put on probation.

Nostalgia, however, is a distorting filter. Long before the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that sparked the subsequent invasion of Gaza, there were accusations of anti-Semitism on campus. I tended to wish them away, but after the Hamas attack, the evidence kept walloping me.

Although protests against Israel erupted on many campuses after October 7, the collision between Zionists and anti-Zionists was especially virulent at Columbia. Less than a week after the attack, a woman was arrested in front of the library for allegedly beating an Israeli student who was hanging posters of hostages held in Gaza. (The Manhattan district attorney found that the woman hadn’t intentionally hit the student and dismissed the case after she apologized and agreed to counseling.)

Soon after the war in Gaza began, the Columbia Daily Spectator interviewed more than 50 Jewish students about their experiences: 13 told the student newspaper that they had been attacked or harassed; 12 admitted that they had obscured markers of their Jewish identity, tucking away Star of David necklaces and hiding kippahs under caps to avoid provoking the ire of fellow students.

To Columbia’s misfortune, the university had a new president, Minouche Shafik, who’d arrived by way of the London School of Economics. Any leader would have been overwhelmed by the explosion of passions, but she seemed especially shell-shocked by the rancor—and how it attracted media, activists, and politicians, all exploiting the controversy for their own purposes. Panicked leaders, without any clear sense of their own direction, have a rote response: They appoint a task force. And in November 2023, Shafik appointed some of Columbia’s most eminent academics to assess the school’s anti-Semitism problem. (Shafik had hoped to have a parallel task force on Islamophobia, but Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia historian and the most prominent Palestinian scholar in the country, called the idea a “fig leaf to pretend that they are ‘balanced,’” and the idea never hatched.)

In “listening sessions” with students, task-force members heard one recurring complaint: that administrators were strangely indifferent to Jewish students complaining about abuse. Rather than investigating incidents, some administrators steered Jewish students to mental-health counseling, as if they needed therapy to toughen them up. Students who had filed official reports of bias with the university claimed that they’d never heard back. (To protect the privacy of listening-session participants, the task force never confirmed specific instances, but it deemed the complaints credible.)

Perhaps, early on, one could imagine benign explanations for the weak response. But in June, as the task force went about its investigation, The Washington Free Beacon reported on a series of text messages fired off by four Columbia deans as they attended a panel on Jewish life at Columbia. (A panel attendee who had sat behind one of the administrators had surreptitiously photographed the text thread over her shoulder.) Instead of sympathetically listening to panelists discuss anti-Semitism, the deans unwittingly confirmed the depth of the problem. These officials, whose role gave them responsibility for student safety, snarkily circulated accusations about the pernicious influence of Jewish power. “Amazing what $$$ can do,” one of the deans wrote. Another accused the head of campus Hillel of playing up complaints for the sake of fundraising. “Comes from such a place of privilege,” one of them moaned. After the Free Beacon published the screenshots, Columbia suspended three of the administrators. Not long after, they resigned.

A month later, at the beginning of the academic year, the task force published a damning depiction of quotidian student life. An especially powerful section of the report described the influence of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organizer of the anti-Israel protests. CUAD was a coalition of 116 tuition-supported, faculty-advised student groups, including the university mariachi band and the Barnard Garden Club.

CUAD doesn’t simply oppose war and occupation; it endorses violence as the pathway to its definition of liberation. A year ago, a Columbia student activist told an audience watching him on Instagram, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” At first, CUAD dissociated itself from the student. But then the group reconsidered and apologized for its momentary lapse of stridency. “Violence is the only path forward,” CUAD said in an official statement. That wasn’t a surprising admission; its public statements regularly celebrate martyrdom.

When groups endorsed CUAD, they forced Jewish students to confront a painful choice. To participate in beloved activities, they needed to look past the club’s official membership in an organization that endorsed the killing of Jews and the destruction of the world’s only Jewish-majority country.

According to the task force, complaining about the alliance with CUAD or professing sympathy for Israel could lead to a student being purged from an extracurricular activity. When a member of the dance team questioned the wisdom of supporting CUAD, she was removed from the organization’s group chats and effectively kicked off the team. A co-president of Sewa, a Sikh student group, says that she was removed from her post because of her alleged Zionism. In an invitation to a film screening, the founder of an LGBTQ group, the LezLions, wrote, “Zionists aren’t invited.”

I’m not suggesting that Jews at Columbia feel constantly under siege. When I gave a speech at the campus Hillel group last spring, many members, even some who are passionate supporters of Israel, told me that they are happy at Columbia and have never personally experienced anything resembling anti-Semitism. The pro-Palestinian encampments included Jewish protesters, some of whom received abuse from their fellow Jews. To the task force’s credit, its report acknowledges many such complexities, but it brimmed with accounts of disturbing incidents worthy of a meaningful official response. Unfortunately, that’s not the Columbia way.

Had I been wiser as an undergrad, I could have squinted and seen the roots of the current crisis. In the 1990s, Israel was a nonissue on campus: The Oslo peace process was in high gear, and a two-state solution and coexistence were dreams within reach. But the most imposing academic celebrity on campus was the Jerusalem-born Edward Said, a brilliant professor of literature, who had served as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legislative arm.

During my years at Columbia, Said, who was battling cancer, was a remote figure. A dandy who loved his tweeds and was immersed in the European cosmopolitanism that he critiqued, he taught only a course on Giuseppe Verdi and imperialism.

Still, he bestrode the university. His masterwork, Orientalism, was one of the few books by an active Columbia professor regularly included in the college’s core curriculum. That book, by the university’s most acclaimed professor, was also a gauntlet thrown in the community’s face. Said had convincingly illustrated how racism infected the production of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies. Even if scholarship paraded as the disinterested study of foreign cultures, it was inherently political, too often infected by a colonialist mindset.

To correct for that bias, admirers of Said’s book concluded, universities needed to hire a different style of academic, including scholars with roots in the region they studied, not just a bunch of white guys fascinated by Arabs. The Middle Eastern–studies department filled up with Said protégés, who lacked his charm but taught with ferocious passion. Because they were unabashed activists, these new scholars had no compunction about, say, canceling class so that students could attend pro-Palestinian rallies.

Joseph Massad, a Jordanian-born political scientist who wrote a history of nationalism in his native country, became the most notorious of the new coterie soon after arriving in 1999. His incendiary comments provoked his ideological foes to respond with fury and, sometimes, to unfairly twist his quotes in the course of their diatribes. But his actual record was clear enough. Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 2003, he accused the Israelis of being the true anti-Semites, because they destroyed the culture of the Jewish diaspora; the Palestinians were the real Jews, he argued, because they were being massacred.

Violence, when directed at Jews, never seemed to bother him. This moral vacuity was on full display in the column he wrote in response to October 7, which he called a “resistance offensive,” for The Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based publication aligned with the more radical wing of the Palestinian cause. His essay used a series of euphoric adjectives—“astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome”—to describe Hamas’s invasion, without ever condemning, let alone mentioning, the gruesome human toll of the massacre, which included rape and the kidnapping of babies. In fact, he coldly described the towns destroyed by Hamas as “settler-colonies.”

Massad has long been accused of carrying that polemical style into the classroom. In the course description for a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” he wrote in 2002: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides.” On the one hand, that’s an admirable admission. On the other hand, Jewish students complained that he treated those with dissenting opinions as if they were moral reprobates, unworthy of civility.

In 2004, a pro-Israel group in Boston put together a low-budget documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which strung together student testimony about the pedagogical style of Columbia’s Middle Eastern–studies program. To take two representative incidents: After an Israeli student asked Massad a question at an extracurricular event, the professor demanded to know how many Palestinians he had killed; a woman recounted how another professor, George Saliba, had told her not to opine on Israel-Palestine questions because her green eyes showed that she couldn’t be a “Semite.”

In response, Massad denied ever meeting the Israeli student; Saliba wrote that he didn’t recall the green-eyes comments and that the student might have misconstrued what he was saying. But Columbia’s then-president, Lee Bollinger, instantly recognized the problem and appointed his own task force to examine the complaints. But it would have taken more than a task force to address the underlying problem. The emerging style of the American academy, especially prevalent at Columbia, viewed activism flowing from moral absolutes as integral to the mission of the professoriat. But a style that prevailed in African American–studies and gender-studies departments was incendiary when applied to Israel. With race and gender, there was largely a consensus on campus, but Israel divided the university community. And as much as Bollinger professed to value dissenting opinions, his university was ill-equipped to accommodate two conflicting points of view. And the gap between those two points of view kept growing, as Said’s legacy began to seep into even the far reaches of Columbia.

If I were writing a satiric campus novel about Columbia, I would have abandoned the project on January 29. That’s the day the Spectator published lab notes for an introductory astronomy course, written by a teaching assistant, that instructed students: “As we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is also important to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation. Take 15 minutes or so to read through the articles ‘Wonder and the Life of Palestinian Astronomy’ and ‘In Gaza, Scanning the Sky for Stars, Not Drones.’ Remind yourself that our dreams, our wonders, our aspirations … are not any more worthy.” At Columbia, a student couldn’t contemplate the Big Dipper without being forced to consider the fate of Khan Yunis.

This was a minor scandal, but a representative one. Over the years, the subject of Israel became nearly inescapable at Columbia, even in disciplines seemingly far removed from Gaza. For a swath of graduate students and professors, Palestinian liberation—and a corollary belief that Israel is uniquely evil among nations—became something close to civic religion.

In 2023, at the School of Public Health, a professor who taught a section of its core curriculum to more than 400 students denounced Jewish donors to the university as “wealthy white capitalists” who laundered “blood money” through the school. He hosted a panel on the “settler-colonial determinants of health” that described “Israel-Palestine” as a primary example of a place where the “right to health” can never be realized. Several years ago, the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning offered a class on “Architecture and Settler Colonialism” and hosted an event titled “Architecture Against Apartheid.”

By insisting that Israel is the great moral catastrophe of our age, professors and graduate students transmitted their passions to their classes. So it is not surprising that Jewish students with sympathy for Israel found themselves subject to social opprobrium not just from their teachers, but also from their peers. In its September report, the task force that Shafik had convened described the problem starkly: “We heard about students being avoided and avoiding others” and about “isolation and even intimidation in classrooms, bullying, threats, stereotypes, ethnic slurs, disqualification from opportunities, fear of retaliation and community erosion.” This was the assessment of Columbia professors, many of them unabashed liberals, who risked alienating colleagues by describing the situation bluntly.

Pro-Palestinian protesters march around Columbia in April 2024. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

In September, the task force presented its findings to Columbia’s University Senate, an elected deliberative body that brings faculty, administrators, and students into the governance of the institution. Its creation was a utopian response to the 1968 protests. But the senate session about anti-Semitism was a fiasco. Almost from the start, members began to attack the task-force report’s motives and methodology—even its focus on discrimination against Jews. “No such resources were put into covering anybody else’s subjective experience on this campus,” the English professor Joseph Slaughter said, “and I think that creates real problems for the community.” The hostility to the report wasn’t meaningless fulmination; it was evidence of how a large part of the faculty was determined to prevent the university from acknowledging the presence of anti-Jewish activity in the school.

No other university has a governance structure quite like Columbia’s, and for good reason. Most academics with busy lives want to avoid endless meetings with their colleagues, so most professors aren’t rushing to join the senate. In recent years, the senate has attracted those of an activist bent, who are willing to put up with tedium in service of a higher cause. Two members of the rules committee were allegedly part of a faculty contingent that stood guard around the encampments on the quad. They did so even though they had jurisdiction over potentially disciplining those protesters. As it happens, exceedingly few of the protesters who flagrantly disregarded university rules have suffered any consequences for their actions. Columbia didn’t impose discipline on students who stormed Hamilton Hall last spring—at least not until last week, amid Trump’s threat of drastic cuts to the university. But by then, a culture of impunity was firmly rooted.

Barnard College is integrated into Columbia, but it has its own set of rules, its own governance structure and disciplinary procedures. And it acted swiftly to expel two of the students who were in the group that burst into Avi Shilon’s class in January. (Columbia had suspended another participant, pending an investigation, and failed to identify the other.) For once, it felt as if the university was upholding its basic covenant with its students: to protect the sanctity of the classroom.

But instead of changing anyone’s incentives, Barnard’s hard-line punishment inspired protesters to rush Millbank Hall, banging drums and chanting, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” In the course of storming the building, they allegedly assaulted a Barnard employee, sending him to the hospital. For more than six hours, they shut down the building, which houses the offices of the administration, and left only after the college threatened to bring in the police and offered an official meeting with the protesters. But the possibility of police action wasn’t a sufficient deterrent, because a week later, two dozen protesters returned to occupy Barnard’s library.

In some deep sense, the university had lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos. And looking back over the past few months, I see a pattern of events that, in some ways, is far more troubling than the encampments that received so many headlines. In November, protesters descended on the building that houses Hillel, the center of Jewish life on campus—its main purpose is to provide Jewish students with religious services and kosher food—and demanded that the university sever ties with the organization. The next month, a demonstrator marching up Broadway punched a kippah-wearing Jew in the face. In January, to memorialize the murder of a Palestinian girl, protesters filled the toilets of the School of International and Public Affairs with cement. Skewering two Jewish women affiliated with the school—its dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and an adjunct assistant professor at the school, Rebecca Weiner—they spray-painted the message “Keren eat Weiner,” with an image of feces.

All of this unfolded as the Trump administration launched an assault on higher education. But thus far, Columbia students haven’t bothered to protest that. Unlike Palestine, which for most students is a distant cause, the stripping of federal funding for the institution will ripple through the lives of students and faculty. But university activism has its sights obsessively locked on Israel.

That Trump assault on Columbia has now arrived, in the heaviest-handed form. Anti-Semitism on campus, a problem that merits a serious response, has been abused in the course of Trump’s quest to remake America in his image. Tellingly, the administration’s withholding of federal grants will fall hardest on the hard sciences, which are the part of the university most immune to anti-Semitism, and hardly touch the humanities, where overwrought criticisms of Israel flourish.

The indiscriminate, punitive nature of Trump’s meddling may unbalance Columbia even further. A dangerous new narrative has emerged there and on other campuses: that the new federal threats result from “fabricated charges of antisemitism,” as CUAD recently put it, casting victims of harassment as the cunning villains of the story. In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. But in its past—especially in its history of overcoming its discriminatory treatment of Jews—the institution has revealed itself capable of overcoming its biases, conscious and otherwise, against an excluded group. It has shown that it can stare hard at itself, channel its highest values, and find its way to a better course.

Putin Won

2025-03-08T06:00:00-05:00

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Historians like to play a parlor game called periodization, in which they attempt to define an era, often by identifying it with the individual who most shaped the times: the Age of Jackson, the Age of Reagan. Usually, this exercise requires many decades of hindsight, but not so in the 21st century.

Over the past 25 years, the world has bent to the vision of one man. In the course of a generation, he not only short-circuited the transition to democracy in his own country, and in neighboring countries, but set in motion a chain of events that has shattered the transatlantic order that prevailed after World War II. In the global turn against democracy, he has played, at times, the role of figurehead, impish provocateur, and field marshal. We are living in the Age of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps, that fact helps explain why Donald Trump’s recent excoriation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office felt so profound. The moment encapsulated Putin’s ultimate victory, when the greatest impediment to the realization of the Russian president’s vision, the United States, became his most powerful ally. But Trump’s slavish devotion to the Russian leader—his willingness to help Putin achieve his maximalist goals—is merely the capstone of an era.

Nothing was preordained about Putin’s triumph. Twenty years ago, in fact, his regime looked like it might not survive. With the color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, Russian influence in its old Soviet satellites quickly withered. The threat was that democratic revolution would spread ever closer to the core of the old empire, Moscow, as it had in the dying days of communism. Indeed, as Putin prepared to return to Russia’s presidency in 2012, after a stint as prime minister, protests swelled in Moscow and spread to other Russian cities, and then kept flaring for more than a year.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Preserving his power, both at home and abroad, necessitated a new set of more aggressive tactics. Resorting to the old KGB playbook, which Putin internalized as a young officer in the Soviet spy agency, Russia began meddling in elections across Europe, illicitly financing favored candidates, exploiting social media to plant conspiracy theories, creating television networks and radio stations to carry his messaging into the American and European heartlands.

Just as the Soviet Union used the international communist movement to advance its goals, Putin collected his own loose network of admirers, which included the likes of the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, who venerated Putin for waging a robust counteroffensive on behalf of traditional values, by claiming the mantle of anti-wokeness. The fact that so many Western elites abhorred him titillated these foreign fans.

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration

One of Putin’s core objectives was the protection of his own personal fortune, built on kickbacks and money quietly skimmed from public accounts. Protecting this ill-gotten money, and that of his inner circle, relies on secrecy, misdirection, and theft, all values anathema to democracy.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Kleptocrats, in the mold of Russian oligarchy, ardently desire to sock away their money in the relative safety and quiet anonymity of American real estate and banks. Not so long ago, a bipartisan consensus joined together to pass laws that would make it harder for foreign kleptocrats to abuse shell companies to move their cash to these shores. But, as one of his first orders of business, Trump has shredded those reforms. His Treasury Department announced that it would weaken enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act; his Justice Department disbanded a task force charged with targeting Russian oligarchs and relaxed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such that Putin’s allies can hire lawyers and lobbyists without having to worry about the embarrassing disclosure of those relationships. The Trump administration has essentially announced that the American financial system is open for Russia’s kleptocratic business.

As Putin has sought to impose his vision on the world, Ukraine has been the territory he most covets, but also the site of the fiercest resistance to him—a country that waged revolution to oust his cronies and that has resisted his military onslaught. Until last week, the United States served as the primary patron of this Ukrainian resistance. But the Trump administration has surrendered that role, thereby handing Russia incredible battlefield advantages. Because the Trump administration has cut off arms to Ukraine, it will exhaust caches of vital munitions in a few months, so it must hoard its stockpiles, limiting its capacity to fend off Russian offensives. Because the U.S. has stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv, the Ukrainian army will be without America’s ability to eavesdrop on Russia’s war plans. All of these decisions will further demoralize Ukraine's depleted, weary military.

Just three years ago, as European and American publics draped themselves in Ukrainian flags, Putin’s Russia seemed consigned to international isolation and ignominy. For succor and solidarity, Putin was forced to turn to North Korea and Iran, an axis of geopolitical outcasts. But Trump is bent on reintegrating Putin into the family of nations. He wants Russia restored to the G7, and it’s only a matter of time before he eases up on sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on Russia. And Trump has done more than offer a place among the nations. By repeating Russia’s own self-serving, mendacious narrative about the origins of the Ukraine war, he lent American legitimacy and moral prestige to Putin.

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization's very survival.

[Garry Kasparov: The Putinization of America]

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Now, with a like-minded counterpart in the White House, he no longer needs to make a case against democracy to his own citizens. He can crow that the system is apparently so unappealing that even the United States is moving away from it.

The Dangers of Philo-Semitism

2025-02-26T14:30:00-05:00

It is the misfortune of Jews that they so often find themselves the subject of obsessive fixation. By his own description, Pankaj Mishra is a lifelong obsessive. As a boy in India in the 1970s, the writer grew up in a Hindu-nationalist family that revered Jews, despite not knowing any. In that spirit, Mishra placed a portrait of the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Suez Crisis, on his bedroom wall.

If I had known Mishra then, I would have warned him that philo-Semitism is not a healthy condition; that, in his future, he would realize that Jews, like every cluster of humans, have their flaws; and that he shouldn’t take his disappointment personally. This moment arrived for him during a trip to the West Bank in 2008, where he witnessed the ugliness of Israeli occupation, which left him feeling a “bit foolish” and “resentful.”

Obsessions, especially when they overtake an agile mind, are destabilizing; swooning and repulsion are the alternating registers of a mind consumed. And repulsion is the animating sentiment of Mishra’s new polemic, The World After Gaza.

The title suggests the grandiosity of his ambitions. To merely denounce the war, or to call for the end of American military support for Israel, would have been small beer. Instead, he wants to make the case that Israel today is a symptom of what ails the planet, “a case study of Western-style impunity,” and a “portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world.”

The underlying problem with the West, Mishra argues, is its sanctification of the Holocaust. He blames Jewish leaders, along with their philo-Semitic supporters in the Western elite, for defining the Holocaust as the epitome of evil and insisting that the world incessantly remember the Nazi genocide, a practice he calls “atrocity hucksterism.” (Full disclosure: I think that the Holocaust was the epitome of evil.) By fetishizing the Holocaust, they diverted attention from the suffering of others and “obscured closer examination of the West’s original sin of white supremacy.” And then he asks: “When does organised remembrance become a handmaiden to brute power, and a legitimiser of violence and injustice?”

Mishra has a habit of couching incendiary accusations in rhetorical questions, but his answer to this one is unambiguous. From the first page, Mishra seems intent on demonstrating that Israelis are, in fact, the new Nazis. His book opens with a long description of the Warsaw Ghetto, quoting at length from the poet Czesław Miłosz’s description of the screams of Jews he heard drifting over its walls. Mishra then abruptly juxtaposes a scene from Gaza, flush with heavy-handed language that bludgeons home his comparison. He calls Israel’s war an “industrial-scale slaughter” and a “livestreamed liquidation.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Hamas’s theater of the macabre]

Although any decent human should mourn the deaths of Palestinian civilians, Mishra races past the specious underpinnings of his analogy. To cite the obvious: Unlike Hamas, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto never launched an armed invasion of Nazi Germany. They didn’t rape or murder or kidnap Germans, let alone German babies, or in any way engage in violent activity that might morally justify a military response. The Jews of Warsaw never used human shields. They never published a charter calling for German genocide. Mishra mentions Hamas’s attack in passing, but he never wastes his breath chastising the group.

Later in the book, Mishra concedes that anti-Israel protesters justifiably wield such comparisons in the service of trolling. He writes, “Since the Shoah was coded as the greatest evil, incomparable and unprecedented, those describing Zionism as a genocidal ideology aim to defuse the symbolism of the Shoah and represent the destruction of Gaza as the true evil of our times.” It shouldn’t require minimizing the senseless loss of life to acknowledge that the death of more than 46,000 Gazans, some number of whom were Hamas combatants, isn’t the same as the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews. But by hyperbolically analogizing, Mishra seems to be intentionally salting Jewish wounds. This is hardly the stuff of the more ethical world that Mishra claims to desire.

Even on his own terms, this rhetorical turn is gratuitous, because imagining a more measured version of Mishra’s argument is so easy. It would go something like this: Benjamin Netanyahu has exploited memories of the Holocaust to justify brutal tactics in Gaza. Although Mishra agrees with that more restrained claim, it doesn’t suit his inflated goals.

His attempt to blame the plight of the wretched of the Earth on the Shoah’s central place in Western culture is unmoored from evidence. He writes about the “deepening links between Israeli governments, pro-Israel Jewish outfits and white supremacists in the United States and Europe.” But American white supremacists traffic in anti-Semitism and tend to blame Jews for the migration crisis. (In 2023, Elon Musk circulated a version of that claim.) And although American Jews have shifted slightly rightward in recent years, polling suggests that they remain a reliable constituency of the Democratic Party, far more liberal than other white voters. Mishra loves to mine the writings of postwar Jewish intellectuals for a damning quote—a racist protagonist in a Saul Bellow novel is one of his primary data points—but he can’t be bothered to cite the present-day leaders of Jewish organizations.

(Mishra does quote The Atlantic, as evidence of “a strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah” that “diminishes” American journalism about Israel; and he also attacks The New Republic, which I once edited, for becoming a “purveyor of racism and Islamophobia” in the 1980s.)

[Read: The problem with moral purity]

As he depicts Jews parochially clinging to their victimhood, Mishra skirts some pretty important countervailing pieces of evidence. It was Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer, who in the 1940s coined the term genocide, which he helped to enshrine in international law, in a quest to prevent other ethnic minorties from suffering the fate of the Jews. Mishra flays Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who won a Nobel Peace Prize—quoting Alfred Kazin, who called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust”—while neglecting to mention Wiesel’s opposition to South African apartheid and his record of advocating for interventions to prevent genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. (He also popularized the slogan “No human being is illegal.”’) And I wonder if Mishra has ever set foot in a synagogue aligned with Reform or conservative Judaism, the two largest denominations in the United States. After the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, they festooned their buildings with banners in support of Black Lives Matter, in the name of Tikkun Olam, healing the world.

Mishra inadvertently proves the thesis of Dara Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews. He writes with loving care about the Holocaust, referring to it by its Hebrew name, the Shoah, and he exudes nothing but sympathy for interwar writers such as Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth. But as he describes the Jewry that emerged from the ashes, he mostly finds unredeeming qualities. Mishra keeps reaching for his shelf to pull the books in which he’s underlined passages from intellectuals, many of them Jewish, denouncing Jews. Among the accusations he recycles: Jewish intellectuals in the U.S. became “too comfortably conforming to the American ruling class”: They “clung to the Holocaust and Zionism for a sense of identity and purpose”; “the Jew profits from his status in America.” Citing the unpleasant Holocaust survivors portrayed in an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, he notes, “Oppression doesn’t improve moral character.” There are many more such accusations. Each might be justifiable in context. But sewn together, they resemble nothing better than a grotesque effigy.

Like so many other intellectuals who have taken up the banner of Palestine, Mishra is unclear about what he really wants. He describes the two-state solution as a “pretence,” without offering a viable alternative. After reading his book, I had no clue how downgrading the historical import of the Holocaust would enhance the struggle against racism. In the final paragraphs of the book, he applauds the campus protesters for their defiance, even though he admits “they risk permanently embittering their lives with failure.” To howl into the wind without any plausible vision of a better world isn’t heroic or ethical; it’s a gesture of nihilism, and so, too, is this book.

A Man Who Actually Stands Up to Trump

2025-02-24T06:00:00-05:00

The scene in Kyiv earlier this month recalled the darkest days of oligarchic rule. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slipped a piece of paper across the table to Volodmyr Zelensky. “You really need to sign this,” Bessent told the Ukrainian president, according to The Wall Street Journal. The document was a deal to give the United States the rights to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Ukraine’s minerals. When Zelensky said that he needed time to consider the proposal, Bessent pushed the paper closer to him and warned that “people back in Washington” would be very upset.

The Trump administration was operating in the old spirit of the kleptocrats who built fortunes in Ukraine and Russia at the dawn of the post-Communist era, wielding veiled threats to bully the nation’s leader into hastily handing over precious resources in a shady deal.

To Zelensky’s credit, he did his best to resist Bessent’s pressure. “I can’t sell our state,” he explained. It was as if he had actually internalized the message that American diplomats from the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations had attempted to drum into Ukraine’s collective psyche: Ukraine’s democracy depends on it resisting powerful business interests that seek to plunder its wealth on terms highly unfavorable to the Ukrainian public. Zelensky’s willingness to stand up to President Donald Trump, holding true to American values in the face of American intimidation, was a perverse trading of places.

[Anne Applebaum: The end of the postwar world]

The moment recalls another episode in Ukraine’s recent past. Three years ago today, Russian troops streamed across the nation’s borders, assassins descended on the capital in search of its president, citizens decamped to the subways in search of shelter. Western intelligence agencies predicted Ukraine’s imminent demise. And in that moment of despair, Zelensky strode out into the empty streets of Kyiv, in the dark of night, to record a video reassuring the world, “We are still here.”

In those initial days of the war, Zelensky began to pose as a defender of liberalism, fighting on behalf of global democracy. Whether he actually meant it wasn’t clear. Before the war, his record of curbing corruption was spotty at best. With his political inexperience, and his strange unwillingness to prepare his country against the looming Russian threat, the former comic actor hardly had the makings of a sturdy bulwark against autocracy.

But he became one in the face of an unrelenting assault. Having preserved his nation’s independence, however, he’s now facing not one but two of the world’s most powerful illiberal leaders, conspiring in tandem. For reasons both petty and pecuniary, Trump seems intent on fulfilling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of crushing Ukrainian sovereignty. The American president is pressing for Russia’s favored resolution to the war, without even allowing Zelensky a seat at the negotiating table. And the resource deal he’s pursuing amounts to World War I–style reparations, but extracted from the victim of aggression. It would force the Ukrainians to hand over the wealth beneath their ground, without any guarantee of their security in exchange. The extortion that Trump proposes would deny Ukraine any possibility of recovering economically, and consign its people to a state of servitude.

[Peter Wehner: MAGA has found a new model]

In this new moment of crisis, Zelensky is reverting to the role he played in the war’s earliest days. Confronted with blunt force, he’s bravely resisting. Squaring up to the bully, he accused Trump of swimming in disinformation. Despite all the pressure the United States has applied on him to accede to the mineral deal, he’s refused. Yesterday, he said, “I am not signing something that ten generations of Ukrainians will have to repay.” Knowing that Trump will never set aside his personal animosity toward him, he offered to resign in exchange for a Western security guarantee.

He has resisted the administration’s demands despite the fact that he has no leverage in his dealings with the U.S. other than moral suasion and a limited ability to get in Trump’s way. Ukraine’s military is entirely dependent on American arms, and its European allies can do almost nothing, at this late date, to fill the void. In the end, given Ukraine’s tenuous existence, Zelensky might have little choice but to accept whatever Trump imposes, but at least he’s shown that there’s a course other than immediate surrender.

[Quico Toro: Brazil stood up for its democracy. Why didn’t the United States?]

Once upon a time, the United States poured diplomatic resources and military aid into Ukraine so that it wouldn’t descend into Russian-style autocracy. Now it’s the United States that’s headed in that direction. In the form of Elon Musk, an oligarch has captured the power of the American government, through which he can invisibly advance his own interests. The president is attempting to intimidate (and sue) the media into complying with the administration’s agenda. The norms of the administrative state have been shattered so that Trump can reward cronies and punish enemies. And in the most literal sense, the United States is collaborating with Russian autocracy so that the foreign policies of the two regimes are more closely aligned.

American institutions have largely faltered amid Trump’s assault, and European allies have aimlessly panicked. But Zelensky’s very presence reprimands the West for its futile opposition; his resoluteness shames Republicans, who once admired him as a latter-day Winston Churchill, for their own abject capitulation. Although he arguably has more to lose from a Trump administration than anyone on the planet, he’s kept pushing back, with resourcefulness that recalls Ukraine’s guerrilla tactics immediately after the Russian invasion. When the history of the era is written, Zelensky will be seen as the global leader of the anti-authoritarian resistance, who refused to accept the terms that the powerful sought to impose on his nation. He clarified the terms of the struggle with his heroic example. He reminds despairing liberals, “We are still here.”

The Hidden Costs of Musk’s Washington Misadventure

2025-02-12T11:40:00-05:00

As the Trump administration widened its campaign against the civil service, my mind kept turning to an old source, Max Stier, who has earnestly devoted his life to making government work better. Like his great passion, the bureaucracy, he’s relatively anonymous. In 2001, he founded an outfit called the Partnership for Public Service, a name that suggests an almost lyrical devotion to the gritty stuff of government. His organization is a font of ideas for making bureaucracy more effective. Over the years, it has trained thousands of government employees and helped agencies devise modernization plans.

Hoping to understand the damage that President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have managed to inflict, I called Stier this past weekend. What was he telling the civil servants who were calling him in a state of panic? Because he is levelheaded and committed to a nonpartisan agenda, I trusted him to deliver a measured assessment. That he seemed so profoundly alarmed was itself terrifying. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Franklin Foer: I’m sure your phone is constantly buzzing. What are you hearing?

Max Stier: I’ve fielded calls from Forest Service workers in Idaho and health-care workers in Georgia. It’s important that people know that the bulk of civil servants are not in D.C. Eighty percent of the feds are outside of D.C. They’re in every community in our country—and they used to be in a lot of communities globally too. Some people have been chased away. Some people have been directly fired, largely illegally, or put on administrative leave or sidelined. But there is no part of the workforce that is immune from this profound distraction and fear.

[Read: It’s time to worry about DOGE’s AI plans]

Foer: Okay, survey the totality of the wreckage for me.

Stier: There is just a series of hammer blows that have been wielded against the civil service. The so-called deferred-resignation offer is their attempt to create a stampede out the door, to make it easier for them to get rid of the apolitical expert civil service. And then, on the other end, they’re creating a system that enables them to politicize the hiring and the management of the workforce. Certainly there are parts of our government—and most obvious ones, like USAID and the Department of Justice and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that are taking it on the chin even harder. Some of the most frightening things are happening at the FBI.

Right now, we’re seeing the destruction of infrastructure, but also a culture that focuses on the public good and the commitment to the rule of law. What we are going to see next is the use of government authority that is possible because that culture has been eradicated—the use of government authority for improper purposes. And so when you think about what’s happening, for example, with prosecutors who were fired because they investigated or prosecuted January 6 rioters or the president himself, these events foretell the use of government authority to pursue a personal agenda and to go after perceived enemies.

One other point: Sometimes even the media describes this as an effort to cut costs. This is not an effort to cut costs. This is going to cost the American taxpayer and the American public in huge ways.

Foer: Wait, explain that to me.

Stier: If you really wanted to reshape the federal workforce, you would start with an actual investigation of all the talent that you have—and then all the talent that you need. You would develop a plan. But what they’ve done is a random exercise. They are going after people without any sense about whether they’re the best performers or the poor performers. It’s probably a little worse than that: The people who may be the most talented have a larger propensity to leave, because they’ll have more options.

And the administration is creating liabilities. It will now owe money to people who are put on the sideline for no reason, and it will have to fill gaps that are created that they don’t even understand, which will mean eventually going out to hire contractors. There will be lawsuits—and lawsuits that are meritorious. Guess who pays for that? The American taxpayer is going to be funding the defense in those cases and will pay the payoff. If your intent were to shrink the workplace in a cost-effective way, this is a crazy way to do it.

Foer: But that’s the Silicon Valley way—moving fast and breaking stuff.

Stier: That may or may not be a smart strategy in Silicon Valley. It is not in the government, because there are real consequences. People get hurt in a different way when public capability is broken. One of the challenges in our government is that when it tries to modernize technology, it has to build up a new system alongside the legacy system. That’s how it manages to keep functioning.

Our government is about creating good outcomes; it’s not about throughput. So the objective is wrong here. The public sector has accountability, transparency, reliability issues that are simply not the same as in the private sector.

Foer: All the focus has been on DOGE, understandably. But what does the focus on Musk leave out?

Stier: Most democracies count their political appointees in the tens, not the thousands. We have a government where there are 4,000 political appointees that a president makes. That’s a vestige of the spoils system that actually creates a lot of grief. Only 1,300 of them require Senate confirmation. The remaining appointees are a bit invisible. The public isn’t seeing that they are the ones doing a lot of the damage right now.

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Foer: Trump’s are qualitatively different from the appointees who show up in every administration?

Stier: It is qualitatively different. In modern times, there’s never [before] been a collection of political appointees where personal loyalty to the president has been the paramount value that has been used to select them. They swear an oath of office, when they take these jobs, to defend the Constitution. So they should be following the policy direction of the president within those constraints, but that is not how they were selected and not how they have begun to operate so far.

Foer: What do you make of DOGE’s efforts to gain access to government databases?

Stier: I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had with the community of chief information-security officers. They’ve never seen anything like this, and it terrorizes every bone in their body. These are not just people who are trying to protect the status quo. These are people who would have been good allies for reform.

Foer: What are some of the scariest risks that you’ve heard described that these actual practitioners see as plausible?

Stier: Chinese control over vital assets of our government and our country, because DOGE has opened the door for that to happen. Selective attacks on enemies lists. Breakage of systems that have consequences for vulnerable Americans. And it’s not like, Oh, here’s a mistake. They are engaging in the same practice everywhere—and they are not asking for advice or help from people who know what those risks are.

Foer: What would a responsible government-reform agenda look like now?

Stier: Ask Americans what they think about our federal government, and they think about bickering politicians in Washington. They don’t actually think about civil service. And that’s part of the challenge here. The opportunity is hopefully they will begin to understand who those folks are and appreciate what they have, even if we can do better.

But a place to begin is tapping into the very best technologists in Silicon Valley to modernize government systems. We need to have a reorientation toward the customer. In the private sector, we’ve seen improved customer service that is created by the digital universe we live in. Our government needs to be much more customer-focused.

And at the end of the day, we need to see the reform of leadership. We have too many political appointees. The folks chosen for these jobs are chosen and rewarded for a policy announcement, not actual policy execution. We have short-term leaders aligned to long-term organizations. Take the Veterans Health Administration, which is a hospital system run by a political appointee. Much of the time, there’s no one in that job. And when they’re there, they’re there for two years. And you can’t run an operationally complex system with short-term leaders.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Interestingly, every career civil servant has a performance plan that they have to commit to. We need to hold political leaders responsible for real performance.

Foer: When civil servants ask you for advice about staying or going, what do you tell them?

Stier: The first thing I say is, this is a personal choice. No judgment from me.

A third of the civil service are veterans. Coming out of the military, they want to continue to serve. That is the dominant ethos in our government. So I say: Remember the sense of purpose that you carried into government. The longer you can stick it out, the longer you will continue to be able to help the American people. Systemically, we need the civil service committed to stay as much as possible—to ensure that the rule of law and the Constitution are actually followed.

Our government is the only tool for collective action that we have as a society. We live in a phenomenally dangerous world that has gotten scarier. Harms have metastasized. Our government needs to actually get better at meeting the set of risks that we face. Civil servants are the best tool we have for actually making our government better.

Blame Gerald Ford for Trump’s Unaccountability

2025-02-11T07:30:00-05:00

Elon Musk has brazenly dismantled government agencies because he can feel assured of his insulation from the law. By the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, he may well receive a pardon. That’s what many recent pardons (Paul Manafort, the Biden clan, the January 6 insurrectionists) suggest: Presidential loyalists and family members are, in effect, immune from prosecution. On the most disturbing scale, they have become like diplomats who can park wherever they want.

The dawn of this age of impunity can be dated to any number of administrations. In his new book, The Pardon, Jeffrey Toobin makes a compelling case that a primary culprit is the 38th president, Gerald Ford. Toobin’s thesis is brashly revisionist; Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon has gone down in history as a great act of beneficence. According to conventional wisdom, by immunizing Nixon from prosecution, Ford short-circuited years of polarizing legal proceedings against the former president that would have torn the nation asunder. But Toobin argues that this overpraised act of catharsis established a precedent of lawlessness. The road to Trump begins, in some moral sense, with the absolution of Nixon.

At a glance, the amiable Ford, a college football star and World War II veteran, seems impossible to villainize. Compared with Trump or Nixon, he was the picture of humble decency. On the day he became president, he lumbered out of his suburban-Virginia house in a bathrobe to pick up the paper. In the White House, he toasted his own English muffins. He told dad jokes, played in celebrity golf tournaments, and had a reputation for basically wanting to do the ethical thing.

Having stumbled into the Nixon presidency, as the replacement for the venal vice president Spiro Agnew, he stumbled into the presidency after Watergate. As Chevy Chase portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, dooming him in popular memory, he was always stumbling. The shtick drew on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous aperçu, “Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” (Johnson also declared, “There’s nothing wrong with Jerry Ford, except that he played football too long without his helmet.”)

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Ford made it his mission to learn as little about it as possible. He defended Nixon in the vaguest terms, and essentially ran in the other direction when Nixon asked him to examine evidence in the scandal. Ford stubbornly, and somewhat inexplicably, refused to prepare for the possibility that he might become president. He had initially accepted the vice presidency in the hope that it would be a capstone to his long political career. Indeed, that was the reason Nixon picked him: He knew that Ford had so little appetite for the big job, and so little political guile, that he was unlikely to conspire to oust him.

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

In the days leading up to his ignominious departure, Nixon hatched a very Nixonian plot to exploit Ford’s goodwill and naivete. He wanted to pressure the future president into pardoning him without ever making a direct ask—a strategy he conceived with the White House counsel Fred Buzhardt, under the cover of attorney-client privilege.

On August 1, 1974, Nixon told Alexander Haig, his chief of staff, that he wanted him to begin preparing Ford to assume the job. “Tell him what’s coming,” he instructed. Nixon knew that Haig would check in with Buzhardt before sitting down with Ford. This was the twist in his scheme: Buzhardt had prepared a memo for Haig, listing six “endgame” scenarios for Ford to consider. In classic Washington style, he arrayed the possibilities so that every plan entailed a messy, prolonged handoff except for one: “Nixon could resign and then Ford could pardon him.” This was the elegant solution, but it had the whiff of corrupt horse-trading.

The pardon wasn’t something that Ford had ever considered, so he peppered Haig with questions about it. Although they didn’t agree to anything in the course of conversation, Ford’s interest had been ignited. He came to believe that a pardon genuinely served his own interests. When he finally assumed the job, he wanted to be more than a pleasant placeholder, and he could never be his own man without first disposing of the looming presence of Richard Nixon.

And so Ford talked himself into the pardon. He read a 1915 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the acceptance of a presidential pardon is tantamount to admitting guilt, and convinced himself that the public would accept that legal logic. He would tell aides that he felt sorry for poor old Nixon, who he worried was in physical decline.

Ford pushed the process forward without really debating the merits of a pardon with his staff. His poorly argued, nervously delivered speech announcing the decision to the nation was so rushed that aides didn’t have time to prepare a teleprompter. Ford barely gave congressional leaders a heads-up, and none of them could quite grasp his reasons for haste. Tip O’Neill, the majority leader in the House, asked Ford, “Then why the hell are you doing it?” He posed that question minutes before Ford went on national television.

In the most outrageous passage of the speech, Ford declared the fate of Richard Nixon “an American tragedy in which we all played a part.” The public, having been accused of complicity, took its revenge. In a single week, Ford’s popularity plummeted 21 percentage points. His party suffered catastrophic collapse in that year’s midterm election.

[Jeffrey Crouch: O]ur Founders didn’t intend for pardons to work like this

With the benefit of time, however, Washington revised its opinion of the decision. Bob Woodward, of all people, eventually concluded, “Ford was wise to act. What at first and for many years looked like a decision to protect Nixon was instead designed to protect the nation.” Ford slowly remerged with the reputation of a healer, a man of grace.

That revisionism is nostalgic gloss. Toobin makes a damning, nuanced case against Ford. Nixon had, at that point, committed the worst crimes in the history of the presidency, vividly and irrefutably captured on tape, and he escaped without any punishment. He received absolution without displaying remorse. “The pardon was just a free pass handed from one powerful man to another,” Toobin writes.

Despite his earnest desire to undo Nixon’s legacy, Ford’s pardon was itself an assertion of the imperial presidency. That’s because the pardon is an inherently Caesarean implement. In every other facet of the American system, carefully installed safeguards are designed to limit the authoritarian exercise of power. But there is no curb on the pardon other than the conscience of the executive issuing one. Presidents tend to tacitly admit that they are misusing this authority when they sheepishly hoard pardons for the final hours of their administration, waiting for the moment when there’s no political price to pay and hoping that their shabby behavior is drowned out by the inaugural hoopla.

By absolving his former patron, Ford helped create a new Washington ritual: the moment when presidents release their cronies, friends, and family from the bonds of justice. George H. W. Bush sprinkled his magic forgiveness dust over Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, and Elliot Abrams, among others, letting them off the hook for the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton bailed out the financier Marc Rich, whose alleged crimes included buying oil from Iran in defiance of an embargo. (Rich’s wife was a generous donor to Clinton.) And then Joe Biden had the temerity to pronounce himself a defender of the rule of law before he used his presidential powers to insulate his own family from potential prosecution.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has exposed the flimsiness of American institutions. Pressure-tested by his audacious assault on the civil services, those institutions instantly folded. But when a bridge tumbles into a river, the rivets and bolts don’t suddenly fail. They erode over generations. This is what happened in Washington: The unfettered power of the president kept expanding, Congress entered a state of sclerosis, the parties became apologists for their leaders, and courts fell into the hands of ideologues. As Toobin depressingly shows, even upstanding nice guys like Gerald Ford played their part in the collapse.

Franklin Foer | The Atlantic

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