Tom Nichols | The Atlantic

Trump’s Latest Meltdown

2026-04-14T13:16:47-04:00

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On many recent nights, Donald Trump has been posting obsessively on his Truth Social site into the wee hours. The president, of course, has never been one for a solid night’s sleep—or restrained and temperate commentary on social media—but his emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.

Judging from those posts, the commander in chief is in distress. No one can say for sure what is causing the president’s bizarre behavior. Perhaps Trump’s narcissistic insistence that he is always successful in everything he undertakes is feeling the sting and strain of multiple public failures, including the collapse of his campaign to dislodge the Iranian regime, plummeting approval ratings, the decline of the U.S. economy, and, on Sunday, the crushing defeat of one of his favorite fellow authoritarians, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

But whatever is driving this decline in Trump’s self-control, Americans must not shrug off the president’s latest implosion. They should recover their ability to be outraged; more to the point, they must demand that their elected representatives ask questions about the course of the war and whether Trump still has the capacity to fulfill his constitutional duty as commander in chief. Too much is at risk to dismiss his outbursts as just another idiosyncrasy: U.S. forces have been at war for almost six weeks, and China is reportedly helping Iran rearm. Even if all other problems, including the economy, were holding steady—and they are not—America cannot keep ignoring the dysfunction of the commander in chief, the sole steward of the codes to a massive nuclear arsenal.

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

Trump has always gotten lost in his own public statements, splashing about like a poor swimmer trying to reach the shore of a fast-moving river. But the president is now flailing in blacker and deeper waters. Genocidal threats against the the Iranians, with whom America is at war, are bad enough, but his defenders will excuse them as part of the Trumpian bulldozer approach to international negotiation; aiming long screeds at the pope, as if he, too, is an enemy of the United States, is not only unhinged but entirely pointless. Trump’s fusillade against the first American pope was not only politically incomprehensible—20 percent of Americans are Catholics, and most of them voted for Trump—but it was yet more evidence that the president is sinking into rage and confusion.

Why was Trump angry with Pope Leo? For the same reason that Trump ever gets mad at anyone: The Holy Father dared to criticize him. Last week, the president of the United States posted an expletive-filled threat—on Easter Sunday, no less—to destroy the ancient civilization of Iran. His supporters wrote this off as a clever gambit to bring an end to the war (which it has not). Leo called the threat “unacceptable,” blasted the “delusion of omnipotence” that led to the war, and said: “Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!”

Of course, Trump wasn’t going to take that kind of talk from some former Chicago science teacher just because the guy is now the Bishop of Rome. So a few minutes after nine on Sunday night, Trump posted a salvo of more than 300 words on Truth Social. According to the White House’s official schedule, he had just landed at Joint Base Andrews after his trip to Miami, and was likely posting from the plane. His post was, in every way, bonkers. The president accused the pope of being “Weak on Crime” and “Weak on Nuclear Weapons.” He said that Leo “wasn’t on any list to be Pope” and that he likes Leo’s brother Louis much better because “Louis is all MAGA.”

And so it went, sentence after sentence of boorishness and whiny self-regard. Leo was only chosen, you see, to deal with Trump: If not for the 47th president, “Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The president is not a Catholic (and neither am I), but he claims to be a Christian, and an ordinary follower of Christ might pause a moment before concluding that Trump, personally, motivated the Holy Spirit to guide Rome’s cardinals toward a particular successor to Saint Peter.

But Trump wasn’t finished. He had recommendations for the pontiff about how to be a better Vicar of Christ, saying he “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” Again, Trump is not a Catholic—he has referred to Communion as a “little wine” with some “little crackers”—and his track record both as a president and a person is replete with the seven deadly sins (and probably a few more that haven’t made the list yet). He is also now officially the most unpopular modern president ever, so the pope might understandably pass on accepting either his secular or spiritual advice.

This one screed against the leader of a billion and a half Catholics was worrisome enough, but for Trump, it was just the beginning of a long night. Only 45 minutes after flaming the pope, Trump—now back at the White House—posted an AI-generated image of himself as (apparently) Jesus Christ, healing a sick man while soldiers and nurses and other worshipful white people gaze in awe and military jets fly overhead. You have to see the image to really grasp its weirdness, and to take in how offensive, even heretical, it might be to Christians of any mainstream denomination. (Trump has since taken that post down, claiming that he thought it depicted him as wearing a doctor’s outfit—a denial that is not only laughable, but is also hardly reassuring about his cognitive health. “I do make people better,” he said yesterday, “and make people a lot better.”)

Five minutes after this sacrilegious nonsense, Trump posted a mock-up of a Trump Tower on the moon. (Sure, why not.)

Twenty minutes after that, at 10:10 p.m., Trump shared a silly meme about how Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden all look old after so many years in office, unlike himself. Twelve minutes later, he posted a clip from Newsmax’s Rob Carson Show. Twenty minutes later, he posted yet another Newsmax clip from the same show.

Relative calm then overtook Trump’s phone until 12:43 a.m., when he announced that the U.S. Navy would be blockading Iranian ports in the morning—as if it were just another stray factoid to share in his news feed.

Then, a bit more than two hours later—at 2:35 a.m.—he posted a link to a right-wing news site that approved of his Iran actions. At almost the same time, he posted another news story from the site about the Biden family and Ukraine. Two minutes later, he posted an article about Eric Swalwell leaving the California governor’s race. A few minutes later, he posted the same Biden story, again.

[Ali Breland: Iran out-trolled the troller in chief]

Within another minute, Trump posted a link about an appeals court ruling that he could keep building his beloved ballroom until April 17. Finally, after a brief pause, he wrapped things up by posting a laudatory article from the New York Post—at 4:10 a.m., not long before dawn.

This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader. Pope Leo, for his part, said he has “no fear” of the administration and will continue to preach the messages of the Gospel. The rest of us, however, should be very worried about a commander in chief who is trying to govern the country between social-media binges, who attacks religious leaders in narcissistic frenzy, and who imagines himself as a deity. If an elderly parent did such things, most people would be concerned. The president doing such things is far more alarming.

The American people must not look away, as they have done so often in the past. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.

Did Trump Just Threaten to Use Nuclear Weapons in Iran?

2026-04-07T14:41:52-04:00

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The president of the United States is losing his head, and that means the rest of us must keep ours. At 8:06 a.m. eastern daylight time, Donald Trump posted this on his Truth Social site:

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

The world, unfortunately, has gotten used to Trump’s overheated rhetoric, and to dismissing the commander in chief as something of a crank who (as the French president recently advised) should perhaps keep more of his thoughts to himself.

But the president’s statements are policy, and he has now made it the policy of the government of the United States that at 8 p.m. Washington, D.C., time (3:30 a.m. in Tehran), he will order the U.S. military to destroy Iran and its entire civilization—permanently—unless his terms are met. (He did not specify those terms, but on Easter Sunday, he posted a frenzied and obscenity-laden message on Truth Social demanding that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz.) Whether the president is saying this with full control of his faculties or has well and truly lost his mind is irrelevant: He is still the president, and so we must consider the meaning of this policy.

[Read: Trump threatens to destroy an entire nation]

First, Trump is vowing to eradicate a nation of 92 million people and their entire culture, “never to be brought back again.” No leader standing in front of a court at The Hague would be able to finesse that language: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” doesn’t leave a lot of room for charitable interpretations. Even Richard Nixon, the author of the “madman theory”—the notion that a president might seek advantage over an enemy by appearing to be irrational—never publicly threatened to wipe out Vietnam. Trump could argue that his threats against bridges and electricity plants might not be war crimes, if they have a military use, but his promise to erase a civilization from the Earth is a flat threat of genocide.

Second, the most important aspect of Trump’s threat is that it implies the use of nuclear weapons. Trump did not explicitly invoke nuclear arms, and he claims to abhor the idea of using them. (He has also, of course, asked why America has them if they can’t be used.) But the United States could launch every conventional munition it has, and although that kind of onslaught would immiserate the people of Iran, result in many deaths, and make reconstruction a long-term nightmare, Iranian civilization would survive. German civilization survived years of bombing so intense that the firestorms melted glass and asphalt; Japanese civilization survived similar incendiary attacks and two nuclear bombs. A threat to destroy an entire civilization in one night, assuming he means it, can be fulfilled only with the wide use of nuclear weapons.

The president now sounds no different from the authoritarian rulers of the world’s worst regimes. North Korea, when it was pursuing nuclear arms, would threaten to turn cities into “lakes of fire”; Iran, of course, has often threatened to “wipe Israel from the map,” which is why the world has been trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Now Trump is making those same kinds of threats—and he has nuclear weapons.

In the past, Trump’s sycophants in the conservative media have tried to wave away his bellicosity as just the way he talks and dismiss concerns as pearl-clutching from people who just don’t get him. But would any American offer the same grace to Kim Jong Un or Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, if they used the language Trump employed today?

Imagine how the United States would react if the leader of a major nuclear-armed power made a similar threat—if Russian President Vladimir Putin said something like Ukraine must submit to my demands by 0800 hours, or I will eradicate Ukrainian civilization, or if Chinese President Xi Jinping said, Taiwan must accept Chinese rule by sundown, or Taiwan, in one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world, will be gone and never return. At the least, the United States would likely go on heightened military alert—and might even raise the readiness of its nuclear forces—because we would have to assume that such statements from a national leader are not mere bluster.

Even during the Cold War, American planners avoided such pronouncements. U.S. nuclear strategy prioritized targeting enemy nuclear weapons, command and control, military assets, and the enemy government. There were good reasons for this list of priorities: Those targets mirrored what the Soviets would strike in the United States. Had World War III erupted, the net effect would have been something akin to what Trump is threatening now, but as the horrifying consequence of a nuclear exchange, not as an intended goal. (In 1967, Robert McNamara, in a moment of exasperation with some hawkish questioning from Congress, blurted out that the Kremlin’s leaders knew that if they attacked America, we’d kill 120 million Soviets; he was trying, however, only to reaffirm the deterrent logic of mutual assured destruction, not advocating for such action.)

If Trump did give an order to attack civilian targets that have no military value as a means of collectively punishing the Iranian people, he would be ordering war crimes. If he directs the widespread and irrevocable destruction of Iranian civilization—that is, if he commands a genocide and especially if he approves the release of nuclear weapons—the U.S. military should refuse such blatantly illegal orders.

In a better world, Trump would face a revolt in his Cabinet over such orders. Unfortunately, his Cabinet is stocked with needy courtiers who, to date, have preferred to enable the president’s reckless schemes rather than argue with him or resign in protest. Indeed, they were chosen not for the strength of their character but for their pliancy: People such as Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard exist as national political figures only because they circle Trump like dwarf moons around a gas giant. They are not going to stop him.

[Barbara A. Perry: This is not how presidents typically communicate]

Only Marco Rubio’s resignation would matter. Rubio, as secretary of state (and, concurrently, national security adviser), has a certain amount of political gravitas left, and if he spent it by threatening to walk out of the White House tonight as a private citizen, he might sway Trump from his mad threats. If Trump wishes to follow through on his threats, and the Cabinet declines to stop him, Congress could in theory convene and attempt to restrain him—but that seems even less likely to happen, despite some panicky concern from a few GOP senators.

Should Trump persist in his threatened course of action, then only a mass resignation of senior officers would stand between the president and a campaign of genocide. By this, I do not mean a mutiny or coup. The answer to Trump’s lawlessness is not more lawlessness. But American officers have a positive duty to refuse illegal orders, and the destruction of an entire civilization with nuclear weapons—which poses no similar threat to the United States—is as illegal as it gets. We must all hope that Trump’s message was an early-morning rant that got loose in the wild before anyone could stop him. But it’s out there now, and we are just hours away from his deadline. He is the president, and his words have meaning, and he has publicly committed the United States to the extermination of an entire nation.

If Trump gives that order, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should lay his stars down in front of Trump. Then, each general who gets the order should do likewise, and each man—and it will be men, in Hegseth’s Pentagon—promoted as a replacement should do likewise, until Trump has a pile of stars and eagles on his desk. Trump may eventually find someone to fulfill his orders, but people of honor and duty need not be the unwilling instruments of so great a sin.

Hegseth’s War on America’s Military

2026-04-02T22:05:00-04:00

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.) When two Army helicopters buzzed a political rally and then flew to MAGA favorite Kid Rock’s house, Hegseth short-circuited the Army’s suspension of the pilots and squashed an investigation into their actions. Following the best American civil-military traditions, George and other senior military leaders have been remarkably disciplined in keeping their thoughts out of the public eye.

Of course, the tone at the Pentagon was set by the commander in chief. Last June, Trump spoke at Fort Bragg, where he tried to turn his appearance into a political rally. Again, George (and Driscoll) said nothing, at least in public, about this shocking violation of civil-military norms. Trump, after all, is the commander in chief, and his behavior can be curtailed only by the Senate or the American people.

Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

These dismissals are not defensible even as the product of some high-minded strategic reform. Rather, as Pentagon officials told The New York Times, they are the “product of Mr. Hegseth’s long-running grievances with the Army, battles over personnel and his troubled relationship” with Driscoll. Hegseth’s beef with Driscoll may be a product of insecurity: When Hegseth was stepping on rakes in the aftermath of Signalgate, Driscoll was an obvious choice to replace him. The Army secretary also took on important tasks that Hegseth either would not—or could not—do. Last fall, Driscoll, not Hegseth, was part of a high-level Pentagon delegation that traveled to Geneva in an attempt to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Perhaps that was just as well. Hegseth—now scathingly called “Dumb McNamara” by some Pentagon staff—has busied himself with culture-war nonsense rather than substantive defense and security issues. But Hegseth apparently need not worry: Driscoll, according to reporting from my colleagues Ashley Parker and Sarah Fitzpatrick, is now rumored to be one of the next senior appointees facing likely dismissal. (Hegseth may not know much about strategy or leadership, but he knows how to fight a war of attrition.)

The petty vendettas of a passed-over major mattered less until the war in Iran, a conflict that may be escalating beyond American control and is now sinking both Trump’s popularity and the global economy. Pentagon pissing matches are the stuff of legend, and George is not the first general to get an unwanted retirement invitation from an irate civilian leader. But America is now engaged in its biggest conflict in decades, with thousands of troops headed into possible combat on the shores of a country the size of Alaska with more than three times the population of North Korea—and with a president whose only formal speech on the war so far consisted of 19 minutes of jumbled thoughts. The American people deserve to know why so many of their top officers are being tossed out of their jobs.

Pete Hegseth has never shown a willingness to explain himself to the public, nor has he demonstrated the character required to take that kind of responsibility. But now that Randy George, along with other senior officers Hegseth has fired or pushed to resign, are about to be civilians, maybe they can step forward and tell their fellow citizens what on earth is going on in Hegseth’s Pentagon.

Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech

2026-04-01T23:46:48-04:00

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics (including me) have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

A speech that should have been a clear explanation of why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began instead in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. He then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.

Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. But he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

But back to the war: What is America fighting for? Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. Instead, he simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.

Trump, however, then undercut his own point by assuring the country that Iran’s “nuclear dust” was buried under mountains of rubble, inaccessible since the great success of last June’s joint Israeli-American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranians would never be allowed to excavate any of it, he said.

So, then, perhaps the war was about regime change, which would be the surest way to stop every evil plan gestating in Tehran, including nuclear weapons and terrorist plots. Well, no, it turns out, the war is not about that either. Trump explicitly denied that the goal was to bring down the Iranian theocracy—a staggering claim given his exhortations to the Iranian people on the first night of the war that their hour of liberation was at hand. After denying that the U.S. goal was regime change, he then claimed that regime change had now already happened because so many Iranian leaders have been killed.

In addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump laid out three other goals that he said were now within reach: neutralizing Iran’s ability to project power anywhere through terrorism, destroying the Iranian navy, and eliminating Iran’s missile stocks and production capabilities. As with so many other Trump promises, the president said that he will accomplish these goals in two to three weeks. How he will do all this was left unclear, other than that he will hit Iran “extremely hard.”

[Read: Trump’s fateful choice]

Meanwhile, Tehran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said only that other nations should go in, clear the strait, and take Iran’s oil. He chided Americans for their impatience; the two world wars, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, took longer than the current war, he said. He also waved away any economic concerns. Everything will get better, he promised, telling viewers that only a year ago America was a “dead and crippled country” that he personally rescued. Oddly, Trump claimed that the United States has never been more economically prepared for a conflict—the “little journey,” as he called it—like the one he has led against Iran.

The president also said things that might come back to haunt him. He vowed not to let Israel or America’s friends in the Persian Gulf “get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,” as if Iran were not already inflicting damage on them. And he assured Americans that gas prices would come down. (They might, but not anytime soon.) He threatened, yet again, to bomb all of Iran’s electrical plants, a likely war crime if carried out with the completeness that Trump promised, should Iran refuse to … well, do whatever it is he thinks it should do. “We are unstoppable,” he said, noting that U.S. forces were in combat against “one of the most powerful countries.” (This, too, is nonsense: It takes nothing away from U.S.-military valor to admit that Iran was at best a second-tier power even before the war.) America might be unstoppable, but the American president seems to be at loose ends now that the Iranians have a chokehold on a major part of the world’s energy supply.

The only bright spots in the speech were in the things the president did not say. He did not, as many observers expected, prepare Americans for the introduction of ground forces into Iran. (If he now goes ahead with such an operation, he will have betrayed the public by misleading them about the course of the war.) And he did not eviscerate NATO and threaten to pull out of the alliance, as some expected him to do because of his ongoing anger at major European powers’ unwillingness to join a war they did not start.

If the president meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)

The president seems lost. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.

Pete Hegseth Is Vice Signaling

2026-03-30T19:09:00-04:00

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The term virtue signaling refers to an annoying moral peacocking that has less to do with politics than with self-gratification. It’s the dinner guest who feels compelled to comment on the climate impact of every course. It’s the guy who annoys his colleagues during meetings with constant bits of civic guidance. (The author Richard Russo, in a 1990s satire of academic life, created a character whose nickname was “Orshee” because when anyone in a faculty meeting used he as a generic pronoun, the fellow would chirp “Or she” as a correction.)

But Donald Trump and his administration have embraced the Mirror Universe version of virtue signaling. They’ve pioneered the practice of “vice signaling,” or saying insulting or odious things both as attention-seeking behavior and as a way of showcasing their supposedly transgressive political views. They aim to demonstrate strength by being willing to appall other people, much as schoolyard bullies insult their classmates to gain the approval of other bullies. It’s the same peacocking, but with uglier feathers.

Few people besides the president himself have done more to advance the cause of vice signaling than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a man who honed his communication skills at Fox News, where the hosts routinely say outrageous things as a way of showing their viewers how eager they are to own the libs. Hegseth, for example, has long stewed about the fact that women occupy positions of leadership in the U.S. military, and he has hammered on the idea of “merit” as a way of implying that minority officers have been promoted because of their race rather than their talent. He put those beliefs into action almost immediately upon arriving at the Pentagon by pushing for the firing of one Black and several female senior officers who were then replaced with white men.

A few weeks ago, he did it again: According to The New York Times, Hegseth intercepted the Army’s promotion list, which consists mostly of white men, and struck off four officers—two Black men and two women—preventing them from advancing from colonel to brigadier general. Hegseth did not provide a public explanation for his decision, but military officials told the Times that one officer was singled out for writing a paper about the career choices of African American officers, and another was targeted because she had served during the pullout from Afghanistan.

Usually, the defense secretary doesn’t get involved at that level of the process. Promotions like these, to one and two stars, are generally a routine matter, decided on by promotion boards within the military and then presented to the Senate for approval. (Promotions to three and four stars get a lot more scrutiny; those generals and admirals will likely head major commands and become part of the civil-military leadership in Washington.) Hegseth had to know that carving those four colonels out of the list looks both misogynistic and racist, and he chose to send a clear message to the rest of the military: I will intentionally harm the careers of loyal American officers in a display of obvious bigotry just to show that I’m a tough guy.

Meanwhile, every time he steps to the podium, Hegseth seeks not to reassure or inform the American people but to hit hot buttons that will please Trump and the MAGA faithful. He raps out some inane sloganeering rather than offering real information: “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” He says that America will show “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies”—chesty, movie-villain talk that is typical of Hegseth’s cringe-inducing attempts to project confidence. (Perhaps he has become aware that some in the Pentagon now reportedly refer to him as “Dumb McNamara,” comparing him—unfavorably—to the late Robert McNamara, his predecessor who helped mire America in the swamps of Vietnam.)

But nowhere is Hegseth’s embrace of vice signaling more obvious than in his efforts to combine his adolescent, gung-ho excitement about war with Christian prayer. When Hegseth tries to don the armor of a warrior priest, the result is a rancid mess that should offend believers and nonbelievers alike.

Praying for the safety of the troops is not controversial in America, nor should it be. In my faith (I am a Greek Orthodox Christian), we pray each week for “the peace of the world” and “for our country, the president, all those in public service, and for our armed forces everywhere.” Nor are petitions to the Almighty unusual in wartime: In 1944, General George Patton ordered up a prayer to God for an end to bitter weather that was holding up his attacks on the Nazis. His chaplain beseeched the Lord to “restrain these immoderate rains” and to allow the Third Army, “armed with Thy power,” to “advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations.”

But even Patton’s weather prayer looks timid next to Hegseth’s impious rage. Last week—during Lent, no less—he prayed in much the same way as the jihadists he hates might have: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said, asking God to give American forces “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Christianity—whose founder preached peace and mercy and then was tortured to death—has struggled for centuries with the moral questions concerning the permissibility of war for people of faith, and how they should conduct themselves if armed conflict is inevitable. The works produced by these debates are collectively called the “just-war tradition,” a body of thought that is at the foundation of the laws of war both in the United States and in other nations. The just war tradition has always recognized the sanctity of human life and the spiritual peril of taking it, which is one of the reasons “no mercy” and “no quarter” orders are traditionally a violation of the laws of war—and why they are also against American law.

Christian thinkers have always insisted that princes and generals approach war with a sense of grave responsibility. Hegseth, however, sees war as just another opportunity to display depravity as if it were a martial virtue. (During Trump’s first term, Hegseth reportedly encouraged the president to issue pardons to two men convicted of war crimes.) As Greg Sargent noted today in The New Republic, Hegseth’s wartime prayers—rooted in his apparent adherence to a far-right evangelical sect—not only contravene the traditional Christian abhorrence of war but also suggest that “God actively approves of as much killing as possible.” One Baptist minister told Sargent that the secretary gets to this conclusion by cherry-picking various bloody passages from scripture, using them in a “kind of a Mad Libs mash-up of biblical violence.”

Vice signaling is rampant throughout the Trump administration because the president’s appointees know that the boss likes underlings who emulate his aggressive indecency. But when the man in charge of the Defense Department disgorges this kind of toxic waste, it seeps into the groundwater of military culture. It tells young service members—and men, especially—that racism, sexism, and the display of faux masculinity are signs of a true warrior.

Whether Pete Hegseth is sincerely a man of faith, I cannot say. His brand of Christianity is unrecognizable to me, but ostensibly we worship the same God, and we definitely read the same Bible. So perhaps I can suggest that he revisit Matthew 6:5, in which Jesus admonishes his followers about showy displays of piety: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”

Related:

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Today’s News

President Trump said that there has been “great progress” in talks with Iran to end the war but again threatened to bomb key infrastructure in Iran if negotiations fail; the announcement jolted oil markets. Iran has denied that direct negotiations are taking place with America and also accused Washington yesterday of secretly planning an assault while pursuing negotiations.
Trump allowed a Russian oil tanker carrying about 730,000 barrels of oil to reach Cuba yesterday, easing his administration’s fuel blockade of the island; the tanker arrived at the Cuban port of Matanzas earlier today. The fuel shortage in Cuba has led to blackouts and disruptions of basic services.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said yesterday that ICE agents will continue assisting at airports “until the airports feel like they’re 100 percent” and can carry out “normal operations.” Trump signed an executive order last week to start paying TSA officers, but the agency said that at least 500 agents had quit since the Department of Homeland Security shutdown began.

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Bartolome Esteban Murillo, "La Toilette Domesque" (1670–75) Bridgeman Images

Don’t Get Sucked Into the War on Lice

By Daniel Engber

The human-head louse has a ghostly quality. It tends to glimmer in and out of view, leaving only subtle signs and omens of its presence. Is that oblong speck an egg sac or a flake of dandruff? Was that a prickle on your scalp? Is it normal that your son is scratching just behind his ear? Maybe you have lice and he has lice, and you’ve all had lice for weeks. The possibility is frightening. The uncertainty leads to madness.

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Trump Had No Plan B for Iran

2026-03-20T06:30:00-04:00

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Three weeks into Donald Trump’s war against Iran, the president has still refused to define victory other than to say the war will soon be over. From the moment he launched hostilities, he offered many rationales for the war, choosing among them like he’s picking hors d’oeuvres from a buffet at one of his golf resorts: It’s about nuclear weapons, it’s about terrorism, it’s about ballistic missiles. As the media, and the world, press him for explanations, he continues, as Pegah Banihashemi and Paul Poast wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday, to “careen” between demanding “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and signaling “that he might abruptly declare victory and leave.”

But Trump did seem to have an overarching goal at the start of the war: regime change. In a video he released during the first night of the attack, he told the Iranian authorities to surrender and called on the Iranian people to rise up against their government. Unfortunately, the regime in Tehran seems to be recovering and, even worse, consolidating power. The American intelligence community has reportedly issued an assessment that the regime “will remain intact and possibly even emboldened, believing it stood up to Trump and survived.” Trump now appears lost, unable to comprehend how a blockbuster movie that he scripted out, one in which he cast himself as the Liberator of Iran, has turned into a poorly received miniseries that might yet be renewed for another dreary season.

The commander in chief was reportedly told that the mullahs might not agree to go gently into the night, but he seems to have waved away such concerns because he was so convinced that the Iranian regime would collapse almost immediately. According to The Wall Street Journal, when General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned the president that a U.S. attack would prompt Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, Trump “told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait—and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.”

[Read: Trump may not be able to end this war]

Trump’s Plan A was to hit Iran hard, watch the theocrats flee, and then hand power to a government of his own choosing. Should such things not come to pass, Plan B was … well, apparently, there was no Plan B.

Regime change, as Americans learned the hard way in Afghanistan and Iraq, cannot merely be willed into existence. Such operations necessitate planning, the creation of an alternative government, and both the muscle and dedication to ensure that the old regime dies and a new one can take root. It requires time, and some hard thinking about what to do if the enemy regime—and the country’s population—will not cooperate with such grandiose schemes.

Trump and his officials have shied away from the term regime change, perhaps realizing that it evokes the failure in Afghanistan and the bloody struggle for Iraq. Trump, however, promised regime change to the Iranian people in his first statement on the war, released during the initial attack. He told the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian military, and the local police all to disarm and surrender or “face certain death.” Then he addressed “the great, proud people of Iran”:

I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.

The president’s statement was, in some ways, puzzling. The United States had no forces on the ground and the Iranian people were hiding in their homes. To whom, exactly, were the IRGC and others supposed to offer a surrender? But one part was clear: The exhortation to take back power was a vow, to the enemy and to its people, that the American attack would end with a new government in Tehran. Since then, Trump has demanded that he be allowed to pick the new Iranian government—the very essence of regime change.

The Israelis and the Americans underscored this goal by rapidly eliminating most of the Iranian leadership. They hurried the ailing 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to his final reward (perhaps only a bit ahead of nature’s schedule), and dispatched at least a dozen other top figures in Tehran. Trump and his only military partner so far in prosecuting this war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently believed that hitting Iran in a comprehensive attack, destroying its military capacity, and killing its leaders would somehow instantly produce a new reality in Iran.

Instead, the Iranian government lashed out at several countries in the region, widening the war both to sow chaos and to emphasize the danger of working with the reckless Trump administration. And in a completely predictable move, it has closed the Strait of Hormuz. Or, more accurately, it has exercised its control over the strait, allowing some ships, including its own, safe passage while counting on fear and uncertainty among ship captains and the world’s insurers to choke the flow of oil to the rest of the world and perhaps create an oil shock in the West of a kind unseen since the 1970s.

Some observers have criticized American planners for failing to anticipate such a move. This is unfair: The intelligence community and the U.S. military have analyzed, planned, and exercised for this scenario for decades. The failure came not from the national-security community, but from the civilians, and specifically the commander in chief, who evidently refused to heed warnings from his senior military advisers that the Iranians would do exactly what anyone paying attention suspected they would do.

This arrogance is likely why Trump began the war by haughtily dismissing the need for allies; he is now whining that America’s allies should help open the strait while paradoxically claiming that he doesn’t need their help. Things have gotten so far out of Trump’s control that the president of the United States has even suggested that the People’s Republic of China—the same China that his top aides think is America’s greatest threat—should become involved in the Gulf.

Ironically, Trump’s flawed decision making on Iran emulates the errors committed by someone Trump admires, and from whom he might have learned a lesson: Vladimir Putin. The Russian president launched a war against Ukraine because he was certain the government in Kyiv would collapse in a matter of days under the onslaught of Russian arms. Putin (perhaps while in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic with only a few close advisers) got it into his head that the Ukrainian regime was on the brink of collapse, and that ordinary Ukrainians were waiting for Russian liberation. He then blundered into Ukraine without a backup plan. Four years later, the Kremlin’s war is an ongoing disaster.

Both presidents made classic strategic errors. They engaged in what analysts call “scriptwriting”: They decided what they wanted to happen, and then wrote out a kind of script in which their adversaries would dutifully play their part and recite their lines. They also both seem to have ignored the standard war-gaming caution to plan for what the enemy can do, not for what you would prefer that it do.

The analogy is not exact. Most important, Putin is engaged in a war of conquest, while Trump, however ineptly, is on the side of right, even if he is in it for his own vainglory. Trump’s rush to war was shortsighted; he evaded Congress (and likely U.S. law); he overrode American public opinion. But the Iranian regime is a malignancy and a threat to global peace, and had Trump succeeded in taking it down quickly and efficiently, he would deserve some credit. Indeed, Trump could later have tried to defy the legal and moral consequences of launching a war on his own by arguing that he took a bold risk, much as George H. W. Bush did in 1990. (Bush privately told my then-boss, the late Senator John Heinz, that going to war against Iraq in Kuwait was the right thing to do, and that he was going to order the operation even if it meant his impeachment.) And Trump, unlike Putin, has not thrown a generation of young men into a meat grinder.

Or at least not yet. Trump this week ordered thousands of Marines to head to the Persian Gulf, and new reports suggest that he is considering sending thousands more. (Asked about these reports on Wednesday, Trump said, in one of his usual circumlocutions: “No, I’m not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” after which he added that he “will do whatever’s necessary to keep the price” of oil down.) The likely explanation for the movement of the Marines is that they are being positioned for an attempt to seize Kharg Island, a major installation that serves as one of Iran’s most important lifelines to the global oil economy. But if Trump is about to send a much larger force, he may be planning to occupy territory on the Iranian mainland in order to push back threats to the strait.

The U.S. military has long studied and planned for such operations, but on a strategic level, these moves amount to improvisation. Trump’s statements in public and to Caine imply his assumption that the war wasn’t supposed to last very long—certainly not long enough that deploying Marines would even be a question, which is probably why the Japan-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit wasn’t in the region at the start of the war and won’t arrive there for another week or so.

What now? Trump’s options are not appealing, as sometimes happens when a leader goes all in on a hunch and a wish. The U.S. military can continue its operations. It can go on destroying installations, enemy forces, and other targets at will. Sooner or later, as Trump himself recently suggested, the military will run out of things to bomb, but for now, the United States can keep inflicting pain on the Iranian government (and its people).

Without a clearly defined goal, however, these operations are unlikely to lead to strategic success, not least because Trump seems to still be holding on to some unrealistic notion that Iran will surrender—whatever “surrender” now means. Instead, these operations are more like an attempt to play the first days of the war over and over, in hopes that the Iranian regime will finally collapse and hand power to someone else, despite the fact that there is no “someone else” ready to take the reins. (The son of the former shah has offered his services, but he is a would-be king without a throne or an army.)

[Read: How much pain is Trump really willing to endure?]

The Iranian leaders, for their part, know they can win merely by surviving. (Again, the parallel—and contrast—with Ukraine is striking: The authoritarian regime in Tehran and the democratic government in Kyiv both understand that they are winning against much more powerful opponents by stubbornly continuing to exist.) The new ayatollah and his lieutenants are likely betting that Trump’s infamously short attention span and his frustration with anything that doesn’t instantly go his way will lead him to use some arbitrary metric of destruction, call it victory, and get out.

Whatever Trump chooses to do from here, the American president is now being driven by events instead of controlling them. Like a gambler chasing his losses, he keeps investing new money to stay at the table. Worse, Trump faces far more risk today than he did during his first throw of the dice: If he quits anytime soon, he will affirm that the Iranian control of oil is an even more effective shield against regime change than any putative nuclear program.

Trump has said that the war will not last long. The Iranians have been severely weakened, and their nuclear program is, for the time being, almost nonexistent. For the president, that may be enough to declare a win and let the world’s markets (and nerves) settle back down. But if the regime survives, and Tehran keeps its fist around the throat of the global economy, Trump’s Plan A will have failed. And without a Plan B, the temptation to escalate will grow as Trump tries to spackle over the gap left by his own unwillingness to engage in judicious strategic thinking when it counted most: before the war.

Operational Excellence, Strategic Incompetence

2026-03-06T21:04:44-05:00

The war in Iran has reaffirmed two truths. One is that the United States is blessed with the most professional and effective military in the world. The men and women of the American armed forces can conduct missions of almost any size with formidable competence, from special operations to seize a rogue-state president to a large-scale war. The other truth is that the Trump administration, when it comes to strategy, is incompetent.

Strategy is about matching the instruments of national power—and especially military force—to the goals of national policy. The president and his team, however, have not enunciated an overarching goal for this war—or, more accurately, they have presented multiple goals and chosen among them almost randomly, depending on the day or the hour. This means that highly effective military operations are taking place in a strategic vacuum.

Worse, Donald Trump is now pointing to these missions as if the excellence with which they have been conducted somehow constitutes a strategy in itself. He appears so enthralled by the execution of these missions that he has enlarged the goals of this war to include the complete destruction of the Iranian regime, after which he will “Make Iran Great Again.”

[Karim Sadjadpour: Trump has lost the plot in Iran]

This kind of thinking is an old problem, and it has a name: “victory disease,” meaning that victory in battle encourages leaders to seek out more battles, and then to believe that winning those battles means that they are winning the larger war or achieving some grand strategic aim—right up until the moment they realize that they have overreached and find themselves facing a military disaster or even total defeat. It is a condition that has afflicted many kinds of regimes over the course of history, one so common that my colleagues and I lectured military officers about it when I was a professor at the Naval War College. The issue is especially important for Americans, because when national leaders have exceptionally capable military forces at their disposal—as the United States does—they are even more likely to be seized by victory disease.

The Persian emperor Xerxes had it; that’s how he found himself eventually suffering a historic defeat in Greece at the Battle of Salamis. Napoleon had it; that’s how he ended up freezing in the Russian snow after years of brilliant victories over other European states. The French in 1870 had it; that’s how they confidently marched to catastrophes against a superior Prussian army. The Axis had it; that’s how Germany and Japan convinced themselves that their early successes meant that they could quickly defeat the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively.

The Americans caught the same bug in the Korean War, when they chased the North Koreans to the Yalu River, a drive that ended in disaster when Communist Chinese troops streamed across the border and joined the conflict. The U.S. fell prey to this syndrome again in Vietnam, when it poured men and materiel into the war for years yet remained unable to turn many battlefield triumphs into a strategic victory.

American policy in the Gulf War in 1991 is an honorable exception; George H. W. Bush avoided victory disease, calling an end to Operation Desert Storm rather than marching on Baghdad after achieving his stated aim of rescuing Kuwait. But his son, George W. Bush, chose to fight two wars at the same time. Once again, the men and women of the U.S. military managed to achieve remarkable operational successes, but it took years to stabilize Iraq, and Afghanistan today is back in the hands of the Taliban.

And now Trump seems to have contracted a whopping case of victory disease. He is clearly convinced that previous operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and, of course, Iran are all evidence that a total victory over the regime in Tehran will be relatively quick. But he has provided no conception of what “victory” would look like. As of yesterday, his goals have expanded to include a demand for “unconditional surrender.”

Admiring the performance of the U.S. military is understandable. But it is not the same thing as using that military power to achieve some national purpose. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth so far seem to be enjoying the fireworks. But the efficient and rapid destruction of buildings and machines, and the killing of some enemy leaders, is not the same thing as a strategy.

Today, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have achieved almost full control of the skies over Iran and the waters around it. They appear able to destroy any targets they choose with near impunity. The Iranians still have the ability to strike back by launching missiles and drones at various targets, and they managed to kill six American service members with an attack against a makeshift installation in Kuwait. Nevertheless, Iran has been bested at the operational level of war, and its air and naval forces cannot offer meaningful resistance.

American operations have not been flawless. Last week, a U.S. strike on an Iranian naval base may have destroyed an Iranian school and killed dozens of children. Every major military engagement is fraught with risks of targeting errors, friendly fire, and other accidents, and preliminary evidence indicates that the school bombing was a tragic American error, one that was made more likely by the U.S. and Israeli decision to attack during the day (when children would be in the building). Even so, American military operations have for the most part been astonishingly well executed. Years of training, study, and planning, along with careful use of intelligence, have all contributed to the rapid elimination of much of Iran’s capacity to project power, and almost all of its ability to resist allied attacks.

Operational competence, however, cannot answer the question of national purpose. What is the war about, and when will America know it’s done? Trump, when pressed, dodges the issue of war aims by pointing to the excellence of the military. “I hope you are impressed,” Trump said on Thursday to ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better.” Trump then repeated, “How do you like the performance?” Karl noted that no one is questioning the success of military operations, and he asked the president what happens next. “Forget about ‘next,’” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”

Likewise, the next day, CNN’s Dana Bash asked the president how he thought the war was going. Trump rated the war, Bash said, a 12 or 15 out of 10, and then said, “We’re doing very well militarily—better than anybody could have even dreamed.”

Each time Trump or one of his lieutenants speaks this way, they generate more questions than answers. Yes, military operations are proceeding impressively, with very few casualties among the U.S. and Israeli operators. But what would have constituted a “10” that we can now say that America is at a “15”? Now that Trump, at least for the time being, has issued a call for “unconditional surrender,” perhaps vaporizing every piece of military hardware with an Iranian flag on it is enough. Comments on Thursday by Hegseth and Admiral Brad Cooper of Central Command suggest that this seems to be the plan.

But “unconditional surrender” is unlikely to last. To effect such a total defeat, Iran would have to be occupied and administered by the victors. This kind of language is at odds with the reluctance of some in the Trump administration and other Republicans, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, to even call Operation Epic Fury a “war.” (I will exercise my prerogative here as someone who has studied and taught national security and international relations and confirm that when you bomb a nation, kill its leaders, and call for its people to rise up, you’re engaged in war, and if you call for “unconditional surrender,” you are definitely at war.)

Trump will likely find himself backpedaling from the demand for unconditional surrender. He might also redefine unconditional to denote more easily achieved aims. (Indeed, hours after Trump’s post, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt was already offering an interpretation of unconditional that was far more limited than absolute capitulation.) Soon, the Americans could find themselves retreating to the strategic incoherence that has characterized the administration’s approach since the first hours of the war. Military operations and national purpose will become more and more distanced from each other, because military prowess cannot clarify America’s war aims. As the old saying warns: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

My colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl have pointed out the severity of this problem by noting that Trump and his aides have offered at least 10 rationales for war over the course of only six days. Rationale No. 1 was “an imminent threat” from Iran, Rationale No. 2 was nuclear weapons, Rationale No. 5 was election interference, Rationale No. 6 was “world peace” writ large, Rationale No. 10 was that America had been dragged into the war by Israel. Some of these reasons might constitute a casus belli—others, such as Rationale No. 9 (“fulfill God’s purpose”), less so—but Trump’s team has thrown them all at the wall to see what sticks, perhaps in part because the war is still unpopular with the American public and Trump has so far seen no “rally ’round the flag” benefit from launching it.

[Read: Six days of war, 10 rationales]

But each of these rationales demands a different strategy; eliminating an imminent threat involves a different set of operations than establishing peace in the region (or the world). Instead, the Americans are choosing an “all of the above” approach, employing immense power across Iran. Entranced by the show, Trump, Hegseth, and others assume that because these operations are going well, something good will come of them. This kind of poor strategy, ironically, is an option only because of the excellence of the American and Israeli militaries: If Trump had to make decisions under greater material or military constraints, such as shortages of money, weapons, or talent, he would have to choose an actual war aim and stay with it.

If the goal is regime change and “unconditional surrender,” do current U.S. operations support that goal? Again, military prowess and victory disease may be encouraging the White House to avoid thinking about some hard realities. Regimes are not changed by bombing; they are put in place by men and women wearing boots and carrying guns. (These need not be American boots, but they have to be somebody’s boots.) Trump has called for the Iranians to surrender, but to whom? A U.S. occupation force? Or is an internal group of rebels assembling in Iran? In any case, a new regime will have to gain support by rebuilding infrastructure that’s being destroyed. Are the target sets being adjusted accordingly over time? No one can answer these questions, because the civilian leadership of the United States does not seem to have thought them through.

[Thomas Wright: America’s and Israel’s goals are already colliding]

Victory disease divorces military excellence from political wisdom and strategic discipline. It convinces leaders that whatever they’re doing must be working and that they should keep doing it, blinding them to the possibility that military operations may have become counterproductive or detached from achievable aims. The American military is given tasks—clear the skies, suppress air defenses, sink the enemy navy—and then it breaks those instructions down into discrete and granular missions against particular targets. The pilots and planners can execute those missions with courage and professionalism, but they cannot force them to make strategic sense.

Meanwhile, despite the successes of the military overseas, Trump now admits that a regime that was supposed to be eliminated quickly could reach the United States with terrorist attacks. He told Time this week that “we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.” The American people might be willing to tolerate such risks if they knew what their sons and and daughters were fighting for and how long they would be at war. Trump has retreated behind the skill of the U.S. military rather than answer such questions.

Perhaps the greatest danger of the current epidemic of victory disease is that it seems to be making Donald Trump think he’s a brilliant strategist: He is already talking about overthrowing the government of Cuba, even as American forces are still fighting in the Middle East, and the threat of terror may well be growing at home now that the United States is at war. At this point, all Americans can do is admire the fortitude and excellence of the U.S. military while hoping for victory—whatever that is, and whenever it comes.

Pete Hegseth Treats Fallen American Soldiers as a PR Problem

2026-03-04T18:01:00-05:00

The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time, might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S. goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials. Even Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has held only a few briefings.

Perhaps the Pentagon chief’s reluctance to speak to the press is just as well, because many Americans would be alarmed to realize that their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as Pete Hegseth.

This morning, the defense secretary gave a briefing on the war that quickly degenerated into Trumplike bombast. (Wisely, the Pentagon scheduled this at 8 a.m. eastern time, when most of the country is either sleeping or busy starting their day.) Hegseth apparently prefers to sound more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense: “Death and destruction from the sky all day,” he said, along with other empty phrases such as “We’re playing for keeps.” (As opposed to what, exactly?)

Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel to air his own grievances with the press.

On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation: The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly vulnerable to aerial attack.

The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”

“Tragic things happen”? Hegseth said this as though it is unreasonable to look any closer at such events. He seems unable to grasp that the deaths of Americans are not merely a public-relations problem: When a drone slips through U.S. defenses and kills six members of America’s armed forces, the deaths of those servicepeople are the story. The people of the United States deserve to know what happened and why. Hegseth complaining that he’s not getting credit for all of the drones that didn’t get through is like an airline executive responding to an air disaster by growling about all of the planes his company made that didn’t crash.

My colleague Nancy Youssef was at the Pentagon this morning, sitting just three rows from the podium. I asked her what the atmosphere was like after Hegseth’s heartless remark. She told me that his comments “sent a stunned silence through the briefing room.” Even members of Hegseth’s staff, she said, seemed to flinch at what he was saying. “Some put their heads down,” she said, while others just looked around. Someone in the room then said: “That was one of the most insulting things I have ever heard,” quietly but audibly and, as far as Nancy could tell, to no one in particular.

Unlike Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine opened his remarks by grieving the deaths of the fallen soldiers, saying that “it’s with profound sadness and gratitude that I share the names of four of our six fallen heroes.” He didn’t have the names of the other two, because while Hegseth was griping about media coverage, the U.S. military was completing the next-of-kin notification. (The names could be publicly released as soon as later today.) “Our nation stands with you,” Caine told Gold Star parents, wounded warriors, and their families, “and we are eternally grateful for your courage, your resiliency, your devotion to this mission and to our nation.”

The contrast was unsettling. For years, defense secretaries and top generals have carried the anguish of decisions that have led to troop deaths. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that he wept as he read the stories of the fallen; some generals have carried photos of those lost under their command—even into their retirement. Hegseth, instead, noted the losses almost in passing, and used them as a vehicle for his ongoing beefs with the press.

But Hegseth wasn’t content merely to carp about the coverage of American deaths. After expressing his irritation at the press, he decided to trash America’s allies. Instead of simply praising Israel—America’s only ally in this war—he took a needless shot at other nations, saying that U.S. allies in the past provided only “ancillary benefits” in global conflicts because they were “maybe willing but not as capable” as the Israelis. Hegseth made this preposterous claim in front of military people who had fought in previous wars alongside these allies—and who saw many service members from these nations sacrifice their life alongside their American comrades.

Hegseth is now holding more press conferences, according to Nancy’s reporting, because some White House officials have privately conceded that they are losing the communications war. The Trump team should have seen this coming: When Hegseth kicked the press corps out of the Pentagon last fall—including reporters from The Atlantic—for not agreeing to publish only Pentagon-approved news, some reporters warned department officials that such a move might make it harder for the public to understand America’s operations overseas, Nancy told me. Now the United States is involved in a major war, and no one in the Pentagon, the White House, or the State Department seems able to explain why without contradicting one another.

In the midst of all this, Hegseth provided at least one moment of clarity: He showed, yet again, why he is an execrable choice to lead the Pentagon. Like his boss, he does not talk to the American people so much as put on performances for them, and this morning, he played the role of the Fox News pundit castigating other journalists. But the people in the briefing room were doing their job trying to get the facts. Unlike Hegseth, they are taking their responsibilities seriously: This is not a game, it’s not a TV show, and it’s not some adolescent test of wills.

Pete Hegseth, if he does not resign, should at least get out of the way and let better men than him talk to the nation and to the press. No one is asking for classified details to be revealed in public; no one expects Periclean rhetoric from a talk-show host. But the people of the United States deserve more of an explanation of what’s happening in this war, and they certainly deserve more of an encomium for their fallen children than “Tragic things happen.”

Related:

The last days of the Pentagon press corps
Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is becoming a bubble. (From August)

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Today’s News

NATO air defenses shot down an Iranian missile headed toward Turkey, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian naval ship with a torpedo—allegedly the first such sinking of an enemy ship with a torpedo since World War II.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Justice Department’s role in the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, as part of its ongoing investigation into the federal government’s handling of the case against the convicted sex offender.
The Texas Republican Senate primary is headed to a runoff between Senator John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Texas State Representative James Talarico won the Democrats’ Senate primary against U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett.

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Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic

The Tyranny of the Relationship Gap

By Faith Hill

Every so often, I hear a time-honored dinner-party question that always leads to lively debate: Would you sleep with your clone?

It’s hard to say where the conversation starter came from. Perhaps it originated with a 2015 BuzzFeed article titled “Can We Ask You a Really Weird Question?,” which inquired—well, you know. Or maybe it can be traced much further back, to works of science fiction that explored similar puzzles. Is a clone conscious? Does it have rights? But today’s clone query, in my experience, tends to prompt chatter about something a little less heady: whether engaging sexually or romantically with someone just like yourself sounds like a creepy nightmare—or whether it sounds like a dream of convenience, of perfectly aligned interests and interactions as frictionless as silk.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic

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Trump Has Given America a Constitutional Dilemma

2026-03-02T18:49:00-05:00

Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives. His launching of hostilities (with the embarrassingly bro-themed name “Operation Epic Fury”) is the culmination of decades of expanding presidential powers over national-security issues, and Trump has now taken that expansion to its extreme conclusion, launching wars and using military power as he sees fit.

Many of his critics are focused on the claim that the war is illegal under both U.S. and international law—and they are probably right about that. But Trump has already floored the accelerator and driven off the cliff. What are the options for Congress and the American people—the majority of whom do not support this conflict—to regain some control over a president conducting a war as if he were a medieval prince?

Unfortunately, the few legal options available are laden with their own risks. Congress could decide to cut off funding for the war, which at this point could be as reckless an act as starting one. Men and women overseas did not choose to go, and they should at least be allowed to conduct their operations without worrying that Congress will simply turn off all funding. It could pass a resolution demanding an immediate end to hostilities—also a risky move.

Congress does have a less dramatic option: It could invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution, a law often discussed but rarely understood by the public. I have my own skepticism about using this law: In fact, I helped to avert its use in 1990 when I was working in the Senate during the first Gulf War.

I’ll come back to that. Meanwhile, here’s where the law came from and what it actually says.

The War Powers Resolution was adopted in 1973 during the waning days of the Vietnam War. The resolution imposes these limits on the power of presidents to wage war:

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

This seems simple enough: Unless Congress declares war or passes some law, or the United States is attacked, the president cannot send U.S. forces into harm’s way.

Simple, but irrelevant. Presidents have gotten around this by using that last part about “national emergencies” to justify the use of force; multiple commanders in chief have also—rightly—noted that they may use military power in support of existing treaties (which are the law of the land) if an ally calls for American help.

Nearly a decade before the War Powers Resolution existed, President Lyndon B. Johnson ramped up U.S. involvement in Vietnam by claiming self-defense—he said that U.S. ships had been fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese—and the need to honor a treaty commitment to South Vietnam. Congress rewarded him with the open-ended Tonkin Gulf Resolution, empowering him, “as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”

Many in Congress regretted issuing LBJ this blank check, and by 1973, American legislators realized that maybe handing out “all necessary measures” passes to presidents might not be a great idea, so they repealed Tonkin Gulf in 1971 and later passed the War Powers Resolution. President Richard Nixon vetoed the resolution, on multiple grounds of constitutionality and prudence, but the Congress of 1973 was in no mood for lectures from Nixon, and it overrode his veto.

The problem is that the War Powers Resolution is both too weak and too strong. On the one hand, it requires that the president “consult” Congress only if possible. On the other hand, the resolution sets a firm clock on military action: Within 60 days of notifying Congress, the president “shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces with respect to which such report was submitted” unless Congress declares war, extends the deadline, or cannot meet because of enemy attack. (That’s a Cold War provision—Congress can’t meet and approve military action if it’s been vaporized by a nuclear strike.)

The law, drawn up half a century ago to stop a future LBJ or Nixon, is poorly written, and even now, members of Congress argue over its meaning. (Yesterday, for example, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut admonished Representative Mike Lawler of New York for cherry-picking some of the law’s language.) Assuming that Congress does not pass a law ending the operation, Trump, in theory, has almost two more months to continue the fight.

This time limit is, in general, a bad idea. It’s a signal to the enemy that the United States has only two months to fight before its legislative and executive branches possibly go into conflict with each other. In any case, competent strategists do not put expiration dates on their operations; such limits give the opponent an incentive to negotiate in bad faith, to engage in information operations against American voters—or perhaps to up the level of violence and hope that congressional nerves are shaken so badly that even the steeliest president cannot keep a wartime political coalition together.

I am familiar with these arguments because I made them in 1990 to my boss, the late Senator John Heinz, when I was his personal assistant for national security and defense. At the time, Heinz and a small group of Republican senators wanted to invoke the War Powers Resolution as President George H. W. Bush was heading toward war against Iraq. Heinz supported Bush’s intentions, and he wanted to avert a challenge to Bush’s authority. The War Powers Resolution is the law of the land, the senator told me, so wouldn’t it help Bush if Congress did its duty and invoked it?

I was a lot less concerned about rogue presidents back then, but I was very concerned about time-limiting a war to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait. (Senator Heinz passed away 35 years ago, so I am not spilling secrets here.) I told him that I thought the resolution was of dubious constitutionality, but even more to the point, I asked him whether he was willing to have a floor fight to extend Bush’s authority two months after the war had started. At the time, the Republicans were the minority in Congress, and we talked about what such a messy political brawl might look like in the middle of a war. He and the other GOP senators dropped the idea.

In the end, it didn’t matter. One day, after lunch with Bush, Heinz told me that Bush was determined to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait even if it meant his eventual impeachment, no matter what Congress said in the meantime. Yet Bush did go to Congress, and he got resolutions of support from both houses just before combat operations began in January 1991.

Right now, Trump has no such worries of impeachment—the GOP controls both houses of Congress, and he has an iron grip on his party (at least until November). But the question remains of whether Congress has any ability to restrain Trump, who has used force more times in more places in just one year than any of his predecessors.

At the least, Congress could use the threat of the War Powers Resolution clock to demand hearings and some explanations. Trump and his people have so far explained almost nothing about the rationale for the war. (The secretary of defense, meanwhile, gave a briefing today that amounted to a lot of chest-thumping nonsense about fighting “to win” without being bound by “stupid rules of engagement.”) And invoking the War Powers Resolution would be far less dangerous now that Iran’s military has largely been beaten and the U.S. and Israel have complete control over Iran’s skies.

Congress is now set to debate the War Powers Resolution, but the fact that this debate is needed at all is a reminder of how much the exercise of American democracy has historically been predicated not on black-letter law but on trust, norms, and basic decency. Congress should not have to argue over whether to trigger the War Powers Resolution, and certainly not in the midst of conflict; better presidents, even when they have abused their authority, have obviated such a fight by going to Congress, speaking to the American people, and building a consensus for action. Trump, instead, has thrown U.S. service people into combat—and dared everyone to stop him.

For now, Congress can try, at least, to use the law to rein in Trump and force him to answer questions about a war he started on his own. But Operation Epic Fury should also impel legislators to think about future ways to place presidential war powers back within the limits of a deliberative, constitutional republic.

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Today’s News

President Trump said that America’s operation in Iran, which began on Saturday, is projected to continue for four to five weeks, adding, “We have capability to go far longer than that.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth didn’t rule out deploying American troops in Iran.
Officials across countries have reported mounting casualties in the Middle East, following the strikes in Iran. Four U.S. troops have been killed and several wounded; at least 500 Iranian civilians have been killed; at least nine people died in Israel after an Iranian strike; officials in the United Arab Emirates reported deaths after Iranian strikes; and Lebanese authorities said that 31 people died in Israel’s retaliatory strikes against Hezbollah.
Republicans are citing the U.S. attacks on Iran to pressure Democrats to end the Department of Homeland Security’s partial shutdown, warning that it could weaken domestic security. Democrats say they will continue to withhold funding unless the department changes immigration enforcement, even as agencies such as FEMA and TSA show early signs of strain.

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The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores stories on how to create an equal household.

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Illustration by Ben Hickey

The Impossible Predicament of the Uninsured

By Jenisha Watts

The day after Thanksgiving, I got a voicemail. A woman identified herself as a doctor at the University of Louisville hospital: “I believe I may have one of your family members here.”

The message was hard to understand. Most of my family lives in Kentucky, so I didn’t know whom the doctor was referring to. I called the hospital, but kept getting put on hold. Then I tried my aunt—if someone was in trouble, she’d be the one to know. But she didn’t answer.

A few hours later, her son got in touch with me. My aunt was the one in the hospital. She’d had an aneurysm on the right side of her brain, and it had burst. The drainage tube the doctors used to stop the bleeding kept slipping loose; after three tries, they finally got it to stick. Only then could they do surgery. My cousin FaceTimed me afterward, from the ICU. “Are you ready?” he asked. He angled the camera down to my aunt’s face, and I started sobbing like a sudden rainstorm.

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In writing this story, I came across some photos and memos from my time working with Senator Heinz on his speech in support of what was about to be Operation Desert Storm. He and I spent days writing that statement, and like the good and judicious legislator he was, he agonized over the language and the reasoning. One day, he turned to me in the late-afternoon gloom of his office—it was December, and he hadn’t turned on the lights while he was pacing about—and said, “Am I doing the right thing here?”

He was voting to send Pennsylvania’s sons and daughters to war, and he didn’t take that lightly. (He perhaps had a premonition: The last Scud missile Iraq fired during the war landed on a barracks of reservists from Pennsylvania.) But he made his case, read it into the record, and voted with a clear conscience. I wish I could feel that more of the people supporting Trump now took their responsibilities as seriously as John Heinz did.

— Tom

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran

2026-02-28T06:01:00-05:00

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The United States has gone to war against Iran. America has only one ally—Israel—in this operation (the Arab states of the Gulf, which fear the Iranian regime, are targets of Iran, but so far are not participating in the attack), and both Washington and Jerusalem are making claims about “imminent” threats that require “preemptive” strikes. But we should dispense with such statements: Iran is not presenting immediate danger to the United States or Israel. Even President Trump, in a recorded address, didn’t bother overly much with such excuses; instead he presented a farrago of charges and accusations going back a half century that included everything from killing American troops in Iraq to terrorism. These indictments are all grounded in truth, but none presents a rationale for immediate attack. Trump ended by calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government.

This is not a preemptive war. It is a war of choice, a discretionary war. It is a war for regime change. Many of Iran’s 92 million people want the regime removed. But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome.

To think about the possible courses of this war, we should start by clearly understanding three realities: First, Iran is a terrible regime that deserves to fall. The regime recently murdered thousands of its own citizens who were seeking freedom from their oppressive rule, and no one should be shedding tears for the mullahs hiding in their bunkers.

Second, “success” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and eradicate Israel. But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

Third, the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. Yes, he has vowed to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, but beyond that, he seems to be arguing for just inflicting military damage on the regime, on the assumption that enough ordnance on enough targets will weaken the grip of the ayatollahs. Once the theocrats are on the ropes, the thinking seems to go, the people of Iran will finish the job of regime change for us.

Americans have tried this before. In 1991, after stripping Saddam Hussein of much of his military power, George H. W. Bush called on the people of Iraq to rise up. That call led to disaster, as Saddam attempted to commit genocide against the Kurds in the north and the rebelling Marsh Arabs in the south, campaigns that would have been even more murderous without U.S. and British airpower patrolling those regions.

Later, in 2003, we succeeded in taking down the Iraqi regime, and then bumbled our way through the ensuing chaos. Charmed by stories that Jeffersonian democrats were lining up to run the country, we disbanded the Iraqi military and exiled all the Ba’ath Party members from their jobs. These were disastrous choices, but they were undertaken with far more preparation and forethought than Trump has apparently given to a war against a much larger nation; worse, he seems resistant to any concerns among even his military advisers.

Years later, the U.S. and its allies conducted a similar operation against Libya. With the approval of the United Nations Security Council, and with a vow not to put troops on the ground, U.S. and NATO aircraft stripped Muammar Qaddafi of his military and security assets, effectively leaving him vulnerable to the armed rebels that were heading into the cities. These groups almost tore Qaddafi to pieces. We then washed our hands of the whole business.

[Read: An Iranian network is ready to act]

America twice had its hands full in Iraq, a nation of 37 million, even with the assistance of several countries. The U.S., France, and Britain managed to subdue tiny Libya, a nation of 7.5 million, and left its dictator to be raped and beaten in the streets. This time, conditions are different and more challenging: The target is two and a half times the size of Iraq, America has exactly one openly declared ally in this enterprise, no serious armed rebel force exists in Iran, and no coalition of nations is assembling to march into Tehran.

Trump has boldly told the regime to lay down its weapons and surrender—but to whom? The president in his speech did not rule out American troops on the ground. Does he envision a conquering American general accepting the pistols and swords of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in some sort of ceremony?

Here’s one way, however, all of this can go right: The air campaign is so well designed, so precise, and so thorough that it strips the regime of its major military formations and its security police. Some of the top leaders are killed in at least a partial decapitation, and other forces begin to defect to the side of the people en masse. Rebel groups form quickly and efficiently to seize weapons and set up alternative ruling councils across the country. They cooperate with one another, rather than bicker or actually fight. Outside powers in the region stay away and let the Iranian people sort out their destiny. Peace, of a sort, comes to Iran.

Unfortunately, the ways that all of this can go wrong are more numerous and more likely. Perhaps the Americans, for example, take unexpected casualties, and Trump—who seems to be counting on an easy victory—pulls back. (Trump has spent years decrying American presidents whose actions cost the lives of America’s soldiers; it seems unlikely that he will blithely accept American casualties.) The regime rallies, kills even more of its own people, and survives to fight another day. Or the current regime falls and is replaced by a junta or military regime even more brutal than the one that’s just been destroyed. Or what happens if Iranian retaliation turns out to be more effective than the Americans or Israelis expect, and the region becomes embroiled in repeating cycles of murder and reprisals that leave Americans and Israelis and others dead, but the regime intact?

Another possibility is that the bombing goes well, but America demurs from doing much more, and the rebellion is abandoned. People who believed they were going to be rescued by the American cavalry find themselves, like the people of Afghanistan, abandoned and left to be cut to pieces by a regime we’ve grown tired of fighting. And of course, Iran can cause havoc with shipping lanes and try to bait the U.S. and Israel into a larger commitment—or a larger war—than they planned.

When the 2003 war with Iraq ended, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine said that when American diplomats embarked on reconstruction, they ruefully joked that “there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”

[Listen: What the Pentagon fears in Iran]

Trump, who has not consulted Congress, has done little to explain the war to the American public, and has made no effort to build a coalition of allies, does not have that luxury. The president, a former casino boss, is taking a huge gamble. He has drawn his cards; the chips are now on the table. He has exactly one shot at getting this right. As Tom Warrick, a former Department of Homeland Security official, posted on X, Trump is trying to draw an inside straight.

Every so often, that pays off. Inside straights do exist, and occasionally a player manages to put one together. But any gambler will tell you: It’s not usually the way to bet.

The Diplomats Who Carry Trump’s Grievances Abroad

2026-02-27T15:39:00-05:00

American diplomats are supposed to represent the nation, advocate for the interests and policies of the U.S. government, and stay on generally good terms with the country to which they’re assigned. Even when they are sent to places that have an adversarial relationship with the United States, they are expected to maintain decorum while conveying messages these regimes may not want to hear.

Some of President Trump’s ambassadors, however, are a different type: They seem to think that their job is to carry their boss’s boorishness and petty grievances abroad. Ambassadors are supposed to represent the president, but these incompetent emissaries take that concept to an extreme, and they have managed to get into needless conflicts with America’s friends in France, Poland, Iceland, and Chile, among others, along with pretty much the entire Middle East.

The most recent example is from Paris, where U.S. Ambassador Charles Kushner refused a summons this week from the French government. Summoning an ambassador is a standard diplomatic action; it usually happens when a host government wants clarification about, or to express displeasure over, something an ambassador’s nation has done or said. In this case, the State Department had injected itself into the aftermath of the far-right French activist Quentin Deranque’s murder by posting on X that he was killed by violent leftists. The French government regarded this as interference in its internal affairs and called in Kushner, who then refused to show up—the second time that he’s refused such a summons. This is a serious snub, especially among allies.

France then prohibited Kushner from meeting with any French government official, which escalated the feud far beyond the initial problem, and …

Wait. Charles Kushner is, in fact, Jared Kushner’s father, and he did time in federal prison for a slew of tax violations and other offenses (including an incident of witness retaliation in which he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and then sent a video of the encounter to his own sister). So you might be asking an obvious question here: Why is this convicted felon and the father of the president’s son-in-law an ambassador to a major U.S. ally?

The choice is meant to be offensive—that’s why. As the professor and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies authoritarianism, posted on X: Kushner “was put there as a (pardoned) felon to symbolize the death of democratic notions of diplomacy in the US. This thuggish individual was installed in Paris as an act of aggression towards democratic France.”

Meanwhile, America’s man in Warsaw, Ambassador Tom Rose, said earlier this month that he would have “no further dealings, contacts, or communications” with Włodzimierz Czarzasty, the speaker of the lower house of the Polish Parliament. Rose objected, in his words, to “outrageous and unprovoked insults directed against President Trump.”

What were these insults? Rose didn’t specify, but a few days earlier, Czarzasty had had the temerity to say that Trump did not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. A Polish politician in his own country expressed an opinion, and the U.S. ambassador took it upon himself, like a scorned teenager blocking a phone number, to say that he and the Polish legislator were no longer on speaking terms with each other. Much like the French foreign minister reminding Kushner that he has an “apparent misunderstanding of the most basic expectations” of his job, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk gently noted on X: “Mr. Ambassador Rose, allies should respect, not lecture, each other.”

But insulting our allies is Trump’s brand of diplomacy. In Ottawa last year, Pete Hoekstra, a former representative who is now the U.S. envoy to Canada, delivered a Trumplike—and expletive-laced—tirade criticizing Canada and defending the president’s tariffs. Likewise, the American ambassador in Chile, a former Border Patrol agent named Brandon Judd, managed to annoy Chile’s president by taking umbrage at criticism of Trump and saying that such remarks “harm the Chilean people.” And over in Reykjavik, the former member of Congress Billy Long managed to irritate everyone with a dumb joke about making Iceland the 52nd state. (After Greenland—get it? Long later apologized.)

But the king of ambassadorial buffoonery is former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who is now America’s ambassador in Jerusalem. Last week, he gave a lengthy interview to Tucker Carlson. (The ambassador to Israel talking to Carlson, a man who platforms Holocaust deniers, is more evidence that ghastly anti-Semitic views are no longer unwelcome in the GOP.) During their discussion, Huckabee and Carlson somehow got onto the question of who owns the Middle East, and for once, an American ambassador didn’t insult his host country—he just enraged the hundreds of millions of people who live near the host nation.

Carlson asked whether Huckabee agrees that God, in the Bible, gave the region—“I think it says from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is, once again, basically the entire Middle East”—to the Jewish people. “You’re saying he did,” Carlson concludes.

Huckabee then hauled off this banger: “It would be fine if they took it all, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.”

Matters did not improve when Carlson followed up, asking Huckabee whether he really meant that “it would be fine if the state of Israel took over all of it.” Huckabee missed the life preserver that Carlson tried to throw his way: “They don’t want to take it over,” he answered. “They’re not asking to take it over.”

Well, thanks for that clarification, ambassador. Of course, the region lit up with fury once an American diplomat—posted to Jerusalem, no less—said that he’d be just fine with giving the whole place to the Israelis. Huckabee tried to walk back what he admitted was a “hyperbolic” statement, and the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem quickly tried to clean up the mess. But all of this raises the question of why Trump is sending such unqualified and potentially dangerous people to important postings around the world.

In fairness to Trump, a lot of nations have sent plenty of scandalous embarrassments abroad as envoys—and Trump is not the first U.S. president to reward friends and supporters with these cushy gigs. But Trump has elevated diplomatic incompetence to an art. Aside from letting Huckabee loose in the Middle East, he sent an unqualified loyalist, Matthew Whitaker, to NATO. He also stashed his son’s ex-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle in the embassy in Athens. And even in smaller and less complicated postings, Trump has made wince-inducing choices: America’s ambassador to the Bahamas is Herschel Walker, a former football player whose campaign for the U.S. Senate in Georgia imploded because of scandals and the candidate’s obvious incompetence. What’s Trump got against the Bahamians?

Of course, the insults are the point. Trump seems to have a special loathing for our allies. He has used some of these appointments as a middle finger to states and organizations that he does not understand. He likely views some of them as impediments to his plans and schemes—such as, say, Norway, which he thinks is responsible for shutting him out of the Nobel Prize competition. What better way to stick it to those uppity French than by sending a convicted felon? Why not saddle NATO with a guy who has no foreign-policy experience?

Trump and his supporters might think it’s a hoot to watch Europeans seethe while Ambassador Kim Guilfoyle eats baklava and strolls under the shadow of the Acropolis, but America needs competent representation in the world’s capitals, especially when contemplating risky policies. Last week, General Dan Caine reportedly expressed concern about going to war with Iran while the country’s alliances are not in order. He may have been thinking not only of the damage done by Trump’s approach to foreign relations but also about the crew of bumblers and hangers-on whom the president has sent to represent America around the world.

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Netflix announced yesterday that it had backed out of its offer to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming assets, saying that the deal is “no longer financially attractive.” The move clears the way for Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, pending regulatory approval.
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, told embassy staff that those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY,” after the State Department authorized nonessential personnel to depart the country amid rising tensions with Iran.
Former President Bill Clinton told the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door deposition that he “saw nothing” and “did nothing wrong” regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case, while acknowledging that he and Epstein had known each other and traveled together.

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Boredom Is the Price We Pay for Meaning

By Daniel Smith

When my first child was born, I discovered, as many new parents do, that my love for her was more profound than I could have anticipated. I had friends and relatives for whom I was willing to die. For my daughter, so visceral was my love, so instantaneous and complete, I knew I would kill.

That I loved my daughter was never in doubt. My problem was that I didn’t much like being a father. This came as a shock. I’d wanted a baby because I had taken such pleasure in life that I’d felt driven to expand the scope of existence itself. Experience was too wonderful to hoard, so I had a child. The irony was painful in that, seemingly overnight, the very things that most enlivened and sustained me—reading, watching movies, seeing friends, making love, sitting quietly by myself—were crowded out by a child whose needs absorbed nearly all of my energy and time. From a life of freedom and agency I had entered a life of constriction and tension, of white-noise machines, parenting manuals, and fatigue.

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President Trump’s State of the Union Variety Show

2026-02-25T00:54:19-05:00

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The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, emcee, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor.

Trump did his usual rote lying about the economy—pity the fact-checkers who tried to keep up even in the first 10 minutes or so of the speech—along with some of his other greatest hits, including the many wars he stopped and the magic of tariffs. (He referred to the “unfortunate involvement” of the Supreme Court on the tariff issue, as if the justices had barged into his office like interlopers.)

President Ronald Reagan, the “Great Communicator,” once managed to do the entire State of the Union address in 31 minutes; that’s because he could say important things efficiently and well. Tonight, however, was not about communication—it was about showmanship. Almost every line was a cue for applause from obedient Republicans; they even gave Jared Kushner a standing ovation. Every few minutes, Trump told a story and reached out into the audience like the host of The Price Is Right, telling people to come on down.

He started, of course, with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Just basking along with Team USA wasn’t enough. Trump soon announced that the goalie Connor Hellebuyck would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Normally, this honor is bestowed for a lifetime of achievement, but this time it was given as if the young athlete had chosen the right door and found a new car.

And so it went, all night. Sometimes, the guests were meant to tug at the heartstrings, such as when Trump recognized Erika Kirk, the wife of the murdered activist Charlie Kirk. Others were presented as ornaments meant to illustrate Trump’s successes: Enrique Márquez, a Venezuelan political prisoner freed after U.S. forces deposed the strongman Nicolás Maduro, was given a round of well-deserved applause. Trump also gave a shout-out to a woman whose IVF medications were now, he claimed, cheaper because of him.

But no group received more attention than the U.S. military. Trump handed out two Purple Hearts (one posthumously), a Legion of Merit, and not one but two Congressional Medals of Honor. Military awards that should have been treated with dignity and respect were placed on men like prizes, including a moment when Trump’s co-host, the first lady, put one of the Medals of Honor around the neck of a 100-year-old fighter pilot.

Trump even had designated heels in the audience: the Democrats. He called them crazy and accused them of impoverishing the nation. He dared them to stand up if they agreed with him that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” This stunt was obviously meant to force Democrats either to stand or boo or otherwise do something that Trump could exploit; instead, it merely resulted in several awkward seconds of a staring contest between the president and the Democrats in the chamber. Trump managed to bait Representative Ilhan Omar into shouting at him, but for the most part, he seemed genuinely irritated that the Democrats sat through his show in stony silence.

As the whole business dragged on, the atmosphere started to seem less like a game show and more like the late-night Jerry Lewis telethons of the 1970s, in which a tired but pumped Lewis alternately griped at the audience, broke into maudlin emotion, or jumped up to welcome a new guest. The only thing Trump did not do was explain his policies—especially about war and peace—to Congress or the American people.

The largest American armada assembled since the second Gulf War is now approaching Iran. Trump never mentioned the buildup; instead he claimed that his one overriding interest was that Iran would forswear nuclear weapons forever. The brief case he laid out, however, was not for nonproliferation, but for regime change. The president claimed that Iran has killed 32,000 of its own people in recent crackdowns, a number on the higher end of estimates. He made the accusation—rightly—that Iran is an odious regime and a supporter of terrorism. He vowed that they would never get a nuclear weapon.

And that was it. Back to the show!

But if some of the address was a game show, much of it was a bloody Grand Guignol theater of horror stories, almost all about immigrants preying on the helpless and the innocent. Trump led into these anecdotes by starting with an accusation that the Somali community of Minnesota was scamming the state. He followed up with stories of murder and mayhem, including the tale of a tractor trailer driven by someone in the country illegally—“let in by Joe Biden”—who hit a little girl. She and her father were, of course, in the audience.

Some sort of a message from the chief executive to the legislature about “the state of the Union” is required by the Constitution. Most presidents have treated it as a chance to note their accomplishments, to harangue Congress into supporting their priorities, and to speak to the American people. It’s an outdated institution, and Americans would likely be better off if the report were delivered from the president to Congress in a letter rather than the media festival it has become.

But Trump tonight went far beyond what even the most self-indulgent presidents would have envisioned. Beset by scandal, facing multiple defeats in America’s courts, and hitting levels of unpopularity that would make President Richard Nixon nod with empathy, he turned the State of the Union into a vulgar, populist carnival.

Trump made a great show of honoring a handful of U.S. military heroes. Meanwhile, thousands of young men and women are a world away, waiting for his orders to go to war. The president of the United States might have taken a moment tonight to tell their families why they’re out there, and what they’re supposed to do. But why bother? The show must go on.

The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem

2026-02-23T07:00:00-05:00

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

[Read: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson told Politico. But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem.

The U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino in Minneapolis on January 15, 2026 (Octavio Jones / AFP / Getty)

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush repudiated the former Klan leader David Duke, who was running as a Republican to be Louisiana’s governor. Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?

When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. A liberal Black Republican, Edward Brooke, had just finished two terms as our junior senator from Massachusetts; the liberal Republicans Lowell Weicker and John Chafee represented Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. In college, I worked in the Massachusetts state House for our hometown representative, a young and principled working-class Democrat (my GOP membership was not a disqualifier; imagine that). I got to know Republican legislators on Beacon Hill because they were close friends with my Democratic boss. Party affiliations were about political disagreements among Americans, not markers of antithetical worldviews.

I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants (something I objected to at the time).

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

[From the November 2018 issue: McKay Coppins on the man who broke politics]

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

[From the October 2022 issue: Kim Phillips-Fein on the long unraveling of the Republican Party]

Soon after McCain’s loss to Obama, the Tea Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party? To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. When I told him how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But Reagan’s dominance of the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Some of these trolls are merely pasting swastikas on their nihilism, but their ideological sincerity is irrelevant. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, his 1961 novel about a man posing as a Nazi: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “That 1930s Feeling.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Pete Hegseth’s Attack on Harvard

2026-02-09T17:54:43-05:00

Harvard University has more than 100 students who are in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. They will get their diploma and then put their life on the line for their country, serving under a secretary of defense, if he is still in his job by spring, who has nothing but contempt for their education and their alma mater.

In a statement issued on Friday, Pete Hegseth charged that Harvard is graduating officers with “heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.” He declared that the Pentagon would cut all ties with Harvard and its programs.

Hegseth’s characterization makes it sound like students are lolling under the trees in Harvard Yard while getting instruction in Marxist theory from the Chinese Red Guards. This is, of course, nonsense, but Hegseth wants to paint colleges in general, and especially elite schools of the type he attended, as enemy territory. (His undergraduate degree is from Princeton, and he has a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, though he symbolically returned his diploma in 2022.) This campaign against education is not about what’s actually being taught at Harvard; rather, Hegseth, among others, is using the school as a punching bag to express the generic social anxiety and status-based resentment that drives much of the MAGA movement.

Although Hegseth said that he would examine Defense Department involvement at “other” schools, he made special mention of the Ivy League. Perhaps that’s because these institutions have long been a kind of shorthand for an elite standing to which Hegseth clearly once aspired—as did his boss. The president brags regularly about his degree from the University of Pennsylvania and about his uncle, who taught at MIT. But Donald Trump, like Hegseth, must know that his views are for the most part unwelcome on these campuses, and rejection stings. Trump’s hatred of these universities has had an effect: Republican voters went from viewing the role of colleges in American life positively to negatively almost overnight after Trump was elected in 2016.

[Missy Ryan: Holy warrior]

The timing of Hegseth’s current anti-Harvard move is likely because of a sudden turn Trump took last week. For months, Trump has been attempting to squeeze Harvard for a $200 million settlement (over charges of … well, being Harvard, basically), and his efforts recently seemed to have reached a dead end, with Harvard apparently standing firm against paying. But when The New York Times reported last Monday that Trump had backed down, the president reversed course, posting twice late that same night and then again the next morning on Truth Social that he was now upping his demand to $1 billion, an arbitrary number that sounded as if it came directly from Dr. Evil trying to shake down the United Nations.

Soon, Hegseth jumped on the Harvard-bashing train, a kind of me-too move similar to the secretary’s clumsy attempts to involve himself in the administration’s immigration mayhem in Minnesota. Hegseth added that he would be looking at the Defense Department’s involvement with “all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members at all Ivy League universities and other civilian universities.” I reached out to Harvard to ask what the impact of Hegseth’s announcement might be on military participation at the university and was told that it is still sorting out the implications but that graduate students associated with the Defense Department across various Harvard divisions could be affected, including in the law school, Ph.D. programs, the Kennedy School, and continuing-education classes.

I am more than familiar with many of these courses and programs, because I designed and taught some of them. More than 10 years ago, the Air Force Institute of Technology reached out to me because the Air Force, after a series of scandals involving nuclear weapons, was under orders to expand general understanding of nuclear issues among both officers and enlisted personnel. The officer from AFIT asked if I could talk with him about ways to get courses I was then teaching at Harvard’s Extension School on international relations and nuclear weapons to more people in the Defense Department. (Military schools are sometimes not good about communicating with one another, and he was surprised to learn that I was not full-time Harvard faculty, but a professor at a sister military institution, the Naval War College. I would later become an adjunct professor at AFIT’s School of Strategic Force Studies.)

After many discussions, we approached Harvard, and the result was new course offerings on the Cold War, nuclear weapons, arms control, and deterrence. Harvard grouped these courses into a Nuclear Deterrence Graduate Certificate. I was proud to teach in this program, which I did separately from my War College duties; the courses were open to anyone but had a regular complement of military people, as well as civilians from organizations such as the U.S. Strategic Command.

No one was trying to indoctrinate students with Marxism or globalism; indeed, I gave lectures at both Harvard Extension and at the Air Force’s Nuclear School, in New Mexico, that were almost identical. I was teaching the students about the evolution of U.S. nuclear strategy, the history of arms control, and the various schools of nuclear deterrence. We did not spend our time on “woke” terms and concepts, unless such things as “circular error probable,” “post-boost vehicles,” and “blast overpressure” count as woke.

A diffuse resentment about education and an underlying sense of insecurity seem to afflict many in Trump’s circle. Trump himself, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Vice President Vance all attended elite schools and attained success, but for various reasons, they seem to have come away angry at institutions that they apparently, and in some cases accurately, felt would never embrace them. As The Boston Globe has reported, in his 2013 graduate thesis, Hegseth was an admirably bipartisan advocate for the “laudable goal” of closing racial achievement gaps; he supported “equality, diversity, and accessibility” in public education and called for allying with Democrats to improve such opportunities. But after leaving Harvard, he threw in his lot with Fox News and MAGA world—environments that rewarded rather than restrained the kind of undisciplined and extreme rhetoric Hegseth favors.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Hegseth’s headlong pursuit of academic mediocrity]

Hegseth’s announcement on Friday betrays this kind of neediness, a plea to be accepted by elite institutions: “For too long,” he said, “this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard, hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class.” But that’s not why the military sends people to universities. They do not go to Harvard or Johns Hopkins pleading to be understood; they go so that they will understand. They go so that they can comprehend the complexities of the world they live in, develop the intellectual skills to be agile and dispassionate thinkers throughout their career, and, most important, spend time among the civilians they will one day work with in creating strategy, procuring weapons, and planning the use of force. In America, civil-military relations are 99 percent civil and 1 percent military.

Education is the foundation of a healthy democracy, especially one that relies on citizen-soldiers rather than a separate class of isolated Spartans. Hegseth yet again is showing that he is unfit for his post: He doesn’t seem to understand (or care) that when some of these young officers attain the ranks that Hegseth never reached and become senior leaders in the United States Armed Forces, what they learned at a top university or at a senior war college will be a lot more important than how many push-ups they did 20 years ago.

Countdown to an Arms Race

2026-02-03T07:00:00-05:00

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Something very dangerous is on track to happen this Thursday.

In two days, New START, the last significant survivor of the age of nuclear-arms-control agreements that began in the 1960s, will come to an end. Donald Trump—a president who claims to be very concerned about “nuclear,” his odd, one-word appellation for all things relating to nuclear weapons—has decided to let the treaty lapse. In July, Trump said that New START was “not an agreement you want expiring,” but last month he backtracked: “If it expires, it expires.”

The New START agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, in force since 2011, puts caps on the number of American and Russian “strategic” weapons, the long-range missiles and bombers that can cover the thousands of miles between North America and Eurasia. It is the last in a line of treaties that helped stabilize the relationship between the superpowers during the the tense years of the Cold War, and then provided the framework for serious reductions in nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. On Thursday, the two largest nuclear powers will be free to begin a new arms race, a needless competition that both nations have managed to avert for decades.

Indeed, even the Russians think the treaty should be renewed. Moscow suspended its participation in the treaty’s ongoing processes (such as information exchanges) back in 2023 as part of the diplomatic sparring with the U.S. over Ukraine, but the Russians have nonetheless offered to abide by the treaty’s numerical limits for one more year. The Trump administration has shown little interest in even this much. As the nuclear-arms researcher Pavel Podvig noted last week, “the US expert and political community has essentially reached consensus on the need to expand the US strategic arsenal.”

[From the August 2025 issue: What Trump doesn’t understand about nuclear war]

Podvig isn’t exactly right here: The U.S. nuclear establishment—the web of think tanks, contractors, and industries that make and support nuclear weapons—almost always favors the creation of more and newer weapons. (I worked for one such contractor decades ago.) Plenty of other experts and political leaders, of course, would contend that building more nuclear weapons is a very bad idea, but they’re not advising this White House. As in his first term, Trump is surrounded by people who oppose most treaties, regarding them as little more than annoying limitations on American power, and who view arms-control agreements as a sign of weakness. The secretary of the Navy even wants to put nuclear weapons on Trump’s proposed new battleships, a dangerous Cold War policy that was abandoned by George H. W. Bush more than 30 years ago.

New START is a good treaty, but it did not merely leap into being when it was ratified back in 2010. The progenitor of START was SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, begun by Richard Nixon. The SALT Treaty, a major achievement signed in 1972, also put limits on missile-defense research. (A follow-up treaty, SALT II, foundered during the renewed tensions of the late ’70s and early ’80s.) As the Cold War wound down and the Soviet Union’s days grew short, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev optimistically rechristened the SALT process “START,” replacing the word limitation with reduction, an idea first proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1982.

The cuts that followed were dramatic: The superpowers in the 1980s had a total of some 20,000 warheads pointed at each other on strategic delivery systems. Thousands more were mounted on short-range aircraft and missile systems all over Europe, as well as on surface warships. START slashed these numbers, setting a limit for each side of 6,000 warheads on no more than 1,600 delivery platforms. The process hit a dead end when George W. Bush withdrew from the missile-defense portion of the old SALT agreement and the Russians balked at signing an updated version of START. But Bush instead proposed another agreement: SORT, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Signed in 2002 by Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, SORT had no provisions for verification, and set only an approximate goal for each side to reduce their inventories to 1,700 to 2,200 deployed strategic warheads by 2012, when SORT would expire.

In 2010, Barack Obama presented the replacement for SORT, New START, to the Senate, where GOP hawks blocked it until Obama agreed to spend tens of billions of dollars for future nuclear-modernization programs—in effect a shakedown for the nuclear-weapons industry in exchange for ratification. But the deal was worth it: New START was a better treaty that included stronger verification procedures and a new limit of 1,550 warheads each. It also included somewhat simplified counting rules that made it easier for both sides to stay in compliance: A bomber that could carry many weapons, for example, counted as only one warhead, because which delivery system carried the bombs was less important than keeping the total below 1,550—a level that both nations achieved.

I studied nuclear weapons back in the mid-’80s; I even took a course in nuclear technology at MIT to make sure I was able to understand the technical details. (I once could calculate things such as “equivalent megatonnage,” but those formulas, like my old slide rule, are long forgotten.) If you had told me in 1985 that one day the Soviet and American strategic arsenals would be down to 1,550 warheads each, I—and most Cold Warriors—would have laughed out loud. And yet here we are, because of the work done to negotiate and ratify New START and its predecessors.

Trump, however, now claims that he wants a “better” treaty that would also include Chinese forces. China has already rejected the idea, but no matter: Trump’s demand to include China is almost certainly a poison pill meant to stop any progress on renewing the existing treaty. Bilateral arms treaties are hard to achieve; multilateral arms treaties are exponentially more difficult.

[From the August 2025 issue: The nuclear club might soon double]

What happens next may depend, as so much does in this White House, on whatever happens to strike Trump as a good idea. Both sides could merely leave things alone for the moment, which would be the least destructive option for now. But controlling nuclear weapons is about more than observing numerical limits. Regular meetings, inspections, and exchanges of information build trust and relationships that can come into play during times of uncertainty or crisis. Treaties alone do not keep the peace. (The year after SALT was signed, for example, the Soviets and Americans faced off in a dangerous crisis during the 1973 Yom Kippur War that ended with the United States putting its nuclear forces on alert.)

A more likely outcome is that Trump will sign off on more money for more nuclear arms. Such an expansion would be pointless; the United States has more than enough nuclear firepower to deter both Beijing and Moscow. Put another way, America has the ability to destroy both the Russian and Chinese governments and most of their infrastructure with a relative handful of weapons. More bombs will not lead to more security. As Emma Belcher, the president of the arms-control organization Ploughshares, put it to me in an email, failing to replace New START would “contribute to greater geopolitical instability, escalated tensions across the world and a higher likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe in our lifetime.”

Deterrence and international stability, as we should have learned during the Cold War, are not solely about technology and numbers but about will, commitment, the strength of alliances, and, most of all, the fear of a nuclear cataclysm. Trump said during a 2015 primary debate, “I think, to me, nuclear is just the power. The devastation is very important to me.” If the president cares so much about what he once called the “biggest problem” in the world, he has an opportunity to do something about it before Thursday.

Pete Hegseth Should Stay Out of Minneapolis

2026-01-24T20:24:29-05:00

This story was updated on January 24, 2026, at 8:46pm ET.

The Trump administration has once again immersed the United States in a crisis. The officers who are supposed to be protecting America’s borders have again been unleashed on an American city—this time, Minneapolis. The authorities in Minnesota want the Border Patrol and ICE forces to leave; the U.S. government’s response has been to continue to allow them to operate without any limits. These agents are now behaving like a roving mob, a riot squad in balaclavas desperately in search of a riot—and for the second time in 17 days, they have killed one of the American citizens protesting their police-state behavior.

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Today’s victim was a 37-year-old ICU nurse named Alex Pretti, shot multiple times while lying on the ground after taking a beating from government agents.

As if to prove that they can always make a terrible situation worse, Trump-administration officials have made a series of statements; some of them are tasteless and immature, while others challenge the intelligence of anyone who has viewed the multiple videos of the killing. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claimed that the victim walked up to the agents with the intent to slay several of them. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted on X that an “assassin tried to murder federal agents.” Neither of these seems to correspond with the video evidence.

Minneapolis police say Pretti had a firearms permit, and that open carry is legal in the state for permit holders. Video of the incident shows him holding a phone, not a gun. Officers do not seem to have realized he was armed until after they pinned him to the ground, and the video does not show them opening fire until after they have taken away his pistol.

The situation looks bad from every angle, which is probably why administration figures are spinning this moment as hard as possible. But what on earth is the self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, talking about—and why is he talking at all?

Late this afternoon, Hegseth posted this from his personal account on X:

Thank God for the patriots of @ICEgov — we have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country.

Shame on the leadership of Minnesota — and the lunatics in the street.

ICE > MN

What, exactly, does this mean? (A Pentagon spokesperson said the department had “nothing to provide beyond the Secretary’s tweet.”) The leader of the U.S. military is telling the agents of another government department—one of whom is on video pumping at least five bullets into a man who’d already been shot and was lying on his face—that “we have your back.” Does Hegseth intend to protect these men if they are charged by city or state authorities? Or is he itching to get the U.S. military into the streets, to back up ICE’s undertrained civilians with professional soldiers and heavier hardware?

Worse, the secretary seems to be implying that the government of Minnesota is an enemy of the United States. “ICE > MN” might mean that ICE is … better than Minnesota? Sovereign over Minnesota? Whatever the intent of this formulation, Hegseth thinks ICE is “saving the country,” apparently from the elected leaders of Minnesota and the “lunatics” in the street. (These “lunatics” are also known as “American citizens.”)

Hegseth has neither the legal authority nor the right—and certainly not the moral standing—to make such claims. Statements by incompetent appointees like Noem are bad enough, but Hegseth committing the United States military to “have the backs” of men who shot to death a citizen lying in the street, before the shooting has even been investigated, is beyond irresponsible. Unfortunately, such recklessness is to be expected from a man, and an administration, that treats any city, state, or government agency not controlled by Trump loyalists as an enemy.

Perhaps Hegseth was only showing off. He is an immature and undisciplined man, and he may be trying to prove that he, too, can say something terrible in the wake of a shocking moment of violence. But the secretary of defense is supposed to be the steward of the American military. He is supposed to keep the armed forces out of all but the most dire civil disturbances; instead, Hegseth is trying to involve them in a lawless mess created by another government department. He is supposed to keep the military professional, ready, and apolitical; instead, Hegseth has identified a bunch of rogue civilians as brothers-in-arms, and promised to protect them. He is supposed to keep the American military ready to fight foreign enemies; instead, Hegseth is lashing out at state officials in Minnesota.

Hegseth’s apparent desire to get involved in the Minnesota debacle is dangerous not only to the lives of innocent Americans, but to American democracy itself. The military should not be involved in domestic policing. Cops and border agents and soldiers are different from one another, and they are kept separate in a democracy for good reason. And most important, the Pentagon’s top official should not use his office to identify elected leaders who disagree with the president as enemies who will destroy the nation.

Pete Hegseth has one of the most important jobs on the planet, and it carries a world of obligations to the soldiers of the United States, and to the American people. For now, he might consider adding another task to his many duties, one that would be of immense help to the nation and to the armed forces: He should shut up.

The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal

2026-01-19T15:49:00-05:00

Updated at 4:45 p.m. ET on January 20, 2026

The United States is a global superpower, and its military trains for war in every domain. During my years as a military educator, I saw American officers wrestle with any number of scenarios designed to challenge their thinking and force them to adapt to surprises. One case we never considered, however, was how to betray and attack our own allies. We did not ask what to do if the president becomes a threatening megalomaniac who tells one of our oldest friends, Norway, that because the Nobel Committee in Oslo refuses to give him a trophy, he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of Peace” and can instead turn his mind toward planning to wage war against NATO.

As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, Donald Trump’s threatening message to the Norwegian prime minister should, in any responsible democracy, force the rest of the U.S. political system to act to control him. The president is talking about an invasion that would require “citizens of a treaty ally,” as she put it, “to become American against their will,” all because he “now genuinely lives in a different reality.” And yet neither Congress nor the sycophants in the White House seem willing to stop him.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s letter to Norway should be the last straw]

The U.S. military is obligated by law, and by every tradition of American decency, to refuse to follow illegal orders. But what about orders that may not be illegal but are clearly immoral and illogical? The president, for example, can order the Pentagon to plan for an invasion of Greenland; such an order would be little more than a direction to organize one more war game. (The military, as it sometimes does during war games, might not even use real place names, but rather use maps that look a lot like the North Atlantic as it organizes an invasion of “Verdegrun” or something.)

But after years of experience with American military officers, I believe that even these hypothetical instructions will sound utterly perverse to men and women who have served with the Danes and other NATO allies. Denmark has been a friend to the United States for more than 200 years. As my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker has written, it joined our fight against the Taliban after 9/11 and suffered significant casualties for a small nation. Danish soldiers bled and died on the same battlefields as Americans.

American officers know what Trump is planning—the world knows it, because Trump won’t stop saying it—and their minds will rebel at directives to take everything they’ve prepared to do for years and apply it backwards, against the people they have trained to work with and protect. The president, in other words, will be ordering them to do something they have been trained never to do.

America’s armed forces are conditioned to obey the orders of civilian authorities, and rightly so. But these will be orders that force U.S. military minds to step into a horrifying mirror universe where the United States is the aggressor against NATO, a coalition that includes countries that have been our friends for centuries. Should Trump pursue this scheme of conquest, the military’s training will have to be shattered and reassembled into a destructive version of itself, as if doctors were asked to take lifesaving medicines, reconstitute them as poisonous isomers, and then administer them to patients.

I think back to my days as the chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the War College, and I can only imagine what would have happened had I convened the faculty and students and said: “It’s time for us to think about how you might plan for an American invasion of a NATO country. Small nations have no claim to sovereignty and cannot defend their borders or possessions; we should create case studies for seizing whatever we want from them.”

The most likely outcome of such a meeting is that I would have been called in to explain myself to my superiors. If I had stayed fixated on such an idea, I might have been relieved of my leadership duties. If I had remained as adamant as Trump has become on the subject, I might have been directed to seek counseling or even undergo a renewed background check. Today, however, this aggressive and immoral stance is the policy of the commander in chief—because when the president speaks, it is policy—and he may well order the military to move it from rhetoric to reality.

[Tom Nichols: The silence of the generals]

Some military officers will shrug at Trump’s ravings and say that orders are orders, and that yesterday’s friends are today’s enemies. Every defense organization has people in it, uniformed and civilian, who are morally hollow and see only figures on a map that must be targeted for elimination. But most Americans, and the members of the military that serves them, are decent people. They know that attacking your friends is evil and mad. I am certain that the men and women of the armed forces will be conflicted and disturbed as they try to turn Trump’s unhinged obsessions into a coherent military plan.

In the end, however, if senior officers—starting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the heads of each service—follow Trump down this dark road, the officers and enlisted people below them will likely obey the chain of command. Such an outcome would be a tragedy, and potentially a global catastrophe.

It is not up to the armed forces to put a stop to Trump’s ghastly ideas. Every molecule in the body of almost every uniformed American service member is likely to reject doing something they have spent a lifetime training never to do, but the United States is not run by the military, nor should it be. Americans, and their elected representatives, must take this burden away from the armed forces—now.

This article originally described Denmark as a U.S. ally during the two world wars. In fact, Denmark remained formally neutral throughout the world wars.

Trump Is Risking a Global Catastrophe

2026-01-14T14:47:51-05:00

Donald Trump has a lot of odd fixations, both as a person and as a president. He tends to focus his tunnel vision on things he wants: the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Many of Trump’s quirks are harmless, if unpleasant. (He seems to hate dogs, for example, but no one is forcing him to adopt one.) Some of his ideas, however, are more destructive: His stubborn and ill-informed attachment to tariffs has brought about considerable disorder in the international economy and hurt many of the American industries they were supposed to protect.

But a few of Trump’s obsessions are extraordinarily dangerous, and likely none more so than his determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country allied to the United States for more than two centuries. Perhaps because he does not understand how the Mercator projection distorts size on a map, the president thinks that Greenland is “massive” and that it must become part of the United States. If Trump makes good on his recurring threat to use force to gain the island, he would not only blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe—or even to World War III.

[Isaac Stanley-Becker: Denmark’s army chief says he’s ready to defend Greenland]

Greenland, of course, is important to the security of the United States—as it is to the entire Atlantic community and to the free world itself. This fact might be new to Trump, but Western strategists have known it for a century or more, which is why the United States has had a military presence in Greenland for decades.

During the Cold War, America and its allies were determined to defend the sea lanes between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom (often referred to at the time as the “GIUK” gap), the North Atlantic passages through which the Soviet Union could have sent submarines from its Arctic bases toward NATO convoys trying to reach Europe. America and Denmark have always worked closely in the Arctic region, and even once had a secret “gentlemen’s agreement” under which Denmark declared Greenland off-limits for the stationing of nuclear weapons, but would look the other way so long as the United States kept the presence of any such weapons quiet and unacknowledged. (The U.S. Air Force, in a rather flexible reading of that agreement, flew nuclear-armed B-52 bomber patrols over Greenland; one of them crashed and scattered radioactive debris on the island in 1968.)

The Cold War is over, but Greenland is still an important part of North Atlantic security, which is one of many reasons Denmark and the United States and other North Atlantic nations are part of a thing called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But for the Trump administration, NATO—another of the president’s hostile fixations—is not enough to guarantee America’s safety. Trump, like the mad president in the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, seems to believe that the United States must absorb Canada and Greenland and create some sort of Atlantic co-prosperity sphere stretching from Alaska to Norway, a ring of ice and iron that would stand as a tribute to the imperial ambitions of America’s 47th president.

In Trump’s first term, he made overtures about buying Greenland, as if the territory and its people were just a house on the market, available for purchase with all of its original furniture and fixtures. Neither the Danes nor the Greenlanders were interested, and the whole scheme faded away once Trump was immersed in the series of scandals and outrages that led to his loss in 2020 and his attempted coup against the Constitution in 2021. When voters returned Trump to office in 2024, his electoral affirmation seemed to strengthen his determination to do all the things that the responsible adults in his previous administration told him he couldn’t do the first time around.

The idea of a purchase is, in theory, still on the table. Denmark is still not selling. At this point, Trump is so consumed with acquiring Greenland that he has implied that he would use force against an old American friend, if that’s what it takes to get the island. “I would like to make a deal the easy way,” Trump said last week, “but if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” (He added, in one of his verbal tics, that he’s “a fan” of Denmark, as if it were a sports team or a rock band and not an allied nation of 6 million people located less than 1,000 miles from Russia.)

As Trump’s rhetoric has escalated, other administration officials have tried to clean up his remarks, but with little success. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dutifully met with members of Congress to reassure them that Trump intended only to offer to buy the island, but the next day, the White House issued a statement reaffirming that “utilizing” the military “is always an option.” The same week that Rubio was on the Hill, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on January 5 scoffed at the idea that seizing Greenland would lead to armed conflict, because “nobody’s going to fight the United States” over Greenland. (A few days earlier, his wife, Katie, also a White House aide, posted a picture on social media of an American flag superimposed over Greenland, with the comment: “SOON.”)

The president’s obsession with Greenland is especially dangerous because it has no real constituency: Trump is determined to get the island, it seems, only because Denmark and the rest of the world are telling him that he can’t have it. As is so often the case, telling Trump not to do something makes him more determined to do it.

Even the loyal MAGA base has shown no interest in Greenland, or at least not yet; the president’s supporters, of course, usually end up supporting whatever he wants. But so far, taking Greenland is not a chant or talking point on the same level as, say, building a wall along the Mexican border once was. In fact, polls show that most Americans oppose the whole idea. Even so, that didn’t stop Randy Fine, who represents Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, from introducing the Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act on Monday. Perhaps Fine’s constituents in Palatka or Pierson are clamoring for a victory parade in Nuuk, but this idea seems to have possessed Trump and almost no one else, which means the president may choose to get it done with the only instrument that he feels is totally within his control: the United States Armed Forces.

This morning, Denmark sent an advance military command to Greenland in preparation for sending yet more Danish forces to the island. Danish lawmakers told my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker last week that the timing of this deployment is not a coincidence and represents an attempt to create a “credible deterrent” on the island—presumably to the Americans. This afternoon, the foreign ministers of both Denmark and Greenland met with Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House, and, clearly, got nowhere: Both ministers reiterated that any solution to Trump’s “concerns” that does not respect the territorial sovereignty of Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark is “totally unacceptable.” (The Danish foreign minister called these Denmark’s “red lines” on the matter.)

The Danes are not going to hand over Greenland; the Greenlanders will not vote to become part of the United States. What, exactly, is left for Trump to do, and what will happen if he takes Greenland over the objections of Denmark and NATO?

As my colleagues Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Jonathan Lemire reported recently, Danish officials are concerned that Trump will simply issue a late-night proclamation that the United States owns Greenland and then dare anyone to contradict him. The international community has become inured to many of the president’s grandiose statements, and Trump declaring himself Lord Protector of Greenland might not have much impact.

But Trump might then try to enforce his claims. He could start by ordering the U.S. military to treat Greenland as sovereign U.S. territory. And such an order, which would be illegal but would likely be fulfilled by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, could set in motion a disastrous chain of events.

Assume, for example, that Denmark closes Greenland’s airspace to U.S. flights in order to assert its continued sovereignty (and to prevent Trump from sending more troops to the island). Trump might then order the Air Force to ignore any directions from local authorities—because, of course, Greenland would now be American airspace—and to treat all such encounters as potentially hostile. Or imagine that Denmark, following some intemperate claim from Trump, demands that U.S. forces in Greenland remain confined to their bases, and Trump, incensed at the insult to his putatively unlimited power, tries to force the issue and tells American servicepeople to act as the island’s de facto police, including suppressing any demonstrations or resistance from the population.

Either by design or accident, members of the American military might end up confronting Danish forces, men and women with whom they have trained for years and may have served in Afghanistan. Someone might be killed. The death of a Greenlander, a Dane, or a member of any other military there as a show of support for Denmark—Sweden has already sent troops to Greenland, and Britain is considering similar moves—would incinerate the NATO alliance. Then the real nightmare begins.

The United States is already overstretched around the world because of Trump’s chaotic threats and impulses. Ships that should be in the Gulf or near Europe or Asia are paddling around in the Caribbean because of Trump’s operation to remove the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power. The president has threatened to attack Iran, again, if the regime in Tehran continues to kill its own citizens, and U.S. forces would have to dart back across the world to undertake new assignments in the Middle East. Of course, such a move would undermine Trump’s ongoing warnings that he might strike Mexico and Colombia.

As the American military chases Trump’s ever-changing Sharpie lines across the world’s maps, the West’s enemies will be tempted to take advantage of the fact that the United States has obliterated the most powerful alliance in history while scattering American forces around the globe in showpiece operations that have more to do with Trump’s vanity than with sound strategy. They have surely noticed that the U.S. defense and intelligence services are in the hands of unqualified loyalists, and that so far Trump’s plans for improving the battle readiness of the American military are mostly limited to pictures of make-believe battleships that will never be built.

If NATO collapses because of bullets fired in Greenland, Russian President Vladimir Putin might well assume that he could bury the Atlantic Alliance once and for all by attacking NATO’s Baltic members. As the political scientist Ian Bremmer, who founded the analytical firm Eurasia Group, said on social media this week, “Nobody wants the United States to take control of Greenland (and, accordingly, destroy NATO) more than Putin.” The Russians don’t need to fully occupy Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; the point would be to start a war aimed at isolating them. (The three countries together are about the size of Wisconsin.) Putin has taken ghastly losses in Ukraine, but he has enough of an army left, backed by drones and other assets, to pummel the Baltic states and grab pieces of territory that may have no strategic value but whose capture would serve to remind the world that the United States—the new masters of Greenland—will not save Europe.

Other nations, however, are unlikely to sit by, especially neighboring NATO countries such as Poland and Finland. Should they come to the aid of their Baltic allies, at least some other European nations would likely support those efforts, and the result would be a broader European conflict involving some of the most militarily capable states in the world. For the first time in almost a century, the continent would be at war, this time one involving multiple nuclear powers. U.S. forces, like it or not, would find themselves in the middle of this bedlam, and with each day of violence the chances would grow of a cataclysmic mistake or miscalculation by any of the combatants.

[Read: Trump seizing Greenland could set off a chain reaction]

Meanwhile, a world away from Europe, China might wonder if America has finally tied itself in enough foolish knots to put the conquest of Taiwan within reach, especially with Trump’s “Golden Fleet” nowhere in sight. And although no one should try to predict what North Korea’s bizarre dynasty would do, South Korea and Japan would have to begin planning for the risks that will come during, and after, America’s voluntary strategic immolation, most likely with crash programs to develop nuclear arms.

And all this could happen—for what, exactly? The vainglorious demands of one man who can’t read a map?

Concerned leaders in both parties should explain to the citizens of the United States how much peril Trump is courting. His obsessions could lead not only to the collapse of their standard of living but present a real danger to their lives, no matter where they live. Congress, of course, should have stopped Trump—on this as on so many things—long ago. The Republican majority has the power to put an end to this lunacy by closing its purse strings and passing laws directly forbidding further adventures: Yesterday, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Jeanne Shaheen introduced the NATO Unity Protection Act, which explicitly prohibits using Federal funding “to blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state without that ally’s consent.” This is one case where the MAGA base, which claims to hate foreign adventures, might forgive the GOP for opposing Trump.

Most Americans probably couldn’t care less about Greenland, but they will be forced to care—tragically, too late—if Trump’s gambit engulfs the world in flames.

Maybe Russia and China Should Sit This One Out

2026-01-03T14:27:00-05:00

Updated at 8:24 a.m. ET on January 4, 2026

President Donald Trump has launched not a splendid little war, but perhaps a splendid little operation in Venezuela. He has captured a dictator and removed him from power. So far, Trump seems to have executed a bad idea well: The military operation, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” seems to have been flawless. The strategic wisdom, however, is deeply questionable. And the legal basis, as offered by the president and his team, is absurd. Some Americans, and some U.S. allies, are appalled.

Russia and China claim to be appalled, too, but to use a classic diplomatic expression, the leaders in Beijing and Moscow should be invited, with all due respect, to shut their traps.

“We firmly call on the U.S. leadership to reconsider this position,” the Russian foreign ministry said this morning, “and release the lawfully elected president of a sovereign country and his wife.” The Russians then shamelessly turned all the sanctimony knobs to supernova levels: “Venezuela must be guaranteed the right to determine its own future without destructive external interference, particularly of a military nature.”

You don’t say. Perhaps we might generalize that principle to other nations, such as Ukraine, where Moscow’s forces are murdering people every week—in part because the Russians failed to kill or capture the “lawfully elected president of a sovereign country” four years ago.

The Chinese, too, are absolutely shocked that a great power is menacing a small neighbor and inflicting regime change by military force. China, the foreign ministry in Beijing said, “is deeply shocked”—at least it wasn’t shocked and stunned—“and strongly condemns the use of force by the U.S. against a sovereign country and the use of force against the president of a country.”

Noble words. And then, like the Russians, the Chinese dared the world to laugh out loud: “China firmly opposes such hegemonic behavior by the U.S., which seriously violates international law, violates Venezuela’s sovereignty, and threatens peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean. We urge the U.S. to abide by international law and the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and stop violating the sovereignty and security of other countries.”

Only two days ago, however, China engaged in military exercises that included surrounding Taiwan and then firing missiles in the waters around the island. A giant nation regularly running war games aimed at invading its tiny neighbor—and threatening Japan, for good measure—counts as “hegemonic behavior” that threatens the “peace and security” of a region, and China knows it.

The more stinging irony here is that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping probably approved these public statements with a chuckle. The United States has now given Russia, China, and anyone else who wants to give it a try a road map for invading countries and capturing leaders who displease them, with a lawlessness that by comparison makes the 2003 invasion of Iraq seem as lawyered up as a bank merger.

Let us all stipulate that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is a bad guy. He deserved to be driven from power, perhaps with American help. An operation rooted in support from the international community and approved by Congress would be a tough sell because Venezuela presented no threat to the United States, but it would have been the right way to go. (Drugs don’t count as an imminent danger.) Instead, the president declared the “Donroe Doctrine,” another moment that will stand for ages as an embarrassment to the United States and raises the question yet again of whether the commander in chief is cognitively stable enough to be ordering the invasion of other nations.

Trump and his team didn’t even try creating a coalition either at home or abroad. By simply landing troops in another nation and decapitating its leadership, Trump has done Russia and China a great service by trashing, yet again, guardrails that limit other nations from running amok. International law? Pointless. The United Nations? Never heard of it. The Congress of the United States? Well, they’re good folks, but according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, they couldn’t be told ahead of time, for security reasons. (He said this while standing next to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a fountain of security violations.) Putin and Xi must have watched Trump’s presser while nodding and taking notes.

Hypocrisy, the French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld once said, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. In this case, there is little virtue to be found; the Russian and Chinese statements are vice paying tribute to vice. They already know that the president of the United States is helping to clear the way for their adventures—and they should keep their faux outrage to themselves.

Trump’s ‘Operation Iranian Freedom’

2026-01-02T14:17:08-05:00

Alone in the dead of night, a man can fall into bleak thoughts. In the wee, small hours of the morning, he might think about lost loves, mull over great regrets, or wrestle with the inevitability of his own mortality. But Donald Trump, awake and restless in the Florida darkness, apparently consoles himself by imagining a war of liberation in a Middle Eastern nation of 92 million people.

At 2:58 a.m. EST (according to the time stamp on his Truth Social post), the president of the United States wrote: “If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” And then, of course: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

[Arash Azizi: Iranians have had enough]

A man pushing 80, fighting sleeplessness as older people sometimes do, should be expected now and then to send some weird messages on his Jitterbug. He is also entitled to make some typos, as we all do. But this particular senior citizen is the leader of the most powerful country in the world, and he’s implying he’ll use force against a country he has attacked once already. At the least, Americans might expect that when threatening military action, the commander in chief would give his post a quick proofread. (True to sycophantic form, the official White House account transcribed Trump’s warning while also repeating the typo—as if his mistake was intentional.)

For an America Firster, Trump seems to have quite a global military agenda: In the first year of his second term, he has used force in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Congress used to debate authorizing such things, but with the GOP House and Senate now reduced to glorified White House staff offices, Trump need not trifle with such annoyances. Only in Europe and the Pacific does he seem shy about flexing American muscle; after all, those places have genuinely tough customers—China and Russia—that scare him. Fishing boats in the Caribbean and small villages in Nigeria are easier pickings. Now, however, he’s threatening something a lot bigger than lobbing a few cruise missiles.

What’s going on here? The answer is probably: Not much. Trump might be considering another showy round of B-2 strikes, which wouldn’t be much help to people demonstrating in the streets of Tehran. Or he might have just outed some sort of intelligence operation in Iran. Or maybe he just couldn’t sleep. Trump claims “we” are locked and loaded, but America is not ready for a war of national liberation in Iran.

One possibility is that Trump is mulling over his meeting last Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After that meeting, Trump said Iran “may be behaving badly” and warned that if “it” is confirmed—presumably, he means evidence that Iran is rebuilding its nuclear program—the “consequences will be very powerful, maybe more powerful than last time.” Although Netanyahu recently insisted that political transformation in Iran must “come from within” and is “up to the Iranian people,” he has in the past pushed for regime change in Tehran. Perhaps he was selling Trump on being remembered as a great liberator, a world-historical role that would be catnip to a narcissist like the president.

One painful irony here is that Iran needs regime change, and nothing would be better for that nation than its people driving the mullahs from power. Another is that the United States used to support the Iranians with efforts such as the Voice of America Persian service, a low-cost program that brought real news and information to them. But Trump, along with his pick to run VOA, Kari Lake, shut down VOA’s Persian broadcasts last March, an idiotic decision that led to the panicky rehiring of Persian speakers just before the U.S. strikes on Iran last June. (Mass firings since then have effectively shut down VOA.)

Trump’s nocturnal ravings are dangerous. The world may be more or less accustomed to Trump’s bizarre threats, but it is still a big deal when the president of the United States menaces another nation. Intelligence analysts, friend and enemy alike, do not have the luxury to presume that the American commander in chief is just having a bad night. They will ask, as they should, whether something is happening behind the scenes, and whether Trump has blurted out something that might be classified.

The United States and Israel are unlikely to be planning some misbegotten war of liberation in Iran, even if Netanyahu and Trump make ruling out such an adventure impossible. Another danger, however, is that ordinary Iranian citizens might see the president’s message and take it seriously. People protesting for their freedom in various parts of the world, especially during the Cold War, have made the deadly mistake of believing that the American cavalry was just about to come over the top of the hill and save them—in Budapest and Prague, and later in Georgia and Ukraine—and faith in Trump’s faithless promises could lead to serious miscalculations by desperate people.

One of the most powerful statements about the dangers of such false promises and the risks of military intervention came not so long ago from an American leader who resolutely objected to both feckless red lines and the use of force abroad: the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. On October 23, 2019, Trump announced a cease-fire in Syria that he argued averted the need for more comprehensive American military involvement in the region. “We’ve saved a lot of lives,” he said.

And then he took a potshot at his predecessor, Barack Obama, for making a promise that America, in Trump’s view, could never have kept.

Most importantly, we have avoided another costly military intervention that could’ve led to disastrous, far-reaching consequences. Many thousands of people could’ve been killed. The last administration said, “Assad must go.” They could’ve easily produced that outcome, but they didn’t. In fact, they drew a very powerful red line in the sand—you all remember, the red line in the sand—when children were gassed and killed, but then did not honor their commitment as other children died in the same horrible manner.

Gassing children in Syria? A poorly drawn red line that did not merit U.S. action and could lead only to a messy war. Killing peaceful protesters in Tehran? “Locked and loaded!” (The president had few such compunctions in 2020 about hurting peaceful protesters in America, whom he wanted to shoot in the legs.)

[Thomas Wright: What if ‘America first’ appears to work?]

A lot of places on this planet—hellscapes where people are warring, starving, and living under terrifying repression—might benefit from forceful intervention. Few of them will get it, because Americans know that military action, especially to overthrow a regime, is a risky business, and certainly not something to ruminate about in the middle of the night.

In a better time, the leaders of Trump’s own party would do their constitutional duty and constrain the president from speaking—and acting—so recklessly. But the one truth in Trump’s unhinged messages, as in so many of his statements, is that the United States is now led by someone who cannot contain his thoughts or emotions, and who still thinks of the men and women of the U.S. military as little more than his own toy soldiers.

An Idiosyncratic Christmas Playlist

2025-12-24T13:00:00-05:00

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Christmas has always made me nostalgic, but I have come to realize, with something of a jolt— perhaps because I just turned 65—that my sense of nostalgia is not what it used to be. When I was younger, I happily got all wistful when hearing Johnny Mathis or Perry Como because I would think of my parents and the Christmases I knew as a little kid. My folks were still around, and it didn’t seem all that long ago that I was hoping to find new accessories for my beloved Captain Action doll under the tree.

When you’re very young, you’re enveloped in the memories and traditions of the adults around you. But my parents have been gone for many years, and the house I grew up in, where my mother would lovingly tape every Christmas card to the walls, has changed hands at least twice since their passing. So I now find myself comforted less by the songs of my childhood and more by the music I came to love as a teen and young adult—just like my parents did in the 1960s, when they were dreaming about the 1940s. I now want to remember my contemporaries, not those of my parents. Perhaps that’s how time and memory work; I still have fond recollections of my childhood, but I also have a kind of newer nostalgia.

So yes, when I hear Vince Guaraldi, I still think of being bundled up in my pajamas with a mug of hot chocolate and A Charlie Brown Christmas. But if you look at my Spotify list of Christmas songs, you’ll see that these days I am truly nostalgic not for Percy Faith but for … Billy Joel and the Alarm. I will always love Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” but think of this: In 2025, we are now as far away from the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” as we were from Meet Me in St. Louis when I was in college back in the early 1980s.

My list does not include a hundred versions of “Last Christmas” and the earworm known as “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Allow me to offer something a little more, ah, idiosyncratic.

“Christmas Wrapping,” released in 1981, has become a charmingly offbeat holiday mainstay for decades. It shouldn’t work at all as a holiday song. It’s a tale of harried urban singledom—with an admittedly happy ending—half-sung and half-rapped by the late Patty Donahue in her trademark flat-affect voice. When I was in college, the first jingle-jingles of “Christmas Wrapping” on Boston’s FM stations meant that school was done, and that I was going to go home to see my family. The song has always marked, for me, the beginning of the season.

The rest of my list, however, isn’t very upbeat. (Notable exception: “Christmas Won’t Be the Same Without You,” a great 2008 sing-along by the Plain White T’s and proof that I listen to a few things from this century.) In fact, most of these songs are rather melancholy. Perhaps the theme among them is something I try to remember at Christmas: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Greg Lake, of the group Emerson, Lake & Palmer, didn’t really mean to write a Christmas song when he released “I Believe in Father Christmas” in 1975. Lake’s song, composed with lyricist Peter Sinfield, laments the loss of his childhood wonder at the holiday; he describes feeling betrayed because “they said there’ll be snow at Christmas … / But instead it just kept on raining.” I get that feeling; I am a man of faith who nonetheless knows that Christ was not born on December 25, who no longer believes in Santa Claus, and who feels mournful when it rains on Christmas.

“Circle of Steel,” a 1974 song by Gordon Lightfoot, is also lovely but depressing. Lightfoot tells three stories of inner-city Christmas despair, as reminders that life is a roulette wheel—a circle of steel—where many lose, and the rest of us should count our blessings. More than a decade later, Sir Bob Geldof, co-writer Midge Ure, and a bevy of top British and Irish artists collectively recording as the group Band Aid would do the same with a song titled “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

Ironically, the people who made “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” aren’t crazy about it, despite the song’s success in raising money at the time for famine-stricken Ethiopia. “It’s not a great song,” Ure said in 2014. “Had we known it would end up side-by-side with ‘Silent Night’ and ‘White Christmas’ we’d have tried to write a better track.” Geldof said in 2010 that it was one of the “worst songs in history,” but he has since softened his view, noting a “guileless innocence” that resulted in something that is “so English, spotty, scruffy.”

Geldof, Ure, and Band Aid created a brutal, if melodic, reminder that in some places, Christmas bells are the “clanging chimes of doom,” and not everyone is choosing between turkey and ham while drinking good wine and exchanging expensive gifts. “Tonight,” the Irish singer Bono, of U2, howls, “thank God it’s them instead of you.”

I have a special affection for the song because I bought it as a 12-inch-vinyl single in 1985 and discovered a gem on the other side: A long version with all of the stars wishing you (as the British say) a happy Christmas, including a gentle remonstration about world hunger from David Bowie. Sure, I have some quibbles with it: For one thing, Ethiopia, the epicenter of the 1984 famine, is a nation with a large population of my fellow Orthodox Christians, so yes, they did in fact know it was the Christmas season. But even I am not enough of a curmudgeon to dislike a Christmas song that wraps a classic Brit-pop sound and the instantly recognizable drumming of Phil Collins around bushels of real sincerity.

Other songs on my list, I admit, make for oddball listening. “Snoopy’s Christmas” was a goofy but adorable—and extremely catchy—novelty hit by the Royal Guardsmen in 1967, in which our canine pal encounters the “Red Baron” in combat on Christmas Eve, and instead of fighting, they enjoy a chivalrous truce.

The thing is, such truces did happen in World War I, so after you smile at Snoopy, listen to “Christmas in the Trenches,” a 1984 song by the American folk singer John McCutcheon. McCutcheon’s gentle ballad opens with British and German troops hearing each other as they sing carols in their trenches while celebrating Christmas. Soon—as actually happened in some places during the Great War—they tentatively venture out into no-man’s-land to shake hands, “share some secret brandy,” and play soccer by flare-light. As morning comes and the war resumes, the men return to their trenches but wonder: “Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”

You might notice that my list includes some real clunkers. Why did I include “Wonderful Christmastime,” by Paul McCartney? (Because it was released during my first year of college; that’s why. I know it’s terrible. Shut up.) The sticky gunk from Neil Diamond and Faith Hill is there because I’m old enough that even the 1990s can trigger nostalgia. And I have to listen to the boys from South Park do “Merry F**king Christmas” as a kind of palate cleanser now and then, despite my wife’s exasperated sighs.

I hope that whatever your faith or tradition, this season you find some joy, and that you take a moment—as the young people in Band Aid sang so long ago—to “pray for the other ones” and remember our common responsibility to them. I know this has been a tough year, but remember, as Judy Garland promised us in 1942: “Let your heart be light,” and hope, as we always do, that “next year, all our troubles will be out of sight.”

Merry Christmas.

Related:

Evening Read

Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty

What I Lost When I Gave Up My Catholicism

By Xochitl Gonzalez

Few experiences in modern life are as wondrous as a really good Christmas Vigil Mass. It’s a full sensory encounter: the sight of the chapel, decked out for the holidays; the smell of the incense; the sound of the choir singing “Adeste Fideles” or “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”; the taste of the Communion wafer; the heavy feel of the chalice when you sip your Communion wine. The message, every year, is that no matter the state of the world, goodness can be born anew.

I don’t remember the last time that I let myself experience this.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Lauren Puente / AFP / Getty.

Examine. Why did we ever watch To Catch a Predator? A new documentary (streaming on Paramount+) probes the influential Dateline series—and the titillating nature of true crime itself, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Listen. Growing up, Anna Holmes’s holidays were profoundly shaped by the sound of a Charlie Brown Christmas.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Trump’s Vanity Fleet

2025-12-22T20:43:09-05:00

Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.

That’s pretty much what the president did today when he announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the “Golden Fleet,” his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)

Trump’s press conference today was among his more haywire performances, and his slushy delivery and meandering answers will not halt speculation about his cognitive health. When asked for his endgame in the confrontation with Venezuela, for example, he launched into his usual lines about people being sent into the United States from prisons and mental hospitals, as if someone had hit the wrong button and played the wrong recording. He also reiterated that he wanted U.S. ships to be more attractive, noting that he would be involved in the design of the new vessels because “I am a very aesthetic person.”

(Apparently, no one has ever explained to him that sharp design does not equal military value. The B-52 bomber, the mainstay of the U.S. bomber force for decades, was affectionately called the BUFF by its crews. Big, ugly, fat … the rest you can figure out.)

Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan did make some news today. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth were also on hand, but they limited themselves to some standard-issue sycophancy.) First, we learned that the president of the United States clearly has no idea what battleships are. Second, the United States is going to invest in a new class of naval vessel. Third, America is going to reverse more than 30 years of wise policy by putting nuclear weapons back on U.S. Navy surface vessels.

[Read: The pitiful childishness of Donald Trump]

Trump announced that the new Trump-class ships will be “battleships,” but they seem to be supersize versions of the existing workhorse of the Navy, the Arleigh Burke–class destroyers; the first ship, called the Defiant, will be about three times the size of a Burke. The Navy has also announced the development of a new class of frigates. Destroyers and frigates, as the Navy knows (and as the commander in chief should know) are not battleships. Battleships are huge and powerful, and are meant to dish out —and withstand—serious punishment. Destroyers and frigates are less rugged, and perform missions that require more speed and agility than battleships can muster. But none of that matters: The goal, apparently, was to give a childlike president a new toy, named after himself, in exchange for gobs of money that the Navy will figure out how to spend later.

Indeed, defense investors cheered the announcement, but the spending will likely come much later, because the United States does not have the capacity to build vessels it hasn’t even designed yet. Trump told a reporter today that he expects the first ship to arrive in two and a half years, which is possible if the Navy slaps some gold paint on a Burke class, adds some missiles, and then stencils USS TRUMP on the side. But the last time the Navy really tried to create a new kind of ship—the Zumwalt-class destroyer—the process took years and ended in failure.

The biggest news came today when Phelan said that the new Trump class will carry nuclear weapons. Why? Perhaps Phelan, who has no experience in, or with, the Navy, figured that Trump would want the new ships to have the biggest and best of everything. (Phelan did promise today that they would be the “best-looking” warships in the world.) But like everything else about this chaotic scheme, putting nuclear arms on destroyers or cruisers or “battleships” makes no sense in the 21st century—if it ever did.

During the Cold War, U.S. surface vessels carried all kinds of nuclear munitions for use against other ships, submarines, and land targets, because such was the logic of the Soviet-American standoff: World War III would be a final confrontation of two immense military forces, including nuclear duels at sea. In 1991, with the Soviet Union on its last legs, President George H. W. Bush ordered the removal of all such weapons from the surface fleet. Many Navy officers were relieved: I know from speaking with several at the time that they regarded nuclear weapons on their ships as a useless burden.

Today’s Navy is not going to get into a nuclear showdown with the Soviet fleet. Nor, for that matter, is it likely to trade mushroom clouds at sea with the Chinese or Russian fleets. Carrying nuclear weapons on surface vessels—big, slow, exposed platforms—is not only strategically pointless but also a needless risk. George H. W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, both defense hawks, knew this more than three decades ago.

As with all Trump vanity projects, no one seems to be asking what national purpose is served by these new plans. Does the Navy need new ships? What should it do with them if it gets them? Do they really need to be armed with nuclear weapons? The answer from the Trump administration, clearly, is: Who cares? As retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery told The Wall Street Journal, the Golden Fleet plan is “exactly what we don’t need”—but, he added, no one is focused on America’s maritime needs, because “they are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

[Read: This is what presidential panic looks like]

Phelan might not know much about the Navy, but he knows Trump: He promised that the new Trump-class ships will inspire “awe and reverence” in any port they visit. But strategy is more than just giving lethal playthings to a president who has a simplistic understanding of ships. It is the art of making choices, an attempt to match means with ends. In a rational world, this would be the thinking driving the acquisition of weapons.

I taught military officers for more than two decades at the Naval War College. One thing I learned from conversations with my students was that the Navy really needs to invest more in its officers and sailors, and reduce the tempo of operations that are burning them out. The best ships in the world won’t mean much if their crews are fatigued and poorly trained. As the defense analyst John Ferrari recently wrote, for years, the Navy has been “structurally compromised” because its people are exhausted, its ships are “aging faster than they could be repaired,” and the fleet’s readiness is declining. These are serious problems that require serious work, but Trump has found a way around all of this irritating chatter by sticking his name on a new ship and telling the military to go build it.

At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump reiterated his demand that Greenland must become part of the United States. His plan for a fleet of Trump-branded battleships is only slightly more likely to happen than a victory parade in Nuuk—and neither is in the national interest of the United States.

This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like

2025-12-17T22:36:00-05:00

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The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.

His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.

This was not a holiday address from the president of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. Trump has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.

Pete Hegseth’s Weak Excuses

2025-12-04T17:24:09-05:00

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The report from the Pentagon’s inspector general’s investigation into Signalgate, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s transmission of the details of a U.S. military option in Yemen to a group on Signal—including, by mistake, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg—has now been released to the American public. Its conclusions are unequivocal and brutal: Pete Hegseth endangered the success of a U.S. military operation and put the lives of American military personnel at risk.

The secretary of defense has responded to this stark judgment by resorting to weaselly dodges and sending his public-affairs people out to claim that he has been “totally exonerated.” This is nonsense.

Originally, before the report was cleared for public release, the lines about Hegseth’s transgressions were classified as secret and unreleasable to foreign nationals—probably because public knowledge of Hegseth’s actions would be so damaging to the reputation and security of the United States:

The Secretary’s transmission of nonpublic operational information over Signal to an uncleared journalist and others 2 to 4 hours before planned strikes using his personal cell phone exposed sensitive DoD information. Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.

If Pete Hegseth were anyone else but the secretary—and if he didn’t have top cover from President Donald Trump—he’d be in a world of trouble. According to the report, he violated Defense Department regulations, refused to cooperate with investigators, and waved away the significant dangers he created while trying to preen like a tough guy in a group chat.

[Read: Pentagon Report: Hegseth risked endangering troops with his Signal messages]

Americans might expect leadership from the Pentagon’s top civilian, but that is too much to ask of someone like Hegseth, whose responses are the worst kind of bureaucratic ass covering. The report notes that when investigators asked to speak with him, he declined. I was a Defense Department employee and held a security clearance for decades. I have been interviewed in DOD IG investigations—thankfully, never as a target—and it is the duty of a government employee to cooperate with such inquiries. When investigators asked to see Hegseth’s phone, he refused. When he was asked for a full transcript of his Signal chat, he again demurred, according to investigators, “because it was not a DoD-created record,” thus forcing them to rely on “The Atlantic’s version of the Signal group chat.”

The only response Hegseth gave to the IG team was a snippy letter, included in the report, in which the secretary claimed that he had the right to do what he did, that he did not reveal any classified information, and that his predecessor, Lloyd Austin, kept a personal cellphone with him. (No Trump appointee can ever answer anything without a “whatabout.”) Hegseth’s answer was what might be expected from some lawyered-up paper pusher, not from a man responsible for the nation’s secrets, military plans, and nuclear arms, and the lives of thousands of American men and women in uniform.

But even taken on their own terms, Hegseth’s excuses don’t stand up. The report makes clear that the information Hegseth transmitted in the group chats came from Central Command and was classified. Rather than admit that he sent out secret information—again, data that could imperil American lives if revealed—Hegseth claimed that he used his authority to declassify the material he released. This information is secret, he was told. I declare it no longer secret, he responded. Problem solved.

Well, not exactly. The IG report agreed that Hegseth did, in fact, have the right to declassify the material, but it then noted that the information was no less damaging just because Hegseth had decided it was no longer classified. Hegseth also claimed that he used only information that would be “readily apparent to any observer in the area” and contained no classified strike details. The IG wasn’t buying that one, either:

Although the Secretary wrote in his July 25 statement to the DoD OIG that “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission,” if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.

One problem here is that Hegseth is claiming that he declassified the details before the strike—a move that makes no sense. (As CENTCOM told investigators, “following an operation, the command sometimes declassifies specific operational details, such as photographs or mission-related information, but that this is not typically done before an operation is complete.”) His subsequent assertion that his messages contained no secrets appears to be an attempt to evade legal responsibility for releasing the information in the first place.

[Tom Nichols: Pete Hegseth needs to go—now]

Neither Congress nor anyone else should accept such obviously deceptive evasions. Instead of showing leadership and accepting responsibility for a mistake that could have been a lethal blunder, instead of stepping forward and admitting his error, instead of cooperating and helping improve Pentagon security, Hegseth hid behind his desk and said that he had the legal right to do something stupid and dangerous, as if that made his actions any less stupid and dangerous.

Hegseth’s responses are nothing more than sniveling from a man who is supposed to be a model for an organization built on bravery and competence. The secretary had a good teacher: Trump. When caught with boxes of classified information in his bathroom, Trump claimed that he had the ability to declassify materials just by “thinking about it.” When Justice Department officials asked him to cooperate and return the materials, he told them to pound sand. Like Trump, Hegseth has adopted the I can do anything I want mantra, a selfish and childlike rejection of the U.S. military’s core beliefs of discipline, honor, and personal responsibility.

Pete Hegseth risked American lives. He should be removed from his office; in a better government, he would have to deal with legal charges. (Other senior U.S. leaders have faced charges for far less serious breaches.) Such possibilities may seem irrelevant now that he faces even more severe accusations of being a murderer or war criminal, but the Trump administration as a general principle views any acknowledgments of responsibility from its people or its leader as a surrender to the president’s political enemies. Hegseth remains in a position he has dishonored, because he does not have the decency to resign—and Trump, so far, does not have the decency to fire him.

Pete Hegseth Needs to Go—Now

2025-12-01T16:17:00-05:00

Presidents have always sent people to lead the Pentagon who respect the institutions and personnel of the armed forces, not least because Americans tend to bristle at any sign that an administration does not unreservedly support the men and women of the U.S. military. (Just ask Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom were castigated for such supposed disrespect.) In his first term, Donald Trump sent General James Mattis, a veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, when Mattis quit, he appointed a long-serving defense professional, Mark Esper.

But this time, the president found a perfect instrument of destruction to send across the Potomac: Pete Hegseth, a Trump sycophant who served in the military, topped out at the mid-level rank of major, and left full of bitterness and resentment toward a military establishment that clearly didn’t value his brilliance and fortitude.

The halls of the Pentagon are apparently strewn with rakes these days, and Hegseth has managed to step on almost all of them, including security blunders, needless fights with the press, and envious, unmanly whining about the medals on the uniform of Senator Mark Kelly, a veteran of higher rank and far greater achievement than Hegseth himself. Like Trump, Hegseth thinks his job is to get even with people he views as enemies: When Hegseth pulled more than 800 senior officers into an auditorium to give them a long and pointless harangue, it was not only disrespectful; it was cringe-inducing, like watching the angriest kid in your high school come back 20 years later as the principal and unload his adolescent gripes on all the teachers in the staff lounge.

[Read: Holy warrior]

Now, however, Hegseth is in new and far more dangerous territory. The Washington Post reported last Friday that, back in September, Hegseth ordered the killing of the survivors of the first strike against what the administration says are terrorist-controlled drug boats. If this report is accurate, it means that Hegseth issued what is called a “no quarter” order, a crime in both American and international law.

So far, the president and the secretary have not disputed the facts, instead fumbling about with classic Beltway-style “non-denial denials.” Today, the White House admitted that the second strike did in fact take place, but on the orders of the Special Operations Command chief, Admiral Frank Bradley, which seems to be setting Bradley up as a scapegoat. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that “Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” adding that Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”

This seems implausible. Bradley is an experienced officer who by virtue of his rank and position would be intimately familiar with the laws of armed conflict. He would have to know that such an order is likely a war crime, and any senior officer would want civilian leadership to sign off on an order with such potentially immense consequences, especially on the first such operation. (If the admiral actually did give the order on his own, that’s little comfort; it would mean Hegseth’s Defense Department is even more dysfunctional and out of control than anyone might have guessed.)

If either Hegseth or Bradley gave such an order—or if Hegseth issued the order and Bradley carried it out—both could be guilty of murder and war crimes. The United States, after World War II, prosecuted German and Japanese officers for similar offenses. (Yesterday, in fact, was the 80th anniversary of the execution by firing squad of Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, a Nazi U-Boat commander who sank a civilian steamer and then killed the survivors.) Such a possibility is horrendous enough, but Hegseth has since responded to these grave accusations with the crass juvenility characteristic of the toddlers who run this administration.

Yesterday, the secretary of defense of the United States of America posted a meme on X depicting Franklin, the cartoon turtle who is a beloved children’s-book character, as a Special Forces operator killing people on boats. He added a comment: “For your Christmas wish list…” Just to make the point, the secretary tagged the X account of SOUTHCOM, the Southern Forces Command, which has had to carry out the strikes, as if blowing up boats and killing the survivors was a joke to be shared with a chuckle and a backslap.

Perhaps Hegseth thinks that sinking boats on the high seas is funny. Maybe he just wanted to own the libs and all that. Or maybe he thought he could disrupt the gathering war-crimes narrative, like the school delinquent pulling a fire alarm during an exam. Or maybe he just has poor judgment and even worse impulse control (which would explain a lot of things about Pete Hegseth). No matter the reason, his choice to trivialize the use of American military force reveals both the shallowness of the man’s character and the depth of his contempt for the military as an institution.

Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat.

It is, instead, the response of a sneering, spoiled punk who has been caught doing wrong and is now daring the local fuzz to take him in and risk the anger of his rich dad—a role fulfilled by Donald Trump, in this case.

Institutions, for a time, can cope with buffoonish leaders. While the secretary has been festooning the Pentagon with new Department of War signs, adults in the building have tried to conduct some of the nation’s geopolitical business. Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll, for example, is likely the Defense Department point man for Ukraine because Hegseth has made a fool of himself too many times to be taken seriously by American opponents. (The Russians would have to suppress the smirks on their faces if Hegseth were sent to Moscow or Geneva for anything more than a grip-and-grin photo opportunity.)

But Hegseth is still the secretary of defense. He can be kept out of important meetings and excluded from rooms where policies are being debated, but his authority to order the military into action means he can still risk American lives and get people killed. In a remarkable paradox, Hegseth’s formal power and personal incompetence—to say nothing of his apparently nonexistent moral compass—mean he remains dangerous even if he is otherwise insignificant.

[Read: 20 U.S. boat strikes in three months]

Enough of this. Trump is president and has the right to stay in office for his term, even if he thinks fallen warriors are “losers” and “suckers” who have no purpose beyond serving his needs as props and pawns. He again showed how little he regards military lives this weekend when he was asked if he would attend the funeral of Sarah Beckstrom, the young West Virginia National Guardsman killed in Washington, D.C., last week. He said he would think about it, and then immediately made her death about him by adding that he won big in West Virginia in the last election, as if that were relevant to whether he owed her his presence at her funeral.

Pete Hegseth, however, was elected by no one. He is an unprofessional—and sometimes unstable—appointee who does not seem to comprehend the seriousness of the office he occupies, does not respect the senior officers who serve this country, and does not seem to care at all about the people of the U.S. military, except that he’s worried that too many of them are fat—or women. Hegseth is unqualified and incompetent, and he should have been fired months ago.

The secretary is unlikely to resign, but Trump has a record of throwing people under the bus when they are no longer of use to him, and Republicans should increase the pressure on him to fire the most unqualified secretary of defense in U.S. history. Let them and all Americans say to Hegseth what the British politician Leo Amery said to Neville Chamberlain as Europe began to crumble under the Nazi offensive in 1940: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.” Channeling Oliver Cromwell from centuries earlier, Amery added: “In the name of God, go.”

In the name of God, Pete Hegseth, go.