Politics | The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jared Kushner’s Mysterious Role in the Trump Administration

2026-04-15T09:46:20-04:00

In 2021, shortly after he left his role as a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner let it be known that he had loved his job but disliked the scrutiny and disclosure that came with being a top U.S. government official. He set up a private-equity firm and took a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He proclaimed that he was embracing private life. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in a 2024 interview. If President Trump “calls you on November whatever and says, ‘I’d like you to come back to D.C.,’ you say, ‘Thanks, but I’m good’?” the interviewer, Dan Primack of Axios, pressed. “Yes,” Kushner responded.

But Kushner did come back. Two days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran this past February, he was in Geneva in a negotiation of the highest possible stakes. Over the weekend, he traveled with Vice President Vance to Islamabad to participate in failed peace talks with Iran. Without title or remit or any kind of official designation—only “presidential son-in-law”—Kushner has in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration sat down with world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky, along with Saudis and multiple other actors from the Middle East.

[Vivian Salama: The end of diplomacy]

Yet Kushner also did not come back. While carrying out public business for his father-in-law, he has continued to pursue his private interests and declined to disclose any information about them. There’s a carve-out designation in ethics laws known as the “special government employee,” which allows businesspeople to perform work for the government. Elon Musk was a special government employee, and so was Corey Lewandowski. But Kushner has not been designated one. He is both outside and inside government—a “volunteer,” the White House calls him. And he is vaulting over strictures that were put in place to defend the mechanisms of government from becoming tools of foreign or private interests.

Nobody’s pointed out any instances, Kushner told 60 Minutes last fall, where he’s “pursued any policies or done anything that have not been in the interest of America.” But it’s impossible to know, from the available shreds of information, where Kushner’s economic interests lie. He tried, for example, to raise $5 billion for his firm, Affinity Partners, in Davos, The New York Times reported, where he was also part of the official U.S. delegation presenting a plan for Gaza’s future. When I asked Affinity about this, it sent over a statement from its chief legal officer, Ian Brekke: “Affinity had early conversations with its anchor investor and does not intend to take in any additional capital while Jared is volunteering for the government. An SEC-registered investment firm, Affinity has abided by all laws and regulations and will continue to do so. Jared Kushner has complied with all applicable laws and requirements, and any suggestion otherwise is false. Jared has always operated in the best interests of the United States.”

In a wave of post-Watergate reforms, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978, and soon set up the Office of Government Ethics to uphold the principle that the “American people could see the financial holdings of the most senior officials in the executive branch, and use this information to ensure those officials were free from conflicts of interest.”

But Kushner isn’t filing any ethics disclosures. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that he “is acting in his capacity as a private citizen; therefore, he is not subject to disclosure requirements.” She added, “Mr. Kushner has been generous in lending his valuable expertise when asked. He does so in his capacity as a private citizen, and the entire administration appreciates his willingness to step away from his family and livelihood in order to help address these complex problems.”

Kushner may not have a title, but there is no question that he is a senior person in Trump’s hierarchy and is acting as a senior official would. He has traveled the globe with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—who founded a cryptocurrency business with his two sons and the Trumps just weeks before the 2024 election, and who officially became a government employee last summer and filed a disclosure form that showed he still held shares in that crypto outfit, World Liberty Financial. (In February, the White House counsel told The Wall Street Journal that Witkoff had divested from World Liberty.)

This is leagues more transparent than Jared Kushner has been.

“Kushner’s role is no different than Witkoff’s,” Donald Sherman, the president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “So they should have to explain why he is being held to a different ethics standard than someone who has the same job.”

Ethics disclosures are highly imperfect. They are crowded with names of limited-liability companies that shroud officials’ business associates; different rules apply for publicly traded holdings and privately traded holdings; adult children are exempted from disclosure; the forms can run to excessive lengths. One Trump official filed an 1,878-page disclosure form, nearly nine times as long as the president’s 234-page form.

Yet Kushner has not filed even an imperfect form. He has dismissed the concept of conflicts as it applies to him and Witkoff. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner told 60 Minutes after he and Witkoff negotiated the Gaza cease-fire. “If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal we were able to get done, that freed these hostages, would not have occurred.”

[Listen: How crypto is used for political corruption]

Kushner has a reputation for being a serious negotiator. And he has a direct line to the president. But his political dealings are ineluctably intertwined with his businesses. Kushner is related by marriage to the president, one who smiles on those who do business with his family, and the 2021 Saudi investment in Affinity Partners was made despite the Saudi fund’s own finding that the company’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Kushner has defended the deal, saying that the Saudi fund “is one of the most prestigious investors in the world.”

Trump is now on his fourth ethics chief. He has fired most of the presidentially appointed inspectors general and replaced them with loyalists, and the Department of Justice, which would ordinarily prosecute criminal conflicts of interest, is pliant to his will. Amid this wreckage in the ethics landscape, insisting on disclosure for Kushner may seem quaint, or at least not the top priority.

But the Framers of the Constitution believed that the threat of corruption—which they associated with European royalty—was as great as the threat of war. They believed that it was human nature to respond to financial interest, so their solution was to put in place structures to limit temptation and remove incentives to commit corrupt acts. It’s why they wrote into the Constitution the emoluments clause, which prohibits a president from taking a gift from a foreign leader without congressional approval.

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” George Washington wrote in his 1796 farewell address, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Centuries into our democratic experiment, this is still true.

An Oligarchy of Old People

2026-04-13T08:00:00-04:00

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Gerontocracy has always thrived in undemocratic places—Communist people’s republics, Gulf monarchies—where only death could pry power from the ruling elders. American gerontocracy is exceptional for being freely elected. Donald Trump will soon be an octogenarian, and is president in part because the preceding octogenarian, Joe Biden, did not want to admit his senescence. The median senator is 65, and the oldest, 92-year-old Chuck Grassley, has not ruled out running for reelection in 2028. The typical general-election voter is a spry 52, but in primary elections, which decide the majority of political contests, that number rises to 59. Half of all the money donated to political campaigns comes from Americans age 66 and older.

Although political gerontocracy has operated overtly, the rising economic power of the elderly has escaped much notice. Over the past 40 or so years, American wealth has grown ever more concentrated among the oldest generations. In 1989, Americans over age 55 held 56 percent of it; today they hold 74 percent. During that same period, the share of wealth held by Americans under 40 has shrunk by nearly half, from 12 to 6.6 percent. The color of money is now gray.

Much of this shift is the result of demographic change: 18 percent of Americans are senior citizens today, up from 13 percent in 1990. But even at the household level, Americans over 55 have accrued wealth more rapidly than those who are younger. Among those 75 and older, the numbers are particularly striking. In 1983, their household net worth was only slightly above the national average; by 2022, it was 55 percent higher.

For nearly a century, some of the central debates in American politics have been over inequalities—between rich and poor, male and female, Black and white. When the Baby Boomers were children, older Americans were widely viewed as vulnerable. “Fifty percent of the elderly exist below minimum standards of decency, and this is a figure much higher than that for any other age group,” Michael Harrington wrote in his 1962 book The Other America, often credited with inspiring the War on Poverty. “This is no country for old men.”

Three years later, in 1965, Medicare was created. A major expansion of Social Security followed in 1972. These changes were remarkably effective: The share of elderly people living in poverty dropped by more than one-third within a decade. But because these programs are broad-based entitlements, they have transferred huge sums to the prosperous, too. The portfolios of that latter group, meanwhile, have been swelled by a rising stock market and rising home values, outcomes that may not be entirely replicable for younger generations. As a result of all of these factors, intergenerational inequality between old and young has not merely reversed. It has accelerated.

Most current Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries will receive more from the program over their lifetime than they paid in taxes, and the extra money will necessarily come from the pockets of younger generations. The two programs now pay out more than $2 trillion a year, more than one-third of all federal expenditures. Their sustainability was a subject of major debate during the Obama years, when the national debt was much lower than it is today and interest rates on that debt were close to zero. Financially, the matter is more urgent now. The trust funds for Social Security benefits and Medicare’s hospital insurance are projected to become insolvent in roughly seven years.

[Lyman Stone: The Boomers ruined everything]

Yet even noticing the looming threats has become taboo for the two major political parties. One of Trump’s shrewdest political realizations was that entitlement reform—once a priority for fiscal conservatives—was a losing issue. Instead, he has pledged not to touch entitlement spending and lavished seniors with even more government money. His One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a special $6,000 tax deduction for seniors, which will cost taxpayers $91 billion over the next four years. The same bill cuts $1 trillion in spending on Medicaid, which is expected to leave some 5 million working-age Americans uninsured.

This bodes poorly for intergenerational peace. Respect for elders is being replaced by resentment of elders. A majority of young Americans no longer believe in the American dream. Many Millennials and Gen Zers expressly blame the Boomers for that, accusing them of hoarding wealth, jobs, and power. Many of these accusations are inchoate, but they are not entirely baseless.

The best rebuttal to the gerontocratic critique is that young Americans do not appreciate how good they have it. Although people of working age possess a smaller share of the national wealth, they are richer in absolute terms than Boomers were at their age. The median 35-year-old Millennial earns 38 percent more in post-tax, inflation-adjusted income than the typical Boomer did at the same age, according to research by the economist Kevin Corinth. Gen Zers have only begun their careers, but so far they are earning more than their Millennial predecessors. This trend shows up in wealth statistics, too. When Boomers were between the ages of 25 and 43, they had a median net worth of $58,000 (in 2022 dollars); Millennials at the same stage of life had a net worth of $85,000. So why are young Americans so depressed about their economic future?

[From the May 2023 issue: Jean M. Twenge on the myth of the broke Millennial]

The pathologies of the housing market are one reason. The typical home today costs five times the median annual income, up from 3.5 times the median annual income in 1984. Boomers got lucky: When they were young, they could afford to buy houses that then appreciated fantastically in value. But that luck was arguably manufactured by Washington, which engineered the rise of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages and created tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes.

These government subsidies still exist today. But even with them, younger Americans cannot buy houses at the same rate that Boomers did. In a paper titled “Giving Up,” the economists Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo predicted that Millennials will enter retirement with much lower homeownership rates than the generations before them—74 percent compared with 84 percent for Boomers. Some 15 percent of Millennials, they noted, had already given up on homeownership by age 30. These Millennials, they found, work less, spend more on credit, and are more likely to buy cryptocurrency or make other risky investments. Feeling locked out of owning a house casts a malaise—one made worse by the anxiety that the welfare state they currently support will become stingier when they eventually need it.

Older generations used the levers of government to create this situation. In high-cost cities, the building of new homes and apartment complexes is often derailed in local planning and zoning-board meetings. In 2019, the political scientists Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, and David Glick published a study examining who attended such meetings in the Boston area. The attendees, they found, were likely to be longtime homeowners who oppose new development. Preventing construction kept the value of their assets high—at the expense of younger, prospective homeowners.

Homeowner preferences hard-coded into state constitutions decades ago now further sustain the gerontocracy. In 1978, Californians voted by referendum for Proposition 13, which severely limited the property taxes that existing homeowners would have to pay—so long as they remained in place. In one study, the law was estimated to have caused a 15 percent increase in California housing prices all by itself. As longtime homeowners profited, the lost tax revenue forced reductions in school spending.

California is not unique, and housing is not the only means by which the older generations have effectively pulled up the ladder behind them. Preferences for the elderly over the young are a fixture of public budgets nationwide. Across all government programs—federal, state, and local—$2 are now spent on seniors for every $1 spent on children.

According to Tim Vlandas, an Oxford political economist, advanced democracies around the world are reaching the point of “gerontonomia”—his term for a stagnating political economy set up to prioritize elderly citizens. These citizens punish their elected governments for inflation, which lessens the value of savings and pension payments. They are much more tolerant of unemployment, because they no longer work; slow growth, because their wealth has already accumulated; and high public debt, because their descendants will pay it. The result, Vlandas argues, is lower wage growth for those still working, and also worse outcomes for their children, as a result of lower social investment over the course of their lives.

Graying democracies everywhere have made generous pension commitments that they are struggling to maintain. In the United Kingdom, the “triple lock,” a rule that in most years mandates that state pension payments increase more than inflation, seems politically impossible to change. In France, people protested for months against Emmanuel Macron in 2023 over the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64.

Yet these challenges are especially acute in America. Because Social Security still has a trust fund to draw on, voters may not realize that benefits already exceed contributions. But this fund, which stood at $2.9 trillion in 2021, is on pace to dwindle to zero by about 2033. The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown will hasten the arrival of exhaustion day by cutting the number of tax-paying workers who support retirees’ benefits. Once that trust fund is gone—absent a tax increase on current workers or some other change—beneficiaries would suffer an immediate 23 percent cut in payments. A similar process would leave the Medicare Part A program, which covers hospital stays for the elderly, insolvent at about the same time.

The national debt will by then be gargantuan. Previously unthinkable ideas—such as means-tested Social Security benefits, confiscatory wealth taxes, even health-care rationing—might be contemplated. The bill coming due for the senior welfare state might not trouble this president, but it could well be the defining problem for the next one.

Some people would like to start the fight over how to resolve it now. Among them are radical thinkers who contend that in order to defeat economic gerontocracy, Americans must first defang the elderly ruling class. In his forthcoming book, Gerontocracy in America, the 54-year-old Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn calls for destroying this “tyranny of the minority,” set up by “old people with enormous private power who hold society in chains.” Power, he argues, needs to be seized back, leaving “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property.”

Moyn wants to create mandatory retirement ages, perhaps starting as low as 65, for elected officials and people with some desirable private-sector jobs. Then he would come for the money, increasing taxes on both income and accumulated assets to dilute the share of elderly wealth. Most astonishingly, he proposes diluting older Americans’ political power too, by literally valuing the votes of young people more, on the theory that the latter will suffer the consequences of political decisions for much longer. (This proposed social engineering is both harsh and vanishingly improbable. The modern legal principle of “one person, one vote” exists for good reason.)

Still, Moyn’s ideas underscore the need for an equitable post-Boomer settlement, one that will be easier to find if we start the search sooner rather than later. In the 20th century, the United States realized it was too rich and too decent a country to allow its elderly citizens to live in penury. And it made an enduring commitment to address that problem, one that has unequivocally succeeded: There has never been a better time to be a senior citizen in America. And yet the U.S. has made no comparable commitment to working families, who are stymied not only by expensive housing but also by child-care and higher-education bills. Child poverty in America persists at levels alarmingly higher than in other advanced democracies.

Initiatives such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society established what current workers in a decent country owed to retirees. A new social contract can be struck that would deliver at least some optimism for today’s workers. Curing gerontonomia would require redirecting some public funds from programs aimed at the elderly, such as Social Security, to family benefits, education, and infrastructure. But an intergenerational recalibration can come about in gentler ways than Moyn’s: The wealthiest Social Security recipients, for instance, could forgo some of their scheduled benefits, which could instead be contributed annually to “baby bond” accounts for America’s children, a source of capital to be used in adulthood.

And not every solution rests with the welfare state. Cutting through housing restrictions would generate enormous social benefit, if America’s elderly ruling class were to allow such a feat. Today’s gerontocrats will eventually die. But their legacy will be a mess to sort out.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “A Fine Country for Old Men.”

Hungary Just Ousted the Unoustable

2026-04-12T17:53:00-04:00

This story was updated on Sunday, April 12, at 7:15 p.m. ET.

Friends danced on one another’s shoulders. Fathers embraced their children. A teenage girl wept. Beer flowed. After 16 years, Hungarians had voted their strongman leader, Viktor Orbán, out of office. “I knew it was possible,” Balázs Nagy, a warehouse worker, told me this evening in Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. “Hungarians are stubborn, and we don’t give up on each other.” To his wife, Szilvi, the evening’s results had reaffirmed a truth less geographic than metaphoric. “We’re in the heart of Europe, and that’s where we belong,” she said.

The couple stood in a throng of people waiting for Péter Magyar, who led the opposition to victory. Three hours after the polls closed in national elections, they watched as he marched through the crowd holding a Hungarian flag. “Fellow Hungarians, countrymen: We have done it,” he said. “Together we have replaced the Orbán system. Together we have liberated Hungary.”

He spoke opposite the river from the grand neo-Gothic Parliament. Power is about to change hands in that body, so decisively that Magyar’s new government will be able to undo elements of the “illiberal state” that made Orbán a model for populists all over the world. In losing control of his country, Orbán became an exemplar of a rare political breed: an autocrat ousted in an election.

The prime minister’s loss is a crushing defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, who modeled their agenda in part on Orbán’s governance and staffed their movement with activists trained at his think tanks. As Trump alienated traditional U.S. partners, Washington looked to the like-minded leader in Budapest to represent its interests inside the European Union. The bond was so meaningful to Vance personally that he traveled to Budapest last week to campaign alongside Orbán as if they were running mates.

But voters rejected Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in favor of Magyar’s new faction, Tisza. In the process, they set a new national record for turnout. Magyar is a onetime Orbán loyalist who turned on the prime minister two years ago and managed to do what past opposition leaders couldn’t—overcome the incumbent’s enormous advantages. Since 2010, Orbán has rewritten election rules and removed independent checks on his power. He has suffocated civil society while extending his control over the media. And he has presided over patronage networks that have enriched his friends and family while impoverishing his society. State contracts helped turn the prime minister’s childhood friend, once a gas retrofitter, into a billionaire, but salaries for everyday Hungarians have languished at less than half the EU average. “It’s not livable,” Bendegúz Neszádeli, an 18-year-old who had just voted for the first time, told me. He held up a bracelet, braided with the Hungarian tricolor, that’s handed out to maiden voters. “It feels like there’s a future again.”

The European Parliament calls Hungary an “electoral autocracy”—voting still takes place, but under fundamentally undemocratic conditions. That makes elections harder to contest but, as Hungarian voters proved, not impossible to win. Today, an election toppled a government whose advantages included support from the governments in both the United States and Russia. Echoing a chant in the crowd, Magyar declared in his victory speech, “Russians, go home.”

Efforts by foreign governments to prop up Orbán gave his defeat implications that extend well beyond this small country of fewer than 10 million people. The prime minister has been a scourge to international institutions and a source of inspiration to far-right politicians throughout the West. He was demonizing immigrants and dictating talking points to friendly media before Donald Trump came down the golden escalator. Trump desperately tried to keep Orbán in power, issuing multiple endorsements and dangling the prospect of economic assistance in the days before the vote. Among Hungarians, however, sympathies had shifted dramatically. To note just one example: A Fidesz mayor who was recently elected with more than 70 percent of the vote in a small village in Hungary’s Southern Great Plain region declared his support for the opposition on Facebook this morning, writing, “I vote for European values and against Russian influence.”

[Read: J.D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]

The election campaign was fierce, characterized by competing claims of foreign influence. Orbán tried to paint the opposition as a puppet of Brussels, and an accomplice to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s war aims. He acknowledged economic misfortune but argued that his opponent would disrupt what little stability the country still enjoys. “The message was, ‘We could live even worse,’” András Bíró-Nagy, a political analyst, told me. Magyar, meanwhile, vowed to recoup funds frozen by EU institutions over rule-of-law violations, impose a wealth tax, and imprison Fidesz officials he accused of pilfering public coffers. “We will not be a country of no consequences,” Magyar told his supporters as he claimed victory.

The threat of civil unrest hung over the final days of voting. Orbán’s aides argued that Tisza agents were preparing to commit acts of violence—warnings that Tisza representatives decried as a pretext for a government crackdown. Consistently, independent polls showed the opposition with a sizable lead, but Western diplomats in Budapest cautioned me not to underestimate Orbán’s ability to mobilize voters at the last moment, or to manufacture circumstances justifying a state of emergency. They said Magyar would need a blowout, which is exactly what he got.

His party is set to command the two-thirds legislative majority necessary to amend the constitution, as well as to reconstitute influential bodies such as the Constitutional Court and to change so-called cardinal laws governing areas including media regulation and family policy. In his victory speech, Magyar said his party would have a “mandate to build a functioning and humane home.” As Magyar’s supporters waited for him, Orbán appeared on-screen to thank his voters and concede, but his words were drowned out by boos at the opposition’s gathering. I caught only snippets—the prime minister acknowledging the pain of defeat and pledging to start anew.

[Read: Viktor ]Orbán could actually lose

After Magyar’s speech, the riverbank became the scene of a spontaneous dance party. Fireworks burst into the air. A police officer who had traveled 70 miles with her family to listen to Magyar told me that Hungarians had used the last chance available to them to remove Orbán, whom she called a “dictator.” She regretted only that her mother, who died recently, hadn’t lived long enough “to see this ghost of Orbán go away.”

Budapest is filled with monuments to the country’s turbulent past. I waited for the results of the election tonight in Batthyány Square, named for the country’s first prime minister. A statue shows Lajos Batthyány holding up the April Laws—including self-government, freedom of the press, and equality before the law—that inspired the failed uprising against the Habsburg monarchy in 1848–49. Batthyány was executed by firing squad.

It’s April again in Hungary, but where armed struggle once failed, democratic elections have now succeeded.

Erika Nina Suárez contributed reporting.

The Conciliator

2026-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

When I first met Gretchen Whitmer last fall, she seemed to want to talk about anything except Donald Trump. She avoided using his name, referring to him, only sparingly, as “the president.” She came closest to criticizing him when she lamented that “this constant tariff chaos is really hurting our economy.”

Our interview took place, at her team’s request, in a Marriott conference room in Ypsilanti. It lasted precisely 22 minutes. And the Michigan governor, who is formidable in person, with sharply arched eyebrows and dark hair streaked with gray, did not seem thrilled to be doing it. She smiled tightly and spoke with caution while, across from us, an anxious-looking staffer counted down our remaining time together. Whitmer was careful, in fact, to highlight her own carefulness. At a National Governors Association dinner that she had attended with Trump last year, “there was a lot of conversation that I did not agree with,” Whitmer told me. “But I just sat there and bit my tongue because I’m not going to win that debate in that moment, and it’s not going to serve Michigan well.”

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Had Whitmer gone soft on Trump? For more than half a decade, she’s been “Big Gretch,” the Bell’s-drinking, fuchsia-lipstick-wearing, sometimes-performative badass from up north. She became governor during the peak of the anti-Trump resistance. Then her clash with the president during the pandemic sent her rocket into orbit. When Trump dismissed her as “the woman in Michigan,” she put the insult on a T-shirt and wore it on television; Etsy artisans hawked prayer candles with her face on them. In 2020, Joe Biden almost chose her as his running mate. After his disastrous 2024 bid, many Democrats hoped that Whitmer, not Kamala Harris, would swoop in to replace him. Now Whitmer is on the list of potential presidential contenders for 2028.

But if Democratic voters are looking for someone to confront Trump directly, Whitmer might not be their candidate. In his second term, she has instead looked for ways to collaborate with him; one of her visits to the White House last year resulted in a much-mocked photo of the governor hiding her face behind folders in the Oval Office. Contrast this approach with the likes of J. B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, who have spent the past year waging insult warfare against the president. Even Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whose state looks a lot more like Whitmer’s in political makeup, has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration, including calling J. D. Vance “profoundly and pathetically weak.”

Whitmer, in other words, seems to have given up the fight. Which made me wonder: Was this a tactical move—Let Gavin lose his mind on social media, while I win back the Midwest—or was it something else? The governor, after all, was the target of a pretty terrifying kidnapping plot in 2020. Had a fear of violence caused her to change course?

Whitmer didn’t cop to either of these explanations in any of our three relatively brief conversations over the past few months. She maintains that her underlying governing philosophy hasn’t changed: “I’ll take all the heat in the world if I can deliver for Michigan,” she said when we discussed the Oval Office photo.

Some Democrats approve of Whitmer’s new strategy. Others, though, think the governor has lost some of the pugnacity that once defined her. They view Whitmer as “almost groveling” and “pulling her punches” with Trump, a former senior staffer for Whitmer told me. (This person and a few others I spoke with were granted anonymity to talk candidly about the governor, who, for some of them, remains a close colleague.) During a meeting that Whitmer attended with the state Democratic caucus last spring, one lawmaker praised her for being Big Gretch and a strong fighter against Trump. But Whitmer batted down the compliment, calling the nickname a “persona” that others have put on her, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.

Many of Whitmer’s supporters in Michigan have been feeling confused, one of these people told me. “They’re just like, ‘What happened to Big Gretch?’”

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Gretchen Whitmer enters the Clique, a diner in Detroit, in January.

Every Whitmer supporter—and even most of her critics—will tell you that the governor’s single greatest strength as a politician is that she sounds like a regular person. Whitmer, who is 54, is authentic Michigan, down to the nasal vowels; she’s never lived anywhere else. She seems to enjoy making fun of herself. In her book, True Gretch, the governor freely admits that she partied too hard as a teenager and once vomited on her high-school principal. She writes about pulling out her dental flipper to make her colleagues laugh. These days, Instagram provides the best glimpse of Whitmer’s personality. One recent video shows the governor’s endearing struggle with a family recipe for popovers. “Why is it so thick?” she asks, frowning into the blender. “Oh, the milk’s not in there!”

It took a while for me to see this side of Whitmer. While reporting this story, I watched her speak at political events and a book talk. Eventually, I was able to see her interact with regular Michiganders at a diner in downtown Detroit in January, though the crowd there wasn’t particularly organic; ahead of the visit, Whitmer’s team had asked several local party leaders and activists to attend. Still, I got a small taste of a bigger truth: Big Gretch is a good time.

Weaving among tables, Whitmer took selfies and clutched hands. “If I could carry a tune, I’d sing to ya!” she told a man at the counter celebrating his birthday. She posed for a photo with a group of waitresses and somehow ended up with a toddler in her arms. “You’re so cute!” she squealed. At one point, Whitmer joined three women in a booth, ordered a stack of silver-dollar pancakes, and then insisted that a staffer take one. “Eat it, Henry!” she chanted. “Eat it! Eat it!” Later, Whitmer told me with a sly smile that she’d read The Atlantic’s recent profile of Newsom. “I enjoyed that one of your colleagues described Gavin as handsome ‘in a faintly sinister way,’” she said.

A Detroit rapper popularized the nickname Big Gretch, which the governor’s team insists that she “loves,” during the early months of the pandemic. But Whitmer’s reputation as a political force in Michigan goes back decades. Her parents, Richard and Sherry Whitmer, served, respectively, as the Republican head of the state’s Commerce Department and the Democratic assistant attorney general. Whitmer studied communications at Michigan State University in the hope of becoming a sports broadcaster. But after interning for a Democratic lawmaker in Lansing, she followed the same path as her parents: law school, then politics.

She spent six years in the Michigan state House, and another nine in the state Senate, four of them as minority leader. Back then, Democrats were used to being outnumbered, which meant that they were used to having to shout to be heard. And Whitmer was louder than anyone else. When a fellow Democrat was barred from speaking after using the word vagina on the house floor, Whitmer helped stage a performance of The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the state capitol. Once, during a debate, she chided her Republican colleagues until they told her that she was out of order. “Go ahead and gavel me!” she replied. “Her stuff got quoted more than anybody else,” Randy Richardville, a former Republican majority leader, told me. She was funny and direct. “I used to tell my people to stop watching her, stop listening, stop paying so much attention,” he said.

Many Americans first encountered Whitmer in 2013, when she revealed in a speech on the floor of the Michigan Senate that she had been raped in college. Republicans had been pushing for legislation to require women to buy a separate insurance policy to pay for abortions, including in the case of rape or incest. “I think you need to see the face of the women who you are impacting with this vote today,” Whitmer told her colleagues. The legislation passed anyway. But women from all over the state called to thank Whitmer for her honesty.

Even though Whitmer was viewed as liberal, she seemed to genuinely like her Republican colleagues. Richardville recalled a time when Whitmer was particularly angry about some piece of GOP legislation and was harsh with him on the Senate floor. Afterward, the two still met in his office for a drink. “We were kind of like those cartoons—the dog and chicken or whoever they are. They punch in and punch out at five,” Richardville said. Years later, when state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, said that Whitmer was “on the batshit-crazy spectrum,” she sent him a birthday cake decorated with the words Happy 65th BAT Day!

Whitmer announced that she was running for governor a few months after Trump’s election in 2016. Her slogan, “Fix the damn roads,” was folksy and charming, and in November 2018, a generally excellent year for Democrats, she was elected by almost 10 points. After her first year in office, she delivered the Democrats’ response to the president’s State of the Union address, in which she called out Trump’s bad behavior. “Bullying people on Twitter doesn’t fix bridges; it burns them,” Whitmer said. One month later, the coronavirus came to Michigan.

Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux

Whitmer blocks her face as President Trump answers questions from reporters in the Oval Office last April.

Like other governors, Whitmer ordered residents to stay at home and schools to close as the virus spread. She felt comfortable criticizing Trump’s leadership from the start. “The federal government did not take this seriously early enough,” she said in a mid–March 2020 interview on MSNBC. In response, Trump urged Whitmer to “work harder.” A few days later, Whitmer doubled down on CNN. “I don’t want to be in a sparring match with the federal government,” she said. “But we are behind the eight ball because they didn’t do proper planning.” Soon, the president was on Fox News blasting Whitmer for complaining. He told reporters that he’d instructed Mike Pence, who was coordinating the federal and state pandemic response, not to call “the woman in Michigan.” On Twitter, Trump dubbed the governor “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer.”

The situation in Michigan felt especially volatile. Whitmer extended the state’s stay-at-home order through April and initially issued restrictions that many Michiganders found ridiculous, including closing golf courses and outdoor garden centers. That month, 3,000 protesters descended on Lansing. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” the president tweeted in support. Subsequent protests featured armed men loitering outside Whitmer’s office in the state capitol building. The governor faced personal scrutiny, too. After boating restrictions were lifted, her husband, Marc Mallory, tried to use their relationship to get his boat in the water before other people could. A year later, Whitmer was caught violating social-distancing rules with friends at a Lansing bar.

She apologized for some of those missteps. More important to liberals, she didn’t cower in the face of Trump’s attacks. “You said you stand with Michigan—prove it,” she tweeted at the president in March 2020, challenging him to send more masks and ventilators. She appeared on The Daily Show in the T-shirt printed with Trump’s quote, tweaked for a sharper effect: That Woman From Michigan. At the time, Democrats were desperate for heroes, and Whitmer quickly became one. “Big Gretch” merchandise began to appear in tchotchke shops alongside Nevertheless, she persisted mugs and Ruth Bader Ginsburg yoga mats. At one point during the pandemic, Robert De Niro called in to a Whitmer-administration finance meeting to show his support for the governor.

All of this attention seemed like it might add up to something, and by summer 2020, Whitmer was being vetted for vice president. She wasn’t sure about it at first, people familiar with her thinking at the time told me; she struggled to imagine herself as a creature of Washington, D.C. She got along well with Biden, though, and by the time he asked her to fly to Delaware for an in-person chat, she was ready to say yes. Biden didn’t ask. The moment called for a Black running mate, the former senior staffer for Whitmer told me, so he had to choose Kamala Harris. “But I think he wanted it to be Whitmer,” this person said. Asked to confirm, a former adviser to both Biden and Harris said that the assessment carried “some weight.”

Whitmer campaigned happily for the ticket, but behind the scenes she was dealing with a nightmare. Earlier in the summer, the head of her security detail had sat her down in the sunroom of the governor’s residence and offered an urgent update: A group of men tied to a militia group called the Wolverine Watchmen, outraged over her COVID restrictions, was plotting to kidnap and possibly kill her. For the next several weeks, federal and state officials monitored the group as it staked out Whitmer’s multiple residences. Publicly, the governor said nothing. Finally, in early October 2020, the agents had collected enough evidence to arrest the men and foil the plot.

On October 8, Whitmer delivered a steely televised address, calling the men “sick and depraved.” In an article for this magazine, she unloaded on Trump, writing that “his violent rhetoric puts leaders across the country in danger.” During an interview on Meet the Press, she had a small sign reading 86 45, an apparent reference to removing Trump from office, visible in the background of her shot. (When Michigan Republicans accused the governor of calling for Trump’s assassination, a press aide for Whitmer said in a statement, “It’s pretty clear nobody in the Trump campaign has ever worked a food service job.”)

The situation shook Whitmer and her family. Her husband had received so many threats at his dental practice that he was forced to retire early. Her then-teenage daughters, Sydney and Sherry, refused to return to the family’s summer cottage in Elk Rapids, one of the locations staked out by the plotters. In Lansing, $1 million in security upgrades, including a perimeter fence, were installed around the governor’s mansion.

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer’s teleprompter at the Detroit Auto Show

As Michigan emerged from the pandemic, Whitmer was winning again. She was reelected by a huge margin in the 2022 midterms, during which voters also approved a measure to make abortion a constitutional right and state Democrats got their first governing trifecta in nearly 40 years. With their new power, they repealed right-to-work legislation and made breakfast and lunch free for all public-school students, among other accomplishments. The national buzz around Whitmer was growing louder, and Whitmer didn’t shut it down. She filmed a viral social-media campaign that featured a Barbie doll named Lil Gretch zooming around Lansing in a pink convertible, wrote True Gretch, and launched a political-action committee to recruit and train candidates. “People frickin’ loved her,” one Democratic state lawmaker recalled.

But around the same time, some people in Michigan began to detect a change in the governor. Local journalists and state lawmakers who’d been accustomed to watching Whitmer banter with reporters and field unscreened questions from constituents noticed that she’d become less spontaneous and less accessible. Her already tight inner circle became tighter. Her team began giving news outlets notice of the governor’s schedule hours in advance, instead of days. “They never emerged from the lockdown, and they act like it,” partly because of the kidnapping threat, Chad Livengood, the politics editor of The Detroit News, told me. (A Whitmer spokesperson said that the governor maintains “very deep engagement” with state legislators, and that her office “implemented new security protocols” for the safety of Whitmer, her staff, and reporters.)

Livengood, who has covered Whitmer since she was in the state Senate, said that these days, the governor seems “so focused on trying to follow talking points and advisers that some of that old, jocular Gretchen Whitmer talk and haggling has kind of stopped.” One well-known cable-news host also told me that Whitmer’s aides have “a lot more desire to manage” her television appearances compared with other politicians’, which feels “out of whack” with Whitmer’s interpersonal skills.

It would be understandable if the threats had made the governor more circumspect; many Michiganders were—and remain—angry about the way that she handled COVID. “There’s a heightened awareness now that I didn’t have before,” Whitmer writes in her memoir. In one of our interviews, she elaborated. “I think I’m still processing it,” she told me. “I’ve had to have my guard up for so long in such a personal and serious way, that, you know, I’m trying to just let my guard down and be me.” Some of Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers are in prison; other accused conspirators were acquitted. One of them has filed paperwork to run for governor. “It’s a strange place to be in,” she said.

Whitmer’s new reticence also coincided with a quickly deteriorating political environment for Democrats. By 2024, they were struggling to make progress on many of Whitmer’s stated priorities, including paid family leave and government-transparency reforms. Some state lawmakers blamed themselves. Others were frustrated with Whitmer. “There was no vision,” Mark Brewer, a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, told me. “Someone had to lead, and she didn’t.”

To some observers, Whitmer seemed to have made the calculation that, because little was happening in the Michigan legislature, she might as well pivot to national politics. Lots of Democrats hoped it meant that the governor was angling to replace Biden on the 2024 ticket. But Whitmer never wavered in her support for the 81-year-old incumbent—even after his calamitous June debate against Trump. (Although Whitmer did not endorse Harris for 24 hours after Biden dropped out of the race, the governor insists that she was not thinking of challenging her. “I wanted to take a beat and get the lay of the land,” she told me. “It had to be” Harris, she added, because “Joe Biden took so long to make a different decision.”)

The election was devastating for Whitmer, bringing both a Republican resurgence in Michigan that ended her party’s trifecta and a sweeping Trump victory. During speaking engagements, the governor likes to tell crowds that she dealt with the disappointment by watching all eight seasons of the TV show Dexter—“A serial killer to lift your spirits!”—before getting back to work.

This also appears to be the moment when Whitmer decided to try something new with Trump. The kidnapping plot might have given her a heightened sense of awareness and changed her relationship with the press. But now came the strategic recalibration. “When I was ready to reengage, after a brief break, I had done the analysis,” she told me. “This president just got reelected. My own state helped put him in the White House again. I’ve got two years. What am I going to do with these two years?”

Sarah Rice / Redux

Whitmer takes the stage at a Detroit campaign event for Kamala Harris in September 2024.

Whitmer made her intentions clear right away. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, she wrote the president a letter congratulating him and praising his recent words of support for the auto industry. She also included her personal cellphone number and invited Trump to call her if he needed anything. In her State of the State address the next month, Whitmer offered a new declaration of purpose: “I am not looking for fights,” she told Michiganders. “My north star has always been collaboration.”

Whitmer began to set up White House meetings with Trump—she’s had three so far, compared with only one during his entire first term in office. They have discussed an array of Michigan-centric issues—emergency aid after an ice storm, a proposed semiconductor plant, a request for new fighter jets at Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard base. Which brings us to the moment that has probably played like a Chaplin-esque silent projection inside the governor’s brain for the past 12 months: One afternoon in April, Whitmer went to the White House with Matt Hall, the new Republican speaker of the Michigan House. She and Hall were expecting a private meeting with the president, but instead, a White House staffer ushered them into an Oval Office full of reporters. They spent the next hour positioned beside Trump as he signed executive orders related to his 2020-election lies. When a camera turned to Whitmer, she covered her face with a pair of blue folders.

Basically everyone knew it had been a setup. “She got sucked into some bullshit,” Tommy Stallworth, a Democratic former state lawmaker and a senior adviser to Whitmer, told me. (Hall defended Trump, telling me that the president had decided to merge events to save time.) But for some Democrats, the photo became an instant symbol of the party’s feckless response to Trump—and another crack in the Big Gretch persona. Unlike in Zohran Mamdani’s later visit to the White House, when the New York City mayor-elect seemed to charm Trump with his confidence, Whitmer looked helpless. The folder moment showed that Whitmer “is not the badass with these great political instincts that you’ve been led to believe,” one prominent national Democratic Party strategist told me. “I love Gretchen Whitmer,” Brewer said. “But oh my God.” (Months later, in an article dubbing Whitmer “Trump’s favorite Democrat,” Politico reported that the governor autographed a copy of the photo for Trump the next time she visited. She also brought him a mocked-up newspaper celebrating how potential federal investments could deliver a “historic jobs boom” for Michigan, as well as a flag and a bullet from Selfridge.)

To the extent that Whitmer has criticized the president in his second term, she’s kept her comments soft and a little vague. “There is room for her to be a louder voice, particularly because so many folks have gotten accustomed to hearing from her,” former Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes told me. At the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year, for example, Whitmer defended the Trump-maligned United States–Mexico–Canada trade agreement without mentioning the president directly: “We cannot and we should not—as some have said—we cannot and should not abandon it.” Whitmer did not issue a statement in the days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. When I asked the governor why, she said, “I do not need to put out an official Gretchen Whitmer statement on every single thing that happens, because all I’d be doing is putting out press statements every day.” Two weeks later, after Customs and Border Protection agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, Whitmer quickly released an official statement saying that “the violence must stop” without referring to Pretti directly.

Even though the governor has taken some action when state residents have been threatened by ICE, she has at times been slow to do so, including in a case in which state Republicans were eager to help, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Whitmer seems to have concluded that she can do more with her remaining time in office through conciliation than through confrontation. The past year shows “that you can’t be too cautious with Trump, and you have to choose your battles very carefully,” Julie Brixie, a Democratic state lawmaker in Michigan, told me. “Governor Whitmer has done a great job of that.” Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, a friend of Whitmer’s, told me that states are more at risk in Trump’s second administration, which is why she figures that the approach Whitmer and her team “took in the first term cannot be the approach that they take in the second.”

In some ways, Whitmer’s new posture is working. After her Oval Office visits, the president agreed to provide some emergency aid to Michigan, and to supply new planes for Selfridge. Notably, the National Guard has not yet been unleashed on Detroit. And even though ICE agents have conducted immigration-enforcement operations in the state, they haven’t made it a special target. Whitmer believes that she has set an example for other leaders, including Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to visit the White House and work with the president.

At least some of Whitmer’s constituents seem to appreciate this. Whitmer’s visit to the diner in Detroit took place a few days after Good was killed. As Whitmer greeted a group of elderly patrons, she alluded vaguely to the violence in Minnesota. “Crazy things happening out there,” she said, before adding, “We’ve gotta keep that from happening in Michigan.” One woman nodded and replied, “That’s why you gotta keep the channel of communication open.”

It’s not clear how long this strategy will succeed. Trump could change his mind at any moment about the new fighter jets for Selfridge, which aren’t set to arrive until 2028. Whitmer’s much-desired semiconductor plant fell through, thanks to tariffs and a shift in federal policy. “I don’t think it’s worked,” Brewer said of Whitmer’s closeness with Trump. “He’s given us a few trinkets.”

Last May, the president even dangled the possibility of pardoning some of the men involved in the kidnapping plot. When the governor learned this, she told me, she called Trump, who seemed to believe that the men had been treated unfairly. “I said, ‘No, Mr. President, they had trials, and this is very serious,’” Whitmer told him, before following up with a letter urging Trump not to go through with the pardons. So far, Trump has stood down. But “nothing is written in stone,” Whitmer acknowledged. (When I reached out to the White House for a response to this and a number of other questions, an official said in an email that Whitmer and Trump “have a friendly relationship and are willing to work together to get things done for the people of Michigan, whom the President loves!”)

Madeleine Hordinski for The Atlantic

Whitmer at the Clique, in Detroit, in January

If Whitmer runs, her work-with-Trump strategy could double as a 2028 campaign platform. She wouldn’t say so directly, but some of her allies did. “Every social-media liberal believes that silence means complicity,” John Anzalone, Whitmer’s pollster and a Democratic strategist, told me. “Silence is sometimes just really fucking smart.”

Whitmer, who has less than a year left as governor, told me that a presidential campaign isn’t something that she’s “gearing up for.” And many Michigan Democrats think she isn’t interested, perhaps partly because of the 2020 threats against her. It’s also conceivable that, by trying to be as inoffensive as possible, Whitmer is positioning herself as the ideal vice-presidential candidate.

But the governor doesn’t seem to have ruled out a run of her own. A nonprofit group supporting her has raised millions of dollars and hired some of her former aides. While I was reporting this story, the governor attended a fundraiser and a book talk in Florida and a PAC event in Wisconsin. She launched a Substack where she plans to expound on the path forward for Democrats. And like several other would-be presidential candidates, she spoke at this year’s Munich Security Conference, though she kept her comments Michigan-focused and, somewhat perplexingly, seemed unprepared to answer foreign-policy questions.

The affirmative case for a Whitmer campaign goes like this: Right now, Democrats might want leaders who thirst for combat, but their appetites will change. Other Democratic governors have won the “mess-with-Trump primary,” the consultant James Carville told me, but in two years, the president will be “the last person that the country’s gonna want to hear about.” By 2028, voters will want candidates who, like Whitmer, have prioritized action over ideology. In this second age of Trump, Democrats “need to prove that you can make democracy work, that you have delivered for people,” the Democratic political adviser Jennifer Palmieri told me. After Whitmer met with Trump in spring 2025, her approval rating soared—and popularity in Michigan isn’t a bad barometer for someone potentially seeking national office.

The problem with this theory is that, right now at least, Democrats are not looking for careful politicians. A large majority of Democratic voters believe that their leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against Trump and his policies, according to one 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center. In a crowded 2028 primary, Whitmer “will be starting from behind, and leaning very heavily on her record, and I don’t know if that’s enough when people are just so rabidly anti-Trump,” the Democratic pollster Adam Carlson told me. Even though many Democratic donors were excited about Whitmer’s potential as a candidate in 2024, there is no longer much enthusiasm, one prominent donor-adviser told me: “There is no badass energy to Gretchen Whitmer anymore.”

Whitmer seems at least a little concerned about this perception. Toward the end of our final conversation, at the diner, I asked the governor whether she was still comfortable embracing the nickname she’d earned during the pandemic. She seemed exasperated. She spoke for a while, repeating what she’d told me earlier about advocating for her state, and noted that none of her predecessors had managed to get a Selfridge deal. Then she turned back to my question. “I am Big Gretch. Big Gretch is me,” she said. “I’m always going to show up for the people of Michigan—even when it comes at the cost of myself.”

Viktor Orbán Could Actually Lose

2026-04-10T12:15:57-04:00

Viktor Orbán is the closest thing in Europe to a prime minister for life. He has served four consecutive terms since 2010, perpetuating his power with the ruthlessness of a royal. But ruthlessness may not guarantee him reelection. That became clear to me recently in Székesfehérvár, a small city in central Hungary where Orbán was born.

Székesfehérvár lacks Budapest’s grand boulevards and baroque extravagance, but the city is not without luster. Hungary’s first king, Stephen I, built a basilica in Székesfehérvár that served as the coronation site for later monarchs. Rain was lashing the city when I visited one evening last month. It was dark and cold. But close to 1,000 people had gathered in the town square, all of them waiting for Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán loyalist who broke with the prime minister two years ago and is now trying to unseat him in elections on Sunday. Most polls have shown Magyar’s party, Tisza, with a comfortable lead over Orbán’s Fidesz Party. But it’s not a given that popular support will translate into a victory at the polls.

Such is the state of Hungary’s democracy. Gerrymandered districts give lopsided influence to the rural countryside, traditionally fertile territory for Fidesz. Deceptive campaigning is rampant, in the form of billboards that dot Hungary’s highways, deepfakes that dominate the internet, and pro-government messaging that fills newspapers and television channels owned by the prime minister’s allies. Orbán enjoys the support of foreign governments, in both the United States and Russia. Donald Trump’s endorsements have been as forceful as any he has issued in this year’s domestic midterm elections, a sign of his personal stake in a regime revered by the MAGA movement. His vice president, J. D. Vance, traveled to Budapest this week to underline the political alliance and advance conspiracy theories about “bureaucrats in Brussels” meddling in the election, words that could have come from the lips of Kremlin spin doctors.

It may not be obvious why an election in Hungary, a landlocked European country with a population roughly the size of Michigan’s, has commanded so much international attention. It’s not a nuclear power, a global media hub, or a center of innovation. Its language is a beast to learn. But Sunday’s vote may well be one of the most important elections in the history of postcommunist Europe. It will test the longevity of a regime that has deviated from principles of democracy and the rule of law that were vindicated by the peaceful revolutions of 1989 and later secured by the European Union, which incorporated Hungary as part of its eastward expansion in 2004. The bloc doesn’t have a mechanism to expel a wayward member, but Western diplomats told me that brazen electoral theft would inaugurate a perilous new era. Some suggested that the prime minister, who oversees entrenched patronage networks that reach into the minutiae of municipal jobs, has too much at stake to accept defeat. Each side has accused the other of planning violence if the results don’t go their way.

Successive setbacks have predisposed Hungarians to pessimism, even self-pity. Consider what has befallen them in the 11 centuries since Hungarian tribes moved into the Carpathian Basin in 896. They were abandoned during the Mongol invasion in 1241 and then subdued by the Ottoman empire in 1526. Their aspirations for independence from the Habsburgs were crushed in 1849, and their territory was amputated by the peace agreements that ended the First World War. They suffered under communism when the Iron Curtain split Europe, spilling their blood in a failed uprising against the Soviets in 1956. “We are the most forsaken of all people on the face of the earth,” Sándor Petőfi, Hungary’s national poet, lamented.

It would be natural for people in Székesfehérvár to feel that way today. Their manufacturing-led, export-oriented economy is a textbook expression of the model that made Hungary a postcommunist success story. Now it represents the defects that have made Hungary one of the poorest countries in the European Union, and opened Orbán up to his most serious challenge in 16 years. Hungarians have an expression for accepting a disagreeable situation: lenyeli a békát, literally “swallowing the frog.” The people I met in Székesfehérvár were no longer swallowing the frog.

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

Two men wait at a bus stop in Budapest on April 9, beside a government poster of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán reading Fogjunk össze a háború ellen! (“Let’s unite against the war!”).

A pack of university students were standing on a retaining wall to get a better view of the stage. The red, white, and green of the Hungarian tricolor, projected onto buildings that surround the square, danced across their faces. One of the students, Márton Szépvölgyi, climbed down to speak with me. He has been thinking of leaving Hungary for a master’s degree in physics. But if Magyar wins this month, he told me, he’ll stay. “I’m hopeful,” he said. Szépvölgyi mocked the prime minister, who is 62, for seeming unsteady when boos erupted at one of his recent rallies. “He’s crashing out like Ceaușescu,” Szépvölgyi said with a snicker, referencing the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s shock when an audience turned on him in December 1989, a decisive moment in the collapse of the country’s Communist dictatorship.

When Magyar took the stage, he used the same sardonic tone as the student, calling it “awkward” to watch the prime minister reckoning with the limits of his power. “He realizes for the first time that it’s over, that the Hungarian people will dismiss him,” the 45-year-old candidate, whose gelled hair and Tisza-branded windbreaker project an easygoing polish, said. His party’s full name is the Respect and Freedom Party, but it’s known by a portmanteau of the first syllables of those Hungarian words. Tisza is also one of the country’s most important rivers. It often floods the Great Hungarian Plain, a phenomenon invoked by the chant repeated at Magyar’s rallies: “The Tisza is rising!”

[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]

Magyar spoke from a podium bearing the words NOW OR NEVER!, but with a strike-through leaving only the word NOW. Urgency is a theme of his campaign. “This is the very last chance to take back our country,” he told his supporters. Another theme is independence, drawing on Hungary’s historic struggle for self-rule and allowing Magyar to recast the support Orbán has received from the United States and Russia as a liability. “Hungarian history is not written in Moscow or Washington,” he said. His stump speech includes a direct appeal to young people like Szépvölgyi who are contemplating leaving Hungary. The share of emigrants from ages 20 to 24 has doubled during Orbán’s time in office. Magyar urged the crowd to make the outcome of Sunday’s election personal, saying, “Tell your grandparents you want to stay.”

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

Márton Szépvölgyi on Budapest’s Margaret Island, on April 9

Szépvölgyi told me that his grandmother wants Orbán to win. But maybe she could be convinced otherwise. Toward the back of the crowd, an elderly woman, herself a grandmother, told me that she had lost faith in the ruling party. Fidesz, founded as an anti-communist youth movement, still positions itself as the guardian of Hungary’s independence, secured in the peaceful revolutions that swept Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. “They talk about 1989, but they turned 180 degrees,” she said. “Everything broke down.”

Erika Nina Suárez for The Atlantic

People stand with Hungarian flags during a Fidesz rally in Pécel, Hungary, on March 28.

Orbán has many traits in common with Trump. But on the campaign trail, he doesn’t completely deny reality. Székesfehérvár is an hour’s drive from Pécel, a suburb of Budapest where I saw the prime minister rally his supporters. He seemed to acknowledge that life has not been easy in Hungary, thanking voters for remaining loyal to him over the past 16 years and asking them to cheer for one another. “Go Hungary” is his refrain. “Go Hungarians.”

The prime minister’s delivery was limp, but I could hear hints of rhetorical gifts. He managed to articulate the core claim of his campaign, that he’s a bulwark against Hungary being dragged into the war in Ukraine, in a way that sounded halfway plausible. As bad as things were, Orbán seemed to suggest, they could get much worse. So don’t take a risk with a government willing to advance European plans to send more money to Kyiv. “Your whole monthly salary will be spent on utilities,” he said.

[Read: The hardest job in Europe]

Throughout Russia’s war, Orbán has maintained friendly relations with President Vladimir Putin. Recently leaked audio revealed that Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, strategized with his Russian counterpart about advancing Kremlin interests inside the European Union. The U.S. government once aspired to impede Hungary’s drift into Russian arms. But the Trump administration has reversed those efforts, giving Budapest relief from U.S. sanctions for buying Russian oil and glorifying Orbán’s government for dissenting against a supposedly woke EU bureaucracy. “We have not only a national but also a Christian government,” Orbán told his supporters in Pécel. In the crowd, I met Adam Hajdu, who is studying to be a police officer, and his grandmother, Klara, both wearing red Make America Great Again caps. They told me that Trump and Orbán both love God and want peace.

Orbán has a knack for conjuring enemies just in time for election season. In 2014, he cast blame on “multinationals, bankers, and bureaucrats in Brussels” for trying to thwart his economic nationalism. In 2018, he cast George Soros, the Budapest-born Holocaust survivor and liberal financier, as a menace to Hungarian sovereignty. In 2022, he repositioned Ukraine, the victim of Russia’s invasion, as a danger to peace in Hungary. Now he is rerunning a version of that campaign, and his supporters seem convinced by it. A retired postman in Pécel told me that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is nothing more than an actor, swindling the rest of Europe.

Piero Cruciatti / AFP / Getty

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2024

The cynicism of this strategy is astonishing. It was Orbán’s bold call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, in 1989, that first gave him political star power. He was a shaggy-haired, anti-communist youth activist, with humble origins as the son of an agricultural engineer and a teacher, when he delivered a speech at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister who was executed in 1958 for having led the failed uprising two years earlier. At Heroes’ Square in Budapest, Orbán aligned himself with those “fighting for the establishment of liberal democracy.”

When democracy came in 1990—in the form of Hungary’s first free, multiparty elections—Orbán won a seat in Parliament as a representative of Fidesz, an acronym for the Alliance of Young Democrats. Eight years later, he became prime minister, at the age of 35. By that time, he had already redefined his party’s anti-communism, originally identified with Western-style liberalism, as patriotism and national conservatism, a pragmatic move aimed at finding a niche in a fractured right-wing landscape. He was narrowly ousted by a center-left coalition in 2002, a defeat his biographers say he blamed on the media. In the opposition, he plotted total domination, remarking, “We have only to win once, but then properly.” Comments like that fuel criticism of Orbán as an autocrat. Some of his supporters don’t entirely disagree. “He has a firm hand,” a retired teacher at Orbán’s rally in Pécel told me. “He’s almost an autocrat, but not quite.”

When Orbán reclaimed power in 2010, it was with the two-thirds parliamentary majority necessary to rewrite the constitution, which he did, audaciously, in the face of criticism from the European Union and the United Nations. Early changes curbed the power of the judiciary, weakened independent watchdogs, and rewrote election rules to favor the ruling party. A new media law threatened outlets with fines for coverage considered disreputable. By bringing public broadcasters more firmly under government control while clearing the way for loyalists to take over private news organizations, Fidesz now exercises authority over an estimated 80 percent of the country’s media. He continues to reshape the constitution for maximum advantage in the culture wars. Enumerating his government’s accomplishments at his rally in Pécel, he pointed to a constitutional amendment approved last year mandating that all Hungarians are officially counted as either male or female.

These changes form the basis of the “illiberal state” that Orbán first proclaimed in 2014, scorning the values meant to bind EU member states, including fidelity to the rule of law and respect for individual rights. For successful models, Orbán pointed beyond the bloc to Russia, Turkey, and China. It took Brussels another eight years to respond with financial penalties. In 2022, EU institutions began to freeze billions of euros in funds over rule-of-law violations.

[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump]

The consequences have been catastrophic. The economy stagnated for three straight years, starting in 2023. Price shocks from Russia’s war in Ukraine were widespread in Europe, but the loss of EU funds compounded the government’s problems, according to Zoltán Török, head of research at Raiffeisen Bank Hungary, a subsidiary of an Austrian bank. “Hungary is an outlier,” Török told me. “And this is purely derived from the political decisions of the prime minister.”

Bloomberg / Getty

Péter Magyar, leader of the Tisza Party, holds a Hungarian flag during a rally ahead of a general election in Budapest, on March 15.

Janos Kummer / Getty

Magyar delivers a speech at a demonstration during commemorations of the 178th anniversary of the 1948–49 Hungarian Revolution, on March 15, in Budapest.

A different kind of deception about the country’s finances helped lead Magyar into public life, originally as a Fidesz apparatchik. He was a young lawyer in 2006 when a leaked recording caught Hungary’s then–prime minister, from the country’s Socialist Party, admitting that his government had misled the public about the economy. Thousands took to the streets, and police responded by using rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons to disperse the protests, in a show of force that carried echoes of 1956.

Magyar, who comes from a well-connected conservative family, helped create a legal-defense group for the protesters. He also lined up behind Orbán, who leveraged the popular anger to make a political comeback in 2010. Magyar held diplomatic roles in Brussels, where his wife advised a Fidesz member of the European Parliament. She became Hungary’s justice minister in 2019, but her political career cratered in 2024 when she took the fall for a widening scandal over a government pardon in a child-molestation case. By then, the couple had divorced, and Magyar soon released audio of his ex-wife, which he secretly recorded, discussing government meddling in politically sensitive prosecutions. The ploy provoked personal blowback, including allegations of domestic abuse, which Magyar denied. But the revelations brought widespread protests. He used the occasion to announce his leadership of Tisza.

Previous election-year efforts to unseat Orbán have fallen well short—first a loose alliance of left-liberal parties, then a far-right party that tacked to the center to broaden its appeal, and finally a broad coalition that united behind a small-city mayor. None achieved consensus or message discipline. But Magyar has some intrinsic advantages, both as a former Fidesz insider and as a front man for a new party. “People believe him when he talks about Fidesz corruption because he participated in it,” an EU ambassador told me. He also understands how Orbán campaigns; repeatedly, Magyar has prepared his supporters for smear campaigns and false-flag operations designed to strengthen the prime minister’s hand. To fend off attacks, he has found candidates without political baggage to run in the country’s 106 constituencies. His recruits include an opera singer and a zoo director. They have maintained low profiles, keeping the focus on Magyar, who has become a “messianic figure,” as one of his associates put it to me. The associate acknowledged that meteoric expectations may create problems should he get the chance to govern.

Magyar has promised to right the economy and rid the country of graft, studiously avoiding incendiary cultural issues. On immigration, he is said to hew to Orbán’s hard-line views. His foreign-policy adviser, who has a Ph.D. in international relations from Tufts, has told interlocutors that a Tisza government would restore Hungary’s stature in Brussels and reorient its relationship with Moscow. “We’re not a friend of Russia,” the adviser, Anita Orbán (no relation), told the ambassador of a NATO country. At the same time, she outlined a pragmatic approach to the war in Ukraine, reflecting Hungary’s unique energy needs as a landlocked country.

Robert Nemeti / Anadolu / Getty

Tens of thousands of supporters gather at Heroes’ Square as Magyar addresses the crowd.

People who have interacted with Magyar describe him as headstrong and aggressive. But Orbán’s opponents aren’t being picky. Numerous other parties didn’t merely throw their support behind him; they withdrew from the election altogether to avoid dividing the opposition vote. That was a difficult decision for a liberal party called Momentum, according to its parliamentary-group leader, Dávid Bedő. But it’s working. “In previous elections Orbán always controlled the narrative,” he told me. “Now Magyar is in control because he knows how the system works.”

Bedő, who is 33, has been traveling to traditional Fidesz strongholds and recording interviews with locals, which he posts on social media. Some of the clips show onetime Orbán loyalists venting dissatisfaction with the government. Bedő’s surveys, while unscientific, have convinced him that Orbán can’t win an honest election. He predicted that the prime minister will leave office one way or another. If the election doesn’t ratify a change, “people are going to revolt,” Bedő said. “We can’t take it anymore.”

I heard similar sentiments from right-wing opponents of Orbán. Gábor Vona, who challenged the prime minister unsuccessfully in 2018, told me, “We are one step away from a civil war.”

Erika Nina Suárez

Jelenik Tibor, 77, at a Fidesz rally. Of Orbán, he said, “He has a firm hand; he’s almost an autocrat, but not quite.”

Erika Nina Suárez

A woman wears a hat reading Make Europe Great Again during a Fidesz rally in Pécel, Hungary, on March 28.

Western embassies in Budapest are preparing satellite phones and other emergency precautions in the event of mass unrest. Ambassadors who spoke with me did so on the condition of anonymity to avoid the appearance of meddling in domestic politics. Several said it was ironic, however, that Trump issued a public endorsement of Orbán around the same time that Hungary’s foreign minister warned EU ambassadors in a meeting not to get involved in the election. The message, they said, was that interference was acceptable only if it favored the government. Vance reinforced the point when he traveled to Budapest and declared his intention to “send a signal” to European officials to stay out of the election. In remarks to students the next day, he recalled asking the prime minister over lunch, “What can I do to help?”

[Read: J. D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]

Among foreign diplomats as well as former Hungarian government officials, I encountered different views about the lengths to which Orbán would go to stay in power. A recent documentary alleged a Fidesz-operated scheme to buy the votes of the country’s poorest citizens, especially its large Roma minority. Informal patronage networks are also instrumental. In small towns, municipal jobs or spots in government-run child care may depend on support for Fidesz. Outright manipulation of the vote count may be more difficult. Tisza officials told me they’re positioning multiple observers at each of Hungary’s 10,000 polling stations. But some voters I met speculated that Orbán might take last-minute measures to obstruct the election if he expected to lose. Last weekend, he claimed that explosives had been found near the pipeline that carries Russian gas into Hungary through Serbia—assertions the opposition condemned as a pretext to delegitimize the vote.

Foreign diplomats told me they’re placing their trust in international observers from the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe. In past elections, the organization’s monitors have characterized voting in Hungary as free but unfair, citing Fidesz’s structural advantages. The diplomats told me that they don’t expect the U.S. government, the organization’s largest donor, to hold Hungary to account if voting is marred by irregularities. If anything, they said, Trump might encourage his ally in Budapest to declare victory prematurely, just as he did in 2020, before calling his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Zoltán Kovács, Orbán’s spokesperson, dismissed these concerns. When I met him in his office, his television was tuned to CNN. A chyron was relaying Trump’s latest statement about the situation in Iran (Trump: Go get your own oil). Kovács, who is more reflective in person than his bulldog persona online, told me that Hungary’s election system is secure. “Rigged elections are impossible,” he maintained. He allowed that Fidesz is nervous about the final stage of the campaign. “Trying to believe we control reality is a false pretension,” he told me.

Janos Kummer / Getty

Vice President J. D. Vance and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attend an election campaign rally on April 7, in Budapest.

Vance’s visit added to the surreal quality of the campaign. The vice president stumped with Orbán five days before the election as if they were running mates. While Trump was on Truth Social threatening to wipe out Iranian civilization, his vice president was onstage in Budapest praising the Hungarian prime minister as a partner in the defense of Western civilization.

[Read: The first post-reality political campaign]

After the U.S. and Iran reached a fragile cease-fire, raising hopes for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a return to normal oil prices, the vice president delivered a debrief on the negotiations. His audience included students at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a government-linked educational institution financed in part by shares in a company that processes Russian oil. Vance mocked European countries for their dependence on foreign fossil fuels, asking, “Why have the Europeans made themselves completely dependent on unreliable sources of energy?”

His interlocutor, the director general of the MCC, didn’t inform him that Hungary is one of the few European countries that didn’t reduce its reliance on Russian oil after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and that Hungary’s reliance on Russian oil is in fact a foundation of the prime minister’s reelection campaign. A student seated next to me laughed intermittently during Vance’s remarks. When the vice president concluded, I turned and asked her what she had found funny. “He doesn’t know much about Hungary,” she said.

On a rainy evening in Budapest, I met Renátó Fehér, a Hungarian poet. He was in good spirits. Previously, Hungarians opposed to the government were indignant but apathetic. “Now we are enthusiastic in our outrage,” he said. The change reflects an energetic opposition party, but also an ability to see clearly what the prime minister represents. In Fehér’s telling, Orbán melds Russian-style tactics with the ideology of the American far right. He is, Fehér said, “truly a man of the future.” That’s why Fehér calls Orbán’s politics not illiberal, the word used by the prime minister, but post-fascist. The term was coined by Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a Romanian-born Hungarian philosopher who died in 2023. Post-fascism doesn’t involve paramilitaries or do away with elections outright. It operates by stripping certain groups, such as immigrants and sexual minorities, of full citizenship. In place of theories of a master race, its rationale is based on perceived cultural incompatibility or civilizational defense. It is not utopian but cynical and bureaucratic.

In 2014, after Orbán announced his plans for what he called an “illiberal state,” Tamás gave an interview in which he implored the public to read between the lines. “He told us that he will not be removed by elections,” Tamás said at the time, predicting that “those who are against him must be prepared for the grimmest struggle.” Yet for all of Orbán’s aspirations to amass unchecked power, Hungary’s democracy is not yet extinguished. The prime minister must still answer to voters, and their preferences may override all of the advantages he has allowed his party. Sunday will put that possibility to the test. The election could mark the conclusion of this chapter in Hungary’s democratic struggle, or else the start of a grim new one.

Karoly Szilagyi contributed reporting.

The State That Could Decide Trump’s Gerrymandering War

2026-04-09T07:00:00-04:00

Updated on April 10 at 6:55 p.m. ET

Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia.

This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.”

The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, as Republicans added seats in North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.

With new opportunities to gain an edge dwindling, the two parties are waging an expensive campaign in Virginia that could prove decisive. The congressional map that Democrats have proposed is, in its ways, even more audacious than those enacted in either Texas or California. They’re asking voters to temporarily set aside a bipartisan redistricting system they approved just six years ago. Under their proposal, Democrats would be favored to win all but one of Virginia’s 11 House seats—a huge shift from the current districts, which are currently split between six Democrats and five Republicans. The boldness of Virginia’s plan stands out all the more in light of the reticence of neighboring Maryland, a stronger Democratic bastion where the senate president rebuffed a push from national leaders and Governor Wes Moore to draw a map that could have given Democrats the lone remaining House seat they don’t currently hold.

Just how far Democrats would reach in Virginia was the subject of weeks of internal debate within the party. Some had pushed for a slightly more restrained proposal that would have given Democrats the upper hand in nine of the 11 House seats. But advocates of a maximalist approach prevailed, and now Virginia voters will decide in an April 21 referendum whether to use the new maps this fall. The party has unified behind the 10–1 proposal—even if some Democrats seem to be bringing a touch of shame to their campaign.

“Nobody wants to do this. I don’t want to do this,” Michelle Maldonado, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates, told me after delivering a pep talk to campaign volunteers near her home in Manassas. But, like Deeds, she cited as a rationale Trump’s demand for Republicans to carve into Democratic seats wherever they had the power to do so. “We can’t sit back and wait.”

Democrats confronted the same ethical qualms last fall in California, another state where voters had previously acted to remove politics from redistricting. But that campaign took place in a far bluer state at a time when anger among rank-and-file Democrats over the GOP’s Texas gerrymander was raw and fresh. Five months later, the Republican redistricting campaigns have stalled in states such as Indiana and Kansas, where GOP lawmakers rejected pressure from Trump to redraw their maps. The Florida legislature will meet later this month to consider gerrymandering proposals, but there too, many Republicans have become skittish.

[Read: The state that handed Trump his biggest defeat yet]

The GOP’s struggles are welcome news for Democrats nationally, but they have complicated the “Yes” campaign in Virginia, where polls are close and some left-leaning voters are questioning whether their party really needed to gerrymander so audaciously. Deeds, who was the Democrats’ nominee for governor in 2009, is one of Virginia’s longest-serving state legislators. He said he’s tried to explain the stakes to Democratic critics, with mixed success. “Sometimes I’ve been able to convince them otherwise,” Deeds told me. But other skeptics of the plan, he acknowledged, haven’t budged. “Ultimately,” Deeds said, “if this isn’t successful, I think it will be because of people like that.”

Perhaps the biggest risk for Virginia Democrats is that their cutthroat approach to redistricting will wake up a state Republican Party that they thoroughly trounced in November. Abigail Spanberger won the governorship by 15 points and the largest raw-vote margin in state history. But Republicans have been heartened by strong early-voting turnout in conservative areas, along with a landslide victory in a legislative election last month. (The result was a rare overperformance by Republicans in a special election during Trump’s second term, which Democrats have been dominating across the country.)

Democrats “have overreached,” Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader who is helping lead the opposition to the amendment, told me. “There’s no doubt that gives us an advantage.” Representative Ben Cline, a fourth-term Republican whose conservative district would become a Democratic-leaning battleground in the proposed map, has launched another group to defeat the referendum. “Virginia had a Republican governor less than three months ago, but Democrats now want to take 91 percent of the House seats. That’s insane,” he told me.

A narrow majority of likely Virginia voters favored the redistricting amendment in a poll released last week by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School. But the same survey found that Republicans and other opponents of the measure were more enthusiastic about voting. “People understand the hypocrisy and are really angry,” Cantor said. Turnout for an April election “is a tough thing,” he added. “But when you’re angry, I think you win the turnout.”

Democratic ads have featured Spanberger and former President Obama urging voters to fight back against Republican efforts “to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years.” But opponents have tried to muddy the debate by reminding voters of Obama’s long history of campaigning against gerrymandering. Civil-rights leaders accused a dark-money group of engaging in a racist misinformation campaign by sending mailers to Black voters invoking the civil-rights movement and implying that Obama opposes the redistricting amendment. “It’s despicable,” Maldonado said. (The chair of the committee that sent the mailers, a Republican former state legislator who is Black, has defended the tactic.)

With tens of millions of dollars already spent on TV ads, Democrats have dwarfed Republicans in fundraising so far. But turnout has been robust across Virginia, even exceeding the early vote in the fall governor’s race. At the early-voting site in Waynesboro, a small city west of Charlottesville near Shenandoah National Park, cars pulled into the parking lot every couple of minutes on a recent Thursday afternoon. The area is a conservative part of Cline’s district, and most people I interviewed were voting no. Voters expressed more than the usual amount of disgust with both parties. “They’ve all let the power go to their head,” George Trent, a 56-year-old Trump voter who opposed the amendment, told me. J. Strickland, a 71-year-old independent who leans Republican and “reluctantly” backed Trump in 2024, told me he voted no because if the amendment passed, “Democrats would control the entire state.” Strickland, who did not want his first name used while talking about politics, said the whole gerrymandering war made a strong case for term limits in Congress. “This two-party system is crazy,” Strickland said. “Both parties are fighting against themselves.”

As they did in California, Democrats are trying to reassure voters about the redistricting amendment by emphasizing that it’s temporary. The new maps would be used through 2030, after which the state would return to a system in which a bipartisan commission draws House districts after the decennial census. Supporters have also noted that unlike Republican gerrymandering efforts that have won approval only from state legislatures, California and Virginia have each put their redistricting proposals before the voters, as state law required in both cases.

[Read: ‘California is allowed to hit back’ ]

Opponents of the Virginia amendment doubt the claims that these new maps are only a short-term response. Republicans have made no such promises about their own mid-decade redistricting plans, and because of population trends, blue states are likely to lose seats to GOP-controlled states after the 2030 census, putting more pressure on Democrats to maximize their advantage where they can. A Supreme Court ruling rolling back the Voting Rights Act, which could happen later this spring, would allow Republicans in southern states to draw themselves even more seats in the next few years.

If gerrymandering is a tough sell in Virginia, Democrats are also offering voters a simpler rationale for supporting the amendment. This, they tell them, is your chance to fight back against Trump, to “level the playing field” against the president’s many attempts to accumulate power for himself and for his party. The various messages from the “Yes” campaign have a choose-your-own-outrage feel to them. In addition to running commercials with Obama and Spanberger, the “Yes” campaign has released ads featuring military veterans warning about Trump’s threat to democracy. Another ad warns about the prospect of a national abortion ban if Republicans accrue even more power.

At the University of Virginia, “Yes” campaigners were using their own Trump-related controversy as motivation: the ouster last summer of UVA’s president, James Ryan, who resigned under pressure from the Justice Department in a dispute over DEI policies. During a press conference last week, Semony Shah, the president of UVA’s University Democrats, cast the referendum as an opportunity for students to stop what she called “federal overreach” into the university. “These are things that frustrate students, because their voices weren’t accounted for. Their voices weren’t heard,” Shah told me afterward. “This,” she said, “is your way to make your voice heard.”

Democrats acknowledged the strong start that Republican areas of the state have had in early voting, but they told me turnout was picking up among their target constituencies. The campaign is planning a surge of rallies and canvassing events this weekend, timed for the expansion of early voting to dozens more satellite locations across Virginia. At the canvass launch in Manassas, Maldonado warned volunteers that they might encounter concerned and even angry voters who were “worried that this is a power grab by Democrats.” The door-knockers themselves seemed more confident, suggesting that the party’s pearl-clutching over gerrymandering was not as widespread as politicians like Deeds and Maldonado feared. Dylan Salgado, a 24-year-old digital fundraiser from Loudoun County, told me he’s been canvassing regularly since early voting started. I asked him if he had encountered Democrats who planned to vote against the amendment out of a principled opposition to gerrymandering. “I haven’t found someone who’s said that yet,” Salgado replied, “which makes me think we have it in the bag.”

This article originally misspelled Dylan Salgado’s last name.

1979 Is the Year That Explains Donald Trump

2026-04-09T05:00:00-04:00

It sure feels like 1979 again. Iran is fighting the West. The price of gas has been rising for weeks. Moscow is aiming to take advantage of a distracted White House. The party in control of Washington is anxiously looking at the polls. Flared pants and jumpsuits are back! So are cigarettes. Steven Spielberg is riding high after doing a movie about humans encountering aliens. (Not to be outdone, actual space missions are back too.) U2 put out new music. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates are good.

And if we do seem to have returned to that moment in time, then, well, Donald Trump would seem to be ready for whatever comes next, because the guy has lived his whole life like it’s the 1980s.

He embraces the big-bigger-biggest ethos of the decade, with its gold-plated style and “greed is good” mantra. His views have been shaped by the brash era in which excess was the norm and ostentatious displays of wealth and power were celebrated in pop culture and in Trump’s Manhattan. (The pink-marbled lobby of his Trump Tower skyscraper looks just as it did when it opened in 1983.) It was also a moment when New York City was defined by extreme wealth stratification and racial unrest, a time of high crime and corruption. To this day, Trump’s touchstones almost seem preserved in amber from that decade: Sylvester Stallone, George Steinbrenner, Hulk Hogan, the musical Cats. This was an era of over-the-top displays of patriotism and even jingoism; the phrase Let’s make America great again was in. (It’s true—Ronald Reagan got there first.) This was when Trump became a celebrity, when he still had youth on his side. In his mind, at least, he hasn’t left.

Smith Collection / Gado / Getty

Trump’s favorite era may also be shaping his approach to the war with Iran. Back then was when Trump revealed himself to be an Iran hawk, one who believed that President Jimmy Carter’s failed efforts to rescue hostages at the U.S. embassy broadcast a sign of American weakness to the globe. In a series of remarks over the decade when he became a public figure, Trump said he’d punish Iran, and he began to float his now-familiar refrain of take the oil. Indeed, those 1980s discussions of foreign policy and Iran were when the media began speculating that Trump might someday run for president. The lessons he learned decades ago have informed his bombastic approach to this war, which has included the killing of Iran’s leader, the degradation of its military, and a threat Tuesday to wipe out the nation’s “whole civilization.” A fragile cease-fire is now in place. Republicans hope that this Iran crisis won’t wound the White House like the one that did 47 years ago.

Carter’s presidency was largely doomed when, amid the Iranian Revolution of 1979, militants seized the American embassy in Tehran. Weeks later, Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamist cleric, emerged as the new theocratic state’s supreme leader and fueled extreme anti-American sentiment. A military rescue effort failed, and the standoff gripped the United States throughout a presidential-election year. Carter later received some credit for having prevented the situation from growing worse, but at the time, he seemed weak and powerless. In October 1980, a young Trump, then just 34 years old, gave an interview that is believed to be the first time he publicly weighed in on foreign policy.

“That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror, and I don’t think they’d do it with other countries,” Trump said during an interview on NBC with the gossip columnist Rona Barrett. When Barrett asked whether he’d advocate for sending in troops to free the hostages and seize Iran’s resources, Trump answered in the affirmative, saying, “I think right now we’d be an oil-rich nation, and I believe that we should have done it.”

[From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’]

Sounds familiar. As best we can tell, this is also the first time that Trump publicly mused about taking another nation’s oil. It wouldn’t be the last. Reagan won in a landslide a month later, though he never got around to taking any oil. As a parting kiss-off to Carter, the hostages were released on the day of the Republican’s inauguration.

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian and a professor at Rice University, told us that “it almost became orthodoxy in the party in 1980 to say, If I were president, I would not have been weak like Carter. I would have bombed Iran back to the Stone Age.” But Brinkley warned that Trump may have overcompensated. In his effort to project toughness and strength, he’s unleashing bellicose rhetoric that won’t intimidate the Iranian theocracy (after all, their leaders talk that way too) and that, ultimately, will leave him with few good options. “It looks like he wants to live on that 1980 threat. It’s like the ‘madman theory’ of foreign policy,” Brinkley said. “You’ve got to make Iran believe they have to cut a deal.”

White House Photo Office / PhotoQuest / Getty

US President Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004) shakes hands with real estate developer Donald Trump in a reception line in the White House's Blue Room, Washington DC. November 3, 1987.

By the late 1980s, Trump was a celebrity real-estate developer, a best-selling author, and a tabloid fixture. But what he said then effectively previews how he is governing now; indeed, for a politician who has few consistent ideologies (except on tariffs; he has always loved tariffs), it’s striking how Trump’s views on Iran haven’t really changed. A New York Times write-up of an October 1987 speech in New Hampshire relayed that the businessman had suggested that the U.S. “should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” A couple of months later, Trump complained to Phil Donahue (we told you this was a very 1980s tale) that American allies were not doing enough to protect access to oil in the Persian Gulf. The following year, Trump told The Guardian that if he were ever to run for president, he’d be “harsh” on Iran, declaring that “one bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.” Nearly 40 years later, the Pentagon has prepared a plan for a ground invasion to do just this. It’s awaiting Trump’s approval if the cease-fire falters.

Tehran is proving to be just as tricky for Trump as it was for Carter. Besotted with the military successes of his bombing campaign in Iran last summer and the operation to seize Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela in January, Trump believed that a joint operation with Israel would be over in a matter of days, weeks at most. He broke his promise to not start a new Middle East war. Yet despite the obliteration of scores of military targets, the regime in Tehran has proved resilient and able to strike its Gulf neighbors. It seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Energy prices have jumped; Trump’s poll numbers have sunk. And despite U.S. claims of total air superiority, Iran shot down a fighter jet last week, sparking a frantic search-and-rescue operation.

That mission was shaped by Operation Eagle Claw, the failed 1980 military effort to rescue Americans held during the Iranian hostage crisis. The plan then was complex, involving landing cargo aircraft and helicopters in a remote-desert staging site, inserting U.S. forces into Iran, and preparing them to move on Tehran for a coordinated hostage rescue. But the mission failed at what was supposed to be the staging ground, exposing the military’s inability to work across services and carry out complicated operations.

The result was a fundamental yearslong overhaul of the U.S. armed forces. The Pentagon began embracing “joint operations,” and the U.S. established the Special Operations Command, which is dedicated to such missions. The Pentagon also reassessed how it thought about what transport aircraft could do. During Operation Eagle Claw, C-130s were a crucial tactical asset; one landed on a makeshift desert airstrip and eventually evacuated injured service members from that failed mission. Nearly 46 years to the day, C-130s were part of the rescue mission in Iran, again tasked with making a quick landing inside the country and then evacuating.

[Read: The real intelligence failure in Iran]

But that rescue, carried out in the morning hours of Easter Sunday, was followed by an incendiary social-media post from the president in which he wrote, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!” adding, “Praise be to Allah.” Trump upped the pressure on Iran on Tuesday, writing that “the whole civilization will die tonight” if the strait was not opened. Hours later, Trump backed off the unhinged threat, and a two-week cease-fire materialized. The fragile truce, however, seemed to only strengthen Iran’s claim over the strait; if that becomes permanent, it will be difficult to view the war as anything other than a strategic defeat for the United States.

Trump and his aides, though, would hear none of it. They insisted that the war has been won, that Iran’s regime has been changed, and that, as the president put it this morning on social media, we could soon see “the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” How was that possible? Trump’s aides pointed us to the madman theory, saying that the president’s unpredictability, combined with his genocidal threat to wipe out Iran, had forced the agreement. “That’s The Art of the Deal, baby,” one White House aide crowed to us.

That book, of course, was published in 1987.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Nancy A. Youssef contributed reporting.

J. D. Vance Is Definitely Against Foreign Election Interference

2026-04-07T17:58:00-04:00

U.S. presidential campaigns usually get started at the Iowa State Fair or some other exalted arena of Americana. J. D. Vance chose Budapest. The vice president visited Hungary’s capital today to align himself in the most visible way possible with the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is fighting to hold on to power in parliamentary elections scheduled for Sunday.

The U.S. government’s support for Orbán had already been clear. Donald Trump had issued a “Complete and Total Endorsement” on social media. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the most credible threat to Vance’s claim on the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, had traveled to Budapest in February and declared, “Your success is our success.” Vance, not to be outdone, didn’t cloak his endorsement in diplomatic rituals. “I’m here to help him in this campaign cycle,” the vice president said at Orbán’s side. For the prime minister, it was almost too good to be true. He raised his hand to his face as if to stop himself from blushing.

Hungary is of relatively little material value to the United States. It’s a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people that accounts for about a quarter of 1 percent of U.S. trade. It contributes negligibly to NATO, ostensibly the measure that the Trump administration uses to determine the worth of its European partners. But Hungary matters to Vance because it matters to the MAGA intelligentsia—the think-tank bosses, Substack scribblers, and X influencers who help mold the agenda of the modern Republican Party. Many of the gatekeepers of GOP values view Hungary as a model. In their mind, Orbán shows how to cast aside conservative niceties and seize the institutions of the state to advance a particular vision of the good life, one that claims Christianity as its basis while punishing adversaries including leftists, immigrants, and sexual minorities. And so the Hungarian election has become the first stop of the 2028 presidential contest.

[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]

The trip, which took place five days before voting begins in Hungary, couldn’t have come at a better time for Vance, whose self-image as an anti-interventionist is at odds with Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran. In Budapest, he allowed himself some distance from the president’s threats to bomb Iranian civilization out of existence. He was squarely in his comfort zone, conjuring fears of “woke” indoctrination and leading Hungarians in a call-and-response chant opposing multinational institutions and affirming their belief in sovereignty.

Vance’s appearance alongside Orbán in the final days of the Hungarian campaign broke with precedent. American presidents and vice presidents have seldom intervened so overtly in foreign elections. Barack Obama warned against Brexit during a visit to Britain several months before the 2016 referendum, saying that leaving the European Union would place the country at the “back of the queue” for trade talks. But his comments didn’t elevate a particular party or candidate. Bill Clinton visited Israel in 1996 and spoke warmly of Shimon Peres, who was competing at the time against Benjamin Netanyahu. But he didn’t issue an endorsement. There is a long history of covert U.S. influence in foreign elections, especially in Latin America. But part of the reason the activity remained covert was to provide occupants of the White House with plausible deniability.

Vance evidently had no such compunctions. His intervention was made all the more unusual by his accusation that the EU, which has underwritten Hungary’s economic development over the past two decades, was interfering in the vote. “What has happened in the midst of this election campaign is one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I have ever seen or ever even read about,” Vance said during a joint press conference with Orbán. “The bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to destroy the economy of Hungary,” he said, seeking to reframe financial penalties exacted by the bloc for infringements on the rule of law as attempts at election meddling. “And they’ve done it all because they hate this guy.”

Vance’s willingness to cosign conspiracy theories concocted by Orbán reinforced a new convergence. Orbán’s party, Fidesz, enjoys the support of Washington and Moscow, whereas many of the prime minister’s counterparts in the EU, where he has thwarted efforts to send aid to Ukraine, are arrayed on the other side. They haven’t issued endorsements, but they’re quietly hoping that Europe’s enfant terrible is repudiated in favor of Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán loyalist who defected two years ago and now heads a new party, Tisza, which is leading in most polls.

American flags raised in Budapest for Vance’s visit added to the city’s echinate landscape, which is studded with neo-Gothic spires and steeples. At the airport, Vance was greeted on the red carpet by Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, who’d been caught in a recently leaked recording vowing to help Russia navigate EU sanctions. From there, the vice president traveled to a former Catholic monastery that now houses the prime minister’s office.

[Read: America’s future is Hungary]

Vance and Orbán spoke before a press backdrop proclaiming THE DAY OF HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP. Vance breezed through areas of bilateral engagement, including energy, manufacturing, and technology. These were less important, he said, than what he termed “moral cooperation” that ensures that people can have children, and that those children won’t be indoctrinated at school. In his telling, both governments are committed to “the defense of the idea that we are founded on a certain Christian civilization and Christian values that animate everything from freedom of speech to rule of law to respect for minority rights and protection of the vulnerable.”

Vance called Hungary a model for the rest of the EU, but here are some things that the vice president did not say about his host country’s treatment of the vulnerable. In 2023, Orbán’s government approved a pardon for a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse. A government report publicized by Orbán’s opponent found that more than one in five children in state-run care institutions have been abused. Hungary’s maternal mortality rate is more than twice the EU average. Further comparisons are not kind to Hungary, which used to be about 30 percent richer than its neighbor Romania, according to one measure; now Romania is ahead. Those dreaded EU bureaucrats? They’ve financed nearly all of Hungary’s public-development projects. The source for that statistic is not a woke university; it’s the U.S. State Department. Meanwhile, public contracts go disproportionately to allies of the prime minister.

The culture of clientelism in Hungary is part of the reason some Western officials I spoke with doubt that Orbán can lose, despite polls showing his party trailing the opposition. Large segments of the society have been made dependent on Fidesz for their well-being. Vance also discounted the possibility of a loss. “Of course,” he told reporters when asked whether the Trump administration would work with the opposition if it commands a majority in the election. But he seemed to think there was faint chance of that. “Viktor Orbán’s gonna win,” he said, turning to the prime minister and asking, “Viktor, is that right?”

“That’s the plan,” Orbán replied.

From the prime minister’s office, Vance shuttled to a sports arena on the other side of the city to greet the Fidesz faithful. A retired airport bookkeeper was waiting in line. “He came to Europe just for us,” Marietta Sebestyén gushed. The only better guest, she told me, would have been Trump. Her wish was briefly fulfilled when Vance began his address by calling Trump from the stage and putting him on speakerphone. “Mr. President, you are on with about 5,000 Hungarian patriots,” Vance said. “And I think they love you even more than they love Viktor Orbán.” Trump was flattered. “I can’t believe that,” he said, before offering a succinct account of Orbán’s success. “You have a man that kept your country strong, and he kept your country good,” Trump said. “And you don’t have problems with all of the problems that so many other countries have.”

Trump had a question for the audience: “How did J. D. do? Did he give a good speech, everybody?” Except that the vice president hadn’t spoken yet. That came next, and featured him whipping up fear of an indistinct they. They dismiss the idea of the nation. They reject motherhood. They reject Christianity. They condemn children to mutilation. “They hate one man above all others, and his name is Viktor Orbán,” Vance said. “And if they hate him, it means he’s on your side.”

Halfway through his speech, Vance tried to clarify his views on the continent that he was visiting: “The European press asks constantly, Do Trump and Vance—do they have something against Europe? Let me be clear, we love Europe.” He continued, “We love its people. We love its culture. We love its beautiful architecture. And we love the amazing history of this continent. But because we love this culture and these peoples, we reject the faceless bureaucrats who would drive your energy costs through the roof and open your country to millions of unvetted foreigners in the name of progress.”

[Read: The hardest job in Europe]

Applause ensued. European officials have characterized this as an abuser’s logic: I hit you because I love you. Former Trump-administration officials have explained it differently to me, saying that the animus toward Europe is largely an extension of domestic antagonisms. Trump and Vance associate mainstream European leaders with their adversaries in the Democratic Party, and treat them accordingly.

But if Vance sees political opportunity in appealing to Hungarian nationalism, so does Péter Magyar. On social media, he issued a brief statement in response to Vance’s visit, saying, in part, “No foreign country may interfere in Hungarian elections. This is our country.”

The $97 Million Utah Warehouse ICE Bought for $145 Million

2026-04-07T07:00:00-04:00

The empty warehouse on the outskirts of Salt Lake City had a lot of potential but no buyers. Built in 2022, it was one of the largest warehouses in the area, with 833,000 square feet of space—14 football fields under one roof. The surrounding industrial zone had been promoted by the state as “Utah’s Inland Port,” a logistics hub smack-dab in the middle of a desert but only a few minutes to the freeway and the international airport.

Demand for big warehouses had softened, however, and the property remained vacant, a white elephant by the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Then, suddenly, on March 11, the Department of Homeland Security snapped it up for $145.4 million—paying nearly 50 percent more than the property’s 2025 assessed value to a private investment fund controlled by a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Bank.

The deal went through six days after President Trump announced his decision to remove Kristi Noem as DHS secretary. Noem and her team had been racing to buy up industrial properties as part of a $38 billion overhaul of the ICE detention system in an effort to supercharge Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. DHS officials described the acquisitions as a crucial step to meeting the White House’s goal of 1 million deportations a year, after ICE carried out fewer than half that many during Trump’s first year back in office. The warehouses would be reconfigured and remodeled into megajails, with capacity for up to 10,000 detainees each.

Noem’s replacement, former Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, took control of the department on March 24 and ordered a pause on conversion plans for the warehouse in Salt Lake City as well as for 10 others scattered across the country, seeking to defuse backlash from local jurisdictions. Many local leaders say that they were blindsided by DHS’s acquisitions and don’t want giant immigration jails in their communities. Some have made clear that they are willing to fight the government’s plans. Lauren Bis, a spokesperson for DHS, characterized the pause as a logical part of Mullin’s transition process, which requires “reviewing agency policies and proposals” and making sure that the department works with community leaders. “We want to be good partners,” Bis told me.

There are also legal challenges. The administration is facing lawsuits across its new portfolio of industrial properties, including in Michigan and New Jersey. In Maryland, a federal judge halted renovation work at a warehouse that ICE purchased in January. In Social Circle, Georgia, where ICE bought a 1-million-square-foot building in a county that Trump won by more than 70 percent, angry local officials have refused to connect the site to water and sewer lines. ICE has already canceled plans for new detention centers in New Hampshire and Mississippi because of opposition from Republican leaders.

Officials at DHS and ICE told me that the administration has been taken aback by opposition from Republicans, whom they expected to be more supportive of the president’s deportation push. It didn’t help that the government conducted its warehouse-shopping spree around the same time that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis—and right at the moment when Americans were seeing daily images of chaos and violent clashes between protesters and immigration agents. The warehouses triggered fears about how immigrants would be treated and possible impacts on nearby communities, along with broader worries that the warehouses could be used to hold U.S. citizens. As one ICE official told me, “People’s heads started going wild with this.”

The warehouse purchases in Utah and other states are now part of an internal investigation at DHS into acquisitions and contracts made by Noem and Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser and alleged lover in an extramarital affair that both have denied. Complaints about Lewandowski’s role in DHS contracts intensified last summer after he implemented a policy requiring Noem’s approval on any expenditure of more than $100,000. The measure, depicted as an extension of DOGE-style cost cutting, came as the administration got a virtual blank check from Congress—$170 billion for immigration enforcement in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

DHS officials and contractors told me that the $100,000 requirement created a bureaucratic bottleneck and fueled suspicions that Lewandowski was exploiting his position for personal profit. Lewandowski, who worked as an unpaid “special government employee,” denies those allegations and has claimed that Noem’s added scrutiny helped save billions for taxpayers.

[Read: The first couple of a dysfunctional DHS]

But a bargain-hunting ethos was noticeably absent in DHS’s warehouse acquisitions. The department paid an average of 11 to 13 percent above market value for the first 10 properties it purchased for ICE, according to a report by the commercial-real-estate firm CoStar. The firm published its report prior to the $145 million deal for the Utah building, which tax assessors valued last year at $97 million. It was DHS’s costliest purchase yet, and none of the other DHS acquisitions reviewed by CoStar had a gap that wide between purchase price and comparable properties.

I called commercial-real-estate brokers and appraisers in Salt Lake City to ask whether the transaction seemed like an outlier. Sales of similar warehouse properties in the area suggested that it was: A building with about 1 million square feet built in the same area in 2022 had been acquired by Walmart last March for $112 million, CoStar records show, below its assessed value of $119 million. Another 1-million-square-foot property built in 2023 sold last year for $122 million, roughly the same as its assessed value, even though it sits on a 75-acre plot—larger than the parcel bought by DHS. That property, purchased by an investor, already had a tenant, which generally increases the sale price, according to two brokers and an appraiser I spoke with, who did not want to be quoted by name, because the DHS warehouse purchase is so contentious in Salt Lake City. They cautioned that many industrial properties sell for more than their assessed value, and that owner-occupants—which DHS will be—tend to be willing to pay more than investors. But the sale price, which works out to more than $174 a square foot, is far higher than the going market rate. “It’s just crazy,” one broker told me. Another quipped, “This is not something I would want to stand before a judge and have to defend.”

The DHS and ICE officials I asked about the purchase told me that they had little insight into the transaction, but they described the Utah site as a key addition to their broader makeover of the immigration detention system. The Utah warehouse would give the government a large detention facility in the Rocky Mountain region, which would allow ICE to send detainees there from Colorado, Idaho, and other western states, officials with knowledge of the plans told me. Most immigration detention sites are in the South—especially Texas and Louisiana—and the goal of the ICE overhaul is to have fewer locations but with a more even distribution across the country. ICE officials said last year that they want to build a “hub and spoke” system modeled after e-commerce retailers such as Amazon. The process has been guided more by logistical considerations than by worries about political backlash, according to officials familiar with the plans at DHS and ICE.

One person with knowledge of the Utah purchase told me that the warehouse had been appraised prior to the sale at roughly $130 million—more than 30 percent above its tax assessment. The seller had added office space and made about $10 million in improvements to the site, and the rest of the amount went to closing costs and fees, the person said. DHS was a motivated buyer and eager to close the deal quickly. DHS public-affairs officials did not respond to my questions about the appraisal and the company that conducted it.

Spenser Heaps

As a reliably red state in the American West, Utah may look like a perfect place for an ICE megajail. But the politics of immigration enforcement are fraught there too, local officials and real-estate brokers told me. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (which provided much of the original scrubland for the Inland Port) is welcoming of immigrants and has helped settle generations of refugees and international converts to the Mormon faith. Like other affluent cities in Rocky Mountain states, Salt Lake City is a blue island in a sparsely populated red sea.

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, a Democrat, has said that the city’s opposition is currently focused on ICE’s potential utility consumption and strain on local services. City officials said yesterday that the government hasn’t told them what it projects its needs will be but that a facility constructed to hold goods would need “significant” upgrades, including new sewage lines and pumping capacity, to hold large numbers of people. One city official I spoke with, who was not authorized to discuss preliminary negotiations with ICE, told me that a detention center for 7,500 to 10,000 people has a projected water use of 1 to 2 million gallons a day. The city’s entire daily consumption is about 40 million gallons, the official said, and the broader Salt Lake area is bracing for worsening drought after a winter of meager snowfall. The state of Utah opened a new prison with space for about 3,000 inmates not far from the ICE-warehouse site, the official said, and the facility consumes about 450,000 gallons daily.

Brigham Daniels, a land-use expert at the University of Utah, told me that local jurisdictions are not obligated to accommodate the federal government’s water-use plans if scarce resources are threatened. But, he said, the government could find alternative methods for supplying large volumes of water to the site by purchasing water rights from the state or from a different jurisdiction. The city would be on shakier legal ground if it refused to allow that water to reach the warehouse. “It’s one thing to say, We don’t have that water for you,” Daniels said. “It’s another thing to say, We won’t deliver it.”

The city has also raised concerns about the potential threat to the Great Salt Lake, which already competes for water against farms, lawns, and golf courses. The dry bed at the edges of the shrinking lake periodically swirls up into clouds of toxic dust laced with heavy metals. The Trump administration included $1 billion in the president’s budget request to Congress this week to improve management of the lake and route more water into the basin. “This is an Environmental hazard that must be worked on, IMMEDIATELY—It is of tremendous interest to me,” the president wrote on social media in February. Daniels said that the ICE warehouse would not necessarily be in a zero-sum competition with the lake, because most water that is used indoors can be treated and safely discharged.

[Read: Kristi Noem is gone. Now mass deportations can really begin.]

The urgent need that drove Noem and Lewandowski to acquire the warehouses has faded somewhat lately. In the two months since the “border czar” Tom Homan announced a more “targeted” approach to ICE enforcement, with a clearer focus on criminals, the average daily number of detainees in ICE custody has declined from 70,000 to about 60,000, two ICE officials told me. Even so, expanding the detention system remains a priority for the department. Homan has repeatedly said that ICE needs capacity for at least 100,000 detainees if it’s going to achieve Trump’s 1-million-deportations goal.

During his confirmation hearing, Mullin was asked whether he would commit to making sure that ICE had local support before it opened a large detention center in a community. Mullin said that he wanted to “build relationships and work in that manner.” He has also said that he wants a quieter, less confrontational approach than the one Noem and Lewandowski promoted. But the money for mass deportation has already been appropriated by Congress. ICE is in the process of doubling the number of immigration officers on U.S. streets, and recent federal-court rulings have backed the administration’s push to hold far more immigrants in custody while they fight deportation. Trump’s removal campaign may be regrouping and seeking a lower profile to allow the ICE workforce to catch its breath. But the administration now owns more than 7.5 million square feet of new detention space, and it has all the money it needs to fill it.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.

The MAGA Intellectual Who Prophesied a Queen Melania

2026-04-06T07:00:00-04:00

One evening last fall, J. D. Vance threw open the doors of his home, a Queen Anne–style mansion on the campus of the U.S. Naval Observatory, to Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. Over drinks in Vance’s study, the vice president asked Orbán for an update on life in Europe. Specifically, he wanted to know how quickly Christian faith was vanishing from the continent.

The get-together, described to me by someone who was present, was informal. Only close aides were included, among them Orbán’s political director and Vance’s national security adviser. And then there was Gladden Pappin, a Harvard-trained, U.S.-born political theorist with round, dark-framed glasses and graying hair.

Few people have ever heard of Pappin. Until I began examining the U.S.-Hungary relationship—trying to understand why President Trump and the people around him are backing Orbán’s reelection this month as if he were a swing-state Senate candidate—I hadn’t either. So what was he doing alongside Orbán at the vice president’s residence?

The answer lies in the ties binding Orbán’s government to one of the most radical parts of Trump’s movement. Pappin belongs to a clutch of so-called post-liberal intellectuals who are small in number but whose power is magnified by their like-mindedness with Vance. Silicon Valley gave Vance the resources to run for the Senate in 2022; but this group gave him the relevance, and the ideas, to be Trump’s running mate in 2024 and his heir apparent in 2028.

Pappin, like Vance, is Catholic, which infuses his critique of liberalism. In essays and other public comments, he has objected to limits on state power that enhance individual liberty and questioned the separation of Church and state. Privately, he has advanced fantastical ideas. He once predicted that Trump would dissolve Congress, at which point the pope would anoint Melania Trump, who is Catholic, to rule the United States as queen.

I heard this story from multiple people but dismissed it, at first, as implausible. Then I reached Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation and previously a political-science professor. Polet told me that he was present when Pappin said this, over drinks one evening at a 2018 meeting of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which aims to nurture conservative ideas on college campuses. Although often puckish and provocative, Pappin, in Polet’s telling, became animated about this prediction, rebuffing the suggestion that it was merely something that he’d like to happen, and insisting, “This is what will happen.” The notion is derived, tenuously, from Catholic political doctrine dating to the fifth century that emphasizes the preeminence of papal authority over secular powers, according to Polet, who recalled another conference attendee calling the comment “batshit crazy” but at least consistent with a wholesale rejection of liberalism.

In response to questions about the prophecy, Pappin told me in an email that he meant it ironically, writing, “Satire is dead and Trump Derangement Syndrome killed it.” But the comment, intended ironically or not, seems to fit Pappin’s worldview. In an email from the same year, which I reviewed, he wrote “guilty as charged” about a philosophy of “quixotic monarchism,” appearing to wryly affirm his faith in a Christian monarch in place of liberal democracy. Pappin maintained to me that he was merely “poking fun” at “stereotypes of conservative Catholics.” When I asked him whether he believes in democracy, he said, “Western democracies need to return to their roots in Christian civilization in order to pull back from hyperliberal progressivism.” In a 2022 essay, he called the presidency a “quasi-monarchical office.”

Pappin followed these interests to Hungary, where government-funded think tanks catering to foreign intellectuals have sprouted along the Danube like spring poplars. American conservatives journey to Budapest and return gushing about how Orbán has curbed migration and consolidated power, ruling for the past 16 years. Pappin is unusual not only in deciding to stay, but also in effectively going to work for the Hungarian government. Since 2023, he has been the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a state-owned company whose mandate is analogous to that of the policy-planning staff of the U.S. State Department. He writes memos for Orbán and travels the world forging connections with foreign governments and think tanks: west to the United States, where he sits on the Hungarian side of bilateral meetings with American officials; east to China, where he enthuses about opportunities for cooperation with the authoritarian, one-party state.

Back home in Budapest, fellow academics and foreign diplomats marvel at the doyen of Hungarian foreign policy who doesn’t speak Hungarian. But Pappin’s value is clear, and the government can hardly believe its luck—a flesh-and-blood member of the MAGA intelligentsia on its payroll. That’s part of the reason the stakes are so high in Hungary this election season, high enough that Vance will appear alongside Orbán during the final stretch of the campaign this week.

The centralization of state power by a leader who sees Christianity as inseparable from government legitimacy, once a pipe dream of people like Pappin, is now a model advanced by senior figures in the American government. Trump’s biggest boosters frequently liken him to Jesus. Vance insisted last year on the importance of a “Christian moral order,” and as a Senate candidate in 2021, he compared contemporary U.S. politics to a “late republican period,” referring to the era before Caesar’s dictatorship. He urged his ideological allies “to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Hungary shows what getting wild looks like. Orbán has restricted individual rights, curtailed media freedom, manipulated election rules, and undermined judicial independence. Meanwhile, his country has become one of the poorest and most corrupt in the European Union; it’s routine, for example, for people in Hungary to bring their own toilet paper to the hospital. The European Parliament accuses Orbán of running an “electoral autocracy.” Trump calls him “truly strong and powerful.” His victory would validate global Trumpism. A loss might put Pappin out of a job.

Pappin is a French name, and Gladden is the maiden name of Pappin’s mother. His father, a citizen of the Osage Nation, converted to Catholicism. Pappin was born in St. Louis and raised in Little Rock, where his family was friends with the Clintons. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate, attracting attention for his flamboyant attire and flamboyant intolerance. “The Gadfly” is the title of a 2003 article in The Harvard Crimson that notes his cashmere argyle sweaters and “more faculty than undergrad” sense of fashion, as well as the furious reaction he generated when he wrote a letter to the editor describing homosexuality as “not merely immoral but perverted and unnatural.” Pappin said he found “pleasure in fulfilling the stereotypical image people have of me.”

For graduate school, he returned to Harvard, where he studied theorists including Plato and Machiavelli. A more modern point of reference was the French thinker Pierre Manent, an influential euroskeptic. Classmates said that Pappin resented liberal elites but also recoiled from egalitarianism, instead craving the coronation of elites in his own image—ones sharing his commitments to Catholicism, monarchism, and medievalism. One of his classmates told me, “He did not strike me, or any of us, as someone who was likely to play a pivotal role in world affairs, but I guess our imaginations were too limited.” In both the United States and Hungary, some of the people who spoke with me insisted on anonymity because they feared reprisal, whether from Orbán’s government or Trump’s.

[Read: Rod Dreher thinks the Enlightenment was a mistake]

Pappin finished his Ph.D. in 2012 and soon took up a position at the University of Notre Dame, home to Patrick Deneen, a political scientist who is today perhaps the most prominent of the post-liberals. To the extent that there’s an intellectual foundation for Trumpism, Pappin whacked some of its first nails into place. In 2016, he used the pseudonym Manlius Capitolinus—a consul of the Roman republic who was executed after being accused of aspiring to monarchic rule—to write for a pro-Trump hothouse called the Journal of American Greatness. One of his fellow authors, Michael Anton, was made famous by an essay called “The Flight 93 Election,” which argued that voting for Trump in 2016 would be equivalent to charging the cockpit of the hijacked 9/11 flight, because the alternative was certain death. Anton would ultimately serve as the director of policy planning in the State Department for most of last year.

Others gained more attention for publicly defending Trump, but Pappin was crucial behind the scenes. That’s how Kevin Vallier, a philosophy professor at the University of Toledo, explained it to me. In his 2023 book, All the Kingdoms of the World, Vallier argues that Pappin marshaled other so-called integralists—proponents of subordinating the political order to the authority of the Catholic Church—to line up behind Trump. In private communications over the messaging platform Slack, Pappin was the one who “introduced strategy into the discussion,” Vallier told me. “He made the case that the integralists should be trying to acquire power rather than just talking about ideas.” In response to a question about his early advocacy for Trump, Pappin told me, “President Trump singularly changed the course of American history and I have always encouraged my peers to support him, as well as to develop a new governing approach for conservatives.”

During Trump’s first term, Pappin co-founded a quarterly journal called American Affairs and sought to acquaint readers with a post-liberal future. In a 2019 essay that associates recommended to me as a précis of his political philosophy, Pappin wrote that the brand of modern conservatism aimed at limiting state power and enshrining the free market had “reached a terminus.” By that time, he was an assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas, and eventually gained tenure in 2021.

That year, Trump’s time in office reached its own terminus. Pappin’s wife is Hungarian, and he has said in interviews that he and their two children have Hungarian citizenship as a result. He visited the country in December 2020, right after Trump’s defeat. He would soon return.

The political scientist László Lengyel has argued that Hungary’s history gave rise to different species of successful Hungarians: The petty bourgeois he labeled Homo kádáricus because they thrived when János Kádár relaxed Marxist orthodoxy in the 1960s, compared with Homo sovieticus under the hard-line Stalinist leadership that preceded the failed 1956 revolution.

Now it’s possible to talk about Homo orbánicus, the species of people who have found favor during Orbán’s reign. Some of them are childhood friends of the prime minister. One is his son-in-law, among the wealthiest people in the country. Others are leaders of think tanks and institutes with close ties to the government. Since Trump came onto the scene, some Americans have joined them. Orbán was the only E.U. head of government to endorse Trump in 2016, and out of their rapport grew dense institutional networks spanning the Atlantic.

Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, might be considered a high-profile example of Homo orbánicus. His organization licenses the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, brand to the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights, which has hosted an annual CPAC Hungary since 2022. As is customary, Schlapp himself attended this year’s gathering, in March, and returned to the United States repeating Orbán’s talking points. He told me that the prime minister would be reelected because of popular anger about interrupted Russian oil supplies that typically flow through Ukraine.

[Read: In Hungary, the first post-reality political campaign]

Another English-speaking member of this species is John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. O’Sullivan is the founder and president of the Danube Institute, which receives funding from Orbán’s government and stays relentlessly on message. Last year, the institute put on an event called “Is Transgenderism Dying?” With nearly two weeks to go before the election on April 12, the institute hosted a summit featuring a video address by the deputy U.S. secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and in-person remarks from one of his advisers. Weeks earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had traveled to Budapest and told Orbán, “Your success is our success.” The Danube Institute event reinforced that message by giving U.S. diplomats pride of place in the program. “It’s very comforting to know that we have allies like you,” an institute employee told the Americans at the conference’s conclusion.

More powerful still is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, known as MCC. The chairman of the board of trustees is the prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán (no relation). Pappin landed an MCC fellowship in 2021, the same year that Vance announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. Vance had recently converted to Catholicism and, during the course of his campaign, he appeared at events alongside luminaries of the post-liberal movement. At one, hosted by the Franciscan University of Steubenville just weeks before the November 2022 election, Pappin was a speaker. In his remarks, he gestured toward Hungary’s generous benefits for families but mostly mocked liberalism. “You can travel in a little bubble of global consumer liberalism wherever you go, and that’s what makes people happy,” he said, in an apparent attempt at humor. When I asked Pappin if he has a positive vision of post-liberalism, he told me in an email, “I advocate for Western nations to return to their true sources of strength—strong families, strong borders, strong industry—as a basis for thriving in today’s intense global competition.”

Academics who moved in similar circles around this time, attending conferences of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, said that Pappin and others drew Vance into dialogue online. “There was an active recruitment effort to find people of influence,” James M. Patterson, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Tennessee, told me. Vance’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Orbán’s government had a dismal relationship with the Biden administration, and during that period, it needed all the American help it could get. This included installing an American as head of an important foreign-policy institution. Pappin was just the American for the job.

The Hungarian Institute of International Affairs currently operates from an Art Nouveau palace with extravagant stone carvings in the diplomatic quarter of Budapest. The Russian embassy is just a few doors down; the embassies of Turkey, France, and Spain are nearby. Pappin’s arrival as president, in 2023, followed a reorganization of the institute, which was carved out of the foreign ministry and brought under the control of the prime minister’s office. Employees were shocked: Who was this American with a gold Rolex, who didn’t speak Hungarian, coming in to direct their research? At the time, officials at the American embassy were also perplexed, a former institute employee told me, recalling their question, “‘Is he just a figurehead or a real decision maker?’” When it became clear that Pappin was a decision maker, many senior figures at the institute left. “He provided a personal network to the government, and this network was more important than the analysis,” the former employee said.

Zoltán Kovács, a spokesperson for Orbán, told me that Pappin was brought in to refresh the methodology and ideology of the institute, praising the American’s shrewd assessments of Hungary’s opportunities as a small nation in a multipolar world. Pappin told me that he has tripled the size of the institute, whose staff now includes more than 60 people. He traveled widely in his role. In 2023, he posted a black-and-white photo of himself in China on Facebook with the caption “Shanghai noir?” He documented a visit to Doha, where Orbán met with the emir of Qatar. “Our delegation brought Hungary’s message of cooperation on energy security, and our urgent desire for peace in Ukraine,” Pappin wrote.

He seemed most comfortable as a contrarian, and his dissent from geopolitical orthodoxy made him a natural face of Hungary’s overtures to China. Hungary was the first EU country to sign onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and it has become a major destination for Chinese investment, especially in electric-vehicle manufacturing and battery production. “We view China not as a threat but as an opportunity,” Pappin said in an interview distributed by China’s state news agency. “The real risk is de-risking.” That approach has put Hungary at odds with other Western nations, including the United States, that have sought to reduce their dependency on Beijing. As recently as last year, Pappin has continued to take high-level meetings there, including with a senior Chinese foreign-policy adviser. Pappin told me, “Like the United States under the Trump administration, Hungary relates to each country according to its own national interest, and we discuss with counterparts all over the world—as I have done in the more than thirty countries I have visited in Asia, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa.”

His most important destination has been the United States, where he always receives a warm welcome from Vance. In 2024, Pappin visited Vance’s Senate office. A year later, the meeting took place in a more august environment. “Thanks for the West Wing welcome yesterday,” Pappin wrote on Facebook last February.

This month, voters in Hungary will deliver their verdict on Orbán, and on his investments in Trumpism. Pappin is a personification of all the work poured into the relationship, which has given Hungary, a country of fewer than 10 million people, outsize significance in the MAGA mindset.

Last fall, Pappin flew on Orbán’s plane when the prime minister visited Washington, D.C., according to images posted on social media. He accompanied the prime minister to the small gathering at Vance’s residence. Not many foreign leaders get to have drinks in the vice president’s study. It helps to have Pappin around.

Orbán has notched gains from the relationship. Last fall’s visit was a success; Hungary won relief from U.S. sanctions on its purchase of Russian oil. But fuel prices are still elevated, as is the cost of food and housing. Purchasing power has fallen in recent years, and business confidence is weak. Orbán’s opponent, Péter Magyar, is running mostly on kitchen-table issues, capitalizing on dissatisfaction with the economy. Trumpism can’t help much there.

[Read: The hardest job in Europe ]

The president's decision to wage war against Iran, meanwhile, is doing Orbán no favors. It’s destabilizing energy markets and undermining the prime minister’s argument to voters that he and his ally in the White House are trying to settle conflicts while other Western leaders clamor for war. Some of his supporters are still buying it. A family wearing red Make America Great Again caps at a recent Orbán rally in a suburb of Budapest told me that the leaders are similar because they’re both Christian and they both want peace. Addressing the crowd, Orbán made only a passing reference to the war, saying that conflict in the Middle East underscored the need for a steady hand. In a podcast interview with a Hungarian rapper, Dopeman, the prime minister said that he had been in Washington earlier this year as Trump was preparing military options against Iran. The president solicited his input, Orbán said, though he declined to divulge the substance of his counsel.

Pappin has said very little about the self-proclaimed “president of peace” dropping bombs on Iran. The Hungarian foreign-policy chieftain has turned his focus inward, using social media to lash out at journalists and malign Magyar as a “lunatic.” The attacks feel forced; he doesn’t seem like a natural keyboard warrior. In an essay he wrote in 2011 for a Harvard political-theory workshop, which was shared with me, Pappin remarks on the distancing effect of the digital world: “The virtual presents reality to us as a show, and we always stand slightly aloof.”

The observation recalls an insight from Hannah Arendt in her essay on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and its brutal repression by the Red Army. Arendt wrote of the “stability of the totalitarian mind in the midst of the fictitious world provided for it.” Perhaps in the school of MAGA, or in its satellite campus in Budapest, it’s possible to anticipate Trump dissolving Congress and Melania ruling as queen. Perhaps it’s possible to look past China’s use of surveillance, forced labor, and torture. Perhaps it’s possible to believe that Orbán presides over a gleaming model of post-liberalism, instead of a poor and repressive country resembling the socialist regimes that Europeans toppled in the last century. But then reality intervenes.

She Testified About Being Raped. Then ICE Showed Up.

2026-04-06T07:00:00-04:00

Twice a week, a 67-year-old retiree in New Jersey volunteers as an advocate for victims of domestic and sexual violence, often visiting hospitals and police stations as women complete rape kits and answer questions. One afternoon last May, she sat for hours in family court with a 35-year-old mother of two who was trying to secure a permanent restraining order against her ex-boyfriend.

The woman took the stand to tell her version of what had happened, which she had already told police: She and her then-boyfriend had argued. She had started pulling her clothes out of the closet to leave when he grabbed her from behind. Then he placed her in a chokehold and raped her. Eventually she lost consciousness. (That is not the ex-boyfriend’s account of events; his lawyer denied the allegations.) The hearing finally ended at about 5 o’clock. The woman said goodbye to her lawyer and headed downstairs with the advocate.

The two stepped outside into the rain—and the woman who had testified was tackled to the ground. “I thought she was being kidnapped,” the advocate told me. She ran to the law-enforcement officers in the lobby to ask for help. “The police were just standing there like they were having a coffee klatch,” she said. “And I was like, Guys, are you kidding me? Why are you not doing something? This woman is being assaulted. And they said, We can’t do a thing. They’re ICE.”

The advocate remembers wondering: Should I jump in there? What should I do? “I’m strong for a woman my age, but I’m not someone who can fight off two people,” she said. After about 15 minutes, the federal agents—neither of whom were wearing uniforms or identification, both women told me—put the struggling, screaming mother into an unmarked car and drove away.

When President Trump returned to office and launched what he has claimed will be the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, his administration revoked ICE guidance instructing officers to avoid detaining people at sensitive locations, such as courthouses. As the administration tries to deport 1 million people a year, ICE officers are now staking out immigration courts, and many immigrants are skipping routine court appointments out of fear. Although ICE still advises officers to “generally avoid” enforcement at family courts, it has become riskier for victims who are not citizens to report crimes or seek protections, including restraining orders. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson defended the shift toward courthouse arrests as “common sense,” saying in an email that arresting immigrants there is safer for officers and “conserves valuable law enforcement resources because they already know where a target will be.”

Beyond arrests at courthouses, other noncitizen victims seeking help from the legal system have found themselves being targeted for deportation. News reports have described a mother and her child taken into ICE custody in Austin in January after police responded to a domestic-disturbance call; a woman in Houston last April who called 911 to report domestic abuse by her ex-husband only to have the police contact ICE; and a mother of eight in Sacramento detained in September after reporting her case specialist—an ICE contractor—for sexual harassment. Many victims who are not citizens fear that if they interact with law enforcement in any way, they are putting themselves at further risk of being detained or deported, more than a dozen attorneys and advocates told me. A year into Trump’s first term, the ACLU and the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project surveyed 232 law-enforcement officers, and nearly 70 percent reported that investigating domestic-violence cases had become more difficult since Trump took office. That has become true again over the past year, experts told me, and the challenges are growing.

The lawyers I spoke with described a climate of fear for victims lacking citizenship—fear that calling police will get ICE involved, fear of being detained at a courthouse, fear of an abuser’s threats to have her deported if she reports him. Law-enforcement veterans told me that fear undercuts efforts by local police to reduce crime. During ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago last fall, calls to 911 fell by more than 21 percent in Little Village, home to the city’s largest Mexican American population, the Chicago Tribune reported. “This is making all of us less safe,” Morgan Weibel, the legal-services director at Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit serving immigrant survivors of gender-based violence, told me. “If people can’t confidently pick up the phone and call 911 when they or someone else is in danger, it erodes safety for everyone.”

The volunteer advocate in New Jersey spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to comply with confidentiality rules designed to protect the victims she helps. She said she hasn’t witnessed any other ICE arrests in the past year—but she’s more cautious now, more vigilant. Part of her job is to encourage survivors, who may feel scared or helpless, to not give up seeking the help they need. Now she feels an additional obligation, especially when she is dispatched to courthouses. She needs to make sure that people are aware that “ICE could be waiting for them.”

For decades, bipartisan efforts tried to make it easier and less intimidating for victims who are not citizens to report sexual violence and seek protection from their abusers. In 2000, Congress passed a law that built on the Violence Against Women Act by creating new types of visas for victims of certain serious crimes, including domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, and false imprisonment, with the goal of removing immigration status as a barrier to cooperating with police and prosecutors. Although only 10,000 of these visas are available every year, applicants waiting for approval could be given “deferred action” immigration status, making them eligible to legally work in the U.S.

Proponents of these visas—of which the U visa is the most common—say that they have helped victims come forward and helped prosecutors convict more offenders. From 2017 to 2023, immigrants were 5 percentage points more likely than those born in the U.S. to report being a victim of a sex crime, according to an analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey by the Cato Institute. But research also shows that reporting falls at moments of increased immigration enforcement. During President Obama’s first term, when there was a historic spike in detentions and deportations, the likelihood that a Hispanic victim reported an incident to the police dropped 30 percent—and the likelihood that a Hispanic person was victimized increased by 16 percent, according to a recent study accepted for publication by the American Economic Review.

In 2021, the Biden administration built on existing protections by enacting policies directing ICE officers to check whether someone they were arresting was a crime victim, and to exercise leniency if they were. In January 2025, Trump officials reversed those guidelines. The DHS spokesperson said that the visa programs for victims had turned into “loopholes for illegal aliens seeking to stay in the United States.” The spokesperson added that the number of applications for the visas doubled from 2021 to 2024, which they attributed to “rampant fraud, abuse, and exploitation.” A Biden-era inspector-general report found that the U-visa program was susceptible to fraud, and last July, federal prosecutors indicted three police chiefs and two others in Louisiana for a nearly decade-long alleged conspiracy to commit fraud that the prosecutors say involved filing false police reports in exchange for thousands of dollars. Experts counter that although some fraud exists within any immigration program, these visas are among the only immigration benefits for which the consent of police, a prosecutor, or a judge is a prerequisite. And the rise in applications, they say, can be attributed to an increase in awareness about the program among both undocumented communities and the police.

An undocumented immigrant always faced some risk in coming forward, “but the risk was really pretty minor,” Gina Amato Lough, who leads Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and has worked with immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other crimes for nearly two decades, told me. That isn’t the case anymore. The risk level started to change under the first Trump administration, and drastically escalated in the second, she said. For the first time in her 18 years doing this work, she is seeing a growing number of victims get detained and deported even when they have a U visa or deferred-action status, or are in the process of applying for either.

[Read: Hundreds of thousands of anonymous deportees]

Victims have become more reluctant to pursue these visas, advocates told me, and lawyers are changing their guidance, adding layers of caution and caveats. From the spring to the summer of 2025, the number of U-visa petitions the government received dropped by more than 60 percent, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The number of such applicants receiving a visa, meanwhile, dropped by more than 25 percent.

Several attorneys emphasized to me that some of their clients are still successfully navigating the system. A woman in Atlanta, who is in her 20s, told me she had been afraid to leave an abusive marriage to a citizen out of fear that she could be deported. But last year, she called a hotline, was connected with lawyers, and applied for lawful status through a provision that allows certain noncitizens to apply without their abusive family member’s knowledge. “I really want to stress that there is support out there,” she said. “A lot of people don’t even know.”

Although jurisdictions have different policies about working with federal immigration enforcement, the targeted operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis panicked immigrants across the country. All of this emboldens criminal offenders, Giovanni Veliz, a retired Minneapolis police commander, told me. “They say, Hey, we can go target these Spanish-speaking victims, because they’re not going to call the police,” said Veliz, who served as the Minneapolis Police Department’s U-visa coordinator. He worries that heavy ICE enforcement in the city earlier this year jeopardized the department’s efforts to build trust within the community. “That relationship investment that we’ve had for years and years has been fractured,” he said.

Illustration by Owen Gent

Leslye Orloff, an adjunct law professor at American University and one of the architects of the legislation behind U visas, told me that she has been urging lawyers she knows “not to collapse, not to freeze because their client is an immigrant.” She cited her experience as an attorney for undocumented domestic-violence victims in the 1980s—before the Violence Against Women Act or U visa existed. Sometimes, she said, she would get a family-court judge to order an abuser not to call immigration authorities on a victim, then jail the abuser for criminal contempt for violating that order. “There are things that you can do to be creative to address the concerns of today,” she said, “but you can’t do any of them if victim advocates and attorneys are paralyzed.”

As ICE officers arrested the woman in New Jersey last May, her hand was injured, becoming so swollen that she later told me it looked broken. The officers took her to the hospital—the same one where she’d completed a rape kit six months earlier, she said. Five days later, she was moved to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center—where, during her detention, an officer pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a detainee. She shared a sleeping space with more than 70 women, she said, and learned that many of them had stories similar to her own.

The woman agreed to speak with me on the condition that I withhold her name and country of origin, fearing retribution. To verify what she and others told me, I reviewed court, police, medical, and immigration records.

[Read: How the Cruz family decided to self-deport]

She begged an immigration judge last summer to allow her to stay in the United States, explaining that she had been brought to this country against her will as a 13-year-old and has lived a life filled with trauma, including domestic and sexual violence. “I owe all my life lessons to this amazing country of America,” she wrote in a letter to the court. She was once a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, which gave her protection against deportation, but at the time of her arrest, she did not have lawful status. Her arrest record includes prostitution, aggravated assault, and drug possession with intent to distribute—all charges that were dismissed. Two charges on her record—a disorderly-conduct charge and a local-ordinance violation for endangering the welfare of a child—resulted in fines and no jail time. (She’s had many cases of “wrong place, wrong time, wrong relationships,” she told me.) She has two children, a 15-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, who she said live with their respective fathers, and she told the judge that she does not want to be separated from them. “My immigration status has always been a weapon to people that care to take advantage of me, so do me the favor of either releasing me back to New Jersey with my children, or sending me back to my birth country,” she wrote to the judge. “I do not wish to be taken advantage of anymore.”

Her immigration attorney, Carolyn Hines, argued that she should be released because her detention minutes after her testimony violated her constitutional due-process rights and failed to comply with federal statutory law. Officers “likely acted on information obtained from the very individual who had abused” her, Hines said in a court filing—a type of source that ICE prohibits officers from solely relying on when targeting someone for arrest. The DHS spokesperson denied that claim. (The attorney for her ex-boyfriend declined to comment.)

All of the woman’s pleas were denied. Seeing no likely path to legal immigration status, she agreed to what the government calls a “voluntary departure” to her home country in South America. Asked about the woman’s case, the DHS spokesperson called her a “criminal illegal alien” and listed crimes she has been accused of.

The lawyer for her ex-boyfriend, who is a U.S. citizen, accused the woman of fabricating allegations against his client “to protect herself from immigration enforcement,” presumably by getting a U visa. But in the six months between reporting the alleged assault to police and the date of her detention, she never applied for such a visa. The lawyer also pointed me to a pending assault charge on the woman’s record: Her ex-boyfriend had filed a police report against her, accusing her of biting his arm—an act she told police was in self-defense as he put her in the chokehold. And in securing a temporary restraining order against her, the ex-boyfriend made other accusations, saying that she had repeatedly made him feel unsafe, including by cursing and throwing things. (The criminal charges, against both the ex-boyfriend and the woman, have not been resolved.) In designing U visas, lawmakers sought to ensure that charges an alleged perpetrator may file against their victim do not disqualify the victim from protections from deportation.

The woman and I first spoke in January, when she was still in detention. I asked what her hopes had been for the future—before the arrest, before Louisiana, before everything else. She said she had wanted to go back to school and get the training she needed to become a victim advocate, like the advocates helping her. “And I still want to do that,” she said.

We spoke again last month, after she had returned to her home country, and she told me she was trying to take it one day at a time. “I can breathe; it’s fresh air, and I’m able to take things slow,” she said. “I don’t feel like I’m on a hamster wheel. I feel like instead of existing, I can live.” She’s getting ready to apply for a U visa to return to the U.S. and, she hopes, reunite with her children. For now, she is rebuilding her life in a country she had not seen in nearly two dozen years.

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.

Trump’s Purge May Be Just Beginning

2026-04-02T19:53:00-04:00

After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others leaving the administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said that the timing is uncertain and that President Trump has not yet made up his mind. But what was once an unofficial motto of the second Trump term—“no scalps”—no longer applies.

Trump had been reluctant to get rid of any of his top lieutenants, viewing firings as a concession to the Democrats and the media. Even in the past few months, there had been an edict that no Cabinet officials would be removed prior to the midterms, though a series of dismissals were planned for after Election Day. But the president’s declining support since he launched the Iran war has changed the political calculus. The odds of confirming replacements, advisers know, are only growing longer. One person close to the White House told us that Trump was buoyed by the reaction to his decision to remove Noem and that it made him more likely to move ahead with Bondi. (Still, an administration official cautioned that after Noem’s ouster, optics were a concern; officials worried that getting rid of Bondi would be viewed as jettisoning only the most “attractive” women, while keeping the men.)

During her 14 months on the job, Bondi tried so hard to do everything right. She titillated the MAGA base by appearing on Fox News and promising that the Jeffrey Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” awaiting her review for release. She relinquished all pretense of leading an independent Justice Department, going after Trump’s political foes and enemies, even when other prosecutors might not have brought charges. And to the president and his allies, she continued to project the perky, kind, warm Florida persona that had once earned her the girlish nickname “Pambi.”

Bondi did everything right—or, at least, everything Trump asked her to do—but in the end, it was not enough. For Trump, and for his succession of attorneys general, it is almost never enough. In some ways, Bondi’s official service to Trump seemed preordained to end the way it did, with a singular moment of crystalline humiliation, after weeks of low-grade indignities. The case of Jeff Sessions, her distant, first-term predecessor, is instructive here. In early 2016, Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump’s seemingly long-shot presidential campaign, and was rewarded with the nation’s top law-enforcement job when Trump became president. But after Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump viciously turned on his onetime loyalist, publicly and privately excoriating his attorney general until finally pushing him out in the middle of his first term.

“No one can succeed in this job,” someone close to the White House mused to us. “Why would anyone want this job?” Only someone with “unbridled ambition,” the person concluded, would aspire to be Trump’s attorney general of the United States.

Bondi was not Sessions. She would not recuse herself; she would not draw lines; she would not do anything other than loyally serve the president. Her relationship with Trump went back more than a decade and was far deeper than his relationship with Sessions. In 2013, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to a political group supporting her Florida attorney-general campaign. (Shortly after, Bondi, in her capacity as the state’s attorney general, declined to take action against Trump University, despite multiple complaints—launching the first of several controversies in which the two would find themselves embroiled.) She remained in his orbit thereafter, speaking at both his 2016 and 2020 conventions.

Bondi’s trouble as U.S. attorney general, however, started early, during the first full month of Trump’s second term. It was then that she—under pressure from Trump’s base to release the Epstein files—summoned a group of conservative influencers to the White House, handing them thick white binders labeled, in red, The Epstein Files: Phase 1. Those close to Bondi acknowledged that her comments on television that month suggesting that Epstein’s alleged client list was “sitting on her desk” marked her ownership of the entire debacle and her failure to adequately protect the president and those close to him who were friendly with Epstein. There was no client list, the binders contained no new revelations, and “Bondi must go” murmuring began in earnest.

[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]

The stunt further thrust the topic of Epstein—which Trump hoped to avoid—into the news. But that wasn’t what ultimately cost Bondi her job. Rather, it was Trump’s perception that she was a weak attorney general, unable to sufficiently prosecute his perceived enemies. Multiple people familiar with the president’s thinking said that the failed efforts to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, among others, were a particular source of anger. Bondi was perceived by the president as lacking “smarts and guts,” as one person told us.

The Department of Justice declined to answer specific questions but pointed us to Bondi’s post on X saying that she would “continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration.” Bondi characterized her tenure as “highly successful” and declared it “easily the most consequential first year of the Department of Justice in American history.” Multiple lobbying firms were trying to hire Bondi this afternoon, as they fielded calls from corporations and other clients with matters before DOJ.

Some Trump allies (and many of his critics) believe that he asked Bondi for the nearly impossible—to win convictions for seemingly unwinnable cases—and then blamed her when she earnestly attempted yet still fell short. But other members of the Cabinet and the administration have expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us.

Those sympathetic to Bondi say that she was ordered to perform legal miracles with a deeply weakened Justice Department. The president’s demand for absolute loyalty among the department’s rank and file resulted in a profound loss of institutional expertise and a sharply reduced talent pool. Multiple prominent Republican attorneys told us that they’d considered joining the second Trump DOJ. But the requirement to take what they viewed as an oath of loyalty to the president—not the Constitution—was a step too far. “The president has a view that he is ultimately the head of the Justice Department, and the attorney general’s job is to carry out his orders,” one person close to the White House told us.

Officials in other departments told us that they regarded the Justice Department’s errors as harmful to the administration’s credibility with judges; they’d blown up what should have been easy wins for the president. “This has been festering across the administration for a while,” a second person close to the administration told us. “It’s the Epstein stuff, partly. It’s also the critiques of the indictments, like Comey. It’s a general sense of WTF—she’s not logging a lot of wins, not clocking a lot of good media.”

Bondi also enthusiastically enabled one of the president’s most fervently held beliefs: that the 2020 election had been “rigged.” Bondi directed multiple U.S. attorneys to pursue wide-ranging probes into election “interference” and “irregularities,” and her department has pursued lawsuits in 30 jurisdictions to obtain unredacted voter information that Trump’s legal critics believe are an effort to prevent significant numbers of Americans from voting in future elections. In perhaps a last-minute attempt to save her job, Bondi announced on X on Tuesday that she was elevating yet another U.S. attorney to “play a key role in ensuring the integrity of American elections.”

[Read: ‘The trust has been absolutely destroyed’]

When Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee in February, she came prepared with well-honed, pre-written insults for the Democratic lawmakers, in the hope that her fiery attacks would appeal to the only audience that mattered: Trump. But even that approach backfired; she was widely mocked for a non sequitur—“The Dow is over 50,000 right now!”—as well as for her pages of scripted invective. (It turns out that in Trump’s eyes, burns are cool, burn books less so.)

Now the defining image of Bondi’s tenure may be her testimony on Capitol Hill, specifically the image of her refusing to look at Epstein victims seated in the rows behind her, even when asked to multiple times by members of Congress. Weeks later—almost exactly a year after the initial Epstein flare-up—the buzz at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, where Bondi is a frequent presence, was that Trump was looking to get rid of her and hoping to have a replacement confirmed by the November midterms. Multiple people at the Justice Department and close to the White House familiar with Bondi’s tribulations told us that she has come close to being fired multiple times previously, including in the past few months. One thing that extended Bondi’s tenure, several people said, was her warm personal relationship with Trump and with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who both genuinely like her. “Pam and I have been friends for more than 15 years, and I think she’s one of the finest people I know,” Wiles told us in a brief phone call.

In response to our questions, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in an email that “Trump has the most talented cabinet and team in American history. Patriots like Kash Patel, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Dan Driscoll are tirelessly implementing the President’s agenda and achieving tremendous results for the American people.”

Despite the attorney-general role being among the most thankless in the Trump administration, there is no shortage of people eager to replace Bondi. Sensing the attorney general’s weakness, Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Jeanine Pirro, a television judge who is now Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, have been jockeying for the job, both directly to Trump and to his allies at Mar-a-Lago. So, too, have EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

Yet the two people close to the White House, as well as a top White House official, told us that Todd Blanche, the Bondi deputy who has now been elevated to acting attorney general, has long coveted the top job and will attempt to transform his interim role into something more permanent. “I think Todd will distinguish himself,” the White House official said, speaking anonymously to share internal thinking. “It’s sort of a trial for him.”

Tales of Bondi’s demise had been brewing since almost the beginning, and we asked the White House official: Why now? Why today? They responded that there was no particular “rhyme or reason” but that Bondi and Trump had “been talking back and forth for some time.”

“Ultimately, he was talked out,” this person explained, “and she was talked out.”

Isabel Ruehl, Jonathan Lemire, and Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

Trump’s Cozy Transportation Secretary

2026-04-02T10:52:00-04:00

Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein have been fighting for more than a decade to roll back Obama-era restrictions on the hours that long-haul truckers can work. Since 2014, their Wisconsin-based business-supply company, Uline, has spent $870,000 on lobbyists registered to push for a reversal of policies that Elizabeth Uihlein has said cause “increased inefficiencies and expense.” As the fourth-biggest disclosed donor to conservative and Republican groups in the 2024 election cycle, their views carried some weight.

After incremental erosion of the restrictions during President Trump’s first term, the latest victory came last summer, when Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced two pilot programs to allow truck drivers greater flexibility in the hours they work. “We’re getting Washington out of your trucks and your business,” Duffy said when he announced the change in June.

But Duffy was also working on a side project. Four months later, he transferred $1 million from the dormant campaign committee that had funded his congressional races in Wisconsin to a new group, called Northwoods Future PAC. The next month, Richard Uihlein became the only other donor to Northwoods, giving $1 million, according to public filings. As of the end of last year, Northwoods Future PAC had spent nearly $1.2 million on mailers and television ads to promote Duffy’s son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, who is running for the congressional seat previously held by the Cabinet secretary. The ads cast Alfonso, a 26-year-old who recently moved to the Duffy family home after working on a podcast in Florida, as a “working-class fighter” who would crusade against insider political machinations. “Time and time again, Washington politicians get rich,” one Northwoods ad for Alfonso begins, “while Wisconsin gets ignored.”

The donation is just one example of how Duffy has maintained an unusual relationship with representatives of the companies he regulates. In December, the secretary was listed as a “special guest” at a campaign event for Alfonso that was sponsored by transportation lobbyists, including those for Delta Air Lines and BNSF Railway, a decision that former ethics advisers to Presidents George W. Bush, Obama, and Biden told me they would not not have allowed or would have tried to reverse. Duffy has also embraced President Trump’s call to use corporate money, sometimes from companies that have transportation interests, to promote efforts by the department to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.

Duffy’s advisers deny any quid pro quo or impropriety, and say all of his actions have been cleared by ethics advisers at the Transportation Department who are not political appointees. “Regulatory decisions are guided by career safety professionals, the law, and the facts,” the Transportation Department spokesperson Nathaniel Sizemore told me. Duffy supported revisions to the “hours of service” trucking rule for years before he took his current job, and the president issued an executive order a year ago calling for the removal of “needless regulatory burdens” in the trucking industry. Uline, the company the Uihleins control, did not respond to a request for comment.

The arrangements have nonetheless raised alarm. Zach Cahalan, the executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, told me that Richard Uihlein’s involvement with Northwoods created “clear conflict of interest concerns” for Duffy. Richard Painter, who was Bush’s chief ethics lawyer and is now registered as an independent, says he tried to stop administration officials from appearing at events hosted by federal lobbyists, even though such arrangements are technically allowed under federal rules if the officials do not use their titles, solicit funds, or engage in any official business. (Duffy’s title did not appear on the event invitation, which also said he was “not soliciting” funds at the event.) “I would tell him to stay the heck away from this thing. It’s going to embarrass the president,” Painter told me about Duffy’s involvement in a lobbyist-sponsored event for his son-in-law. “It just gets too dang close to circumstantial evidence of quid pro quo.”

But the ethics practices that steered past administrations have eroded in Trump’s Washington. The shift has given lobbyists and corporate interests new opportunities to perhaps win favor with regulators by supporting their chosen causes—and it appears to have given those regulators new opportunities to take on projects that their predecessors avoided.

As recently as 2012, Obama refused donations from registered lobbyists, and his campaign announced that he would not appear at events for super PACs that supported him. During the Biden administration, two former ethics officials told me, there was a White House policy that prevented Cabinet secretaries from appearing at events hosted by lobbyists with business before their departments. During the first Trump term, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general referred for possible criminal prosecution findings about then-Secretary Elaine Chao’s use of department resources to help her family’s global shipping company. The Department of Justice, in the final weeks of Trump’s first term, declined to prosecute.

Though the Trump administration has long been less strict about ethics rules than its predecessors, despite the president campaigning on a promise to “drain the swamp,” the second term has been even more freewheeling. Trump has fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general, including the official responsible for the report on Chao. He has aggressively raised money from companies, lobbyists, and trade groups seeking his favor to fund projects such as his presidential library and a super PAC for the coming midterm elections, plus the construction of a new ballroom at the White House and a memorial arch on the Potomac River. Trump has kept careful track of the money coming in, calling his top fundraiser late at night for updates—and monitoring who is giving, who is not, and the role of lobbyists who bundle donations. The president has also urged his Cabinet secretaries to help fundraise for costly celebrations this summer for the nation’s 250th anniversary, events that depend on extensive financial partnerships between federal officials and companies that seek their favor.

[Read: Trump’s eye-popping postelection windfall]

Duffy has thrown himself and his department into those preparations. Last May, he announced the Great American Road Trip, a Department of Transportation initiative to get Americans out on the nation’s roads this summer. Shortly after, Tori Barnes, a recent lobbyist for the U.S. Travel Association who previously worked in government relations for General Motors, founded a nonprofit called The Great American Road Trip, using the same logo that Duffy had unveiled outside his department’s headquarters. The nonprofit does not disclose donations, but its website lists several “sponsors” that are regulated by Duffy, including Toyota, Boeing, Royal Caribbean, the American Bus Association, and CRH, a company that provides building materials for publicly funded roads. Weeks later, the department lent its name to a new mobile-phone app, built by General Motors, called Explore250, which suggests places to visit by car and allows users to collect digital stamps commemorating their travels.

Duffy embraced the nonprofit last month and provided a quote for the group’s news release: “Join us on this exciting adventure.” A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation said Duffy is working with the nonprofit and other public-private 250th-celebration efforts in his official capacity, as part of an administration-wide effort. Barnes told me that Duffy “has absolutely nothing to do” with the nonprofit’s fundraising efforts. She added: “That is solely my responsibility.”

Painter said he believes that government officials should avoid association with outside nonprofits or companies while in office. He objected to Biden’s decision to allow the Penn Biden Center (now Penn Washington) at the University of Pennsylvania and the Joseph R. Biden School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware to continue to use the president’s name while he served in office. “We do not endorse nonprofits or for-profits with the seal of approval of the United States government,” he said. “I don’t care how patriotic it is.”

The White House spokesperson Kush Desai, in response to this story, described Duffy as “a critical asset for President Trump and his administration,” specifically praising the secretary for “spearheading celebratory events for America’s 250th birthday.”

Duffy has taken a more direct approach to supporting his son-in-law’s campaign, a decision that has caused tension with White House advisers. Alfonso, who previously worked in construction and for Dan Bongino’s podcast, is married to Duffy’s eldest daughter, Evita.

On November 11, six days before Uihlein gave his donation to Northwoods, Duffy traveled to Wausau, Wisconsin, to appear at a meet-and-greet for Alfonso. He also was listed as a “special guest” for a December 3 fundraiser for the campaign. An invite to that event, previously reported by Politico, listed the Delta Air Lines PAC as a host, along with a group of Washington lobbyists with interests before the Department of Transportation or past ties to Duffy. They included Husein Cumber, who represents eight companies on lobbying efforts at the department; Andy Keiser, who represents BNSF Railway; and Tyler Duvall, the president of the smart-highway company Cavnue. Eight employees of the lobbying firm BGR Group, which represents Delta and is where Duffy previously worked, were also listed as hosts. (Duffy decided last year to terminate a joint venture between Delta and the Mexican carrier Aeromexico, a major setback for the companies, amid an ongoing dispute over U.S. carrier access to Mexican airports.) Duffy ultimately did not attend the event, because a White House announcement with Trump happened at the same time, two people familiar with the planning told me.

But Alfonso’s campaign has since benefited from donations from lobbyists and transportation-industry PACs. These included donations from fundraising efforts affiliated with Delta Air Lines, the National Air Transportation Association, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Travel Association, and Brightline Holdings, a privately owned passenger-train company. Other lobbyists not listed as hosts with business before the department have also since given to Alfonso’s campaign, ProPublica recently reported.

Sizemore said that career ethics officials at the Department of Transportation “reviewed and cleared” Duffy to appear at the Alfonso event hosted by lobbyists. “These processes and rules have existed for decades,” Sizemore told me. “If Secretary Duffy attends fundraising events, he does so in his personal capacity and he will continue to do so.”

[Read: Fox News vets are taking over America’s 250th birthday party]

But two ethics officials who worked for the Biden administration, who requested anonymity because of their current jobs, told me that such an arrangement would not have been permitted when Biden was president. In advance of the 2024 reelection campaign, the Biden White House set up a system for screening and approving any party or candidate fundraisers that Cabinet secretaries attended in their personal capacity. “On the hosts, we would not allow anyone to be from a regulated industry or a lobbying firm,” said a former ethics official in the Biden White House Counsel’s office, who was involved in vetting fundraisers.

A second former senior political appointee in the Department of Transportation general counsel’s office also told me that the secretary would not have been permitted to be listed as a speaker at a fundraiser hosted by industry lobbyists. “We would not have wanted to put the secretary in that position,” this person said. “We wanted there to be a clear line.”

Norm Eisen, a White House special counsel for ethics during the Obama presidency who has since helped lead legal efforts against the Trump administration in federal courts, told me that Duffy’s decision to attend a lobbyist-hosted event for his son-in-law would not have passed muster during the Obama years because, he said, “it creates the appearance of possible beholdenness to special interests.”

The lines in more recent weeks have been anything but clear, as Duffy has rolled out more public-private partnerships to celebrate the nation’s anniversary. On March 6, Duffy appeared at Union Station in Washington to announce a new Department of Transportation advertising campaign, funded largely by private industry. Several private companies had agreed to wrap their vehicles or display advertising celebrating the nation’s birthday at the request of the department and Freedom 250, a fundraising effort set up by Trump’s advisers. Acting as host, Duffy introduced executives from Brightline, Penske, and Greyhound-owner Flix. “We have public assets, public property,” Duffy told the group. “But we have so many partners from around industry and corporations that want to celebrate in this great birthday.”

The Intellectual Right Is Mad at the Mess It’s Made

2026-04-02T10:50:34-04:00

In 1961, William F. Buckley Jr. had a problem. The preeminent intellectual of the conservative movement was being outflanked to his right by the John Birch Society. Founded just three years earlier, the group had grown to tens of thousands of members, fueled by its claim that Communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. Buckley reportedly complained at the time that he was incessantly asked about the organization.

By 1962, Buckley had had enough. In what conservatives have since heralded as a principled maneuver, Buckley used the pages of his magazine, National Review, to excoriate Robert Welch, the society’s leader, as a ham-fisted operator who was unable to understand nuance, who was incapable of leading a proper right-wing movement, and who “anathematizes all who disagree with him.” Buckley’s diatribe is credited with limiting the influence of the Birchers, as they were known, in mainstream politics.

Buckley’s fight has been replicated by high-brow conservatives in other eras when they believe that the conspiratorially minded among their brethren have gone too far and risk turning off those who might otherwise be persuadable. In the 1990s, the writer Norman Podhoretz tried his best to stymie the influence of the populist paleoconservative commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom Podhoretz saw as anti-Semitic. In 2017, as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was consuming the right, the respected conservative columnist George Will wrote that conservatism had been “hijacked” by “vulgarians” and “soiled by scowling primitives.”

And today, many of the conservative cognoscenti are again fed up with the right-wing hoi polloi.

In October, Politico published racist and misogynistic group-chat logs from members of the New York Young Republicans Club. The conservative writer James Lindsay, who made his name by opposing what he viewed as overly sensitive “woke” culture, chastised his fellow right-wing scribes for not taking the revelations seriously. “The group chat exposé is the tip of a very nasty iceberg, and your denialism isn’t helping a damn thing,” Lindsay wrote on X. Later that month, the conservative commentator and conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza wrote that he was seeing more “vile” anti-Indian racism on the right than he had ever encountered in his 40-year career. In December, the right-wing writer Scott Greer complained that the right’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination “exposed the idiocy and weaknesses of the modern conservative movement,” as well as “its addiction to conspiratorial thinking.”

Richard Hanania has been one of the loudest and most consistent critics of the right from within its own ranks. He has publicly criticized the conspiratorial and racist tendencies that have become popular on the right, but he told me that these frustrations are also being discussed in private. Hanania said several high-profile conservatives have reached out to him to share their grievances about what the movement has become.

The most notable public protests have come from Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who works at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. Since 2020, Rufo has been influential chiefly because of his crusade against how he believes matters of race were being taught in public schools. His campaign against critical race theory—a 1970s academic framework that posited that racial bias is embedded in American law and society—helped turn some school boards across the country from sleepy, overlooked features of local government into political battlegrounds. Rufo is also seen as a driving force for the Trump administration’s campaign to banish diversity training across the federal government. But in February, he posted on X that “the Right’s collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it.”

[Read: Nick Fuentes’s strategy is working ]

In the post, Rufo didn’t say whom he was talking about. But he has been critical of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. Since September, Owens’s podcast has focused on a convoluted conspiracy theory about how Kirk, her fellow conservative personality, was killed—possibly by the Israeli government—as part of a plot that’s now being covered up by shadowy forces. She also has questioned the character of Kirk’s widow, Erika, in a YouTube series called “Bride of Charlie.” Fuentes is a young white supremacist and anti-Semitic streamer whose profile was elevated in the right-wing mainstream by his easygoing, sympathetic interview in October with Tucker Carlson. Lindsay and Hanania, among others, also take a dim view of Carlson, partly for his own conspiratorial views and partly for his elevation of Fuentes and another interview subject, the Nazi-apologist podcaster Darryl Cooper.

Bookish conservatives are fond of the tale of Buckley banishing the John Birch Society to the fringes. But that’s not the whole story. Buckley walked a fine line, publicly criticizing Welch while otherwise trying not to alienate the society’s rank and file, the historian Matthew Dallek argues in his 2023 book, Birchers. Buckley’s gripes were more about the group’s style and its leaders than its ideology. Birchers were widely derided for being racist and conspiratorial. But Buckley, the genteel conservative, was broadly in alignment with some of the group’s views, calling white people “the advanced race” in a 1957 editorial in National Review, supporting Jim Crow segregation, and writing a book defending the Red-baiting propagandist Senator Joseph McCarthy.

[Read: ‘We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power’ ]

Some members of the modern right-wing intelligentsia have their own awkward tension with the people they are now criticizing, having espoused comparably extreme views in the past. Greer, for example, has pseudonymously written racist and anti-Semitic articles for the white supremacist Richard Spencer’s website, Radix Journal. In the ’90s, D’Souza argued that “we have to take the possibility of natural differences seriously,” including the chance that there is a “natural hierarchy of groups: whites or Asians concentrated at the top, Hispanics in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.” Similar arguments are now being used to justify the racism he is speaking out against. He’s also continued to spread his own bigotry—in January, he shared a video of a racist caricature of a Somali person. (He did not respond to my request for comment.) HuffPost reported in 2023 that Hanania made his own pseudoscientific arguments about the inferiority of Black people. (He has since said that he regrets those views and has renounced them.) As a group, the right could be said to have seeded the same extremism that they now condemn.

When I asked right-wing writers about this, I received a range of responses. Lindsay, who has broken from the right and now describes himself as a classical liberal, was the most contrite. “I’ve reckoned with it on my end,” he told me. “I seriously lament any role that I played in contributing to this. I seriously reevaluated how and who I’ll work with.”

Greer told me that his past associations with Spencer and like-minded people were a necessary part of politics and coalition building. He said that despite working with Spencer and Radix, he’s not a white nationalist. “I didn’t write about killing people, so I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said. “I’m a right-wing, conservative American nationalist. White separatism is stupid. No one wants it.”

Hanania has apologized for his past work. When I asked him about his previous writing on the links between race and IQ, he told me that “different groups score differently on standardized tests,” but that focusing on this is not healthy or conducive to “maintaining a kind of social harmony.”

Rufo was less penitent. In 2024, Rufo co-wrote a Substack post titled “The Cat Eaters of Ohio,” which claimed to have video evidence of an African immigrant in Dayton grilling a cat. Rufo also offered a $5,000 “bounty” for anyone who could provide “hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.” Statements from local officials and subsequent reporting from Drop Site News cast doubt on Rufo’s story. On the campaign trail that year, Trump and J. D. Vance made similar claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

In 2021, Rufo encouraged his followers on X to call teachers who discuss LGBTQ matters “political predators” and accuse them of “ideological grooming”; he made a similar point the following year. When I asked Rufo about these statements, he said the “framing of this story is disingenuous, littered with factual errors, and even after I have repeatedly corrected them, they are still here.” He did not provide details.

If some of these conservatives are reluctant to revisit their own role in fostering hatreds they now condemn, their shifting views might nevertheless be significant. Again, Buckley provides a potential model. By the late 1960s, he had grown more sympathetic toward the mainstream. “I think he understood, as the ’60s moved on, that conservatives had an opportunity to win real power, and to do that, it made a lot of sense politically to moderate,” Dallek told me. “I do think that he did evolve, and he was not clamoring for a return to Jim Crow in the mid-to-late 1960s.”

Frustrations over the right’s inflammatory factions may be seeping into the intellectually inclined wings of the White House as well. A senior administration official, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal, explained the right’s tolerance of bigots as a product of politics and “foxhole sympathies.” In the past, conservative thinkers were more tolerant of the anti-Semitic and conspiratorial right because they felt that the left was more powerful and intent on demonizing their ideological adversaries. Since Trump’s return to the White House, that sense of camaraderie on the right has dissipated, and the extremists—the administration official termed their views “feverish, howling Nazism”—are now viewed by many as hurting the cause. The irony of this, of course, is that Trump has been one of the key enablers of the right’s most extreme fringes.

In their heyday, intellectuals such as Buckley and Will were the closest thing to influencers on the right, heavyweights whose written words in national publications made them prominent conservative voices. Buckley could make or break careers and help determine policy priorities.

[Read: Teenagers are pushing Himmler’s favorite myth]

Today, the most influential voices on the right are the people the intellectuals are criticizing. Owens’s show is the fourth-most-popular news podcast on Spotify and the second-most-popular conservative news show. Tucker Carlson’s podcast is first in both categories. The overtly anti-Semitic and white-nationalist politics of Fuentes have made such views more popular than they’ve been in decades. They’ve also gained purchase among young members of the right, who will shape the movement’s future. Even though relatively high-profile voices on the right have stepped up to condemn the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism, they don’t seem powerful enough to stop it.

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.

Public Anger Is Rising

2026-04-01T16:59:47-04:00

For a brief moment last week, Congress started to do something productive. The Senate, after weeks of bickering and fruitless negotiations, unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, taking a small but meaningful step toward resolving one of the many crises that have sprung up like targets in a game of whack-a-mole during President Trump’s second term. All that stood between tens of thousands of federal employees and their paychecks was a similar vote in the House.

But House Republicans would not agree. Instead of considering the DHS bill, Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the bipartisan compromise and then sent the entire chamber home for a two-week Easter recess. The move all but guaranteed that the government’s third-largest department would remain unfunded indefinitely as the nation wages war against Iran. Meanwhile, as lawmakers enjoy time with their families—or jet off on vacations and taxpayer-financed junkets overseas—millions of Americans are struggling with a spike in gas prices caused by the war.

“It’s a failure of everyone,” Representative David Schweikert, a Republican who represents a politically divided district in Arizona, told us.

Public anger is rising rapidly. The president’s approval ratings—which were already anemic—have sunk to new lows, and Republicans are facing the prospect of an electoral wipeout in this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP’s hold on the House majority has appeared precarious for months, but now its more comfortable advantage in the Senate may be in jeopardy too. Even TMZ is channeling the national discontent: The website known for trailing celebrities has begun hounding members of Congress, encouraging its readers to send in photos and video of lawmakers fleeing Washington, D.C., and living it up while the public servants responsible for protecting the homeland go unpaid.

Back in their districts, members of Congress—particularly swing-seat Republicans—seem to be in hiding. Hardly any are holding town halls or other well-publicized events that could put them face-to-face with frustrated voters. We contacted the offices of more than a dozen House Republicans in tight reelection races this year. Only Schweikert responded. No one else would agree to interviews about what they were hearing from constituents, nor would they disclose the events they were holding to solicit public feedback. (One of those members, Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, was spotted by TMZ on a trip to Scotland with several colleagues.) A spokesperson for Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, a Republican who won her last campaign by just 799 votes, referred us to a Facebook post in which Miller-Meeks called for Congress to return to the Capitol and “resolve this impasse.” “Our office does not share the congresswoman’s schedule,” the spokesperson said, “but she will be busy and has several exciting events planned in the case that Congress remains out of session.”

Trump did alleviate one pain point for the public last week by declaring that he would go around Congress to pay TSA agents, a move that reduced the snaking lines at airport-security checkpoints across the country. Wait times had stretched to hours as missed paychecks thinned the ranks of on-duty TSA agents, causing staffing shortages.

Yet the president’s unilateral action, though welcomed by lawmakers and air travelers alike, addressed only the most visible part of a crisis that has dragged on for weeks. Thousands of DHS employees, including members of the Coast Guard and FEMA, and administrative staff, have worked without pay for more than a month—and that’s after they missed paychecks during the larger 43-day government shutdown last fall. (Because most DHS employees are deemed “essential,” relatively few of them have been furloughed, and therefore most have had to report for duty during the funding lapse.)

In Congress, the dispute over DHS funding has centered on ICE and Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. After federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year, Democrats said they would not agree to fully fund DHS without reforms to the way that ICE operates. They’ve demanded that ICE agents wear body cameras and not masks, and have asked for requirements that agents seek judicial warrants before entering private homes in search of undocumented immigrants. The two parties appeared to be making progress toward an agreement early last week before Trump scuttled the talks by insisting that Republicans tie any DHS-funding deal to passage of the unrelated SAVE America Act, an elections bill that Democrats staunchly oppose.

[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill ]

Trump briefly considered a rarely used move to force Congress back into session, but on Wednesday he urged Republicans to ensure long-term DHS funding without Democratic votes. Such a process would circumvent the Senate filibuster, but it could take weeks or even months to enact. In response, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune issued a statement agreeing to the president’s demand and saying that Congress would act “in the coming days” to end the shutdown.

Schweikert’s House district in and around Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of the wealthiest and most highly educated in the nation. But its voters are livid at Congress. In interviews this week outside grocery stores, gas stations, and at the airport, many told us they were scrimping on food—cutting back on pricier meats and fruits—and others said they had changed their driving habits because of gas prices that are nearing $5 a gallon in some locations. Retirees, and those close to retirement, told us they are anxiously riding the volatility of financial markets amid the war.

Erica Squires and her sister Christina made trade-offs as they shopped for Easter goodies for their niece and nephew at Walmart. Grass filler, which they typically use to stuff Easter baskets, had just about doubled in price, they said, and basket prices were up too. They skipped both and opted to surprise the kids with a prefilled mermaid-themed gift for $15.97 and a lawn-mower bubble toy: “It was actually cheaper than making a basket,” Christina said.

The Squireses also are intentional about buying gas. They opted to fill up at the Walmart in Scottsdale, where they paid about $4.20 a gallon—less than in other parts of town. And rather than driving solo to visit their sister in a far-flung Phoenix suburb, they are now carpooling. Erica gave up shopping at a natural-grocery store because of rising prices. While they are hustling to make ends meet, the sisters told us, they don’t see Congress doing anything to make their lives better. If anything, they said, lawmakers are making it worse. Asked how they felt about Congress at this moment, Erica—a freelance digital marketer who voted for Trump in 2016 (and the libertarian Chase Oliver in 2024)—dryly replied, “Aren’t they not doing their job right now? They’re on vacation while we’re over here driving five miles to get cheaper gas.”

Others we encountered felt the same way. One young Democrat who works as a health-care administrator said his girlfriend’s luxury car has been sitting at home for the past month because it needs premium gas, which is almost $6 a gallon. He blames Congress: “It’s ridiculous.” A middle-aged woman whose truck sported a Don’t tread on me sticker matter-of-factly summed up her feelings about the country’s lawmakers: “Everything is terrible.”

At Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, officials had set up a donation site for unpaid TSA employees at its Compassion Corner, where people and businesses could donate items including nonperishable food, diapers, and gift cards of $20 or less for groceries and gas. The airport collected more than 3,700 gift cards and 1,800 food and household items, an airport spokesperson told us. The collection could open back up if a long-term funding measure for TSA does not pass.

[Read: American aviation is near collapse]

The security lines had dissipated yesterday, a day after TSA employees began receiving back pay. Passenger frustration had not. Layton Martin, a Republican from Phoenix who was flying to Salt Lake City, told us that members of Congress were playing with the livelihoods of government employees for their own political benefit. “They’re having, like, an ego party,” the 28-year-old fitness trainer said. “It seems very childish.” Martin’s rent is up $300 compared with last year, he said; his cost to fly to Salt Lake was double the normal price, and his friends can’t find jobs.

Schweikert, the Republican who represents Scottsdale in Congress, seemed just as frustrated. He told us that he views the DHS shutdown as a symptom of a larger unwillingness by Congress to tackle the nation’s structural problems. (He frequently warns that the Medicare trust fund could be insolvent in fewer than seven years, for example.) “I’m in a 50–50 district and I keep introducing bills to try to stabilize the debt, and I can’t even get a co-sponsor,” Schweikert told us. His constituents, he said, complain that their wages haven’t kept up with inflation, so they are poorer today than they were five years ago and are stressed about rising housing costs and making car payments.

Schweikert said he would have been happy to stay in Washington over the Easter break if it had looked as though a funding deal was possible, but the votes weren’t there. He placed blame on everyone—“Republicans, Democrats, leadership”—who refused to sit down and keep negotiating. “One side is using their rage at DHS to raise money and the other side—my side—is often terrified to actually have detailed, mathematically honest conversations about population and immigration.” Schweikert insisted that he is still working during the break, attending both community and political events. He’s not campaigning for reelection, however. Instead, he’s making a bid for governor. When he announced his candidacy for governor last fall, the eight-term lawmaker deemed Congress “unsavable.”

Someday in Tehran

2026-04-01T12:45:00-04:00

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Like Donald Trump, I, too, once underestimated the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the fall of 2004, as an underemployed freelance journalist drawn to heady stories about international politics, I had the bright idea of traveling to the notoriously closed country on a tourist visa. Press visas for Iran were hard to come by, and my travel was exploratory—I had no particular assignment. My profile was low, I figured. Who would care if, between the obligatory sightseeing expeditions, I rattled around Iranian cities meeting political analysts, philosophers, students, filmmakers, and the relatives of Iranian expats I knew?

The Islamic Republic was not to be messed with in this way. Its visa regime was deadly serious; so was the official paranoia about foreigners. American tourists were required to travel with a specially vetted guide. For four weeks, I strained to see past the diminutive figure of a young woman I’ll call Pardis, who pretended to be a tour guide while I pretended to be a tourist. Pardis excelled at her job, which was not only to make sure that I adhered to the terms of my visa, but also to report on all of my movements and conversations, and to obfuscate everything I saw.

One day I watched a bus disgorge a troop of uniformed Basij militiamen at an intersection in central Tehran.

“Who are they?” I asked Pardis.

“Oh,” she said. “They’re a youth group. Sometimes they help the police.”

Because Pardis stood between me and all that I was truly curious about, I studied her. She was not a dour Islamist but a fun-loving 31-year-old who had hair flowing out of her headscarf and risqué online flirtations with men overseas. She was an orphan, unlucky in love, and ambitious in her minder-ing, circumstances that rendered her marginal—an unmarried career woman living with a roommate. She was also relentlessly trivial, with a knack for diverting any potentially substantive encounter I might have with her country or anyone in it into an endless stream of repetitive inside jokes and girlish banter.

[Read: The ‘existential anxiety’ of the Islamic Republic]

We wandered through bazaars, threatening to buy each other the ugliest items we saw—a giant pair of red satin underwear, a wig, a dowdy zebra-print skirt. We flew to Shiraz on IranAir, a black-turbaned cleric across the aisle from us. Pardis took out a bottle of polish, began painting her nails, and smiled at me impishly. “In front of the mullah!” she said in her little voice. (He was absorbed in opening his airline-issue carton of apple juice.)

Pardis was not invested in anything that the Islamic Republic seemed to care about. But she was, for professional reasons, invested in exercising control over me. For my safety, she insisted, I could never be without her protective presence. But when she entered a room—even, memorably, one where I sat talking with members of her own family about their feelings about the hijab—everyone stopped talking.

Privately, she’d tell me about her love interests. Relationships between unmarried men and women were commonplace but forbidden under the Islamic Republic. Suddenly she’d freeze in fear and implore me not to tell anyone, or backtrack and claim that she was talking about a friend. Toward the end of our month together, in the shadow of a breakup, she sat smoking and brooding in my hotel room. I told her that Iranian women seemed forced to live complicated lives.

She replied with uncharacteristic bluntness: “Better to say that women here find ways to kill lots of things inside themselves.”

Pardis was not interested in politics, but I was. What had drawn me to Iran was a political and philosophical movement that seemed unique in the Muslim world. A circle of the most radical revolutionary elites—hostage takers, religious philosophers, former officials, even founders of the security forces—had fallen out of political favor in the early 1990s and spent the better part of a decade remaking themselves as proponents of incremental democratic reform. They produced an entire theoretical literature that drew on Western and Islamic sources; they mobilized young people to support their campaigns for elected office; and they tried to clean up abuses in some parts of the government they ran. The reformists were insiders who intended not to destroy the regime, but to liberalize it. They sought to make the supreme leader a benign figurehead—like the Queen of England, they sometimes said. The supreme leader had other plans.

My first visit to the country was comically unsuited to exploring any of this. By day, Pardis was obligated to fully occupy my time. Some of what we saw was splendid: palaces and gardens; museums of carpets, miniatures, and Islamic calligraphy; even madrassas and shrines. Then Ramadan set in, and all museums closed. Pardis had us driven around in circles or held me all but captive in her apartment, watching music videos on satellite television. After she dropped me at my hotel in the evenings, I went out to meetings I’d arranged on my own. She was livid when she learned of this. I needed to bring her with me, she insisted, or she’d lose her job. She threatened to sit in my hotel lobby until midnight to make sure I didn’t leave—unless, she said, I agreed to give her the names of everyone I saw.

Sure, I said. I’d give her all of the names before I left. I never intended to do this, and she never again asked me to. Maybe whoever needed to know about my movements already did. Or maybe Pardis covered for me—because she was lonely and considered me a friend, or because she feared she had told me too many of her secrets. Possibly she was simply satisfied that she had already done her job. I returned to New York in relative darkness about the reform movement and loath to write about the one thing I really knew, which was Pardis, and the story of how an otherwise indifferent person comes to hold a stake in a brutal regime—how she forces that stake on others just as it was forced on her.

During the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 to 2005, a window opened wide enough for a democratic-minded civil society to draw breath in Iran. A crop of semi-independent newspapers sprouted, along with investigative journalists who dared to write for them. Cultural and philosophical magazines published searching essays on religion and the state. Young people formed NGOs to address an array of civic needs; some ran for newly formed city and provincial councils. Student activism spilled onto the streets.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did his best to slam this window shut. His henchmen tortured journalists and student activists in prison until they made humiliating confessions on national television. State-linked thugs beat up a philosopher at his lectures and shot a political theorist point-blank on the steps of Tehran’s city hall. Even so, a real infrastructure for democratic change persisted for a time—in the form of people who had the training and experience to run newspapers and civic organizations, citizens who expected these things to be allowed, and the semblance of a political network that connected society to the ministries of the state.

Two presidential elections tested the resilience of this infrastructure. I covered the first of these, in 2005, with a proper journalist’s visa and a minder in her mid-40s who had a deep smoker’s rasp and a loud, insistent warmth. Bahar (also not her real name—for their safety, I’m using pseudonyms for the private citizens I met) belonged to a lost generation of bohemian Boomers whose class and secular social milieu had been violently displaced by the 1979 revolution. Women who had once lived and studied abroad now gathered in homes that smelled of opium smoke, where husbands were absent or idle and grown children seemed adrift. I learned only later of money troubles, past prison sentences, and ethnic- or religious-minority status that must have contributed to the sense of profound isolation in those homes, where it mingled with something louche and lively and almost careless.

Of all the handlers I was assigned to in Iran—I returned in 2006, 2008, and 2012—Bahar was the least beholden to the agency she worked for. I gave her a list of the people I intended to speak with, many of them reformist politicians, student activists, journalists, and former political prisoners. Her boss told her we’d wind up dead, like a photojournalist who had reported near Evin prison a few years before. Bahar was undeterred. The people on my list were heroes to her for standing up to the Islamic Republic, and she would not forfeit the opportunity to meet them. She told her own handlers that my modesty required us to hire a female driver, which is how we managed to get her best friend, Niki, to ferry us around in her red Peugeot.

How to fully convey the eccentricity of my little entourage? Niki had the stark, exaggerated beauty of a fashion model, though she was gaunt and faded, with a thousand-yard stare. She was also mostly bald. She’d first shaved her head in 1979 to taunt the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. By her telling, she went out bareheaded to test the hijab law, which required women to cover their hair.

Where is your scarf ? a Guardsman asked her.

I don’t need one. I have no hair, she said.

Ah, he replied. But you are still a woman.

Now Niki swathed herself in layers of flowing garments that resembled ordinary hijab less than they suggested dervish, flower child, and grim reaper all at once. She, too, wanted to meet the people on my list, and at times she entered the room with us. Bringing Pardis to any meeting had cast a pall of annoyance mixed with fear. Bringing Bahar and Niki added an antic element. They were extravagantly maternal, often starstruck, and prone to tears. One incident remains particularly salient in my memory.

The reformists had flubbed the election I’d come to witness. They ran three candidates, and many liberal-minded Iranians rejected all of them, on the grounds that the reformist project was a failure and Iranian elections were far from free. And so the populist hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—Khamenei’s favorite—surged to the presidency.

The morning the results came in, the red Peugeot was abnormally somber, Bahar and Niki absorbed in a nearly wordless grief. We were on our way to Tarbiat Modares University to see Hashem Aghajari, a reformist intellectual with a revolutionary background and a wooden leg that had replaced the one he’d lost in the Iran-Iraq War. Aghajari had been sentenced to death for a speech he gave in which he said that Muslims need not blindly follow a supreme leader, as though with “shackles around the neck.” Under popular pressure, including an international campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, the regime had commuted his sentence, but he still lived under the sword of Damocles, and I asked him whether the election results made him fearful.

“We have a saying in Farsi,” Aghajari replied. “ ‘There’s no shade darker than black.’ The worst they can do is execute me. I have prepared myself for that. If I am worried, it is not for myself. It’s for the Iranian people, for young people, today’s generation and future generations. My freedom and my life, and those of one or two people like me, don’t matter. They may take me to prison. I’m ready for that. In this society, we have no freedom to speak or to write. This is a prison, too.”

Outside Aghajari’s office, Bahar, or maybe Niki, motioned for us to sit a moment on a low brick wall in the university courtyard, where the sun beat down, and the two women wept.

“When we have people like this in our country,” Bahar said at last, “why must we have Ahmadinejad as our president?”

The author in Tehran in 2005 (Abbas / Magnum)

Reform was a conundrum like so many others under the Islamic Republic. It demanded cooperation and resistance at the same time—“pressure from below, negotiation at the top,” as one of its theorists articulated the strategy. The trouble was that Khamenei never once indicated that he would negotiate.

A compromise, practically by definition, satisfies no one. Reform was a compromise between hope and resignation. Iranian oppositionists grumbled about the movement’s timidity and its roots in the regime. The alternative, however, was confrontation, and throughout the period of my visits, Iranians were leery of it. The regime’s appetite and capacity for violence were never in doubt, and the country’s last revolution had gone very wrong. The movement behind it was broad-based, including liberals and leftists, but it was the Islamists who had emerged victorious in street battles and in politics, and who sealed their triumph through summary executions and imposed a theocratic state. This was not a distant memory. Mohsen Kadivar, a dissident cleric, once complained to me that his students railed against reform but shied away from rebellion. “If you won’t be the men of revolution,” Kadivar told me he said to them, “then be the boys of reform.”

The last great showing of this meliorist current was the Green Movement of 2009. In that year’s presidential election, liberal-minded Iranians, including many who’d boycotted the 2005 vote, turned out in electrifying force for the moderate reformist candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. On election day, some polls had barely closed when the regime called an implausible win for Ahmadinejad. Iranians I spoke with were incandescent with fury. Millions poured into the streets, and Mousavi and Karroubi eventually joined them there. The protesters didn’t demand an end to the Islamic Republic, even though many of them undoubtedly wished for it. They followed the cautious, legalistic reformist playbook and simply demanded that the system adhere to its own rules and allow them to elect the relatively moderate insider they’d voted for. They stood silently and held placards that read WHERE IS MY VOTE?

Bahar called me in New York on the day that the crowd was at its maximum in Tehran’s Azadi Square. She was enraptured; the atmosphere was like nothing she had ever known. The barriers of suspicion, private humiliation, and pain that had divided people for decades seemed to drop away in that expanse of shared silence, and the sense of common purpose was like a current passing through the crowd. To her special delight, she saw Aghajari not far from her—maneuvering, unafraid, on his wooden leg.

The Green Movement was the largest, most sustained, and most organized campaign of street protests that the Islamic Republic ever confronted. Foreign commenters sometimes mistook this for the spontaneous cri de coeur of a thwarted presidential campaign, mobilized by Twitter posts, but in fact it was a movement with a history, layers of experienced leaders, painstakingly articulated ideas, a pragmatic strategy, and a networked constituency. Precisely for this reason, the Islamic Republic set about destroying it with bullets, tear gas, batons, and torture.

Ahmadinejad’s first term had already seen the closure of virtually all of the reformist publications and NGOs and the exclusion of reformist candidates from campaigns for most public offices. Now the regime arrested enough of the movement’s leaders and activists to fill an auditorium, where they were paraded, hollow-eyed, in prison pajamas and forced to confess to outlandish conspiracies. Lesser-known young activists were remanded to a fetid metal shipping container in the desert. Many were raped and killed. By 2010, even to speak of or publish a photo of former President Khatami was forbidden; the cautious reform movement was dubbed “the sedition,” and Mousavi and Karroubi were placed under a draconian house arrest that would endure for a decade and a half.

When the Arab Spring came to Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries not long after the Green Movement was crushed, I ached for Iran. Of all the countries in the Middle East, up until 2009, Iran had perhaps the most credible infrastructure for democratic change—and one of the most obdurate autocracies.

My fifth and last visit to Iran, in 2012, felt in many ways like a bookend to the first, but with the coercion unmasked. Foreign journalists had been mostly excluded from the country since 2009, but three years later, I was part of a small group permitted to observe a parliamentary election. We were marched onto buses and driven to photo ops not of our choosing; even the top bureaucrats assigned to corral us made rueful jokes rather than pretend, per usual, that any of this was for our safety. Talking with a Green Movement activist required an assignation in a moving car after dark. Once again, I found myself studying the apparatus that stood in the way of studying anything else.

Just hours before I left the country, agents from the IRGC apprehended me for questioning because I had left my hotel at night without a minder. They interrogated me about my movements, my contacts, the time I asked my minder to take me to a butcher to confirm popular complaints about the price of chicken. “You have not behaved,” an interrogator told me—and, more ominously: “We think you’re not a journalist. We think you’re a spy.”

If they had actually believed this, they might have detained me indefinitely. But in the end I think they meant only to intimidate me. In the third hour of our interview, the interrogator seized my belongings and left the room with them. He returned in a fury and threw a folder of mine on his desk.

“Do you think we are not intelligent?” he demanded. “We’re keeping your receipts.” He waved in front of me the ones I’d collected for reimbursement for my travel expenses on my return. (I later realized that he may have thought I’d kept them to document the inflation that the government was at that moment trying to conceal from its citizens.) “And we are keeping this.” He held up one of the two extra passport-size photos I’d had taken for my visa. But I was a journalist, he conceded, and he let me go.

By that time, Iran’s democratic infrastructure had mostly been torched. But the yearning and anger it had once harnessed only grew and became more confrontational. At times, opposition still attached itself to elections—to whoever among the allowable candidates represented the most liberal edge of the possible. But it also exploded in street protests of a qualitatively new kind, such as those that erupted in 2017 and early 2018, when members of the lower classes in provincial cities openly reviled the Islamic Republic and chanted “Death to Khamenei.” For another hot minute, the world held its breath for the Islamic Republic to collapse. Instead, it killed.

To imagine that this cycle would repeat itself in 2022 was almost unbearable. Outraged by the death of a young woman in the custody of the morality police, women and teenage girls made hijab the symbolic center of their revolt. The headscarf was both a tool and a symbol of suffocation: Removing it publicly, en masse, was an act of civil disobedience without precedent under the Islamic Republic. Although the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising was violently quelled like all the rest—some 500 dead, maybe 20,000 in prison, families forbidden even to publicly mourn—it left a uniquely durable legacy, in that women began appearing uncovered in public with relative impunity. This was something new and promising. But it did not bring democracy or suggest what could.

Iran was and remains a heartbreaker. Where else is the civic spirit so enduring, and so unyieldingly denied? Time and again, the Islamic Republic proved itself implacable before even the most rudimentary of its subjects’ desires. It valued neither their lives nor any legitimacy that their consent could confer on the state. It refused them the dignity of small freedoms that might have cost the system nothing. And it would not even afford them a stake in prosperity: Over the course of the first two decades of the 21st century, a largely middle-class country was driven to penury, not only because of international sanctions, but because of the voracious corruption of the IRGC, which Khamenei allowed and encouraged as a means of hoarding power.

I’ll admit that I distanced myself from Iran. My run-in with the IRGC had made traveling there again impossible, and I questioned the value of what I could observe from afar. My network of sources outside the country had always been eclectic. Now it spanned a venomously polarized diaspora that traded accusations—of complicity with Iran’s foreign enemies, and with the ever more hated regime.

To hope for change in Iran was quixotic; to bet against it seemed cruel. Each upswell of protest presented a breathtaking display of youthful courage shadowed by near-certain tragedy. Eternally optimistic, a friend inside Iran offered me a metaphor: If it takes 100 blows of the axe to cut down a tree, he wrote to me on WhatsApp in 2022, you don’t say the first 99 were useless.

But the Islamic Republic seemed to be made of ironwood. It was not one man’s dictatorship. The revolutionaries had built institutions, both civilian and military, that perpetuated themselves. Networks of violence ran deep, through virtually every power center and organ of the system, and the regime retained a considerable base of ideological support in both the populace and the security apparatus. Time and again, asked to choose between their neighbors and their leaders, Iran’s men under arms chose the regime.

Would they really do it? Would they open fire on unarmed crowds of mostly young people, mowing them down by the thousands? This past January, the Islamic Republic made its security forces the instrument of an atrocity of world-historic proportions, killing at least 6,000 and possibly more than 30,000 protesters. Something broke inside of nearly every Iranian I knew. Or ignited: a fireball of rage and trauma. How could one live under such a regime? But what form of resistance was possible? One exiled activist told me privately that she fantasized about returning as an armed resistance fighter: “The reality is that we have reached a point, a dead end, where you almost have to be a partisan to win. Otherwise you have to accept that they will kill you and move on.”

When American and Israeli bombs began blasting their homeland, many of my old friends and contacts hitched their country’s epic hopes to Trump’s epic fury. No nonviolent effort had dislodged or even shaken the regime; here at last was hard power. The alternative was the Islamic Republic, forever. But others among my old network were aghast. The hard power in question was wielded by outsiders for who knew what purpose, against a continuously widening ambit of targets. One friend texted me to ask: If the Iranians celebrating such violent destruction of their country come to power by means of it, can they really be said to be pro-democratic? How will they treat their opponents?

Lately I’ve been wondering whether a fault line has always run through the opposition, or if what I’m seeing now is new. On one side are those who still believe that despite the outcome of the 1979 revolution, its broadest animating impulses—the rejection of monarchy and American dominion, and the assertion of Iran’s sovereignty over its resources and political fate—are sacrosanct. On the other are those who have concluded that not only the Islamic Republic, but the revolution itself, was a wrong turn. There is a potent symbolism in their embrace of the son of the deposed shah as a leader for the future, and their acceptance of American force as the means for empowering him.

The views of these camps are anathema to each other. I am trying to listen respectfully to both—though truth be told, I cannot at the time of this writing imagine a way that this war ends in Iranian liberation, or a way that the Islamic Republic, with or without the war, decides to yield. But how can I say these things, or even think them? Not when every phone call ends with a promise—that we’ll continue the conversation, someday, in Tehran.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Someday in Tehran.”

No Good Way Out

2026-03-31T14:41:12-04:00

President Trump clearly wants out—and soon.

The war that the United States and Israel started with Iran delayed what Trump sees as a landmark visit to China, which he postponed until mid-May, suggesting that he thinks he will be free to travel by then. He said in a Cabinet meeting that most of Iran’s military capabilities have been destroyed, implying a high degree of success. And, having twice left the negotiating table with the regime in the past year, he now appears keen to make a deal of some sort that will allow U.S. and Israeli forces to withdraw and, he presumably hopes, reopen the Strait of Hormuz so that the stock market can rise and oil prices can fall.

But wars rarely, if ever, wrap up neatly, or perfectly solve the problems they aimed to address. Sometimes they lead to new problems. And how they end is always hard to predict. Four weeks into World War II, no one could have anticipated how it would end. By the first month of the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban-led government was collapsing. Less than a month after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, in what turned out to be the apex of the U.S. military campaign. (Saddam was captured nine months after the invasion.)

One month into the war with Iran, U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully degraded Iran’s military capabilities. But Tehran has proved adept at counterpunching in asymmetrical ways, blocking the Strait of Hormuz and targeting U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf with drones. The regime’s allies, Houthi rebels in Yemen, launched at least two missiles toward Israel over the weekend. Those attacks again expanded the battlefield and raised fears that the Houthis could stop ships from using the Red Sea, as they did shortly after the start of the war in Gaza in 2023.

Trump—as his advisers repeatedly remind the public—has options. He is sending ground forces to the Gulf at the same time as he is considering dispatching senior members of his administration to talk peace. Trump said he was extending a pause on strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure until April 6, while the negotiations continue.

None of Trump’s four current options to bring hostilities to an end comes close to achieving the grand ambition the president outlined on the first night of the war—regime change in Tehran—in the weekslong timeline he promised. Whether his other stated goals—destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities, and targeting Iran’s proxies—can be achieved, or whether the U.S. can withdraw and claim a victory with any credibility, remains unknown. All of his options come with serious liabilities, not least the fact that Iran appears to consider its own position to be relatively strong, given its de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz and, therefore, the global price of oil. Tehran may not feel that ending the war on a quick U.S. time frame is in its own interests.

“While we are inflicting enormous pain on Iran, we are also signaling to them that we are experiencing pain, and we don’t like it,” Peter Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, told me. “That tells them that their strategy—to just ‘survive’ and that will be a win—might be working. And if they hold on, they might get a better deal next week rather than this week. And that complicates negotiations.”

1. Send in the Troops

Trump could send in ground forces to seize energy facilities in a bid to sever Tehran’s economic lifeline, forcing the regime to sue for peace.

In the post–Cold War period, some in the United States believed that Russia was prepared to deliberately escalate any conflict—including through the use of nuclear weapons—to force its adversaries to back down. Pentagon policy papers described the doctrine as “escalate to de-escalate.” Nearly four decades later, some in the Pentagon fear that the Trump administration wants to escalate to de-escalate in Iran, sending in ground forces to end the war faster. The Pentagon has so far deployed at least 8,000 troops—including members of the 82nd Airborne Division, which began arriving in the region this week; Marines; and an unknown number of Special Forces. The Pentagon has not disclosed their destinations or missions.

“Maybe we take Kharg Island, maybe we don’t,” Trump told the Financial Times over the weekend. “We have a lot of options.”

Kharg Island—which sits off Iran’s coast in the Gulf, 400 miles from the Strait of Hormuz—is the center of Iran’s energy-exporting industry and has already been hit by U.S. forces multiple times. The U.S. calculus may be that seizing the island in a high-risk mission would put such a severe economic choke hold on Tehran that the regime would be forced into submission.

[Read: The trouble with seizing Kharg Island]

“We can do this. This is something we studied for years. We have thought about how to assault and hold it,” retired Marine Corps General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., who commanded U.S. Central Command, told me.

“You shut the Iranian oil economy altogether; you bring their economy to a halt,” he said. “If you seize Kharg Island, it allows you to return it back to the Iranians later as a bargaining chip.”

But Iran would not feel the economic squeeze as quickly as world markets would, current and former defense officials told me, and the island’s seizure could ramp up retaliatory strikes on Gulf energy and civilian infrastructure. Oil prices would likely spike at the prospect of losing exports from Kharg and as a result of further Iranian escalation.

As many as 20,000 Iranian civilians live on Kharg in ordinary times, complicating invasion planning. Iran would also likely aim drones toward U.S. troops and try to capture U.S. service members. Trump acknowledged during his interview with the Financial Times that if the U.S. targeted Kharg, “it would also mean we had to be there for a while.”

U.S. troops could instead target some smaller islands closer to the Strait of Hormuz with the goal of reviving commercial shipping. But reopening the strait alone would hardly constitute victory for the U.S.; shipping was flowing fine before the war. Neither Secretary of State Marco Rubio nor the White House yesterday identified ships’ transit as a war goal.

Earlier today, Trump appeared to dismiss the idea of a U.S. role in opening the strait, posting on Truth Social that other countries will “have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us” as the U.S. sought the “decapitation of Iran.”

“Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done,” he wrote: “Go get your own oil!”

Ground forces have also been mooted for perhaps the most daring expedition being contemplated: a strike deep into the country to seize enriched uranium from Iran’s nuclear processing facilities. This would be an incredibly complex maneuver. The uranium itself may be hidden underground. But if successful, the Trump administration could credibly claim to have removed the most existential threat posed by Iran, something previous administrations failed to achieve.

2. Desist and Depart

Trump could also declare victory and walk away.

To hear Trump tell it as recently as Thursday, the United States has reduced Iran’s ballistic and drone capability by at least 90 percent. And on Sunday, he told reporters traveling with him that the U.S. had achieved “regime change.” But the theocrats remain in charge. And Reuters reported last week that U.S. intelligence can confirm only that about one-third of Iran’s missile capacity had been destroyed. More of the arsenal has been damaged, but how depleted Iran’s stockpiles truly are remains opaque.

Still, Trump could declare that the U.S. has achieved one goal—“completely degrading Iranian missile capability”—and simply end the campaign there, much as the U.S. and Israel did last June after 12 days of strikes on Iran.

Such a scenario might mean that, months from now, the U.S. and Israel will have to return to stop the redevelopment of Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, a strategy Israel has called “mowing the grass.” And it takes two sides to end a war. Iran may continue its attacks on U.S. bases and U.S. allies to deter the U.S. and Israel from launching a new campaign.

Iran’s surviving leaders could also crack down on internal opponents and rebuild defenses knowing they had survived the onslaught. Operation Epic Fury put on full display the economic leverage that geography gives Tehran over global markets, which the regime may continue to exploit.

Among the many reasons Trump has cited for starting the war was to make sure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. If the U.S. and Israel quickly withdraw, Iran could once again revive its program. Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies may seek their own nuclear arms in response.

3. Negotiate With the Regime

Trump could still do a deal.

The prospect of negotiations has not curtailed hostilities. On Thursday, Israel killed the naval commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Iran has repeatedly struck Tel Aviv and oil infrastructure throughout the Gulf. In the span of 24 hours, Trump both threatened “completely obliterating” Iran’s energy industry and expressed his desire to take Iran’s oil despite the “stupid people” telling him not to. Still, Trump keeps insisting that Iran is keen to negotiate, going so far as to say that the leadership in Tehran is now “more reasonable” to talk to than it was at the war’s outset.

[Read: Why hasn’t Trump mentioned Iran’s oil?]

Any negotiations, however, would start from a place of deep mutual mistrust. The regime has expressed strong reservations in the past about speaking with the U.S. intermediaries Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, because the United States and Israel interrupted previous rounds of talks with bombing campaigns twice in the space of nine months. U.S. officials, for their part, have often said that Iran’s representatives can’t be trusted and that Tehran drags out talks to preserve its regime rather than out of any interest in changing its ways.

Given the toll that the war has taken on both sides and on the global economy, however, Washington and Tehran may actually be motivated to reach a deal.

But Tehran’s five-point plan and the U.S.’s 15-point plan indicate that the two nations are seeking very different outcomes. The Trump administration wants Tehran to give up its ballistic-weapons capability, end its use of proxies, and forswear nuclear weapons. (The U.S. plan makes no mention of better governance for the Iranian people.) Iran wants the promise of no future war with the U.S. or Israel, the lifting of economic sanctions, and to collect a fee to allow ships to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Neither side has retreated from their maximalist claims, signaling that talks could be protracted.

Even if the two sides were to reach a deal, any revenue Iran receives from sanctions relief or through its control over the strait is likely to go toward rebuilding the same hostile capabilities the U.S. and Israel have spent weeks destroying. Israel may then seek to “mow the grass” again. Would the U.S. go along?

4. Keep Up the Sorties

Finally, Trump could order continued bombing until Iran capitulates or the state fails.

If the U.S. and Israeli militaries widen their targeting and keep bombing, Iran’s government may collapse or the country might splinter. But that is an uncertain prospect, given the results so far, and the costs would keep rising. The intense bombing of the war’s first month has already plunged the world into the largest supply disruption in the history of the global market, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. military is burning through its weapons stockpiles, and American consumers are seeing prices rise. As of today, the average U.S. price for a gallon of unleaded gasoline crossed $4 for the first time since 2022.

During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, few in the United States paid a pocketbook price. But Americans are already paying a daily tax in this war, at the gas pump and at the grocery store. The longer the war continues, the higher that tax becomes, as the midterm elections near. The president also said in the hours after the initial strike that Americans should be prepared for casualties, and the toll has since mounted.

If the U.S. and Israel have destroyed at least 90 percent of Iran’s defenses, as the president says, for how long is the Trump administration willing to prolong the war in order to destroy what remains? Israel might find higher gas a price worth paying for security, and see a failed Iran as posing little threat. For the U.S., a failed Iran could mean long-term energy-market instability, threats to Gulf allies and U.S. bases, and mass migration.

[Read: The U.S. and Iran are fighting a massively asymmetrical war]

A prolonged campaign would pose even greater challenges to countries that are more dependent on fuel imports. Over the weekend, Egypt implemented a curfew on businesses to preserve energy, and Sri Lanka went to a four-day week for government workers to combat rising fuel prices. Gulf allies may not have air-defense munitions to counter daily attacks from Iran for a sustained period. And the strain on U.S. stockpiles, troops, ships, aircraft, and weapons could leave the U.S. too weakened to protect itself from other threats, including China.

Most important, endless strikes would not resolve the United States’ strategic dilemma. The U.S. has struck 13,000 targets, Trump has said, with 3,000 more to go, and yet administration officials couldn’t tell fellow Republicans on the Hill last week what the president was seeking to achieve. Simply extending a war is not a certain path to victory. The U.S. fought for 20 years in Afghanistan, only to have the Taliban return to power even before the U.S. could complete its evacuation from Kabul.

The Manosphere Turns on Trump

2026-03-29T07:00:00-04:00

About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”

Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke. (The podcaster-comedians Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Dave Smith all fit somewhere in this camp.) With their help, Trump pulled off his improbable comeback.

But a lot has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow manosphere commentators seem to feel—by varying degrees—duped by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those grievances for months, starting with Trump's handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. To Schulz and others like him, a brand-new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so massive, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to hasten the rapture,” Dillon, another podcaster and comedian, said on a recent show. “The foreign and economic policy of our country currently is the rapture.”

The evolving views of Schulz and others in this cohort are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent had been mounting since even before Trump went to war. “The cracks have been forming for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, the director of the group Young Men Research Project, told me. For some, Iran “might be the last straw.”

The MAGA faithful are overwhelmingly sticking with the president. Not so for everyone else. A number of new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped power Trump’s 2024 win have lost faith in him: His support among young people has cratered; so has his approval among Latinos. According to one survey, more independent voters disapprove of the president now than they did at any point in his first term. The broad coalition that put Trump back in the White House no longer appears to exist. In the short term, this development bodes well for Democrats. Longer term, it might shed some light on the next iteration of Trumpism.

I’ve watched almost every new episode of Flagrant since the 2024 election. The show, which stars Schulz and his comedian sidekick Akaash Singh, along with their co-hosts AlexxMedia and Mark Gagnon, is often hilarious, sometimes insightful, and frequently mind-numbingly dumb. The most interesting segments involve Schulz and the guys debating the news of the day, when they argue gamely about their loosely held opinions, most of which don’t scan as neatly liberal or conservative. They sound, in other words, a lot like the average American voter.

Schulz voted for Trump in 2024 partly because he didn’t trust Democrats with the economy and partly because he considers the Democrats to be pious and annoying. He and the guys seemed particularly excited about the testosterone of the incoming administration. “The way that Tom Homan was talking about them cartels? This is fire!” Schulz said. Later, on the subject of the Houthis in Yemen, Singh gleefully predicted that “Trump be bringing the ruckus to these folks!”

But Trump didn’t bring enough ruckus. Six months into his second administration, prices were still high, and he’d signed a bill that added significantly to the deficit. Then, in an about-face from his campaign promises, he blocked the release of the Epstein files. “Obviously the Trump administration is trying to cover it up,” Schulz said in a July rant, during an episode in which he and his co-hosts are literally wearing foil hats. This was not what he had voted for, he added. “I want him to stop the wars; he’s funding them! I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget; he’s increasing it!” (Schulz, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.)

Even Trump’s deportations were getting to be too much. By December, Schulz and the boys were debating whether and how they’d hide migrants from ICE in their homes. The killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota by federal agents in January led to the second major milestone in Schulz’s Trump evolution. “ICE murdered an American citizen in cold blood,” he said. “I see the administration trying to spin it, and it’s fucking disgusting.” The operation had gotten out of hand, and Schulz and the others were starting to suspect that the cruelty and chaos were intentional. Alexx Media, Flagrant’s most consistently left-wing voice, couldn’t resist pointing out that Trump “said he was gonna do this.”

When Trump embroiled the United States in a war with Iran, Schulz and the guys couldn’t understand the point. “Naturally, Americans are furious about it, right? Because we’re like, ‘How the fuck does it benefit me?’” Schulz said. “‘I can’t afford to pay for college, I can’t buy a home, I can’t pay for health insurance, and we’re gonna spend billions of dollars in a war in a country I can’t even point at on a map?’” (Later, he predicted that it will be much harder to install a U.S.-friendly leader in Iran, a country led by theocrats for nearly five decades, than it was in Venezuela. Iran will “take it to the end,” he said, because, unlike Latin Americans, Iranians don’t “have reggaeton” or know how to “enjoy life.”)

Plenty of other bro-casters have followed the same trajectory as Schulz, as the initial thrill of Trump’s triumph over wokeness quickly gave way to confusion and disappointment. Last year, Joe Rogan was frustrated that Trump was withholding the Epstein files; earlier this month, Rogan complained that Trump’s moves in Iran are “so insane, based on what he ran on.” This week, Rogan asserted that MAGA is “a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks.” Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who’d also endorsed Trump, praised Joe Kent, who resigned over the Iran war earlier this month, and read back some of the anti-war campaign promises from Trump and others in the administration. “Every single one of these things is a complete fucking lie,” Ryan said.

[Read: The first big administration defection over Iran]

Perhaps predictably, some of this Iran-related criticism has veered into anti-Semitism. A number of Trump allies—including the conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes—have suggested that the president was manipulated into the war. “That is unfortunately becoming the narrative” among some young men, Dan Cassino, a pollster and political scientist who studies masculinity, told me. “It’s Oh, the Jews tricked Trump into this.”

Even before Iran, there was plenty of turbulence in Trump world. For months Owens and her internet goons have waged conspiratorial war against Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk over the murder of her husband, Charlie. Onetime pals Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro are at each other’s throats. As the GOP attempts to reel women back into its movement, conservative Christian hard-liners are publicly mulling revoking the Nineteenth Amendment.

[Read: (Some) MAGA girls just wanna have fun ]

Tack on a new war, and you’ve got something worse for MAGA than turbulence. You’ve got disappointment and apathy in a midterms year. You’ve got, as the right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich put it on X last week, “a generational coalition, squandered.”

Although the great majority of self-identified Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the war, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, only about half of Republican-leaning independent voters say the same. There are age gaps too: Older Republicans generally approve of Trump’s conflict, while less than half of those 18 to 29 do. Cassino told me that he isn’t terribly interested in Trump’s overall approval numbers. “The key thing I’ve been looking at is the number of ‘don’t know’” responses in polls, which have “gone through the roof,” Cassino said. The trend shows that many voters are no longer sure if Trump is trustworthy or doing the right thing for the country. To them, Trump has simply become one more unreliable politician.

Of course, most of the die-hard MAGA types will continue to vote for Republicans. (“I don’t care how mad you are at the Republican Party. You get death on the American streets if you vote Democrat,” Kelly said in a recent podcast.) But many of the disillusioned young men and independents who voted for Trump in 2024 have never identified heavily with either party and tend, generally, to tune politics out. These voters are probably not going to cast a vote for Democrats in November—but they also can’t be expected to get out and vote for the GOP. “Staying home,” Charlie Sabgir explained, “is the most likely result.” On the most recent episode of Shawn Ryan’s podcast, Kent told Ryan that Republicans are “going to need a lot of hard-core MAGA people to come out to knock on doors.” “Don’t come bangin’ on my fuckin’ door,” Ryan replied. “I don’t want to hear more of those fuckin’ lies.”

All of this is happy news for Democrats. Low GOP turnout might help them achieve a blue wave in the midterms, much like the one that overwhelmed Trump’s party in 2018. Already, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats across the country, and candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 showing by an average of nearly 13 points.

But the unraveling of Trump’s coalition also provides an inkling of where the MAGA movement goes next—and who might rise to lead it. There’s an obvious opening now for someone to pick up Trumpism’s fallen mantle and carry it further than the president has been willing to himself. That person could be someone like Representative Thomas Massie, the consistently anti-war libertarian congressman famous mainly for being a thorn in Trump’s side. It could also, theoretically, be someone more like Fuentes, a man with darker intentions and a growing following.

“If Trump did one of the things, we would’ve been happy!” Singh told Schulz in an episode from last July. “Stop the endless wars, stop the spending, release the Epstein files—we would have been like, ‘You know what? Okay, cool!’” Whoever follows through on those pledges might just win over the manosphere.

Kristi Noem Is Gone. Now Mass Deportations Can Really Begin.

2026-03-27T08:18:00-04:00

Markwayne Mullin cultivated a reputation in Congress as a brawler, but he sounded more like a peacemaker as he was sworn in this week as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t care what color your state is. I don’t care if you’re red or you’re blue,” Mullin, a former mixed-martial-arts fighter, said during the brief Oval Office ceremony, with President Trump looking over his shoulder. “My job is to be secretary of Homeland and to protect everybody the same.”

Mullin’s conciliatory tone has concerned some of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s immigration crackdown. They worry that the president has lost his nerve after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January, and that firing Kristi Noem signaled a retreat from his promise to conduct the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history. Some Trump opponents have a similar view; they are hopeful that the civic resistance displayed in Minneapolis stopped the administration’s authoritarian march in its tracks.

Although Mullin gives Trump a different face at DHS, his arrival doesn’t change the administration’s overarching goal—enshrined into law last July by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—to remove 1 million people a year from the United States. Noem fell short of that during her tenure at DHS (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement completed about 400,000 deportations last year), but she didn’t have the full kit of mass-deportation tools at her disposal, and her team was internally divided and often dysfunctional. Mullin inherits a rapidly expanding immigration-enforcement apparatus at DHS, amped up by $170 billion in additional funding.

Since Valentine’s Day, the Transportation Security Administration and several other DHS agencies have been shut down amid a bitter fight over ICE’s tactics. Early this morning, after Trump said he’d order Mullin to pay TSA staff, senators reached a deal that would fund everything in the department with the exception of ICE and Border Patrol. The deal, which now goes to the House, does not include the changes Democrats have demanded to ICE tactics. The lack of an annual budget will hardly be a roadblock to mass deportations. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch of the agency focused on arrests and deportations, has an annual budget of $5.3 billion, but the OBBBA provided nearly six times that much—$30 billion—in operating funds. The shutdown, in other words, hasn’t been a fight about money or about stopping Trump’s mass-deportation plan. It’s been about whether ICE officers can continue to wear masks while they’re carrying out the mass-deportation plan that Congress has already paid for.

The spending spree is now Mullin’s to manage. He’s getting a new fleet of deportation aircraft and nearly a dozen warehouses that ICE plans to convert into megajails, some with capacity for 10,000 detainees. ICE is hiring and training 12,000 officers and agents, more than doubling the size of its workforce. It has signed roughly 800 new agreements with county sheriffs and local police departments willing to assist with immigration enforcement. And the Trump administration has won fresh legal victories from two appellate courts that have backed new measures to keep immigrants in ICE detention while their cases are pending. The potential pool of immigrants ICE can hold in custody—making them easier to deport—is now much larger.

Mullin said during his confirmation hearing that he doesn’t want DHS to be in the headlines every day—the same stance embraced by Tom Homan, the White House border czar. Homan has said that he’s been talking with Mullin several times a day, and DHS officials I’ve spoken with expect the mentorship to continue as the new secretary—who has never worked in federal law enforcement or led a federal agency—transitions into the role. The Homan approach to mass deportation is not as loud and flashy as the one employed by Noem; her chief adviser, Corey Lewandowski; and their roving field marshal, the Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino. But it may prove to be more effective at delivering what Trump wants.

When Trump sent Homan to take over in Minneapolis and remediate the political damage left by Noem’s team, Homan steered ICE back to “targeted enforcement,” developing lists of people to find and arrest rather than using the more indiscriminate tactics promoted by Bovino, who retired this week. Homan, who ran ICE during Trump’s first term and promoted the family-separation policy at the border, once received a service medal from President Obama, and has learned to tailor his message to whatever audience he’s addressing. Last year, he aggressively attacked Democrats for having so-called sanctuary-city policies, but since taking over in Minneapolis, he’s been calm and measured in his public statements, emphasizing a focus on immigrants with criminal records while assuring conservatives that “no one is off the table.”

[Read: Kristi Noem bought 11 warehouses to use as ICE jails. Now what? ]

Homan’s tactical shift would give ICE a lower profile while aiming to make it easier for local jurisdictions and their police departments to cooperate on immigration enforcement. That’s what Mullin seemed to be referring to when he told senators at his confirmation hearing that he wanted ICE to operate more like a “transport” agency that could go around collecting deportees from the jails of local jurisdictions partnering with ICE.

Chad Wolf, who served as acting Homeland Security secretary at the end of Trump’s first term, told me that the president clearly signaled that he wants a “new approach” when he sent Homan to Minneapolis and replaced Noem with Mullin. “The overall policy goals, resources, and the law are likely to stay largely the same,” Wolf said, “but the way they carry out immigration enforcement may look different.”

Noem and her staff were belligerent toward Democrats and also toward reporters, many of whom were skeptical of their methods and claims. The department blocked the release of immigration data, weakened internal oversight, and drew complaints from lawmakers of both parties who said that Noem’s team ignored them. Mullin, who comes from the dealmaking world of Congress, has started off differently. When it came time for Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a Democrat, to question Mullin during the confirmation hearing, Gallego greeted him with “Hello, neighbor”—their Senate offices are nearly adjacent—and Mullin replied, “Hey, brother.”

Two Democrats, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, voted to confirm Mullin, but Gallego did not. I asked him on Wednesday how he thought Mullin would do in the job. “I know he’s a good guy, but at the end of the day, what he does with DHS, or doesn’t do with DHS, is what worries me,” Gallego told me. “I don’t know who is actually going to be in charge of DHS.”

Gallego was referring to Stephen Miller, the White House homeland-security adviser. Gallego said that Miller continues pushing the administration in an extreme direction, citing Miller’s trip to Texas this week to urge Republicans to challenge a 44-year-old Supreme Court decision that upheld education rights for all children, regardless of immigration status. I asked Gallego whether he thought Mullin would take orders from Miller. “I think he’s going to take orders from the president,” Gallego said.

[Read: The wrath of Stephen Miller]

Noem’s rocky 14-month tenure at DHS was marked by two phases. During the first phase, last spring, before DHS got the infusion of new money, Noem led a shock-and-awe campaign aimed mostly at scaring people into leaving. Working off plans formulated by Miller, she spent heavily on ads urging “self-deportation,” while the White House deployed the FBI, the Marshals Service, and other federal law-enforcement agencies to help ICE.

By last May, when it was clear that this approach wouldn’t come close to meeting the White House’s goal of 1 million deportations, Noem and Miller were turning up pressure on the ICE workforce. They set a quota of 3,000 arrests a day and threatened to fire ICE officials who fell short, telling them to sweep up laborers in parking lots. This fueled resentment among overtaxed rank-and-file ICE officers—and still didn’t deliver the deportation numbers Miller wanted. Noem sent Bovino and his Border Patrol agents into Los Angeles last June, and viral social-media clips of agents raiding Home Depot parking lots soon followed.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

Noem’s second phase started after Trump signed the spending bill on July 4, 2025, as Lewandowski implemented a policy requiring the secretary’s approval on every DHS contract worth more than $100,000. The enormous amount of money flowing across Noem’s desk led to complaints of bottlenecks and worsening bureaucracy, and raised suspicions that Lewandowski was grifting off the contracts. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Mullin said that he will rescind the contract-review policy and told senators, “I’m not a micromanager.” But the divided leadership structure that devolved into rivalries during Noem’s tenure remains in place, with Homan as border czar and Miller viewed as the shadow secretary who operates more like an actual czar. Miller continues to hold daily 10 a.m. conference calls with DHS leaders and the heads of other federal agencies to demand updates on the machinery of mass deportation: the pace of ICE hiring, the number of daily arrests, the status of key contracts. Noem reportedly told a colleague, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” according to an Axios report in late January.

Andrea Flores, a former immigration adviser to Joe Biden, told me that the White House has remained steadfast in its mass-deportation goals and has been “putting the infrastructure in place to signal that arrests will continue to grow.”

Homan is a key messenger, Flores said, and Miller is the one setting the agenda.

“The DHS-secretary role appears to be the least influential member of the president’s immigration-policy team,” she said.

Trump officials continue to push an extreme agenda at DHS and across the federal government, Flores said, noting that the administration will present oral arguments next week to the Supreme Court in its effort to limit birthright citizenship.

Donald Trump Is Nothing Like Robert Mueller

2026-03-21T17:15:09-04:00

Robert Mueller III was a Bronze Star Marine veteran, an FBI director, and an American citizen. When the president of the United States heard the news that Mueller died today, he put it this way: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

Mueller was honored for his service in Vietnam, and served presidents of both parties as the director of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency. Donald Trump, whose diagnosis of bone spurs kept him from being sent to that same war, has repeatedly denigrated the American war dead as “losers” and “suckers,” and has expressed disgust in the presence of wounded troops (“No one wants to see that, the wounded,” Trump once complained to the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

Trump has never tried to be the president of all Americans. That deficiency was on grotesque display as he celebrated the death of someone who devoted his life to the country Trump now leads. Of course, Mueller spearheaded the investigation into whether there was collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump never forgave him.

Even by the low standards that Trump has set, cheering the death of another man is abhorrent. Not that it hasn’t happened before. Just four months ago, Trump posted on social media that the filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in their own home because Reiner was a frequent Trump critic. (The couple’s son has been charged in their killing, and investigators have not said that politics played a role in the murders.) Generally speaking, ugly personal attacks are Trump’s go-to mode: He has repeatedly made fun of women’s looks. He called African nations “shithole countries.” He embraced the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He made a punch line out of the brutal assault of Nancy Pelosi’s husband. The list goes on from there.

Mueller, in recent years, had retreated from the spotlight. He made few public appearances after his 2019 testimony before Congress at the end of his investigation into Trump; his performance then was, at times, faltering and confusing. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years later. He died at the age of 81.

Trump, with his nation at war, spent the day golfing near his lush Palm Beach estate. He was still at his club when news of Mueller’s death broke. Trump fired off his reaction a short time later. The pushback was swift. Representative Seth Moulton, a veteran and Democrat from Massachusetts, responded with his own post to say that Trump is “a horrible human being and an embarrassment to the United States.” His colleague Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, said, “Mueller and Trump represent polar opposites of what a public servant should be.”

The Russia investigation—or, as Trump put it, the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”—has long infuriated the president. Questions swirled throughout the 2016 campaign about possible links between Moscow and Trump and his associates. Trump himself fueled much of the speculation and, in May 2017, abruptly fired the FBI director, James Comey, who was leading an investigation into the possible collusion. Trump made no secret of why he did it: The very next day, he hosted the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office and told him that firing Comey had “taken off” the “great pressure” that Trump had faced over the investigation. Just over a week later, the Department of Justice named Mueller, who was then retired, as special counsel to investigate a sitting president.

The investigation shadowed Trump, who only added to it by routinely making policy decisions and pronouncements that favored Russia and its authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin. This was most vividly on display in their July 2018 summit in Helsinki when Trump, in response to a question I asked about Moscow’s election interference, sided with Putin over his own nation’s intelligence agencies and then went on yet another screed about the Russia probe.

Meanwhile, back home, Mueller became an unlikely pop-culture figure. Democrats pinned their hopes on him—there were T-shirts, mugs, and more social-media memes that you could count—as they fervently hoped that the Mueller probe would rid themselves of Trump. It was an uncomfortable fit; Mueller stayed out of sight and instructed his team to stay silent; despite the constant attacks from Trump and Republicans, his team would not comment. That silence and resulting air of mystery, in a way, only inspired Democrats more; surely, they said, Mueller would save the day.

He did not. Trump never sat for an interview, and Mueller’s team leaned on a DOJ guideline that stated that presidents could not be charged with a crime. Mueller concluded that it could not be proved that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia. And he did not offer an opinion as to whether Trump obstructed justice in trying to block the investigation. Mueller first gave his report to Attorney General Bill Barr in March 2019, and Barr framed it for public consumption, painting it in the most favorable light for the president. Trump claimed that the outcome was “total exoneration.” It was not. But his presidency survived.

Trump has always governed as an “us versus them” president. Every other man who has sat in the Oval Office has at least nodded toward unity or made an effort to win over those who didn’t vote for him. Trump never has. Instead, he has vilified his perceived opponents—whether Democrats, journalists, or any other average Americans—and deemed them traitors or enemies of the people. In his second term, he has used the Department of Justice, the same agency where Mueller worked for nearly 30 years, as a tool to carry out retribution. There traditionally was a bright line between DOJ and the West Wing; these days, the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington has Trump’s face displayed on a giant banner hanging out front. The agency has opened investigations into several Trump foes, including Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and others. Trump has instead used the government’s levers of powers to punish law firms, universities, and blue states. He surged masked ICE agents into cities that did not vote for him. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s post about Mueller.

Other presidents have been partisan; other presidents have exhibited vile behavior. But Trump alone has publicly exulted in the death of an American. Mueller never sought the attention, though his life story was worthy of biopic treatment. He volunteered to fight in Vietnam and won numerous citations, including the Bronze Star for combat valor when he rescued a wounded Marine under enemy fire during a 1968 ambush. The following year, he was shot in combat. He returned to lead his platoon a few months later. He later practiced law, became a U.S. attorney, and rose through the ranks of the Department of Justice before being chosen by President George W. Bush to become FBI director shortly before the September 11 attacks.

At the conclusion of Mueller’s 10-year term, a president of the other party, Barack Obama, asked him to stay on for another two years. Mueller was approved by all senators, Republican and Democrat alike, 100–0.

Not So Fast, Bill Maher

2026-03-20T11:23:58-04:00

This story was updated on March 20, 2026, at 6:12 p.m. ET.

You could measure the on-and-off feud between President Trump and the comedian Bill Maher in weeks, years, or decades. Last month, Trump called Maher a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” in a lengthy Truth Social post. Years ago, he briefly sued Maher for suggesting that his father was an orangutan.

All of which makes Maher an unlikely pick—at least at first blush—to receive the last marquee honor at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts before it shuts down for two years, at Trump’s direction, in July. Maher was chosen to receive this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, two people familiar with the selection told us. One of them, who works at the center, said an announcement was expected soon. A third person said that Maher had been offered the award—and that Trump had been supportive of the idea—but was not sure whether Maher had accepted it. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because Maher had not yet been officially announced as the award recipient. As with all decisions involving this president, the move was subject to being reversed until publicly announced.

And, in fact, that is precisely what appears to have happened. After this story was published, the White House called the Kennedy Center and made clear that Maher would not receive the prize. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also then sent us a statement: “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award.” The Kennedy Center staffer confirmed to us that the decision had been made but was reversed. The Kennedy Center has not responded to our requests for comment.

The Twain Prize ceremony, which streams on Netflix, is one of two major broadcast events at the Kennedy Center, along with the Kennedy Center Honors. Trump took over the Kennedy Center last February by replacing its trustees with loyalists, and was soon fantasizing to them about selecting the Honors recipients himself. Although he would go on to personally approve the honorees (including Sylvester Stallone and the glam-metal stars KISS), it was too late to swap out the 2025 Twain winner, Conan O’Brien, who had been tapped by the previous Kennedy Center leadership. The event functioned as a last hurrah for the old Kennedy Center, with Will Ferrell and Sarah Silverman among the comics roasting both O’Brien (who was there) and Trump (who was not). John Mulaney’s best line was that the Kennedy Center would soon be renamed the “Roy Cohn Pavilion of Big Strong Men Who Love Cats.”

In fact, the board of trustees eventually renamed it “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” a change that prompted a new wave of artist cancellations (Philip Glass, the San Francisco Ballet) and more anemic ticket sales. By this February, when Trump said the center would close for a two-year renovation, the attractions on the calendar had thinned. At the same time, one notable recent trend has been the booking of right-coded comedians such as Tony Hinchcliffe, Adam Carolla, and Jeff Foxworthy.

[Read: What the Kennedy Center closure really means for art]

With his largely center-left views, the 70-year-old Maher doesn’t belong in that cohort, though some of his positions are idiosyncratic, and he has a tendency to punch left as well as right. Moreover, Maher hasn’t been immune to Trump’s reality-distortion field. After Maher frequently jabbed the president’s first administration, he visited Trump at the White House in 2025, in a meeting arranged by Kid Rock. Describing the dinner on his HBO show Real Time, Maher called Trump “gracious and measured” and willing to “listen and accept me as a possible friend.” The blowback among other comedians, like Marc Maron, came fast. The proximate subject of a satirical essay Larry David wrote for The New York Times—titled “My Dinner With Adolf”—was obvious.

By this February, Maher and Trump were back on the outs. Writing that Maher’s program had reverted to its old, anti-Trump ways, the president posted, “It was a total waste of time for me to have this jerk at the White House.” He was still sharing links to articles about their “Valentine’s Day breakup” as recently as March 6. Maher unpacked the dispute on his show the same day. “Someone has to help Donald Trump understand that I don’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” he said. “He suffers from Bill Maher Derangement Syndrome.” But he gave Trump credit for a few wins, including removing violent criminals who were in the country illegally and “taking out Iran’s nuclear capability.”
Now Maher, who was set to receive one of comedy’s highest honors in a building widely associated with one of his favorite punching bags, will likely have to wait a while longer for a prize he has long coveted.

A Serious Senate Debate About an Unserious Bill

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

The United States has launched a war in Iran. Soaring gas prices are pounding an economy that many Americans already considered unaffordable. And the federal department responsible for protecting the homeland ran out of money more than a month ago.

Naturally, the Senate is debating none of those things.

Instead, Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber are spending this week trying—likely in vain—to pass a bill aimed at addressing President Trump’s yearslong obsession with his 2020 defeat. The proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot.

The legislation is ostensibly designed to toughen enforcement of a core tenet of American democracy that most election experts say is already rigorously enforced: the law that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. But those same experts, along with Trump himself, view the SAVE America Act as much more far-reaching. If it’s passed, voting-rights experts contend, more than 20 million eligible voters could lose ready access to the polls, including many married women who have changed their name and young people who have moved out of state to attend college. (Some Republicans and election experts say that these claims are greatly overstated.) In the president’s estimation, the bill’s passage could seal a Republican win in this year’s elections. “It will guarantee the midterms” in favor of Republicans, Trump told the House GOP conference earlier this month.

The president’s problem is that even the SAVE America Act’s GOP supporters believe that it stands little chance of becoming law. For that to happen, at least nine Democrats would have to join Republicans to defeat a filibuster—a scenario about as likely as Democrats agreeing to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. A slightly more realistic path would be for Republicans to end the filibuster altogether, which Trump has been urging them to do since his first swing through the White House. Although nearly all of the Senate’s 53 Republicans support the SAVE America Act, far fewer of them are willing to blow up the institution’s most controversial quirk to get it passed.

None of these challenges has stopped Trump or his most fervent allies from demanding that Senate Republicans take up the SAVE America Act and try their best to pass it anyway. The president has threatened to not sign any legislation—even a resumption of funding for the Department of Homeland Security—until Congress puts the elections bill on his desk. The proposal’s leading champion, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, has posted on X about little else for months, and he warned that GOP senators who don’t try to outlast Democratic attempts to filibuster the legislation should lose their seat. (Senate Majority Leader John Thune pointedly brushed back this threat.)

The most pressing question about the SAVE America Act is not whether it’s going to pass, but why Trump and his allies are so determined to see the Senate put up a bill that’s doomed to fail. The White House told us in a statement that the legislation is “commonsense” and pointed to polling showing high support for voter identification. “This has always been a top priority for President Trump,” the spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “Our elections should be treated with the utmost security.”

Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat. “When his allies lose elections, it’s a talking point,” Chandler said: “You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]

Trump has said plainly that he wants to “nationalize” elections that by constitutional design are run by the states. A year ago, he issued an executive order— portions of which a federal court blocked from being implemented—that directed the federal Election Assistance Commission to enforce a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration and sought to compel states to hand over voter rolls to DHS. The FBI has seized materials from the 2020 election in Georgia, federal investigations into that contest are under way in Arizona, and state election officials are alarmed by requests to coordinate their activities with federal agencies whose staff now include election deniers.

Given the bill’s dim prospects, we asked Chandler how seriously her group is taking the legislation. “We’re taking it seriously for what it is,” she replied, “which is not necessarily just an effort to pass a bill.”

If and when the SAVE America Act is defeated, voting-rights advocates don’t expect that Trump will be deterred. Rather, they predict that he will escalate attempts to interfere with the midterm elections. But their fears would become far more acute were the bill to somehow pass. Its requirement for people to prove citizenship in person when registering to vote would cut off the mail- and online-registration options now available in many states. (Trump has pushed the Senate to go even further to limit mail and early voting, both of which are popular options with voters of all political affiliations.)

More than 21 million people lack “ready access” to the documents that the bill would require Americans to provide—a passport, a birth certificate, a military ID, or a driver’s license compliant with the Real ID program, according to Michael Waldman of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. New Hampshire passed a similar law in 2024, and voting groups cited reports that hundreds of people were turned away at the polls during municipal elections last year due to lack of proper documentation.

Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the bill would disproportionately affect the approximately eight in 10 married women who change their name. “We just haven’t seen anything on the scale where nearly 70 million women, in one fell swoop, could be challenged and have real barriers to being able to access the ballot,” she said.

Both Trump and the bill’s Democratic critics have characterized the proposal as an overt attempt to swing future elections in the GOP’s favor. But the actual impact the SAVE America Act would have on voting is hard to predict. In a shift from the Obama era, Republican candidates now rely more on their ability to register and turn out less frequent voters, and they have made gains among young and nonwhite voters, who election experts say would face the biggest hurdles if the bill were enacted. And Trump narrowly carried married women in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, exit polls showed.

Democrats and some nonpartisan voting advocates have in recent years grown more open to the idea of a national voter-ID law; they considered a proposal from then-Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia when they desperately needed his support for a broader package to expand voting access. “Democrats support commonsense voter-ID proposals,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday. “But the SAVE Act is not a voter-ID bill. It’s a voter-suppression bill.”

[Read: The last MAGA prisoner]

With primaries already under way for this fall’s elections, the effort to implement the changes, should the bill pass, could result in chaos, election experts told us. Many election offices—especially those in rural America—lack the staff, funding, and technology to carry out such a significant mandate, they said. (In Washington State, the bill could cost at least $35 million to implement this year, according to estimates from Senator Maria Cantwell’s office. The National Association of Counties pegs the nationwide cost to administer changes at $510 million each election cycle.)

Election workers already face enormous strain, and many jurisdictions are struggling to retain and recruit enough people to staff the polls. The SAVE America Act would only exacerbate those challenges, advocates told us, because it could expose election workers who erroneously register people without proper citizenship records to criminal penalties. Under the bill, states would have to give voter lists to DHS to run against citizenship data. Already, dozens of states have refused to provide full voter lists to the federal government as part of its efforts to collect the information. (At least 12 states have either complied or said that they will, according to the Brennan Center. The Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states for the information, and three federal courts have ruled this year that the federal government has no right to the data.)

Some Republican secretaries of state view the debate as an unserious attempt to create policy, election experts who have spoken with them told us. (Several GOP secretaries of state we contacted didn’t want to talk about the legislation; one spokesperson described it to us as a “hypothetical” proposal unworthy of his boss’s time.) Should the bill pass, they figure, the courts will block it—at minimum because of a legal theory that courts should not allow rules to be changed so close to an election, because it could lead to confusion among voters and poll workers. They also argue that state and local election officials already routinely kick ineligible people off of voter rolls and that some states are taking on more restrictive proof-of-citizenship requirements on their own. Proof-of-citizenship bills have been signed by the South Dakota governor and passed by legislatures in Utah and Florida.

[Read: Trump’s favorite voter-ID bill would probably backfire]

Derek Monson, the executive director of the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based conservative think tank, said the centralization of election authority and processes, as well as of citizenship information and voter data, in the hands of the federal government could make voter fraud easier to commit. “What we’ve done is simplified the act of voter fraud for people who want to commit it,” he said. He laid out a scenario in which a clearinghouse of voting data maintained by fewer people at the federal level (as opposed to more people across all 50 states) is accessed by bad actors. “It seems like every other week some federal agency is being hacked,” he added. “Now you’ve just gift-wrapped everyone’s personal voter data for a hacker to get.”

The SAVE America Act’s biggest supporters wave off these concerns. To the many Trump fans who have come to share his unfounded grievances about the 2020 elections, the Senate’s debate represents a moment of validation—win or lose. It “is a sea change from 2020,” Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn his defeat that year, told us. As for the bill’s long-shot chances, she said: “You can’t win if you don’t try.”