Politics | The Atlantic

The FBI Is Reportedly Investigating a Leak to an Atlantic Writer

2026-05-06T10:50:05-04:00

Nearly three weeks after The Atlantic reported that some government officials were alarmed by FBI Director Kash Patel’s behavior, including conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences, MS NOW reported this morning that the bureau has “launched a criminal leak investigation” that focuses on the Atlantic journalist who wrote the story, Sarah Fitzpatrick.

MS NOW reported that there is concern among FBI agents assigned to the investigation, citing two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity. Leak investigations are typically focused on government officials, not on journalists.

“They know they are not supposed to do this,” one source told MS NOW. “But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

The FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied the investigation and said in a statement, “This is completely false. No such investigation like this exists and the reporter you mention is not being investigated at all.” The White House referred me to the FBI.

The MS NOW report said that it was unclear whether internal interviews have taken place to determine who would have had “the kind of information” that appeared in the Atlantic story. It also said it was not known what steps investigators have taken in the case, including whether the FBI had sought to obtain Fitzpatrick’s phone records, examined her social-media contacts, or run her name and information through FBI databases.

“If confirmed to be true, this would represent an outrageous attack on the free press and the First Amendment itself,” The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said in a statement. “We will defend The Atlantic and its staff vigorously; we will not be intimidated by illegitimate investigations or other acts of politically motivated retaliation; we will continue to cover the FBI professionally, fairly, and thoroughly; and we will continue to practice journalism in the public interest.”

This is not the first time in recent months that federal law enforcement has targeted traditional news-gathering practices in ways that seem designed to intimidate journalists and discourage critical news stories. In January, FBI agents executed a search warrant at the home of the Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her phone and other devices as part of an investigation into a government contractor who was charged with unlawfully transmitting and retaining classified information. Weeks earlier, Natanson had published an essay about how she had connected with more than 1,000 sources about the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal government. Some of that work, along with that of Natanson’s colleagues, was recognized this week when the Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In March, the FBI began investigating the New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after she wrote about Patel using bureau personnel to protect his girlfriend and ferry her around, the paper reported. (It also reported that the FBI decided not to pursue a case.)

In an April 17 article titled “The FBI Director Is MIA,” Fitzpatrick wrote that she interviewed more than two dozen people about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. The article included several anecdotes about Patel that had not been previously reported, including an incident in which Patel struggled to log on to an internal computer system and thought he might have been fired, according to nine people familiar with what happened. Fitzpatrick also wrote that there was concern across the government about Patel’s drinking, according to several officials, and that he was known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication. At one point last year, Patel’s security detail requested “breaching equipment” because the director had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Patel denied the details in the story and sued The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for defamation, seeking $250 million in damages. The lawsuit alleges that the article contains “false and obviously fabricated allegations” and claims that the magazine did not give the agency enough time to respond. The Atlantic has defended its reporting and called the lawsuit “meritless.” White House aides have said that President Trump continues to support the FBI director, although he has not mounted a vociferous defense of Patel.

Last year, Patel sued the former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi for stating on Morning Joe that the FBI director had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building,” where the agency is headquartered. On April 21, a day after Patel filed the defamation suit against The Atlantic, a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas dismissed the suit against Figliuzzi.

The House of Representatives Is Turning Into the Electoral College

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

The very short list of constraints on partisan gerrymandering has gotten even shorter. Until last week, the Supreme Court had interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require states to draw some majority-minority districts. But in Louisiana v. Callais, it overturned that requirement and held that the VRA prohibits gerrymandering only if it’s done with the explicit goal of racial discrimination. If the intent behind disenfranchising minority voters appears to be merely partisan, the gerrymander is now legal. The ruling will allow Republican state legislatures in the South to erase most if not all of the region’s few blue House districts without fear of being blocked in court.

And so the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse. Democrats will respond to the Republican response to Callais; Republicans will respond to the response to the response; voters will lose in the process. In a few years, almost every seat in the House of Representatives could be safely occupied by a hyper-partisan incumbent, beholden only to primary voters. The chamber could become something like the Electoral College: Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president.

Because of the timing of the ruling, the effects are likely to be modest for the upcoming midterms. On Thursday, Louisiana suspended its primary election to give the state time to redraw the map. The legislature might eliminate just the one seat at issue in Callais, or it could try to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black, Democratic-leaning districts. A few more seats could be in play elsewhere in the South. On Friday, after saying two days earlier that she would not do so, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced that she would call a special legislative session to redraw the state’s maps. Donald Trump has claimed that he has the Tennessee governor’s promise to do likewise. In other deep-red states, key deadlines have already passed, making last-minute map-drawing difficult or impossible.

The implications for 2028 and onward are more dramatic. Trump’s successful push to get Republican states to do off-cycle redistricting this year already blew past one long-standing impediment to gerrymandering maximalism. The removal of the VRA will make the arms race even more cutthroat. “It’s gonna be awful,” Sean Trende, a prominent districting expert, told me. Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, compared the situation to “an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Republicans could draw Democrats completely out of the delegations of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and take another district or two in Georgia.

Presumably, Democrats would feel the need to respond. In some blue states, including New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Washington, voters and legislators would have to decide to scrap nonpartisan redistricting commissions in order to join the gerrymandering free-for-all. In others, such as Oregon and Maryland, that wouldn’t be necessary. “I’d take 52 seats from California and 17 seats from Illinois,” Representative Terri Sewell, a Black Democrat who represents a sure-to-be-torn-up district in Alabama, said at a press conference after the Callais decision came down. By that, she meant all 52 and all 17. Could California, a state with more registered Republicans than any other, really send zero Republican representatives to Congress? It’s mathematically conceivable. Likewise, Illinois could theoretically engineer a blue-wash. The key is to draw districts that start in big cities and stretch all the way across the state, so that urban Democratic voters outweigh rural Republicans in every district. These maps are sometimes called “baconmanders,” because the districts resemble thin, curvy strips.

[David A. Graham: How the Supreme Court came to accept a practice it called unjust]

Democratic hardball would probably inspire Republicans outside the South to get even more ambitious. Their job would be easier, because red states tend not to have redistricting commissions. Opportunities abound in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kentucky. Even Ohio and Texas could probably find a few more blue seats to eliminate.

Figuring out which party benefits more from this mass disenfranchisement is extremely difficult, because so many variables—including referenda, legislator preferences, and state-court legal challenges—go into determining what happens in each state. “I just feel like you’d really just be guessing,” Kondik told me. Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, was willing to game it out. He tentatively predicted that states would stop just short of the absolute maximum level of gerrymandering, winding up with 206 safe Republican seats and 203 safe Democratic seats. Because there are 435 total seats in the House of Representatives, this would leave the whole country with only 26 competitive districts.

One factor that could stop legislators from enacting the most ruthless possible gerrymander—which even the Supreme Court cannot overturn—is a bias in favor of preserving incumbents’ districts. Creating a new Democratic (or Republican) district generally requires taking some territory away from another district that votes so overwhelmingly Democratic (or Republican) that it has votes to spare. But a congressman who usually wins by 20 does not want to see his advantage suddenly cut to five points—that means more pressure to campaign, fundraise, and worry about what voters think. A similar fear is that of the infelicitously named “dummymander,” in which one party tries to create so many seats for itself that it winds up spreading its support too thin. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans entirely control the map-drawing process, but both parties are competitive statewide. The state legislature could draw 14 districts that all slightly broke for Trump in 2024, but that could mean losing all 14 if the state shifts a few points to the left. (A final factor limiting gerrymandering is shame on the part of state legislators. But this is in steadily dwindling supply.)

Whichever party ultimately gains more seats from the gerrymandering wars, the loser is clear: American democracy. In a maximum-gerrymandering scenario, more than 400 seats in the House could be safe and essentially uncontestable, delivering to voters year after year an unresponsive and unimpeachable class of lazy representatives with little incentive to represent them. At a high-enough level of abstraction, the way out is simple: Congress could enact a federal law prohibiting partisan gerrymandering. The details are not quite as straightforward. One major impediment is, simply, that Republicans have never expressed much interest in ending gerrymandering. As each state gerrymanders, moreover, it sends ever more partisan representatives to the House—the exact representatives least likely to mutually disarm and end the practice that brought them there.

And no single reform is without its flaws. The Democrats’ 2021 voting-reform package, which all but one House Democrat voted for before it died in the Senate, mandated independent commissions in every state. But those commissions can deadlock or produce maps that are still unfair in some way, sometimes requiring the courts to intervene. Academics tend to prefer more creative solutions—such as having one party draw a map with twice as many districts as necessary and then letting the other party choose how to combine them, or switching entirely to a system of proportional representation with multimember districts—but academics are not in charge. If Republicans were to finally join the fight against gerrymandering, they’d likely have their own ideas for how to fix it.

None of these approaches would be perfect. All would be preferable to the status quo, in which politicians elected to represent the will of the voters find more and more elaborate ways to avoid having to do so.

Democrats Could Use a Cold Shower Before the Midterms

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

The Democratic wilderness is starting to look awfully sunny. Gone, for the most part, are the blame-casting, hand-wringing, and paralysis-by-analysis that gripped the party after Donald Trump’s reelection. Same with the constant grousing about how the party is fractured, leaderless, locked out of power in Washington, and unloved across the country.

Actually, that might all still be true. But you don’t hear about it as much. Democrats are too busy being giddy with anticipation for the midterms. Examples of this hyper-confidence began popping up at the beginning of the year (“Democrats will cruise to victory, including Senate control,” the writer Brian Beutler predicted) and have proliferated since then. Nearly every day seems to bring another Democratic overperformance in a special or off-year election, or another great poll for the party, improved House or Senate forecast, or headline about how Republicans are bracing for a brutal November. Is a blue wave coming? A blue tsunami? Or another blue mirage?

The causes for Democratic optimism are legitimate. The president’s approval ratings—historically a solid predictor of a party’s midterm outlook—have now dropped consistently into the 30s. Trump was already underwater on his two most important issues, the economy and the cost of living. Then he launched a protracted, unpopular war of choice with Iran that sent gas prices soaring, the Middle East into turmoil, and his numbers ever further south—all while he dismissed Democrats’ talk of affordability as a “good line of bullshit” and spoke nonstop about the need for an extravagant ballroom at the White House.

According to The New York Times’ polling average, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s overall performance, the highest share since right after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A recent Fox News poll also showed that, by four percentage points, Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans on the economy, the first time since 2010 that Democrats have prevailed on that question.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

Yet to hear some bullish Democrats talk, the idea that the party might merely win the few seats it needs to flip the House—which was widely expected to begin with—feels needlessly cautious. In many cases, Democrats have become unnervingly unrestrained in expressing their higher-end hopes. “Your viewers need to know that the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 seats,” the unnervingly unrestrained James Carville told Fox News in January. “Maybe as high as 45.”

Until recently, arguing that the Democrats could net the four seats required to take back the Senate would have been a major reach. That scenario now seems more realistic, as Democratic candidates are polling competitively (or better) in a number of states—Ohio, Alaska, Texas—that once looked far beyond reach. But some Democrats are allowing themselves to think beyond the merely conceivable. “I feel like we’re going to take back the Senate,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NOTUS, which reported that Schumer envisioned “as many as eight seats in play.”

“This cycle very well might be more like a 1974 post-Watergate cycle, where voters are saying ‘burn the ships,’” David Jolly, a former Republican House member from Florida who is running for governor as a Democrat, told The Bulwark.

Before anyone starts burning ships, a reality check: Democrats have been left devastated by elections in the recent past that they’d also felt great about. The midterms are also still six months away. And presidents—none more than the 45th and 47th—have an unrivaled ability to make news and redirect prevailing narratives. So, for that matter, do Republican-friendly judges, such as the ones on the Supreme Court who last week tossed a grenade of uncertainty onto congressional maps by potentially jeopardizing Democratic seats in majority-Black districts.

Democrats picking up 49 House seats—as they did in 1974—would be exceedingly unlikely in this or any modern cycle. The country is too solidly 50–50, and the congressional maps have been redrawn over the years in a way that will ensure a high degree of stasis. After Democrats won a net total of 41 seats in 2018—their biggest gain since 1974—they significantly exhausted their body of “winnable” seats and thus the potential for future pickups. Only three Republicans carried districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024.

“The pool of possible defections for either party in a bad year is a very small number,” Charlie Cook, a veteran political analyst and the founder of the Cook Political Report, told me.

Dan Pfeiffer, a former top Barack Obama aide and a Pod Save America co-host, told me that even if Democrats manage this year to repeat their popular-vote margin from 2018—eight points—they would win considerably fewer than 41 seats and probably closer to 20. Cook said that Democrats are likely to have a “good” year in the House elections—“good defined between a dozen and 30 seats,” he explained. “But I have a hard time seeing that go north of 30.”

As for the Senate, Democrats face an extremely high degree of difficulty. Cook pointed out that they would not only have to take at least some states that Trump won three times (North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Texas). They would also have to hold Democratic seats in places that Trump won in 2024 (Georgia, Michigan) and would likely have to defeat the Republican Susan Collins in Maine, who has proved over three decades to be a unicorn of electoral resilience. Her likely opponent, the Bernie Sanders–backed oyster farmer Graham Platner, has generally been polling ahead of her. But he is a political novice who is packing heavy baggage, which pro-Collins committees will undoubtedly unpack for maximum effect.

Cook believes that Republicans are still more likely to hold the Senate, in spite of the optimistic Democratic projections. “For a lot of these folks, they’re going with the vibe and not looking at the arithmetic,” he said. Still, neither he nor Pfeiffer, both committed data gluttons, thinks that the Democrats’ buoyancy is misplaced. “I mean, the situation is quite good,” Pfeiffer said. “It does keep getting better.” He added that 2026 might be “the best political environment Democrats have had since 2006, and may be better than that.” (Democrats flipped both the House and the Senate in 2006.)

It’s worth recalling that Republicans had similarly high hopes before the 2022 midterms. A consensus of forecasters in the media and from both parties predicted big Republican wins, while a much smaller contingent of Democratic analysts argued that the election would in fact not be so bad. Simon Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic operative, was the most visible proponent of this contrarian view—and a purveyor of what became known as Democratic “hopium.”

As it turned out, Democrats performed far better than expected that November. Republicans won nine House seats, enough to take only a small majority in Congress. Democrats also gained a Senate seat by winning a large majority of close battleground states. There was no red wave to speak of. Rosenberg was seemingly vindicated, and was celebrated as a corrective to the Democratic Party’s pessimistic impulses. He launched a popular Substack called Hopium Chronicles, which remains widely read. Yet his hopium-laced prognosis for Democratic victory in 2024 turned out to be quite off.

[Ben Ritz: Democrats learned the wrong lesson from 2024]

When I spoke with Rosenberg recently, he sounded cautiously sanguine about November but still generous with his hopium offerings. He thinks that Democrats have a genuine shot at winning the Senate. He pointed out that national GOP committees and super PACs have in recent weeks engaged in “defensive spending”—they are putting huge sums of money into states that appeared solidly red a few months ago.

“This was an admission that those states are really in play, right?” Rosenberg told me. Republicans, he said, are “really panicking.” (Republicans can spend near-unlimited sums—defensively and otherwise—because they enjoy a huge fundraising advantage over Democrats.)

As the hopium pipe keeps getting passed around the Democratic campfire, could it also carry a risk of complacency? Improved morale is great for the party, but not if it saps voters of their most vital asset: urgency. Pfeiffer did not sound concerned when I asked him about this. “No one’s going to stay home because they’re overconfident,” he said. “We are so far from that.”

The elections of 2024 and 2016 remain fresh in the party consciousness, which is its own activation energy. And Democrats turned out in large numbers in 2018, during Trump’s first term, whereas Republicans have voted less reliably in midterms. The president’s willingness to campaign could boost GOP turnout, but that’s assuming that he will be motivated to do so—and he has not seemed to be up to this point. It’s also assuming that his supporters will vote as he says.

Trump is still here, though, despite many past predictions of his demise. That alone should serve as the Democrats’ main antidote to hopium.

My Role as a ‘Complicit’ Journalist

2026-05-05T07:00:00-04:00

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Cole Tomas Allen, the man accused of trying to assassinate President Trump late last month, appeared to consume political news like so many of his fellow citizens, absorbing daily doses of outrage on social media, metabolizing the anger, and projecting it out into the world in his own voice. His posts are remarkable for how typical they are for such platforms, where expressions of disgust are currency and polarization is the product.

In response to a clip of Vice President Vance expressing pride in ending aid to Ukraine, a Bluesky account reportedly used by Allen read, “What a piece of shit.” When another account argued that members of the administration were “damned” for serving a president who posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, the assumed Allen account quoted from the Book of Revelation about God’s fury at worshippers of “the beast.” When Trump proposed charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, Allen apparently responded, “It’s public knowledge that he likely IS basically a sociopathic mob boss.”

These were not calls for violence. But they were building blocks for the crime he would soon allegedly commit. In the manifesto he is said to have emailed to his family, Allen deployed the buzzwords of social media, casting his political disagreements as questions of character that diminished the humanity of his targets. He said that he aimed to kill Trump-administration officials, but that everyone in the ballroom was fair game because “most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit.” He argued that the constitutional order had been upended and the social contract broken: “The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.”

I was among the hundreds of “complicit” journalists who attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. My job is to interview figures from across the political spectrum, including the president and his advisers. I attend their events; I try to earn their trust; I inform the public about what is happening. Sometimes my work requires me to attend functions with administration officials; occasionally I am required to wear a tuxedo in the performance of this duty. It is no great revelation to say that Allen’s purported manifesto is wrong on the facts: The United States of America is still ruled by law, not by one man, or several people. Independent judges continue to interpret that law, and the president has not successfully defied a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court or the voting public. Trump has expanded executive power, dismantled federal ethics practices, and adopted authoritarian tactics, but he does not rule as a tyrant. The free press, despite new legal threats and cowering ownership, continues to check his power. The midterm elections will take place on November 3, and, if current sentiment holds, Trump will see his power diminished. Allen, not Trump, is the villain in this particular story, if he is guilty as charged. There is no justification for the violence he attempted.

But I cannot stop thinking about the role that journalists like me play in the drama that ended with Allen face down in a Washington Hilton hallway. I worry that we are at the beginning of a cycle of political violence that is going to get much worse, that will threaten more journalists, more corporate leaders, more candidates, and more elected and appointed officials. Public access to leaders will diminish as a result, and the gulf between the powerful and the aggrieved will grow. The list of recent attacks by suspects who seem to have been influenced not only by unfolding news events but also by the sludge of online political discourse is long and terrifying: Luigi Mangione, the accused murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; Daniel Moreno-Gama, the accused Molotov-cocktail-wielding attacker at the home of the OpenAI leader Sam Altman, who has faced other threats; Vance Boelter, the alleged killer of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband; Elias Rodriguez, the alleged killer of two Israeli-embassy employees outside the Capital Jewish Museum; Robert Bowers, the convicted anti-Semitic mass shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue; Payton Gendron, the convicted neo-Nazi shooter at a Buffalo supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood; Patrick Crusius, the convicted racist shooter at an El Paso Walmart. (The first five await trials.)

[Read: Rise of the blood populist]

No act has a single cause, and all of those suspects appear to have been mentally unstable to varying degrees. But their ideologies also appear to have been nurtured by the technologies we use to distribute and process political information, which isolate us from one another and push us to more extreme conclusions. Modern democracies function on the relatively recent idea that the violence that historically accompanied power transfer should be replaced with individual rights and open elections. These alleged assailants concluded that this idea no longer held, a conclusion that I observe as a growing feature of the online discourse, which routinely casts real policy difference and character judgment in apocalyptic terms stripped of critical nuance. After September 11, the national-security apparatus focused on finding homegrown terrorists who had been radicalized virtually by distant Muslim radicals. Now radicalization—including for many of the pro-Trump rioters who tried to paralyze the democratic process on January 6, 2021—comes from the algorithmic information systems themselves, which reward outrage, conspiracism, and emotional responses. They also diminish understanding, empathy, and verifiable facts.

My work unintentionally provides raw material for this ecosystem. Four days after the security breach at the Correspondents’ Dinner, I co-wrote an article about Trump’s tendency to compare himself to great figures from history—Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar, in particular. The article contained no hint of a justification for political violence. But as it churned through social media, that’s where it ended up, sparking one outraged post after another by enraged readers who called Trump “batshit crazy,” “f*cking insane,” and much more. “Was the guy who bum rushed the correspondents dinner with a shotgun the bad guy (?)” asked one user on X, responding to a link to the story. “We supposed to just let him conquer the planet and crown himself Emperor Of Earth ??”

This happens all the time. And so I do feel implicated, just not in the way Allen’s manifesto would have it.

Perhaps the most famous scene in The Boys on the Bus, the Timothy Crouse account of reporters covering the 1972 presidential campaign, takes place after the second debate between Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. Newspaper reporters swarm the typewriter of the lead Associated Press writer, Walter Mears, to find out how he will start his story. They each worked for regional monopolies, with captive audiences, and wanted to please their editors. If they filed something different from Mears, they would have to explain themselves.

By the time I started covering presidential campaigns, in 2008, the incentives had reversed. On the internet, we all wrote for the same captive audience, sitting in front of computers at home, so there was no upside in writing the same lede as The New York Times or The Washington Post. To win internet traffic, you had to distinguish yourself. Small things became more important, and appealing to specific groups suddenly had advantages. A blogosphere of liberal and conservative writers—the precursors of social media—emerged to filter what happened through ideological lenses.

Around the same time, the founders of Politico began to adapt traditional media to the new technology. For decades, major newspapers had assigned reporters to watch the Sunday political talk shows and write about the news that was made. Politico’s editors realized that the digital world rewarded bite-size slices and multiple headlines that could ride on Google Search. In one instance in 2009, Politico produced nine separate headlines from a single CNN interview with Vice President Dick Cheney. Some could appeal to liberal emotional cues, perhaps earning a link from The Huffington Post. Some could resonate with the right, earning a link from the Drudge Report. Every reader would get only part of the story.

This echoed the shift in broadcast news that began with cable television. Fox News’s Roger Ailes had discovered in the ’90s that people watched not for information but for emotional gratification—to get mad, to feel the thrill of the underdog, the excitement of a car chase. (Ailes also obsessively demanded that female anchors display their bare legs.) Online, liberals clicked on stories about conservative rot. Conservatives clicked on stories about liberal excess. Independents clicked on stories about the corruption of the whole system. The news became an us-versus-them training ground.

Social media, the current architecture for mass distribution, gave algorithms the ability to supercharge the emotional resonance of information by prioritizing delivery based on engagement, a measure that largely tracks the tingling appeal. But algorithms, unlike regional newspapers, Politico, and blogs, do not screen for falsehoods and have no reputations to protect. So the fidelity to facts soon fell away. (What AI will do to us next is unclear: Some people have argued that the voice of AI is, for the moment, less polarizing than the algorithmic maw. Others predict that AI slop will accelerate the same algorithmic incentives and sever us from the physical world.)

It’s hard to imagine a story more fully covered than one about shots fired at a dinner attended by hundreds of journalists. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer watched a man sprint through the magnetometers and get tackled, and was on his network within minutes detailing what he saw. But if you consumed news of the attack on social media, you were at least as likely to be offered a conspiracist version of the event—the version that gave you the greatest emotional charge—suggesting that Trump could have staged the attempt on his life. The former MSNBC host Joy Reid raised the possibility on her podcast, just as the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson did. “If it was political theater, that would be one of the biggest manipulations in modern history,” Carlson said in a widely viewed video clip, adopting the just-asking-questions mode that has made him one of the most cynical rage-farmers of his generation.

[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner ]

Once you understand these incentives, the other major distortions of political news fall into place. I’ve been in this business for a while, and I can more or less predict the likely readership of a story before it is published. The more a story taps an emotional vein—usually outrage or grievance—the more traffic it will tend to attract from social media. I am in the business of writing long and complicated stories full of nuance. Yet I am at the mercy of platforms that want to turn my words into cortisol and endorphins, often for people who will never click the link to read what I wrote. Regardless of my intentions, my work can fuel the false division I despise. Each derivative of my work, processed through the algorithm, becomes more cartoonish and less descriptive of what is real.

Every part of the political ecosystem now plays the game. Grievance, like a virus that can pass a cell wall, is often the best delivery vehicle. This explains much of the rise of Trump, the original insult-tweeting candidate, who designed his norm-breaking routine to provoke anger and deepen resentment on social media. It also explains the behavior of some Democrats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries assessed a ruling this week on the Voting Rights Act by calling the Supreme Court’s majority “illegitimate,” a moment that immediately became viral. Trump rode the wave, announcing in his own social-media post that Jeffries “should not be allowed to talk that way.”

The Supreme Court is not, in fact, illegitimate under any reasonable legal argument. Each of its members was appointed and confirmed according to constitutional procedures, and they act in accordance with their view of the law, as they should. But Jeffries and Trump are not really engaged in a debate about legitimacy. (A couple of months earlier, Trump called a different majority on the high court “a Disgrace to our Nation,” “fools,” and “very unpatriotic, and disloyal to the Constitution.”) They are sophisticated politicians seeking partisan advantage. Trump has no path to restrict Jeffries’s right to speak, and when the court next rules against Trump, Jeffries will not question its legitimacy. This is a staged performance whose terms are set by the technological medium by which they are distributed. The problem is that many people who consume the debate will take it literally and embrace the outrage. As a typical commenter put it on Bluesky, in response to Jeffries’s comments, “The corrupt six should go to prison and never see daylight again for their treason.”

[Read: The era of normie extremism is here]

I am not suggesting that censorship offers any solutions, and I am not contending that everyone is equally to blame. I want to pause to acknowledge the strange new physics that is distorting how many people understand the world. The information delivered in feeds and podcasts has been torqued away from reality to seize our attention. Just as many children’s brains have been hijacked by TikTok feeds of cute cats or pimple popping, political debate is now captive to a kind of alarmism that dehumanizes by default and announces any deviation from the norm as proof of systemic collapse. Allen and his cohort would likely echo what my social-media commenters tell me each day: That there is a war happening in the United States, and that the system is irreparably broken. For a nation founded in a revolution that met tyranny with force, violence can seem far too logical in the face of such flawed conclusions.

The truth is more complicated, and more challenging: The nation’s political machinery, upset by technological change, is strained but functioning. We must commit again to the basic national project—to disagree, even viciously, while maintaining respect for one another’s humanity and a desire for truth. We must discount much of the venom we see online, and from pandering leaders, as a distortion of reality, not a mirror. If we do not, more people will die.

The Candidate From ICE

2026-05-04T16:01:00-04:00

In mid-January, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents were battling protesters on the icy streets of Minneapolis, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan abruptly quit. This was a week after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good; another protester, Alex Pretti, was slain nine days later. Sheahan, then 28, had been on the job for less than a year, but she did not resign in protest. She left to run for Congress in Ohio.

Sheahan’s campaign quickly raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and released ads that leaned hard into her lead role in President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Sheahan came to ICE with no background in immigration, but she was close to Kristi Noem, Trump’s first Homeland Security secretary this term. Some veteran officials did not take kindly to being ordered around by an inexperienced 20-something who had previously worked at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (some jokingly referred to her as “fish cop”). Noem’s public-affairs team often appeared intent to counter those concerns by circulating photos of Sheahan wearing body armor and an ICE badge, and flying in helicopters. Those images now feature prominently in Sheahan’s political ads and promotional videos.

I was curious to see how Sheahan’s mass-deportation message was playing with Republican primary voters, especially as ICE’s reputation has deteriorated, so I traveled late last month to Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District, which includes Toledo and rural areas across the state’s northwest corner. Ohio was key to the MAGA movement’s conquest of working-class white voters in the Rust Belt who were disaffected by globalization and booming immigration. It is the state where Trump falsely claimed in 2024 that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield were eating cats and dogs. Trump has carried Ohio in the past three presidential elections and won this district in 2024. But without his name on the ballot this year, Sheahan’s candidacy will test how much the mass-deportation message can still drive GOP voters to the polls.

I stopped by the city library for a candidate forum that was hosted by a local MAGA group, Toledoans for Trump, and was attended by about 50 Republicans who were mostly older and white. Several picked up yard signs that said YES to ICE and NO to Sanctuary Cities. Other voters and activists I spoke with said they have been thrilled by Trump’s border crackdown. And they wanted punishment for the immigrants Trump officials have accused of bilking welfare programs. But many told me they are more focused this year on economic issues such as gas prices and inflation. They’re against the expansion of data centers in the district, which they said would swallow up farmland and jack up their electric bills. They’re skeptical of the war in Iran and wary of what they view as undue Israeli influence over Trump.

Allison Molnar, who told me that she was a military spouse, carried home one of the pro-ICE signs and said she would plant it on her lawn. When I asked if she liked Sheahan—who didn’t show up to the forum—Molnar called her “an outsider.” She said she’ll vote for the former lawmaker Derek Merrin, who has run in this race once before.

Merrin kicked off his stump speech that day with illegal immigration—he wasn’t going to be outflanked—and he told the audience that negative media coverage of Trump was intended to demobilize GOP voters. “They want us to forget about the victories and successes that we are having,” he said. “Donald Trump has essentially stopped illegal immigration on the southern border. That’s a huge victory.”

For the past 43 years, the district has been represented by Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, who first won her seat in 1982, the year that CD players and Diet Coke were introduced. Now 79, she is the longest-serving woman in congressional history. Kaptur has positioned herself as a moderate on immigration while urging more oversight of ICE tactics and spending.

Like Ohio itself, the district has trended more conservative in recent years, and Republicans have redrawn the district’s boundaries twice since 2022 to make it more difficult for Kaptur to win. The district now encompasses an area that voted for Trump in 2024 by nearly 11 percentage points—an extraordinary advantage to whoever can win the GOP primary tomorrow. Matt Gorman, a GOP political consultant, told me that Republicans have coveted the seat for a long time—“It’s a white whale,” he said—and that beating Kaptur is especially important for Republicans this year because doing so would help offset heavy losses the party is anticipating elsewhere.

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

“It is a seat we should win. It is a seat we need to win,” said Gorman, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This seat is too important to screw up.”

Before Sheahan unexpectedly got into the race, two state representatives were already front-runners in the primary contest: Merrin, 40, whom Kaptur narrowly defeated in 2024, before the district was redrawn to make it even more conservative, and Josh Williams, 41, a state lawmaker and criminal-defense attorney who notes that he was the first Black Republican elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 50 years. Both men align themselves with Trump and his agenda.

Sheahan has been racing to introduce herself to voters and generate name recognition. Her ads tout her as a “tough team player” who attended Ohio State University, where she was a member of the women’s rowing team, and are loaded with references to Trump. One ad claims, falsely, that ICE deported 2.5 million immigrants during her tenure (government statistics show about 400,000 ICE deportations last year). “In less than one year at ICE, I’ve stopped more illegal immigration than Marcy Kaptur has in her 43 years in Washington,” Sheahan says.

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

Sheahan has secured the endorsement of Urban Meyer, the former Ohio State football coach and broadcaster; the MAGA rocker Ted Nugent; and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry. Notably, she has not received a Trump endorsement.

She appears to have struggled to gain traction. A poll of 600 likely GOP primary voters conducted in mid-April put Sheahan in third place, with 10 percent of support. Merrin, the former lawmaker who previously challenged Kaptur, led with 33 percent support, and the state lawmaker Williams was at 14 percent. But 40 percent of respondents said they hadn’t made up their mind. The pollster, J.L. Partners, noted that voter preference is driven by name identification more than any issue, which benefits Merrin. The survey found that Sheahan was effectively tied with Merrin among respondents who knew who she was, and the pollster noted that a Trump endorsement of any candidate would be powerful enough to “change the entire race.”

But GOP consultants I spoke with told me that whatever hopes Sheahan had of getting a late Trump endorsement were probably dashed on April 23, when The Daily Mail published an article headlined “Lesbian Sex Secrets of Kristi Noem’s ICE leader” that describes Sheahan’s alleged relationship with a younger colleague on the 2020 Trump campaign whom she briefly supervised. (Sheahan’s political adviser denied that she’d ever been in a relationship with a subordinate, and said the behavior depicted in the story was not illegal or outside the bounds of many relationships among young people.)

During my conversations with Republican voters and activists, I was struck by the extent to which they characterized Sheahan as a dilettante and a carpetbagger, even though she grew up on a local farm. A few weeks after Sheahan got in the race, a Williams supporter named Chris Enoch published a stinging editorial in the local Sandusky Register saying that he was “suspicious of Ohio ex-pats charging back in to run for office.”

“A community leader must be of, by, and for the community,” Enoch wrote. “They must know the community because they have lived it, worked in it, and put in the time to understand it fully.” That view of Sheahan was shared by many of the roughly two dozen Republican voters and party activists I spoke with in this district. Not one said they planned to support her in the primary. During my visit two weeks ago, Sheahan didn’t have any public events or speeches scheduled.

Sheahan and her staff did not respond to my calls and text messages. GOP activists in the district I met said they’ve been kept at a distance too. “Not to be rude, but I have zero perception of her,” Ron Johns, one of the founders of Toledoans for Trump, which has endorsed Merrin, told me. “I’ve never even considered her in the race. If she wants to run for something like county commissioner, we could use more candidates,” he said, “but I just don’t think this one is going to be her race.”

Wade Kapszukiewicz, the Democratic mayor of Toledo, told me that regardless of the GOP-primary outcome, Kaptur will face the toughest race of her career this fall. Kapszukiewicz said she is a “tenacious fighter” who has deep roots in a district where authenticity matters and voters “despise phonies.”

“The math looks overwhelming, but she is in touch with the values that matter in this part of the country,” Kapszukiewicz said. “Her real opponents are the mapmakers who redrew the district.” Kaptur has raised more than $3 million to defend against whoever emerges from the GOP primary. As in other recent cycles, to win, she’ll need Republicans to split their tickets and vote for her.

In one middle-class neighborhood of Toledo, I met Steve Hamilton, a retired engineer who told me that he plans to back Kaptur again, even though he’s voted for Trump the past three times. Hamilton has met Kaptur and likes her personally. “She doesn’t always vote the way I’d like, but she’s a good lady,” he told me. Hamilton said he’s worried about the direction of the economy and the country’s ever-increasing national debt. As for immigration, he favors “getting the bad guys out” but said he wouldn’t want to see Minneapolis-style chaos in his hometown.

I met him while shadowing Williams as he knocked on doors of one-story ranch houses and urged Republican voters to turn out for the primary. Williams told me that “affordability” is the No. 1 issue on voters’ minds. “We have the war going on with Iran, and the increase that we see at the gas pumps. We also have an explosion of property taxes.” Immigration, Williams said, “is not that huge of an issue here in northwest Ohio,” but like other GOP candidates, he opposes sanctuary policies and supports ICE.

[Read: Conservative women find a new way to talk about ICE]

Democratic strategists I spoke with said that if Sheahan wins the primary, they would not try to cast her work at ICE as a moral outrage. Rather, they think she’s most vulnerable to allegations of waste, incompetence, and corruption under Noem’s leadership. It was Sheahan who led the effort at ICE last year to purchase a fleet of new “wrapped” vehicles emblazoned with the agency’s logo. Rank-and-file ICE officers, who generally prefer to keep a low profile and use unmarked cars, have eschewed the vehicles, and the Washington Examiner reported that many are gathering dust in ICE garages.

In the campaign events I attended, Merrin and Williams did not mention Sheahan. Their lack of attention to her candidacy may be the clearest sign that they do not view her as much of a threat. Gorman, the GOP consultant, told me that at some point, Kaptur will lose or retire. “And,” he said, “the Republican to finally be there when the music stops for Marcy is going to have a very long congressional career.”

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

The Venture-Capital Populist

2026-05-04T05:55:00-04:00

Illustrations by Mike McQuade

The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. “And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that,” Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. “And maybe it’ll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth.”

A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection” and pronounced Trump “disqualified” from ever again holding national office. “What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics,” he said on the podcast a few days after the event. “He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law.” Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag.” These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from—but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place. One prominent traveler who had already shown the way was a guest at the fundraiser—Senator J. D. Vance, whose attendance helped close the deal on his selection as Trump’s running mate. Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls.

Opportunist doesn’t really describe Sacks. He doesn’t come across as slippery or two-faced. There’s no evasive glance or roguish smile. He can argue at great length, in a steady sinal drone, with an aggressive debater’s ability to make an evidence-based case for any position he holds—but the position always happens to coincide with his benefit. The only consistent principle of his career is a ruthless devotion to self-interest. Sacks has identified as a “libertarian conservative” all of his adult life, but he has sought government intervention on behalf of his investments when it’s suited him. In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Sacks demanded that the federal government bail out the uninsured deposits of start-up companies, much of the money from crypto firms. “Some libertarians care about the freedom of only one person,” Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, investor, and right-wing provocateur, once said of his friend Sacks.

[From the May 2026 issue: What Noah Hawley learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat]

In this sense, though Trump is impulsive and narcissistic while Sacks is cold-eyed and logical, they are well matched. “Sacks is a spirit animal for part of the president’s brain,” a former Biden-administration official told me. “The plutocratic part.” After the election, the new president appointed Sacks as his special adviser, or “czar,” for AI and crypto. After decades of keeping as far from Washington as possible, Silicon Valley would finally have its own man in the White House.

But Sacks has always taken a dim view of politics. At 25, appearing on a C‑SPAN talk show while still in law school, he expressed a preference for “the ethos of Wall Street” over “the ethos of Washington” and quoted Calvin Coolidge on the business of America being business, avowing: “I’d probably rather live in a greedy country where people don’t share than in an envious country where people are stealing from each other.”

Sacks went to Washington on behalf of business, including his own. But business and politics demand different, sometimes opposing talents. “Sacks’s policies are misaligned with his own party,” a congressional aide with a close view of how Sacks operates in Washington told me. “He doesn’t really understand how D.C. works.” His efforts in government on behalf of the tech industry have exposed the president to the charge that Trump is selling out his populist base on behalf of the country’s richest men, driving a wedge through the MAGA coalition.

Sacks once called a rare victory over Thiel in a game of chess one of the greatest moments of his life. In a photo, his arms are raised skyward, ecstatic disbelief on his face. He spent the early years of his career as a kind of junior partner in Thiel’s shadow. Sacks was born in 1972 in South Africa, and moved to the United States at age 5. He grew up in Memphis and attended an elite boys’ prep school before going on to Stanford University. As a sophomore with right-wing views he inevitably gravitated toward Thiel, who was by then in law school, and joined The Stanford Review, the conservative campus publication that Thiel had started as an undergrad. It took aim at the politically correct orthodoxy and anti-Western ideology that swept over American higher education in the late ’80s and early ’90s and never really left. But the outnumbered young conservatives’ mockery almost always overshot the target. An entire issue was devoted to making light of rape, including a contribution from Sacks that challenged whether statutory rape should be a crime. (He has since expressed regret for some of his youthful writings.)

Thiel was determined to be a public intellectual like his hero William F. Buckley, so he began writing a book on left-wing campus extremism. When he found the work too onerous, he turned the research over to Sacks, and they co-authored The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, published in 1995 by a libertarian think tank. Sacks attended the University of Chicago Law School, but law was too much like the detested public sector, and in 1999, when Thiel co-founded an online-payments company in Palo Alto that was soon to be called PayPal, Sacks left a consulting job to lead the company’s product team. He made important contributions to PayPal’s success; by various accounts, including Sacks’s own, he was also known for telling co-workers in blunt terms that they were wrong. A former colleague told me that with Sacks, “there’s masters and there’s slaves. He doesn’t have partners: ‘You do what I tell you to do, or you’re one of the few people that tell me what you want me to do.’ ” The former colleague added, “Part of his drive is that he believes he is one of the small number of elite people who really get it and are capable.” (The former colleague and some other Silicon Valley sources requested anonymity to discuss a figure who has power over their businesses; some government officials requested anonymity to speak about White House conversations, because they were not authorized to talk about them. Sacks declined to be interviewed.)

PayPal became famous for surviving the dot-com crash in 2000, and for producing a spawn of Silicon Valley stars known as the PayPal Mafia, including Sacks. Roger McNamee, a longtime tech investor, watched its success with admiration and apprehension. The PayPal Mafia saw before anyone else that the cost of starting an internet company was going to drop significantly. “They realized that the limits on processing power were going to go away,” McNamee told me. But these 20- and 30-somethings were not inspired in the same way that the founders of earlier Silicon Valley companies were: “They didn’t follow the vision of Steve Jobs, that tech can democratize power. They came to get rich.” McNamee added, “If their value system had been different, we would have a completely different country today.”

I met Sacks in 2011, at a dinner at Thiel’s house in San Francisco with a small group of entrepreneurs and investors, most of them PayPal alumni. They despised higher education, worshipped the creators of tech companies, wanted to found libertarian colonies on the high seas and be cryogenically frozen for future resurrection—eccentric outliers then, but forerunners of a broader political trend in the Valley. One guest was an AI expert named Eliezer Yudkowsky. Last year, he co-authored If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which concludes that artificial superintelligence will kill literally every human being on Earth—thereby causing Thiel to label him “a legionnaire of the Antichrist.”

[Read: AI is grown, not built]

Sacks seemed the most normal of the group. He was a businessman with conventional libertarian views, more optimistic than Thiel about the economic power of the internet, less apocalyptic about the decline and fall of “Western civilization,” a key term in The Diversity Myth that Sacks seldom used after publication, showing no consistent ideological attachment other than to capitalism. His distaste for politics remained strong. “This is the battle,” Sacks told me. “Can the web disrupt the rest of the economy, or does the old economy fight back using politics to keep the new economy from taking over?” At the time we spoke, he was trying to disrupt the car-wash business. He had invested in an app that allowed you to send your car’s location to a person who would come wash it while you were off getting sushi or founding a company or taking a meeting in Hong Kong. The app, called Cherry, lasted only a year, but Sacks did better with another early-stage investment in a company that sent a town car to pick you up. “It’s totally disrupted the taxi business,” Sacks said of Uber, with undisguised pleasure.

He did extremely well, with a movie he co-produced in 2005 (Thank You for Smoking ), with a company he co-founded in 2008 (a Slack-like social network for businesses called Yammer), and with his investments: in Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX after PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002; in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies after he sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. That year, he threw himself a Marie Antoinette–themed 40th birthday party in a rented ancien régime–style Los Angeles mansion, with special guest Snoop Dogg. “Part of believing in capitalism is you don’t have to feel guilty,” Sacks told me.

Christian Grattan / Patrick McMullan / Getty

David Sacks and Elon Musk attend a party after a screening of the 2005 film Thank You for Smoking, which they co-produced, at Elaine’s in New York City.

He conducted himself in the usual way of an aristocrat of the second Gilded Age: buying lavish properties, contributing to mainstream politicians (Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016), and guarding his family’s privacy. He deplored the deterioration of urban life and funded the recall of San Francisco’s ultraprogressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin. Unlike Thiel, he didn’t publish writings on reactionary philosophers and the virtues of monopolistic capitalism.

The politics of the Valley was always a liberal sort of libertarianism: pro-choice, pro-immigration, idealistic, even utopian, arrogant about its mission of empowering individuals and connecting humanity, but indifferent to and ignorant of government, with an engineer’s contempt for the creaky workings of bureaucracy and the cluelessness of elected officials. Leave us alone to do our magic, which you can’t possibly understand, and everyone will benefit.

But about a decade ago, tech’s free ride ran into trouble. In 2013 Marc Andreessen, an inventor of the first popular web browser in the ’90s and now one of the Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, predicted to me a public backlash against technology companies over privacy rights, intellectual property, and monopoly power. With more foresight he would have included the addictive and corrosive effects of social media. Three years later, in 2016, Facebook enabled Russian meddling in an election that inflamed American divisions and sent Trump to the White House.

Trump and his populist followers made Big Tech a favorite target; so did progressives such as Senator Elizabeth Warren. Under bipartisan pressure, Silicon Valley had to search for ways to keep the government out of its business. Executives and investors spent fortunes on lobbying and campaign contributions. Mark Zuckerberg showed up in Washington to stand before Congress with his hand raised—eyes wide, as if stunned by the reality of representative government—and explain in tortured sentences why Facebook’s platforms weren’t driving America’s children to anxiety and depression while shredding the country’s civic ligature.

“Concern with tech monopoly was big in the first Trump administration,” Tim Wu, an antitrust expert and a professor at Columbia Law School who served in the White House under President Biden, told me. “This has been largely forgotten, but the first Trump administration brought the first cases against Facebook, which are under appeal, and against Google, which we won under Biden.” Biden’s Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of his Justice Department pushed anti-monopoly policies even harder. The tech giants “wanted to be able to get in and tell us what to do about everything,” Wu said.

Still, the confrontation between Washington and Silicon Valley under Biden was more rhetorical than substantive. His administration failed to push through any meaningful regulation of the industry, and its legislative achievements in infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing, and clean energy directly benefited the technology sector. Yet during Biden’s presidency a highly visible element of Silicon Valley turned against the Democrats. It became known as the tech right.

Its most famous figure was Thiel, who had kept a lonely vigil for Trump in Silicon Valley since 2016. But by the early 2020s its most vocal spokesperson was Andreessen. For the tech right, technology is Promethean fire. The founders of the most successful companies in the Valley play a godlike role, for they alone can save America and “Western civilization” from Europe’s hyper-regulated stagnation and from communist and Islamist totalitarianism. Fred Turner, a Stanford professor who studies the culture of technology, told me that deep within Silicon Valley’s libertarianism lies “the idea of a community of saints, of special people, entrepreneurs, philosopher kings.”

In 2023 Andreessen published a litany of pseudo-Nietzschean credos called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” On AI: “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think.” The AI revolution is coming, just as electricity did; it will exalt mankind, and any attempt at regulation would be tantamount to mass slaughter: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” Among the “Patron Saints” of this cult of the entrepreneur, Andreessen included John Galt, the hero of every libertarian teen who reads Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and the 20th-century philosopher James Burnham, best known for predicting that the modern world would be run by an amoral class of “managers,” with the talented few ruling over a mass of semi-slaves. Elsewhere, Andreessen has said that oligarchy is inevitable.

The nearly hysterical voice of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is that of a man who has freed himself from a deeply uncomfortable position. Andreessen was a longtime contributor to Democratic candidates. The political change of Silicon Valley figures like him was less a conversion to Trumpism than a deconversion from liberalism, caused by pressure from below and above. In 2025 Andreessen told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat that the new progressivism of the 2010s had “radicalized” young tech workers, turning them into spiteful and, once COVID hit, indolent rebels who intimidated their white, male, for-profit bosses into bowing to the Great Awokening. Andreessen was willing to pay high taxes and support liberal causes and candidates as long as he was regarded as a hero. But during the past decade, what he called “the Deal”—admiration and a free hand for Silicon Valley in exchange for building great companies, making the world better, and supporting Democrats—was broken, when first young people and then the Biden administration turned against the tech industry.

According to Andreessen, the administration wanted to kill the entire cryptocurrency sector by keeping the regulatory rules vague while threatening companies with devastating enforcement actions. He also described a meeting that he and his partner were given with senior officials at the Biden White House in May 2024 that, from the point of view of early-stage venture capitalists, was apocalyptic. Regarding AI, Andreessen claimed, the Biden people declared that the whole industry would be limited to a few heavily regulated large companies, with no place for start-ups: Because social media had turned out to be a disaster for democracy, Silicon Valley had to be nationalized or destroyed. Out in the West Wing parking lot, Andreessen and his partner decided to support Trump in that year’s election.

(I spoke with former Biden officials who disputed what Andreessen claimed he and his partner were told about AI; if anything, the officials said, those present had simply predicted how the capital-intensive technology would play out in the next few years. They pointed to several administration efforts on AI and start-ups that directly contradicted Andreessen’s nightmare account of Biden’s policies. “He needed a conversion story,” one former official told me.)

Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Kiyoshi Ota / Bloomberg / Getty; Consolidated News Pictures / Getty; Sthanlee B. Mirador / Sipa USA / Reuters; Patrick Pleul / Picture Alliance / Getty.

In 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns, Sacks and three other venture capitalists started All-In; the weekly podcast would offer market analysis, political argument, and tech-bro banter about poker and cars. It made them famous online, with Sacks (nickname: “The Rainman”) the smartest, most conservative, and least funny of the four. Shortly after January 6, when Facebook and Twitter banned the soon-to-be-former president and other MAGA figures, Sacks stopped talking about Trump as a threat to democracy. Instead, he denounced the “Big Tech oligarchs” who were threatening free speech in “the biggest power grab in history.”

Free speech—at least as it concerned right-wing political figures—was Sacks’s entry point into MAGA, and he never let it go. Anytime one of the “besties” on All-In mentioned January 6, Sacks countered with claims of censorship. His rhetoric became more polemical, a return to his anti-PC youth, but now in the spirit of Trump, not William F. Buckley, as if he was talking himself into a new political identity. At times his enemies were woke oligarchs, at times mid-level technocrats, at times entry-level radicals, but always “elites.” He criticized the elite’s forever wars and trade giveaways to China, and “the collusion between Big Tech and our security state.” He called himself a “populist” and identified with the two-thirds of Americans who are working-class. In 2022, on the Honestly With Bari Weiss podcast, he said, “I think that the next Republican who’s going to be successful has to take a page out of TR’s”—Teddy Roosevelt’s—“playbook here, which is: ‘We do not represent the interests of these oligarchs and these big, powerful companies. We represent the interests of the working man and woman to have the right to free speech, to make a living, to conduct payments. And it should not be up to tech oligarchs to decide who has those rights.’ ”

[From the March 2024 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on the rise of techno-authoritarianism]

If venture-capital populism seems like a stretch, Sacks resolved it this way: End mass immigration of the mentally average, and you’d lay to rest the heartland’s suspicion of Silicon Valley. The solution to inequality is a smaller, less intrusive government, combined with unbridled technological innovation, which would inevitably increase productivity and wages. (Sacks was unaware or unconcerned that decades of unregulated tech and deregulated finance had coincided with growing economic inequality.) “If the Biden administration had only been letting in people with 150 IQs, we wouldn’t have this debate” about immigration, Sacks said on All-In. “If they were just letting in the Elons and the Jensens”—referring to Musk and Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia—“we wouldn’t be having the same conversation today.”

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sacks voiced alarm about the dangers of American involvement in the conflict. Soon he adopted whole hog the “realist” line (which was also the Russian line) that NATO’s eastward expansion had provoked Vladimir Putin into a defensive war. No matter how often Putin claimed Ukraine as a historic part of imperial Russia, how many times he refused to negotiate seriously, how many provinces he annexed, how many Ukrainian civilians the Russian military killed and cities it destroyed, Sacks stuck by his theory. Eventually, it sank him into conspiratorial waters.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s newest annexation is dire for Russia too]

“This is basically a manufactured conflict that I think really started with Russiagate,” Sacks said in a 2024 speech, “where somehow this fantasy was created that somehow Putin was controlling our elections.” The American left, the “neocons,” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky managed to fool the U.S. and Europe into risking what Sacks called “Woke War III.” “Somehow, this Russiagate hoax has metastasized into a new cold war with Russia.”

It’s worth asking how someone so committed to facts and logic could end up spouting such nonsense. If Sacks made investment decisions on this basis, he would go bankrupt. An obvious explanation is that a successful businessman might not know much about history and politics. But an intellectual deficiency can be compounded by a moral one. It’s striking that the ordeal of a fragile democracy fighting for its life while under assault by an aggressive empire leaves Sacks so cold that he ends up sympathizing with the perpetrator. If you neutralize any sentiment of right and wrong, Ukraine just looks like a risky bet.

In the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Sacks supported Ron DeSantis—not because Trump had disqualified himself, but because he “just gives his political enemies so much to work with.” A moral objection had become a practical one—so when Trump blew away the Republican field, the final step to complete support was easy. Two weeks after the fundraiser, Trump was invited onto All-In and raved about the splendor of Sacks’s house. Sacks returned the compliment. That July, he delivered a six-and-a-half-minute speech for Trump at the Republican National Convention. By August, he had downgraded January 6 to a long-past event that admittedly “wasn’t great” but had been hyped by Democrats into a “fake coup.”

Jeff Giesea, a fellow Stanford Review alum and entrepreneur who had been a Trump supporter in 2016 before turning against MAGA, gave me a sympathetic account of the calculus made by Sacks and the tech right. “The story Sacks told himself, I imagine, is that, regardless of Trump’s flaws, the benefits to society from pro-tech policies would be a great improvement over an administration that was mired in safetyism and identity politics,” he said.

Sacks had taken the measure of Trump and found a kindred spirit. After getting to know the ex-president at the fundraiser and on the podcast, he reported his findings: “All of his instincts are Let’s empower the private sector; let’s cut regulations; let’s make taxes reasonable; let’s get the smartest people in the country; let’s have peace deals; let’s have growth. ”

Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty

Sacks, with J. D. Vance in the foreground, at the Republican National Convention in 2024. A month earlier, Sacks had hosted the fundraiser that helped close the deal on Vance’s selection as Donald Trump’s running mate.

In December 2024 Sacks was named the White House special adviser for AI and crypto, with a venture capitalist from Andreessen’s firm installed as his deputy. Sacks’s status as a “special government employee” allowed him to stay on as a partner at his company Craft Ventures, while working no more than 130 days over the course of a year at his government job. He also continued as a co-host of his All-In podcast, analyzing technology, influencing market perceptions, making predictions—all while playing a central role in shaping public policy on AI and crypto.

Because special government employees are subject to most of the conflict-of-interest rules for regular government employees, the Office of Government Ethics (whose head had been fired at the start of Trump’s second term) required two waivers to allow Sacks to keep a foot in both the public and private sectors. They were written by the White House counsel, David Warrington, a Republican operative who had acted as Trump’s personal lawyer after his first term. A spokesperson for Sacks told The Atlantic, “Mr. Sacks and Craft Ventures had to refrain from investing in companies directly affected by his duties as a government adviser and furthermore had to seek approval from the White House Counsel Office for all potential investments.” In essence, the waivers argued that Sacks’s holdings were so large that keeping dozens of small investments in companies related to crypto and AI would pose no conflict of interest for him, because they made up such a tiny fraction of his overall portfolio. But the waivers give only percentages, and their language is so opaque that it’s impossible to know the actual value of these investments. “They try to finesse the issue by saying, ‘Oh, it’s a relatively small percentage of his portfolio, and he’s so rich, it couldn’t possibly affect him,’ ” Kathleen Clark, an ethics lawyer who teaches at Washington University’s law school, told me, adding that this stance beggars belief.

In November, the Times published a lengthy investigation of Sacks, finding that, despite large divestments, he continued to hold stakes in hundreds of companies that advertised themselves as AI-related, and that key policy decisions benefited both Sacks and his Silicon Valley associates. A chorus of them, including Andreessen, rushed to his defense. Sacks called the Times article a “hoax,” hired a defamation-law firm to write a threatening letter, and argued that he had cost himself and his company a lot of money—$200 million in crypto holdings alone—to work in government voluntarily without pay. Clark waved aside the question of whether there’s personal corruption on Sacks’s part. “I urge you to limit your use of the term conflict of interest,” she told me, “because it doesn’t begin to capture what’s going on.”

What’s going on is that Sacks joined the most corrupt administration in American history. Throughout his year in the White House, his work on tech policy brushed up against the spectacular grift of his boss at almost every turn. Giesea, the former Stanford Review colleague, who remains an admirer of Sacks, said, “He is an asset to the Trump administration on AI policy. But now he’s trapped in a corrupt clown show.” The pervasive rot makes it almost impossible to distinguish public policy from private venality. The Trump administration’s corruption requires a taxonomy of its own.

[George Packer: America’s zombie democracy]

At the most blatant level are the gifts the president accepts from abroad: the $130,000 gold bar and the gold Rolex desk clock from Swiss billionaires, followed by a lowering of U.S. tariffs on Switzerland; the $400 million jet from the Qatari royal family that might cost another half a billion or so to be outfitted as Air Force One, followed by a presidential visit (Trump’s first major foreign trip in his second term) to a country accused of sponsoring terrorism; the Trump-family memecoins sold to wealthy favor seekers. Clark called such brazen bribes “power corruption”: displays intended to show that Trump can get away with anything—“the equivalent of shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue.”

A slightly less glaring kind of corruption abuses government power for private gain: presidential pardons handed out to past and future benefactors; investment deals floated by Trump’s two favorite diplomats, his real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, during the most sensitive peace talks in Russia and the Middle East; major investments in Trump-family crypto and real-estate businesses by foreign governments with extensive U.S. interests; stock trades and prediction bets likely based on insider access to official information, including about war.

Criminal anti-corruption statutes are still on the books. But these embarrassing shows of personal turpitude go uninvestigated and unpunished because the mechanisms for holding public officials accountable have been destroyed. When whistleblowers go unprotected, inspectors general are fired, incompetent loyalists replace nonpartisan civil servants, the Department of Justice is turned into the president’s own law firm and police force, and Congress abandons any oversight function, nothing is left to prevent the rot from spreading into every cell of government. (When Senator Warren wrote to Sacks asking for information on potential conflicts of interest in his role as a special government employee, the answer was silence.) The effect is to demoralize the public, to instill a sense of powerlessness. “We’re living in an era when the corruption is occurring on an unprecedented scale, orders of magnitude larger than anything we’ve seen in the history of this country,” Clark said. “And yet the more important story is what Trump has done to enable that corruption, which is dismantling the rule of law.”

Finally, there’s what Lawrence Lessig, of Harvard Law School, calls “institutional corruption,” which may be perfectly legal: the warping of public trust toward private ends, the replacement of the country’s priorities with those of a special-interest group. This brings us back to Sacks.

In his 2025 inaugural address, Trump declared America to be at the start of a “golden age.” His administration put crypto and AI at its center.

Cryptocurrency is a long-standing libertarian project—the dream of a privatized financial system. The founders of PayPal originally aspired to create a tool that gave people around the world access to finance, including in poor and corrupt countries without reliable banking institutions. But in practice, crypto’s anonymity and volatility have made it extremely prone to criminal activity and risky speculation. As a candidate in 2024, Trump, a former crypto skeptic and a latecomer to investing in it, won the industry’s lucrative backing on a promise to put the federal government to work on its behalf and turn the U.S. into “the crypto capital of the planet.” Back in office, he pardoned convicted crypto executives, neutered consumer protections, ended investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission into crypto firms with ties to Trump’s businesses, and disbanded the Justice Department’s crypto-enforcement team. In May 2025, investors paid up to $400 million to buy $TRUMP memecoins in exchange for access to the president at a private crypto gala. Since 2024, Trump’s crypto wealth has grown by at least $7.5 billion.

[James Surowiecki: Crypto is a victim of its own success]

Sacks’s main item of business was to push through Congress a bill that would create a regulatory structure for cryptocurrency—something that the Biden administration hadn’t done, to the frustration of the industry and venture capitalists. The GENIUS Act required issuers of a type of crypto called stablecoin to back their digital currency on a one-to-one basis with assets such as dollars and short-term U.S. Treasury bills. According to Sacks and other supporters, the GENIUS Act would position the dollar as the default currency of the digital economy, while providing guardrails against fraud and other abuses. Critics argued that the guardrails were inadequate, and that crypto issued by private firms with government backing could undermine the entire financial system because of weak regulations and nonexistent enforcement actions. The law also does nothing to prevent government officials from profiting off crypto. When the GENIUS Act passed on a bipartisan vote in July, Silicon Valley and Sacks won the first big return on their investment in Trump.

If Sacks’s purpose with crypto was to bring it under a federal regulatory regime in order to make the industry more viable to buyers and valuable to investors, his goal with AI was to keep it unregulated, and to align administration policy with the industry’s wishes. His motto became “Let the private sector cook.”

At the start of his term, Trump revoked a Biden executive order that, among other measures, required AI labs to share the results of safety testing with the government. Though one company found that complying with the order required just one day of work for a single employee per year, Trump pronounced it onerous. Safetyism became a dirty word on the tech right, almost as contemptible as the phrase woke AI—an all-purpose indictment of Biden-era attempts to limit harm from AI to the public, especially children. Yet in the early weeks of the new administration, its policies reflected more continuity than rupture. Not only did Trump keep Biden’s restrictions on licensing the export of advanced AI technology to adversaries such as China; he even strengthened them.

Sacks’s influence increased when Elon Musk, his old friend and fellow PayPal mafioso, who was running the Department of Government Efficiency near the czar’s office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, walked away from his work of stripping the executive branch. “You see a more conciliatory approach to China emerging only after Musk has his falling-out with the White House,” Oren Cass, the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, told me. “With Musk out of the picture, I think Sacks certainly became more prominent.” In April 2025, David Feith, a China hawk who was a senior director for technology and national security on the National Security Council, was fired in a larger purge after the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer warned Trump that Feith was disloyal. Soon after, the NSC’s whole technology directorate was eliminated, clearing the way for Sacks to become the loudest voice on tech policy. His goal was to keep AI free of regulation and let the private sector sell the most advanced American technology to the world—even to China.

On May 13, Trump scrapped a Biden rule, about to take effect, that would have restricted the global spread of advanced AI technology by dividing countries into three categories of trust, with China fully denied access. (A former White House official called it “the most ‘America First’ rule the Biden administration ever had.”) That same day the president traveled to the Middle East to consummate a deal, which Sacks had helped negotiate, to sell 500,000 AI chips to the United Arab Emirates. This astonishing figure alarmed national-security officials: Some of the chips were likely to end up in China, where strict export controls still applied, and the sale would make it easier for the Emiratis to acquire enough computing power to build their own AI capabilities.

The smell of corruption hung in the air before Air Force One took off for Abu Dhabi. At the beginning of May, one of Witkoff’s sons had announced that the Emirates’ AI-investment firm would put $2 billion into the crypto exchange Binance, using a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded by the Trump and Witkoff families. A co-founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, was pardoned by Trump after serving four months in a U.S. prison in 2024 for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering measures. In January of this year, The Wall Street Journal reported an even more blatant scandal: A few days before Trump’s inauguration, a powerful Emirati politician known as the “spy sheikh” (almost always photographed wearing sunglasses, even in the Oval Office) had bought a 49 percent share of World Liberty Financial. These deals made the UAE chip sale look like a giant payoff from the administration.

No one is allowed to be more corrupt than the president, but Sacks may well benefit from Emirati goodwill. The nearly $3 trillion UAE sovereign-wealth fund, of which more than half is controlled by the spy sheikh, offers an immense pot of money for venture capital. Although Sacks had no financial interest in the chip deal that he helped broker, it could put Craft Ventures in a sweet spot for a future round of funding. Is it unfair to point this out? Sacks’s position makes it naive not to. Remaining an investor while serving in an administration rife with graft and shaping policies that could significantly affect present and future deals blurs the line between public and private into indistinction. “It’s hard to disentangle his ideology from his personal interests,” the congressional aide who has followed Sacks closely said. “Maybe they’re one and the same: ‘Let the private sector cook,’ and it just so happens he benefits handsomely from that.” (Sacks’s spokesperson told The Atlantic that future investments “would not be a violation of government-ethics rules. Qualified people would not want to serve in government if it meant permanently giving up their careers.”)

On July 23, the White House released its “AI action plan” at an event in Washington co-hosted by the All-In podcast. Trump called out each of Sacks’s “besties” from the show, and they shared the stage with Vice President Vance and other administration leaders. (Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, had nixed the original idea for All-In to be the sole sponsor, perhaps out of a sense of propriety.) The 28-page plan, “Winning the Race,” called for rapid development of AI technology and construction of data centers so the U.S. can achieve global dominance. It was co-signed by Sacks, but its main author was Dean Ball, a technology researcher who served as a White House adviser for four months last year. Ball pointed out to me that the plan didn’t pose a choice between innovation and safety, nor did it take a position on changes in export controls: “What it does say is we should enforce the chip-export controls that we have more robustly than we currently do.”

But Sacks had already undermined this key aspect of the plan. A week before it was released, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the world’s leader in AI-chip production, had announced the resumption of the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, which the Trump administration had banned in April, before Sacks became the dominant official in tech policy. AI is an industry in which the U.S. has a significant advantage over its main rival. China is able to produce less than 3 percent of U.S. computing power—200,000 chips a year to America’s 12 million or so. Hardly anyone except Sacks was able to explain how the decision to lift the ban on selling chips to China fit with “winning the race” for global dominance, or with an “America First” administration.

[Read: Trump wasted no time derailing his own AI plan]

“I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American tech stack,” he said on All-In. “If we have 80 to 90 percent market share, that’s winning.” In other words, sell advanced American AI everywhere, including China, to make U.S. technologies and companies dominant. The counterargument, made to me by former Biden-administration officials as well as conservative critics of the Trump-Sacks policy, is that China will never allow itself to become dependent on U.S. technology. Instead, the People’s Republic will do what it’s done in other sectors: steal U.S. technology and innovate its own—the long-term “indigenization” strategy of Xi Jinping, and the reason the regime has prevented Chinese AI companies, which are hungry for American chips, from importing anywhere close to the numbers the Trump administration has made available for sale.

“Folks on the pro-export side have a story about how actually selling more of these advanced chips to China will addict them to our technology stack and slow their progress,” Oren Cass said of the Trump-Sacks policy. “I find it a ridiculously inadequate story that never holds up to 10 seconds of scrutiny.” Cass distinguished between an ideological view of U.S.-China competition (“two incompatible systems that can coexist but can’t be integrated in any meaningful way”) and the commercial view that has always been Trump’s, and seems to be Sacks’s. The key figure in moving American tech policy on China to the commercial view was Huang, who was eager to gain greater access to the Chinese market. Sacks now had the clout to accompany the CEO of the world’s richest firm into the Oval Office. “When Jensen comes to town, it elevates Sacks’s stature,” the congressional aide said.

I asked a former White House official with knowledge of the discussions if Sacks had achieved his goal of lifting the ban on selling chips to China simply by sitting down with Huang and a president with a well-known weakness for plutocrats. “Yes. That is exactly what happened,” the former official said. As for Sacks’s motive, “there is not a rational explanation. I think doing favors for Nvidia is the only real explanation, or else he believes Nvidia’s talking points that no one else buys.” (In a letter to The New York Times in November, Sacks’s lawyers wrote that the policies Sacks had advocated for benefited “all American chip companies” and that “Mr. Sacks has independently arrived at his views on chip policy by consulting and reading hundreds of experts in the space.”)

Even if Sacks is solely motivated by a sincere belief in free-market capitalism, his portfolio companies could now have privileged access to the world’s most coveted computer chips in a market where demand is stronger than supply. “This is why the person who’s regulating AI for the U.S. government shouldn’t also be running a venture-capital firm that has money all throughout the tech industry,” the former White House official said. “Of course he’s picking the winners that in some way benefit him.”

In December, Huang secured an even more valuable victory when the White House allowed Nvidia to begin selling to China one of its most advanced AI chips, the H200. This was too much for some conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. Jim Banks, a MAGA-aligned senator from Indiana, had already introduced bipartisan legislation, called GAIN AI, that required Nvidia to put American customers, such as start-up companies and universities, ahead of Chinese companies for its limited supply of AI chips. Sacks, determined to prevent government from limiting tech’s commercial potential, began lobbying hard to keep GAIN AI out of the annual defense-appropriation bill. His efforts to get Republican senators to strip it from their version failed, but when the White House declared its opposition, House Republican leadership killed GAIN AI just before the final vote in December. “What ultimately happened is Jensen talked to the president about this, the dam broke, and Sacks got his way,” the congressional aide told me.

Sacks had less success when the administration tried to get Congress to pass a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulations. The measure lost in the Senate in July, 99–1, but its unpopularity didn’t deter Sacks from trying again. In December, Trump signed an executive order, written by Sacks, that banned states from passing laws to regulate AI. By then, state legislatures had introduced hundreds of bills—chiefly in blue states such as California and New York, but also in Florida, Utah, and Texas—and enacted dozens.

Sacks’s heavy-handed interventions in Congress on behalf of tech companies did not sit well with some of Trump’s MAGA allies. Stopping the spread of sexual material, protecting children from harmful chatbots, preserving individual privacy, heading off catastrophic threats such as bioterrorism, preventing large-scale unemployment—these things turn out to matter to Americans across the partisan divide. Polls consistently show that a majority fear AI will do more harm than good. Citizens of the world’s AI leader have a more negative view of the technology than those of almost any other country. Appearing on All-In in December, Tucker Carlson gently pointed out to Sacks and his co-hosts that Americans already feel powerless—“and all of a sudden you have a technology that promises to concentrate power still further in the hands of people other than them, and so they’re touchy about it.”

Oren Cass told me, “One of the challenges of the tech right is they are—what’s the opposite of adept ?” I offered clumsy. “They are very politically clumsy and don’t have a very good feel for the realities of the American electorate, how politics is conducted, what it takes to be successful.” Steve Bannon, a leader of the populist wing of the MAGA movement, recently told me that Sacks’s efforts on behalf of Silicon Valley are blowing up in his face. “Sacks is the best thing to ever happen to the populist revolt against the oligarchs. His unique blend of arrogance and incompetence has single-handedly delivered humiliating defeat to the AI supremacists.”

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Sacks and the Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a private White House dinner for technology and business leaders in September

Meanwhile, AI’s capability is doubling about every four months. It is already changing work and life for millions of people, with the potential to transform fields such as medicine and war. Its inventors spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the technology even as they issue dire warnings of its dangers: It might kill us, but we have to make it as powerful as possible as fast as possible. Sacks dismisses or minimizes the potential for harm. In public comments he has claimed that AI isn’t addictive like social media, that productivity gains will more than make up for lost jobs, and that the number of teenage suicides caused by chatbots is small. Because China doesn’t care about things like copyright protection, compensated journalism, and restrictions on export licenses, we can’t afford to either. He accuses skeptics of belonging to the cult of effective altruists—“doomers,” funded by a few anti-AI Big Tech billionaires, who peddle lies to invite global control of the technology for their own financial gain.

One of the doomers, Nate Soares, a co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, told me: “The lab leaders say this is horribly dangerous, the employees say this is horribly dangerous, the eminent scientists and researchers who developed AI decades ago say this is horribly dangerous. The only people who say ‘Don’t worry’ are the venture capitalists. They’re the ones who stand to profit from it but aren’t close enough to understand it.”

Unlike Andreessen, Sacks doesn’t equate regulating AI with mass murder. But for every concern, he has the same answer: AI is coming, just like the tide. If America doesn’t win the race, China will.

Once in government, Sacks learned to adopt his boss’s language and defend the indefensible. He derided “fake news” and called climate change a “hoax,” January 6 prosecutions “lawfare,” the notion of White House corruption “nonsense,” and the killing of two protesters by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis a consequence of “antifa-style operations” intent on thwarting the president’s deportation of “criminal aliens.” He liked Trump’s idea of seizing Greenland and predicted that the war in Iran, which he blamed on “that whole neocon establishment,” would probably be short and decisive because the markets wanted it over and Trump’s political instincts were “impeccable.” But on the threats of censorship, politicized justice, state surveillance, and monopoly power, which had once animated his outrage, and which now came from the Trump administration, he had nothing to say. Sacks had become what he always despised—political.

[From the July 2025 issue: The talented Mr. Vance]

In March, he left his position as AI-and-crypto czar, saying that he had completed his 130 days of service, and returned full-time to Craft Ventures. In December he had moved from San Francisco to Austin, just in time to escape a proposed tax on billionaires that may appear before California voters this November.

Silicon Valley will still have a valuable line to the White House. When Sacks stepped down, he was named co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Its members include Andreessen, Zuckerberg, Huang, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, a co-founder of a cryptocurrency exchange, the CEO of a semiconductor manufacturer, and a billionaire investor who co-hosts All-In with Sacks. (Among the 15 there is one academic scientist.) This lineup, almost a parody of crony capitalism, signals the final union of America’s interests with those of its wealthiest citizens—tech power fused with state power. The private sector is cooking in Washington.

In his year there, Sacks achieved his two central goals: putting the government’s seal of approval on crypto and keeping its hands off artificial intelligence. He was also a founding member of an exclusive MAGA-aligned club in Georgetown, with a fee of $500,000, called the Executive Branch, and he midwifed the creation of an AI-industry lobby, Innovation Council, that plans to spend at least $100 million in support of the Trump administration’s technology policy in this year’s midterm elections.

In winning his policy battles, though, Sacks might have lost the war. What Tim Wu calls “the turn away from populism to corruption in tech policy” has alienated important parts of the MAGA coalition from Trump and his rich backers. Steve Bannon says that he and his anti–Big Tech allies are going to make the Innovation Council “the moral equivalent of AIPAC: You take that money and you’re dead.” At some point, an unlikely left-right alliance could unite against the tech oligarchs. “Donald Trump and his administration are using the presidency to make themselves and their billionaire friends richer,” Senator Warren told me, listing Sacks’s policy achievements in crypto and AI. “We are at an inflection point where very powerful AI systems threaten to displace jobs and transform our economy—and we will be living with the consequences for years if Sacks gets his way.”

AI could well be the most important issue in the 2028 presidential election. Sacks has moved Trump into the camp of the Silicon Valley saints, selling a world few people actually want to live in, where the state is the handmaiden of industry, wealth accumulates to insider elites tainted by grift, and ordinary people find that they’re losing the last power they have left, over their own minds.

Every so often, the hosts of All-In remember that staggering quantities of money are pooling upward in America, while discontent roils down below. Suddenly sounding earnest, almost chastened, one of them will call on the group to “fix this inequality gap,” end “ostentatious displays of wealth,” do more in the mode of Carnegie and Rockefeller to benefit the public, maybe even support a wealth tax to stave off the coming class war. But Sacks will have none of it. He alone remains committed to the principle of self-interest. He still believes that capitalism means never having to say you’re sorry.

This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The Venture-Capital Populist.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Fight-Club Rule on Gerrymandering

2026-04-29T15:49:17-04:00

Florida Republicans have approved a new congressional map that could hand them as many as four House seats that Democrats currently hold. Their goal is straightforward and universally understood: They want to bolster the GOP’s majority in Congress and retake the lead in a yearlong, nationwide partisan gerrymandering showdown with Democrats.

Good luck, however, getting top Republicans in the Sunshine State to openly admit that.

In contrast with other states that have held lengthy and freewheeling public debates over redistricting during the past year, the drive to redraw maps in Florida has been marked by secrecy and obfuscation. Republicans can’t acknowledge the intent of their gerrymandering proposal, because the state constitution expressly prohibits partisan redistricting. As a result, Florida GOP officials—starting with Governor Ron DeSantis and extending all the way to lowly political operatives—have treated the subject of gerrymandering like a defendant respecting a Miranda warning: Do not say anything that could jeopardize these new maps in court.

“Anything you say will get you subpoenaed,” one political consultant who works for Republicans in the state told me. The consultant spoke on the condition of anonymity because he, too, does not want to be hauled before a judge when Democrats inevitably challenge the new maps as violating the ban on partisan gerrymandering. “You can’t say, ‘We need to make more Republican seats.’ You’re done. You’re toast, and then your map’s invalidated.”

No Republican has followed this fight-club rule more carefully than DeSantis, who called the legislature into session less than a week after Virginia voters evened up the national gerrymandering race by narrowly approving an aggressive Democratic redistricting plan. The Florida governor’s office drew lines based on the likelihood that the Supreme Court would announce a decision weakening enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, insulating the proposal from a challenge in federal court. The justices proved DeSantis’s presumption not only correct but exceptionally well timed: The Court handed down its ruling this morning while Florida legislators were preparing to vote on the new districts, and they paused their debate to read the decision. The 6–3 ruling voided a Louisiana voting map that included a new majority-Black district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. It could lead other GOP-led states to eliminate House seats drawn to boost minority representation in Congress in the months and years ahead. The court did not touch Florida’s state ban on partisan gerrymandering, however. The governor’s proposed map eliminates a district created to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a successful bet on the Supreme Court’s move to limit that provision.

Until Monday, no one had actually seen the map that DeSantis wanted lawmakers to adopt within a few days’ time. When he finally released it, the governor claimed that the proposal was “separate” and “independent” of the tit-for-tat redistricting battle that President Trump launched last year in Texas. “It’s the right thing to do for Florida,” DeSantis told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham.

[Read: Trump’s enormous gerrymandering blunder]

DeSantis’s official rationale for redistricting is that Florida was shortchanged in the 2020 census and that the state’s population has grown dramatically. (“Florida has experienced 10 years’ worth of population growth in, like, three” years, DeSantis said at a news conference in early April.) The closest he came to acknowledging the partisan nature of the new map—which could give Republicans 24 out of Florida’s 28 House seats—was to note, in a statement to Fox News, that the GOP has overtaken the Democrats’ longtime edge in the state among registered voters and now has 1.5 million more. (DeSantis did signal a partisan intent in ways less likely to backfire in court: He gave his proposal first to Fox News before sending it to the legislature, and the map was drawn in shades of red and blue to denote how many seats Republicans could control if it were enacted.)

DeSantis’s bigger gamble is that newly gerrymandered district lines will yield Republicans as many House seats as they aim to gain. For months, the prospect of joining the redistricting race has divided the Florida GOP. Current members of the party’s House delegation were leery of seeing their districts become more competitive in an effort to flip more seats, and some officials feared that in a midterm election year expected to favor Democrats, an aggressive gerrymander could backfire and cost Republicans more than help them. Florida Republicans already drew themselves a skewed congressional map in 2022; they hold more than 70 percent of House seats in a state where Trump earned 56 percent of the vote in the most recent presidential election.

An analysis by the nonpartisan Civic Data & Research Institute published earlier this month argued that Republicans had essentially already maximized their advantage in Florida and that an aggressive redistricting plan would produce “zero net gain” in House seats. Other strategists, however, disagree. “They’re not maxed out in Florida,” Matt Gorman, a former senior staffer at the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me. “You’ve got to make sure you’re not drawing the lines too thin, but the idea that you can’t move anything is ridiculous.”

DeSantis’s proposal appears to adopt that view. Republicans at one point had discussed trying to flip as many as six Democratic seats in Florida, which would have given the GOP all but two statewide. DeSantis didn’t go that far, but the four he is seeking to shift might be more than Republicans can win if the party has a bad year (as polls suggest it will).

Democrats have characterized the gambit as simultaneously illegal and foolish. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dubbed the proposed map “the DeSantis dummymander” and told reporters that if Democrats turn out in Florida as they did in 2018 and 2020, the party could win an additional three to five seats that were not previously in play. Other Democrats, however, avoided Jeffries’s bravado. Steve Schale, a longtime party strategist in Florida who helped Barack Obama twice carry the state, told me that Republicans “definitely created a harder pathway” for Democrats. But, he added, “I don’t think it’s a slam-dunk four-seat Republican gain.”

The GOP proposal appears to target seats held by Democratic Representatives Kathy Castor in Tampa and Darren Soto near Orlando, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Moskowitz in southeast Florida. Schale compared gerrymandering to squeezing a balloon: The air moves around inside, but it’s still there. “The reality is there’s a lot of Democrats in southeast Florida. There are a lot of Democrats in Central Florida,” he said. “You can’t make them just disappear into the ocean.”

The uncertainty of how successful DeSantis’s map will prove to be for Republicans is intertwined with the broader question of Florida’s shifting political identity. Both parties agree that it is no longer the swing state that decided the 2000 election by a few hundred votes. But is it the light-red state that gave DeSantis and Trump narrow statewide victories from 2016 through 2020, or the deeper Republican stronghold that delivered the party double-digit wins in 2022 and 2024? Trump’s win in 2024 relied in part on large gains among Latino voters, but they have swung back to Democrats in special and local elections since then.

For now, Democrats who persuaded voters to approve their gerrymanders in California and Virginia were hoping to block the Republicans in Florida—if not in the GOP-dominated legislature then in the courts. They have grasped at what little moral high ground remains in the redistricting fight, pointing out that whereas Democrats took their plans directly to the voters (which state law had required them to do), Republicans jammed their new maps through the legislature with minimal public debate.

[Read: Welcome to the gerrymandering apocalypse ]

As lawmakers convened this week in Tallahassee, opponents of the GOP plan tried to generate a public groundswell against it. Now that it has passed, they plan to sue on the grounds that it violates the Fair Districts Amendment, the 2010 ballot measure that bans both partisan and racial gerrymandering. “This legislature has refused to engage with the public because they know that what they’re doing is illegal,” Genesis Robinson, the executive director of the advocacy group Equal Ground, told me.

In making its case for the new maps, the governor’s office seems to be banking on a favorable ruling from the Florida Supreme Court, which is composed entirely of Republican appointees and upheld the preceding, GOP-tilted House map that was used in 2022. A memo to the legislature from DeSantis’s general counsel argued that the Fair Districts Amendment was unconstitutional, and in testimony yesterday, a lawyer for the governor’s office acknowledged that mapmakers had used partisan voter data in drafting their proposal. Democrats saw the admission as an opening in the litigation likely to follow enactment of the new map. What seemed clear was that if Florida’s ban on partisan gerrymandering remained intact, the informal ban on copping to it was weakening.

The King’s Admirer in Chief

2026-04-29T13:46:00-04:00

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Cannons fired. Fifes and drums played “Yankee Doodle.” A quartet of F-35s flew overhead, and dozens of military service members held American and British flags. It was about as much pomp as the United States can muster. This 250th anniversary of America, for the Brits, can be … a bit awkward. It’s like celebrating a divorce with your ex, decades after the breakup. But here was King Charles III, ready to toast the land that his great-grandfather five times over allowed to get away. And here, too, was President Trump—who has long admired, complimented, and envied the Royal Family—doing little to tamp down suspicions that he strives to become a monarch in his own right.

Charles’s visit to Washington was part of the celebrations for an anniversary Trump is eager to mark, and the president was keen to impress the King who’d come across the Atlantic. As Trump took the stage yesterday on a dreary morning filled with spitting rain (“What a beautiful British day this is!” he said), he also reveled in the unlikeliness of the onetime subjects welcoming the monarch. “In the shadows of monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, honoring the British king might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence,” Trump said. “But in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate.”

He spoke of how far America had come since a ragtag crew of rebels threw off control by their imperial masters. All around him, however, was evidence of his desire to make the nation’s capital a little more, well, regal. Gilded flourishes now predominate at the White House. Outside the gates, Lafayette Park remains a construction site. The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is closed off as Trump has it painted a bright blue. During the welcoming ceremony, cranes swung back and forth above the site where Trump last year tore down the East Wing—and now hopes a monumental ballroom will rise.

Throughout the day it was clear how much Trump admired, and wanted to emulate, Charles. In Britain, when one monarch dies, they quickly update the currency with an image of the new king or queen. In America, a gold coin with Trump’s image is in the works, as are National Park passes and passports that will bear his likeness. In Britain, there are elaborate shrines marking the history of an empire. In America, Trump plans a giant triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery that’s been dubbed the Arc de Trump.

Over the past year, Democrats and other Trump opponents have staged “No Kings” rallies throughout the country. On this day, Trump, however tongue in cheek, formally declared himself one. As Charles was giving a speech at the Capitol, delivering a none-too-subtle paean to the importance of checks and balances in constitutional government, the official White House social-media account blasted out a photo of the two men. “TWO KINGS,” it read, with an emoji of a crown.

In mid-September, I arrived with President Trump for a two-day festival in the United Kingdom. A few days before arriving, other members of the press corps and I were invited to a special tour of Windsor Castle, the setting for a state banquet in Trump’s honor. A small group of us were shuttled to the property. Television cameras from around the world were broadcasting from outside the walls. As our van drove through the lush grounds, the Red Arrows, the Royal Air Force display team, flew overhead with red, white, and blue streamers behind.

It’s impossible to overstate how elaborate it all was, how meticulous the planning for it was, how grand—and, yes, over-the-top—it all appeared. Inside, each table setting featured five glasses. All told, 1,452 pieces of cutlery were spread around the table where more than 100 staff would be serving. The table itself took a week to lay together and assemble. We were instructed not to take photos, but people sneaked them anyway.

[Read: What we learn about Trump in his rare moments of self-reflection]

The dinner was held in St. George’s Hall, with wooden arches and crests, pikes and shields. At one end of the room was an armored figure on horseback known as “The King’s Champion.” It references a historical figure who would ride into a banquet, throw his gauntlet down, and then challenge anyone to deny the authority of the new sovereign. At the time, it seemed a fitting metaphor for how Trump viewed himself, and his presidency. He was stretching the bounds of what it could do, and he was largely unrestrained.

The president was clearly giddy about the whole experience. “This is truly one of the highest honors of my life,” he said. “Such respect for you and such respect for your country.”

Trump has always had a soft spot for the Royal Family. He wrote to then-Prince Charles in 1994, offering him an honorary membership to Mar-a-Lago. He also received a letter from Princess Diana in 1997, just weeks before her death, in which she thanked him for sending flowers on her birthday. His mother was Scottish and, by his account, sat for an entire day in front of the television watching Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, in 1953. “She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour,” he wrote in his book The Art of the Deal. His dad, he wrote, was less enthralled, pacing and telling her, “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.”

Looking out onto the South Lawn yesterday, he recalled his mother’s affection for the royals generally, and for Charles specifically. “She really did love the family, but I also remember her saying, very clearly, ‘Charles—look, young Charles. He’s so cute,’” he said. “My mother had a crush on Charles. Can you believe it?”

This visit came at a dicey moment, with the Epstein files lingering, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s job in peril, and a war that the United States launched without British help or consultation still upending the global economy. British officials have said they hoped their king, who has tried to cozy up to Trump, would help shore up a “special relationship” that has seen better days. In his most high-profile remarks of the visit, the King was invited to address a joint session of Congress. The event had the feel of a State of the Union, with Charles walking down the center aisle and greeting politicians, the vice president and the House speaker sitting behind him as he spoke.

At moments it seemed like a stand-up routine. He joked that he was there to celebrate what transpired 250 years ago, then paused a beat. “Or, as we say in the United Kingdom, ‘just the other day.’” He quoted from Oscar Wilde (“We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language”), and he mentioned a “tale of two Georges” (“the first president, George Washington, and my five-times great-grandfather, King George III”). In what wasn’t meant as a joke but could be interpreted as one, he also called Congress, which has been mired in unusually severe bouts of dysfunction, a “renowned chamber of debate and deliberation.”

He also said some things that, coming from anyone else, Trump might have interpreted as unforgivable slights. He talked about military cooperation in the world wars and in Afghanistan, adding that “that same unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine”—a pointed reminder that Trump has been anything but steadfast in his support for Kyiv. He spoke of environmentalism and the need to “safeguard nature, our most precious and irreplaceable asset,” at a moment when the Trump administration has been busy undoing one environmental protection after another. One of his most rousing lines came as he referenced the Magna Carta and the legal framework that both countries share, including “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” Democrats were particularly enthusiastic, but Republicans also rose from their seats.

[Read: Is the end of NATO near?]

Rather than be offended, Trump appeared charmed, and more than a little envious. At a dinner that evening—ornate by White House standards, but nothing compared with the one in Windsor Castle last fall—Trump repeatedly complimented the King on his speech (“I was very jealous!” he said as he welcomed him outside). He marveled at how Charles was able to get the Democrats to stand and applaud him (“I couldn’t believe it!”).

As much as Trump craves the partisan combat that has been such a feature of his presidency, it was hard not to think that he’d be just fine with the near-universal adoration of a monarch.

The YOLO Presidency

2026-04-29T06:00:00-04:00

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Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?

Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.

And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.

“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”

The tendency to self-aggrandize is as fundamental a feature of Trump as his sculpted hair and overlong red ties. But it has become even more important in setting his priorities and steering his actions as he hurtles through his final term in office. He no longer has to worry about the judgment of voters and can instead focus on what he’s decided really matters: ascending to become one of history’s so-called great men and leaving an enduring—and, in many cases, physical—imprint. The result, at least so far, has cost many lives and billions of dollars, damaged the world economy, strained already fragile alliances, and cratered the president’s standing with the public. But those around him cast his new focus as a liberation. “He is unburdened by political concerns and is able to do what is truly right rather than what is in his best political interests,” the administration official told us. “Hence the decision to strike Iran.”

What the American people think—and what near-term consequences they may face—has mattered less to Trump than his own designs to remake the world by bombing seven countries, toppling two world leaders in as many months, threatening to seize Greenland, and undermining the NATO alliance. Earlier this month, Trump described the conflagration with Iran in existential terms, writing on social media, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Even when he later agreed to a two-week cease-fire—which has since been extended—Trump portrayed his Middle East adventurism as “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” At home, he has focused his time and attention on unending tributes to his reign—building projects that recall ancient Rome, decorative gilding that evokes imperial France, banners with his visage draped across government buildings, and a gold coin set to be minted with his image for the nation’s 250th birthday. “He is conscious, proud, and hopeful that some of the things that he does are resetting long-standing orders of things,” a second senior official told us. “Not in a Socrates sort of way, just: The stuff I’m doing is very different, and it will reset things to some level, and that includes not just this country but the world.”

[Read: ‘I run the country and the world’]

When we asked several White House officials whether Trump had discovered and embraced Hegel’s writings, they dismissed the hypothesis almost laughingly. The president does not have a reputation as a reader. He did recently learn about the powerful triumvirate in a brief passage that someone handed him, the senior official told us, although that person couldn’t recall if it was a poem or an essay or something else. The second senior official suggested that Trump might be recalling a speech he heard at a golf-club event last year, where a speaker placed Trump in the frame of historical figures such as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. White House officials and allies have debated other reasons for the president’s turn toward history, and some have dismissed it as typical Trumpian braggadocio—the greatest, the biggest, the best. They all spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to candidly detail their private conversations with the president.

Then, on Saturday night, following an assassination attempt at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Trump turned briefly introspective, offering yet another glimpse of how he views his place in the scope of history. Speaking to reporters shortly after the alleged gunman had been apprehended, Trump said that he had “studied assassinations,” mentioned Lincoln, and argued that “the people that make the biggest impact—they’re the ones that they go after.” “They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much,” he continued, before musing that only “big names” face these threats to their life, and concluding: “I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.”

Trump’s heightened tendency to view himself as a world-historical figure—capable of brash, misunderstood greatness—has transformed his second term, and not necessarily in a good way. Republicans are in a panic about the political costs of the attack on Iran, which has increased prices and interest rates ahead of an election that will hinge on affordability. Democrats, meanwhile, delight in Trump’s focus on building a ballroom and a memorial arch, which swing-voter focus groups regularly identify as a misplaced priority. And inside the administration, the excitement of his first year has given way to a more defensive mentality, as some of the president’s most committed supporters splinter away and the political operation struggles to maintain the 2024 coalition.

But for Trump, the costs have been outweighed by what he views as the opportunity before him, a chance to transform the world in a manner that few historical figures have ever even approached. A second Trump confidant summarized bluntly: “He’s clearly in his ‘I don’t give a fuck’ mood.”

Ever since moving back into the Oval Office, Trump has been adding accents to the room, cluttering the space with golden urns, military flags, rows of presidential portraits, and a 19th-century copy of the Declaration of Independence. The crowns of the doors have been gilded, as have the seal and stars on the ceiling. Like clip art in blank spots on the wall, he has affixed ornamental molding, coated in gold leaf. When we entered the Oval Office for an interview last April, one of the first questions he asked us was of decor: “Do I do a chandelier?” he inquired. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.” (Ultimately, he opted against it because the logistics were not ideal; one option included hanging it directly through the bald eagle’s beak on the presidential seal.)

The doors, however, remained glaringly unadorned until Trump had an idea: He took his personally designed presidential challenge coin—such tokens are generally a palm-size souvenir that’s popular in military and law-enforcement circles—and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. “Everyone was impressed by how good it looked,” a White House official told us. In the weeks that followed, Trump made his way through the West Wing, seeking out new places to affix his coins (golden and featuring the presidential seal). One by one, the president decorated the office doors of each of his deputies. His aides are convinced that he will eventually cover all of the doors.

Trump, a developer by trade, has always loved these sorts of details—to a point of distraction. Building and branding are “in his DNA; it’s who he is,” David Urban, a Trump ally, told us. And now, as president, Trump feels that he’s deploying those skills for the common good. “He believes in his mind that he’s making all of these things better, and you know what? At the end of the day, he is making all of these things better.” The president’s friends and advisers have told us story upon story of his obsession with the smallest minutiae, of his dedication to his monuments of self—the time he got down on all fours to help explain exactly how he wanted new tiling at Mar-a-Lago arranged; the time he glanced out of a window at one of his golf courses and then stopped a meeting, just cold stopped it, so he could amble out to instruct the gardeners.

His passion for his personal projects has begun bleeding into daily work as president. One month into the Iran war, for instance—as gas prices averaged near $4, mortgage rates were climbing, and inflation fears were eroding stock values—Trump came to the press cabin in the back of Air Force One to argue that the bombing campaign was working. Or, at least, that’s what the reporters covering his trip home from Mar-a-Lago thought he was there to do. Then he suddenly switched from talking about the war to boasting about his plans for “hand-carved” Corinthian columns as part of his $400 million White House ballroom. The president presented six mounted, photo-realistic renderings of the project that he explained at length, like this was a miles-high slide show. He went on about the drone-resistant roof, the bulletproof windows, the multiple porches, and the basement military facility, before pausing near the end to explain his priorities.

“I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this—I’m fighting wars and other things,” Trump told the assembled press. “But this is very important because this is gonna be with us for a long time.”

A foreign leader visiting Washington today would find a city under reconstruction, with tower cranes over the White House, a spectacle that recalls Roman Emperor Augustus’s claim that “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marbles.” There’s the planned remodeling (and recent renaming) of the Kennedy Center, the affixing of his name to the United States Institute of Peace, the attempted seizure of D.C.-municipal golf courses that Trump plans to renovate, the paving over of Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden into a Mar-a-Lago-style patio, and the tearing down of the East Wing to make way for the massive ballroom. (That destruction prompted the largest outcry, perhaps because the symbolism was visual, physical, visceral—a wrecking ball laying waste to a cherished pillar of democracy.) The proposed “Arc de Trump,” a 250-foot structure modeled after Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, would be taller than any similar structure in world history, and more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial, across the river from where it would stand. “The GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World,” Trump declared three days after announcing the cease-fire with Iran.

Even the yearlong celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial has become as much about feting Trump as observing the nation’s 250th birthday. Trump will mark his 80th birthday in June with a demonstration by modern-day gladiators—a UFC Freedom 250 fight on the White House South Lawn. The fighters will weigh in at the Lincoln Memorial. Later, they will emerge from the Oval Office to battle before a waiting Trump, the event complete with fireworks and a light show—a grandiose and very Trumpian tribute to himself.

Trump doesn’t like to use the term legacy, advisers and allies told us, and some have wondered whether he really cares about his legacy at all. “The only legacy President Trump is concerned with is making America greater than ever before,” the White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told us. As Trump searched for a running mate in 2024, the second Trump confidant recounted that they had tried to implore him to pick someone who could help continue his political movement. Trump retorted: “What the hell do I care? I’ll be dead.”

“I don’t think he’s sitting around musing about what people will think 100 or 200 years from now,” one of the senior officials told us.

But there is no dispute that something has changed in his second term—a freeing of his ambition, and a newfound sense of power. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” Trump told The New York Times after a successful operation in Venezuela to capture its leader, Nicolás Maduro. His top advisers now talk about him as the person with “the highest tolerance for risk in the world, and the best instinct for self-preservation,” according to one of them. That has left everyone around him attempting to proceed as if this is a normal presidency—or, at least, a normal Trump presidency—but the president is different now, firmly in his second term with personal electoral victory no longer a driving force. The guardrails from the first term are gone, and Trump has all but abandoned the pretense of much caring about the Republican Party that he holds in an emperor-like grip.

[Read: It’s not just Iran. Trump is flailing on multiple fronts.]

Top White House officials, political advisers, and Cabinet members gathered in mid-February at the Capitol Hill Club to lay out a midterm-election strategy that would focus on delivering a consistent message that’s focused on the economy and cost of living, regardless of what Trump says or does. The group met again a month later, at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria, which was previously the Trump International Hotel. The February plan had run headlong into the expensive war, so the message became blunter: There was no longer room for error.

Sarah Longwell, a former Republican and an anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups with Biden-Trump swing voters, told us that Trump keeps acting in politically irrational ways. “So every time he’s focused on the ballroom, every time he’s focused on the Kennedy Center, voters are like, ‘But you’re not focused on Americans. You’re not focused on me. You’re not focused on the economy,’” she told us. “Most people are like, ‘I don't care about the ballroom. Just be focused on the economy. That was the whole point of you.’”

One Trump ally told us that the president is not particularly worried whether he loses the House, and that he cares only slightly about holding the Senate. The reason: A Democratic Senate means “a six-month impeachment trial versus three hours,” this person explained. But Trump has survived two impeachments, and he arguably returned more powerful. His focus now is on doing something more enduring with his influence. Trump worries about being perceived as a lame-duck president, several people told us, including this ally. He has—at least on one occassion—acknowledged his own mortality. Jimmy Carter died in late 2024, during the presidential transition, and when he lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, Trump watched the proceedings for hours from Mar-a-Lago, transfixed by the coverage, a person close to the White House told us. One day, Trump mused, he would be inside a flag-draped coffin like that. (In a story about Trump’s health, New York magazine also reported a version of these comments.)

The same ally told us that Trump now cares more about his successor, believing that a Republican president loyal to him will help ensure that his actions are not immediately reversed. After losing in 2020, he had four years out of power to watch President Biden try to return the nation to a pre-Trump status quo ante, and he now understands what lasting change requires. But even that is complicated. “There is a little bit of tension there, because I think there’s a part of him who might also want to say, ‘I’m the only one who can hold this coalition together,’” the first Trump confidant told us. (Trump has publicly mused about running again in 2028—a clear joke to troll his opponents, advisers insist—though other people in Trump’s orbit, such as the MAGA influencer and former adviser Steve Bannon, are more seriously pushing the idea.)

[Read: Doomsday-prepping for Trump’s third term]

In short, the president’s incentive structure has changed. “The hallmark of his entire life has been: Solve the problem that’s in front of my face, and I bet I’ll be able to solve the next problem when I get to it, but I’m not going to worry about it right now. And it leads to this inherently short-term thinking,” this confidant said. Now that Trump is no longer running for president, this person explained, “he’s not thinking about What do my polling numbers say right now? or What are they for in the midterms I’m not running in, or for 2028 when I don’t care?”

Still, Trump’s team remains cautiously optimistic that it can refocus him on the coming midterms, which could act, perhaps, as the last guardrail to curb his influences in a term that, so far, has mainly been dictated by such whims. “He knows he is essentially on the ballot in the midterms,” one of the senior White House officials told us, as if by saying it aloud they could will it into reality. But after those elections, this person mused, “God knows what the next two years will look like.”

Hegel—whether or not Trump has actually read a word of his dense tracts—may offer some hints. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon Bonaparte, Hegel argued, operated with “an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe.” They were not exactly intellectuals, he wrote, and they did not live particularly happy lives. Napoleon was exiled in his 40s to St. Helena; Alexander died at 32; and Caesar, after declaring himself dictator of Rome, was assassinated at 55 by nobles. As Hegel concluded: “So mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.” The German philosopher could just as well have been writing about Trump, some 200 years before the American president dubbed himself a great man of history and began trampling so many modern-day flowers.

Calling Trump a Tyrant Is Not a Call to Violence

2026-04-28T12:25:34-04:00

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To describe Donald Trump as a corrupt aspiring authoritarian is not to conclude that he should be murdered.

This ought to be a simple point to understand. Yet it is lost on a large swath of the American right, who insist that calling Trump what he is causes at least some of his opponents—among them, the accused shooter Cole Tomas Allen—to believe that violence is justified against the president.

In an interview with CBS following the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Trump blamed the most recent attempt on his life on “the hate speech of the Democrats,” which he called “very dangerous.”

The New York Post asked on Sunday, “Where did Allen get such ideas about Trump and the need to remove him, via murder?” It answered the question like so: “Almost certainly from the left, including from Democrats in positions of power. Barely a day goes by without some Dem calling Trump an autocrat, a king, a dictator, Hitler.”

Also on Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Representative Jamie Raskin to engage with the premise. “You and many of your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president,” she said. “Do you think twice about that when something like this happens?” And yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt charged, “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”

This claim suffers three serious defects. First, it assumes that violence is the only logical response to an attempt to undermine democracy. In reality, Trump’s assault on democratic norms can be—and in fact, is being—successfully resisted through democratic means. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán had carried out a more advanced version of the same power-consolidation strategy that Trump is attempting now, and voters defeated him through peaceful organizing.

[From the September 2024 issue: American fury]

The second problem with a moratorium on calling your opponents authoritarian is that Trump himself routinely violates it. The president has spent a decade calling his rivals communists and traitors, among other hyperbolic insults. He has specifically claimed that Democrats rig elections as a matter of course. Taking violent steps to stop undemocratic political leaders follows much more closely from Trump’s rhetoric than from anything Democrats have said about him.

And third, the conservative principle would seem to rule out any criticism of authoritarian tendencies, however real they may be. If calling a politician an aspiring authoritarian is tantamount to inciting their murder, then doing so is irresponsible even if the charge is true. Republicans could nominate the reanimated corpse of Benito Mussolini for president, and Democrats couldn’t question his commitment to democracy without being accused of ginning up violence.

Ideally, critics of Trump’s threat to democracy would recognize that authoritarianism is on a dimmer switch, not an on-off switch, and that his opponents have ample space to oppose him through democratic channels. They would likewise acknowledge that even most dictators fall far short of the horrors of Hitlerism. That distinction is widely, if not universally, understood, which is why the rallies are called “No Kings,” not “No Führers.”

The ruling as out of bounds any discussion of Trump’s contempt for democracy is not merely some unfortunate by-product of the right’s rhetorical gambit, but its central purpose. Trump has been glorifying and stoking violence since he entered politics. He has urged his rally-goers to “kick the crap out of” counterprotesters; has fantasized about unleashing the brute strength of his supporters (“I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad”); and, of course, mass-pardoned the insurrectionists who did precisely that on January 6, 2021.

It is true that, in addition to fomenting violence, Trump has been the target of it. Conservatives appear to be correct to attribute an ideological motive to the recent shooting attempt. The most chilling aspect of Allen’s radicalization, judging from the information available so far, is that it did not spring from either a mental breakdown or some anarchist sectarian plot, but instead relatively banal Democratic partisanship. Allen seems to have posted on Bluesky and attended a No Kings rally.

Some progressives have cheered Luigi Mangione for murdering Brian Thompson, a health-care CEO. The prominence of Hasan Piker, an apologist for terrorism and a proponent of authoritarian regimes, has revealed a much broader comfort on the left with illiberal ideas and violent methods.

Resorting to violence merely strengthens the forces of illiberalism and sense of disorder upon which Trumpism feeds. The official Democratic Party has understood this, which is why not a single elected Democrat at any level has condoned murder attempts on the president or his allies. Allen apparently believes that if you conclude that Trump is an authoritarian, then violence against him is justified. By conflating antiauthoritarian arguments with incitement, conservatives are making the same error but following it to the opposite conclusion.

The norm that many Trump-supporting conservatives seek to enforce is not a prohibition on violent rhetoric or even limits on attacking politicians who are seen as threats to democracy, but a one-sided ban imposed on Trump’s critics so that the president can do as he wishes. Defining political violence as something that is being wielded primarily or exclusively against Trump is to condone his behavior.

Trump’s efforts to exploit the latest attempt on his life illuminate his motives. The comedian Jimmy Kimmel recently offended Trump and his family by joking on Thursday that Melania Trump has “a glow like an expectant widow.” The premise of the bit was obviously that Melania is the younger trophy wife of a wealthy older man, not that Trump was likely to be murdered soon. (Kimmel made the joke before last weekend’s shooting.) Still, Trump absurdly labeled Kimmel’s gold-digger joke a “despicable call to violence” and revived his demands that ABC fire the comedian.

Trump and his allies perceive that the near-universal dismay at another attempt on the president’s life has given them a supply of political capital that they can employ toward their desired ends, many of which involve suppressing criticism. This demonstrates how the gunmen who thought they were going to stop Trump have empowered him instead. It demonstrates as well that the Trumpian right’s supposed abhorrence for violence and antiauthoritarian rhetoric is purely selective.

What We Learn About Trump in His Rare Moments of Self-Reflection

2026-04-27T13:46:51-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

For a guy who had just been rushed out of a ballroom at the sound of gunfire, he seemed remarkably calm. For a president who regularly attacks the press, he seemed unusually gracious. For a fleeting period on Saturday night, Donald Trump appeared introspective, or at least as introspective as he’s capable of being in public.

“It’s always shocking when something like this happens,” he told reporters in the White House briefing room, standing in his tux and appearing to speak without notes. He briefly seemed to consider how familiar he was with threats to his life, and how the shock doesn’t fade: “Happened to me a little bit. And that never changes.”

At least three times within the past two years, Trump has been perilously close to a gunman trying to harm him and has escaped death. When a bullet grazed his ear at a July 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, he described it as a religious experience in which divine intervention saved him for a higher calling. “I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention shortly after the shooting. “I’ll tell you, I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.”

Such talk of the Almighty does not come easily to Trump, who has never been particularly religious, and on Saturday night, he turned to an equally unfamiliar topic: unity. This is a president who had frequently and harshly criticized many of the reporters in front of him, and had sued many of the news organizations that employ them. He had long boycotted the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, calling members of the media the “enemy of the people” and the dinner “a very big, boring bust.” But on Saturday night, he struck a different tone.

“This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press,” he said. “And in a certain way, it did—because the fact that they just unified, I saw a room that was just totally unified.”

He added: “It was, in one way, very beautiful, a very beautiful thing to see.”

Trump marveled at how the cavernous ballroom he had been looking out on two hours prior was a collection of divergent viewpoints. He called for those gathered “to resolve our differences,” suggesting that perhaps the labels “Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives” could become less divisive. But he soon began to slip back into character with a grandiose boast: “Everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd—there was a record-setting group of people.”

Trump had privately remarked that he was impressed at how journalists continued to do their job after the incident, quickly turning from dinner participants into news gatherers, a person close to the president told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share the private details. Trump had fun on Saturday night, despite the dark turn, reveling in the black-tie, celebrity-filled party and delighting in answering questions from reporters that for once weren’t confrontational. He had watched some of the coverage before walking into the briefing room, this person told us, and continued to the next day, marveling in particular at footage of tuxedoed photographers snapping pictures and reporters in formal attire craning to get iPhone shots.

Our colleagues were part of that scramble. We have both been in dozens of sessions in the White House briefing room, which is named after James Brady, the White House press secretary who was severely injured in a 1981 assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan at the Washington Hilton, the same hotel that hosted Saturday night’s dinner. But none felt like this. Reporters were checking on one another, adrenaline pumping after experiencing a major news moment.

[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner]

Trump gave the first question of the night to Weijia Jiang, a CBS News correspondent and the president of the WHCA, who had been sitting next to him onstage and then crawled to safety behind him. He announced that he wanted to reschedule the dinner within the next 30 days and to make it even bigger and better, as if it were his event to plan. (He and his allies have also suggested that future dinners should be held in the massive but controversial new ballroom that he’s building at the White House.)

Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty

“I just want to say you did a fantastic job,” he said to Jiang from the podium. “What a beautiful evening, and we’re going to reschedule.”

The room of journalists burst into applause. Trump chuckled at the response and said: “After that, it’s very tough for her to ask a killer question, right?”

The warm feelings, predictably, didn’t last long. The next day, CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell visited the White House to interview the president for a segment that aired that night on 60 Minutes. It began with a recounting of the night before: Trump remarked on the Secret Service agents who had urged him to drop to the ground for his safety, on how well the first lady responded, and on the speed of the shooter. (“The NFL should sign him up. He was fast.”) “I wasn’t worried. I understand life,” he said, tiptoeing toward the philosophical. “We live in a crazy world.”

But then O’Donnell read from the text of a manifesto that the suspect allegedly wrote, stating that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” She asked the president to respond to that. Trump grew testy, saying he knew she would read that line. “You’re horrible people, horrible people,” he said. “I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”

But the line she read from the manifesto did not explicitly name Trump. Was it his assumption, she asked, that those lines were a reference to him? “Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person?” he said. “I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things.”

The president told the journalist that she “should be ashamed of yourself, reading that.” O’Donnell pointed out that she was simply reading the words of the alleged gunman. “You’re a disgrace,” Trump said. “But go ahead. Let’s finish the interview.”

His temper, eventually, seemed to cool, and he appeared torn over whether to be angry at a press he’s long lambasted or appreciative that reporters had lived through the same experience. “I don’t know how long it will last—the relationship, the friendship, the spirit after a very bad event took place,” he mused.

In the hours after the security breach, Trump told reporters that he has been studying past assassinations, especially that of Abraham Lincoln, and it was clear that political violence has been on his mind. He has pushed to make government records on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. available to the public. He’s talked about William McKinley (“As you know, he was assassinated”), Charlie Kirk (“assassinated in the prime of his life for boldly speaking the truth”), and Shinzo Abe (“unfortunately assassinated”).

“These assassins, they seem to be high-IQ people, but they’re crazy,” Trump said yesterday of those who are accused of trying to kill him. The suspect in Saturday night’s attempt, Cole Tomas Allen, wrote in his manifesto, published by the New York Post, that his top targets were administration officials, ranked highest to lowest.

After the shooting in Butler, Trump would at times talk about the danger of the presidency. He returned to that idea on Saturday night, remarking that he’s always thought of race-car drivers and bull riders as being in particularly risky professions. But statistics show that the presidency is even more so, he said, carrying a 5.8 percent chance of being killed and an 8 percent chance of being shot at. “I can’t imagine that there’s any profession more dangerous,” he added.

About two months after the Butler shooting, a man with a gun was spotted by Secret Service agents outside Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Trump was golfing. Agents fired at him, he fled, and he has since been sentenced to life in prison. There have also been threats of assassination from Iran, which became one element of Trump’s decision to order a joint U.S.-Israel operation that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (“I got him before he got me,” Trump later said. “I got him first.”)

[Read: How Trump lives with the threat of Iranian assassination]

Though Saturday night was terrifying, the gunman never got close to the president or other officials. Some in Trump’s orbit were happy to take the moment to talk about something other than the war with Iran or the struggling economy. Those close to him told us they were reminded of Butler, when a heroic Trump was celebrated for being unbowed by the specter of violence. Trump seemed upbeat, one person who briefly spoke with him yesterday told us, believing that the incident was, in a way, further proof that he was a consequential president.

Asked on Saturday if violence was simply the cost of modern-day politics, the president responded that he thought that was true. But he added that he tries to push such thoughts out of his mind, adding that he has “a pretty normal life, considering,” and doesn’t want threats to affect his mental state the way they could for others: “To be honest with you, I’m not a basket case.”

Trump had wanted the dinner to resume Saturday night, and he suggested that he was planning to alter his jokes to capture the shifting mood of the room, and perhaps beyond. “I was going to get up and make an entirely different speech,” he said in an interview with Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich yesterday morning. “I was going to really rip it last night. I was talking about everybody. And then they said, Well, my speech is going to be much different. It’ll be a speech of love. But I didn’t get a chance to do that. Probably I was better off if I didn’t. I don’t know.”

A Lesson for Guarding the Presidential Line of Succession

2026-04-26T20:30:11-04:00

In the chaotic swirl of events after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, doctors feared that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had suffered a heart attack upon arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. The signs were ominous: Johnson’s face was ashen, and he was clutching his chest. “There was the real possibility that the No. 3 in the line of succession would become president,” the historian Michael Beschloss told me. Johnson was reportedly examined and a heart attack ruled out—but not before then–House Speaker John McCormack was told that he might be the next president. The declaration prompted a severe bout of vertigo in the 71-year-old.

Few moments in history have so starkly exposed the vulnerabilities of the presidential line of succession—or the lack of clarity about how it is protected. Last night provided another illustration of them. If events at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner had gone differently, a gunman who breached security at the Washington Hilton could have reached a ballroom containing an unusually dense cluster of American power. The president and the vice president were seated a few feet apart. Congressional leadership and many Cabinet secretaries were also on hand. In other words, much of the presidential line of succession was in the same spot—and subject to the same vulnerabilities.

Senator Chuck Grassley, 92 and third in line as president pro tempore of the Senate, was home in Iowa—his absence briefly making him one of the most important people in the country. The Correspondents’ Dinner is built for symbolism: the press, the presidency, and Washington’s political elite gathered in a single room, putting their differences aside in celebration of the First Amendment. But the failed attack highlighted the typically unspoken peril of such a gathering, with so many figures in the line of succession crammed into a ballroom packed so tightly with tables, chairs, and people that it was hard to move around—much less duck for cover.

Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent who served on the presidential detail, told me that the system for protecting the president—and those who might replace him in the event of incapacity—is far more fragmented than it appears. Responsibility for protecting senior officials is divided across multiple agencies: the Secret Service, the Capitol Police, and departmental security teams, each operating with different mandates and chains of command. That system functions best when those requiring protection are dispersed. When they converge, it runs the risk of lapses.

“These acute shock moments make it reasonable to reintroduce a conversation,” Wackrow told me. “Should we have all of these political leaders—especially those who are in the line of succession—crammed together in one location?”

[Read: A dark new litmus test for power in Washington ]

A 2003 report by the Continuity of Government Commission warned that in the event of a catastrophic strike on Washington, a large portion of the presidential line of succession could be killed at once. It also noted a deeper constitutional ambiguity: The inclusion of congressional leaders in the line of succession raises both separation-of-powers concerns and the possibility of abrupt partisan shifts in control of the executive branch. The presidential historian Tim Naftali told me that gathering the president, vice president, and speaker in the same space when the United States is at war with Iran—a country previously linked to plots against Trump and other U.S. officials—was ill-advised. “This is not the right time to have all hands on deck,” he said.

That vulnerability is magnified in settings like Saturday’s dinner—which, unlike inaugurations or the State of the Union address, was not designated a National Special Security Event, the Secret Service told me. That designation, granted by the Department of Homeland Security, triggers a full federal-security architecture, Wackrow explained: integrated command structures, airspace restrictions, counter–chemical and biological monitoring, and coordinated intelligence fusion across agencies. Without it, planning is thinner, less centralized, and more dependent on venue-specific security, he said. (DHS and the White House did not immediately respond to my request for comment.)

Wackrow pointed to what he calls “consequence management”—the often overlooked challenge of what happens after prevention fails. A crowded ballroom that can hold more than 2,000 people is, by design, difficult to evacuate quickly. Exits can funnel into choke points. Movement could become dangerous amid panic. Even a contained incident can cascade into chaos simply because the geometry of the space works against rapid response.

The modern system of succession was designed to anticipate worst-case scenarios—but only in fragments. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 reordered the line of succession to place elected officials—the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate—ahead of Cabinet officers. (The secretary of state and secretary of the Treasury are next to follow.) The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, filled another gap, creating a formal process for presidential incapacitation and vice-presidential replacement. But both were reactive fixes, assembled after earlier crises exposed what the system had failed to imagine.

During the Cold War, officials confronted one version of the problem more directly. The concept of a “designated survivor”—a Cabinet member excluded from major events like the State of the Union address—emerged from fears of nuclear war. In the late ’50s, the U.S. government quietly built a massive fallout shelter beneath the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. Code-named “Project Greek Island,” it was designed to shelter the entire Congress if Washington were wiped out in an attack, complete with dormitories, committee rooms, and temporary House and Senate chambers carved into the mountains.

For decades, it sat in plain sight, beneath the luxury hotel—hidden in a space built for the sole objective of government continuity in the event of catastrophe. The bunker was taken out of service soon after its existence was revealed by The Washington Post in 1992; it’s now a Cold War relic of how seriously Washington once planned for the continuity of constitutional government. What those plans did not fully solve was a more ambiguous modern risk: mass vulnerability, without warning, in civilian settings.

That gap persists, though there have been attempts to close it. The 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles led to Secret Service protection for presidential candidates. In 1975, President Gerald Ford survived two attempts on his life in California. Six years later, the shooting of President Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton—the same hotel that hosted last night’s dinner—led to the elimination of its exposed VIP entrance in favor of a stone-enclosed driveway. “We have learned from history,” Naftali told me.

But that accumulated wisdom is undermined, he suggested, by a basic lapse. Gathering so many leaders in the same place, at the same time—particularly during wartime—“is not a good idea,” he said. Beschloss put it bluntly: Elected officials are reluctant to highlight their own vulnerability. “They are afraid it will make them look afraid or too distant from other Americans,” he said. But, he added, “we can’t allow national tragedies to become more likely”—a tension that becomes sharper as political violence becomes more routine.

After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the 2021 inauguration of President Biden took place behind fortified perimeters, lined with thousands of National Guard troops. Beschloss argued that if ever there were a time to hold an inauguration indoors, that was it. But Biden sought to demonstrate the importance of a peaceful transfer of power, even if it was conducted under conditions that resembled a security operation more than a civic celebration.

[Read: Biden’s inauguration is the most militarized since 1861]

The lesson, continuity experts argue, is not that public events should disappear. It is that the system still struggles to reconcile two competing imperatives: visibility and survivability.

Some officials have begun to say so explicitly. Representative Michael McCaul questioned earlier today whether it makes sense for the president and vice president to appear together at events like the Correspondents’ Dinner, noting that a single explosion could have killed multiple officials in the line of succession. Senator John Fetterman, who attended the dinner, argued on social media that the venue was not designed to safely accommodate so many senior officials, suggesting the need for more secure, purpose-built spaces—like the White House ballroom the president is currently fighting to build. (The Correspondents’ Dinner is organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the White House.)

But in the short term, it’s not clear how much will actually change. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted on ABC News that “the system worked,” emphasizing that law enforcement prevented catastrophe and that democratic leaders must continue to appear in public spaces.

He said on CBS’s Face the Nation: “We will not stop doing things like we did last night in this administration.”

A Dark New Litmus Test for Power in Washington

2026-04-26T16:53:00-04:00

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On one level, the system worked. The perimeter held. A would-be assassin was tackled in the hallway outside the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner. The one bullet that found a human target—a U.S. Secret Service agent—was halted, in part, by the officer’s phone and bulletproof vest, according to a law-enforcement summary report that we reviewed. A counterassault team promptly swarmed the stage with assault rifles and night-vision equipment in case the lights were cut. The government’s top leaders—president, vice president, Cabinet officials, speaker of the House—were ushered to secure locations in a matter of minutes. No one died in the attack.

But the collective sigh of relief and rounds of “I am fine” text messages last night belied a heaviness that administration officials and other dinner attendees were still processing this morning, even as Sunday brunches proceeded apace, albeit with more security and a newly somber sheen. This attack was different from the two prior assassination attempts on Donald Trump because the president was not the only apparent target. The alleged attacker wrote in a manifesto obtained by the New York Post that he was after “administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”

As the evening’s adrenaline faded this morning, this reality began setting in among Trump advisers, someone close to the White House told us. Had things gone differently, the nation’s top officials would have been in real danger. Personal security details are designed to protect the principals at all expense. If a presidential motorcade is attacked, there are contingency plans to have it split, leaving behind the junior staff and traveling press. The priority is clear: Get the president to safety. When the shots rang out last night at the Washington Hilton, multiple teams flooded into the rooms to find their protectees and get them out, climbing over chairs—in some cases with guns drawn or hand on holster—and sometimes leaving spouses, colleagues, and others to fend for themselves.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was body-blocked by three agents as he walked from the ballroom. His wife, Cheryl Hines, was left to follow alone a few feet behind, climbing over barriers in a ball gown. Speaker Mike Johnson, who was away from his table when the shooting started, had to send armed officers to retrieve his wife, according to a journalist sitting near him. For the other Trump-administration officials and advisers who lack personal security details, no special consideration was given. They were left behind.

“I noted a new litmus for status among the gov’t elite—whether you were whisked away by secret service, or left to fend,” the former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote on social media today after attending the event.

This situation is not novel. These sorts of attempted attacks on high-profile leaders happen with some frequency. Trump was targeted twice during the 2024 campaign, narrowly escaping death when he was shot at during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Months later, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in broad daylight on a Manhattan street, a crime that was celebrated in some corners of the internet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home was attacked earlier this month, allegedly by a man who warned of humanity’s “impending extinction” from AI. The conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was close to Trump and his aides, was gunned down last year at a political event. His widow, Erika Kirk, was at this weekend’s dinner, visibly distraught as she was escorted out in her sequined cream dress. “I just want to go home,” she sobbed.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in a statement that the president was “thankful for the brave men and women in law enforcement who took swift action to quickly neutralize the perpetrator” and ensure the safety of everyone in attendance.

Some senior White House officials have been given extra protections. As we first reported in October, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller moved to a military base after protesters began appearing outside his Northern Virginia home. Other Cabinet secretaries—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—had already moved to bases, and at least one other senior administration official followed them because of a foreign threat.

[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner]

The question now is what, if anything, needs to change. Already some are criticizing the decision to have so many senior levels of government in a single hall. Mike Pence would not even ride the White House elevator to the residence with Trump in the first term, wary of his responsibility as vice president if something went wrong. But at last night’s dinner, the president was joined by the next two people in the line of succession, J. D. Vance and Johnson. If catastrophe had struck, control of the U.S. nuclear codes would have passed to Senator Chuck Grassley, the 92-year-old president pro tempore.

“Had an explosive device gone off, you would have knocked out the president, vice president, speaker—the three in line of succession,” Representative Michael McCaul, the chair emeritus of the House Foreign Affairs committee, told CNN today. “I think the Secret Service needs to reconsider having both the president and vice president together.”

Even last night, before any shots rang out, some light gallows humor settled over the cavernous ballroom. Some administration officials were surprised to see Vance on the dais alongside Trump—not to mention much of the Cabinet scattered throughout the more than 100 tables—and, referring to the line of succession, quipped that they hoped the night wouldn’t conclude with a President Grassley.

A Shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

2026-04-25T21:43:14-04:00

Updated at 1:29 a.m. ET on Sunday, April 26, 2026

We were under the table before we knew what was happening. One moment, a military band was parading out of the Washington Hilton’s cavernous ballroom; hundreds of government officials, diplomats, and journalists, including more than a dozen of us from The Atlantic, dressed in our best or borrowed black tie, had turned to our spring-pea-and-burrata salads.

The next moment, armed agents—maybe Secret Service, maybe police, maybe hotel guards; it was hard to tell from where we were huddled under a tablecloth—were pushing their way through mounds of people, climbing over chairs, rushing to the stage, where President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump had shortly before been seated.

Trays of plates and tableware fell to the floor with a crash. “Get down! Get down! Get under the table! ¡Abajo! ¡Abajo!” we heard security and waitstaff shout. There was at least one popping sound from the north end of the ballroom. People by the doors started to duck. Then plainclothes security rushed in.

One attendee sitting in the upper level of the ballroom right by the doors said that he heard five or six hollow shots close by, and—before diving under the table—saw a Secret Service agent with his gun drawn backing down toward the ballroom. Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point USA spokesperson who was seated at a table near the dais, said he heard a “pop pop.”

Trump sat onstage for several seconds after the shots, watching people hit the floor before he was swarmed by his heavily armed security. President Ronald Reagan was shot and injured outside the same hotel in 1981. From then on, Washingtonians have known the sprawling building as the “Hinckley Hilton,” after the shooter, John Hinckley Jr.

Secret Service rushed the president and Vice President Vance, seated several spots down the dais from Trump, out of the massive room. Cabinet members, lawmakers, and senior government officials were dotted throughout the crowd of more than 2,000 people. Those who attended the dinner, in addition to Trump and Vance, included House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (That made five out of the first six officials who would follow Trump in the line of succession; No. 3, Senator Chuck Grassley, doesn’t appear to have attended.)

Under the tables, we were piled on top of one another, squished together between table legs and high heels. Colleagues texted loved ones and tried to understand what was happening around them. Two men in suits dragged a woman in a green sequined gown toward the door, each pulling an arm. As guests crouched down for safety, security agents hustled senior officials out of the ballroom, at least a couple of whom appeared to have been lightly injured amid the frenzy.

Attendees had passed through security gates before entering the ballroom. But that screening site was deep within the hotel and was relatively cursory in its execution. Overall, the security seemed lighter than at an airport. The priority appeared to be moving guests quickly through the process and on to the dinner.

When we emerged from under our tables, we and other guests asked one another what had happened. Journalists, lawmakers, and various officials all looked dazed; many panned the room with their cellphone cameras. At 8:55 p.m., about 15 minutes after the initial panic, hotel staff appeared and ordered all attendees to depart, waving their hands and shouting, “Let’s go! Go!”

As the press was escorted out, Kash Patel was in a basement hallway, on his phone and surrounded by a small security detail. Erika Kirk was standing near him, visibly emotional. Soon after, the Secret Service said that a shooting had occurred near a security-screening station, in a lower lobby outside the ballroom. (Footage released later showed the suspect, who police said was a guest at the hotel, sprinting through a detector as agents scrambled to apprehend him.) The suspect was in custody, the agency said in a statement. Trump, in a Truth Social post, said that he, the first lady, and Cabinet members were “in perfect condition” and would reschedule the dinner within 30 days.

Outside, in the chilly April evening, helicopters circled; ambulances with their lights flashing idled nearby. Reporters scrambled to reach the White House for a hastily scheduled presidential press conference. Some took scooters. Others hailed Ubers. Men in tuxedos and women in ballgowns arrived gasping, passed through security, and raced to where Trump stood behind a podium surrounded by the most senior members of his administration. Like him, they were in black tie. The first lady made a rare press-briefing-room appearance.

Trump had initially mistaken the sounds in the ballroom for a dropped serving tray, he recounted. And after he was escorted out, he said that he “fought like hell” to continue with the program. But his security personnel convinced him that it wasn’t safe, and his staff told him that his jokes might not land in the aftermath of the shooting.

Trump lavished praise on the Secret Service, saying he had spoken with one agent who was shot but survived because of a bulletproof vest. More unusual, the president also commended the roomful of reporters who covered the event. (He had been attending his first White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as president, having skipped previous years.) His plan, he said, had been to be rough with the press tonight, but he said he might not be able to be so rough at the do-over.

Trump described the Hilton as “not a particularly secure building,” then pivoted to make the case that the White House ballroom that he wants to build would be safer. When asked if he believed he was the target, Trump responded, “I guess,” but said that he didn’t know if the suspect, whom he called a “sick person,” was politically motivated. He then conjectured that would-be assassins seek out high achievers. “I must tell you, the most impactful people,” he said, “are the ones they go after,” and added: “I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot.” Having experienced two previous assassination attempts, he said that he considers being president the most dangerous profession, asserting that the death rate for presidents far exceeds that of bull riders or race-car drivers.

The area around the Hilton, in the meantime, remained sealed off by a wide police cordon, snarling traffic for blocks in downtown Washington as hundreds of journalists filled nearby bars and sidewalks, phones in hand, to read a breaking-news story that had just happened to them.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Ashley Parker, and Vivian Salama contributed reporting.

The Republican Who Outsmarted Trump

2026-04-25T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Caroline Gutman

Representative Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican who fiercely guards his political independence, doesn’t love being on President Trump’s bad side. He would prefer not to have the president’s allies spend millions to defeat him in a primary. In fact, if Massie had his way, he’d be working for Trump right now.

In his telling, in the weeks after the 2024 presidential election, the two men talked about Massie, a farmer who champions raw milk, becoming Trump’s agriculture secretary. Massie had formally endorsed Trump late in the campaign, offering to help him win over libertarians who might be tempted to stay home or vote third party in key battlegrounds. Trump had been appreciative, and the two had chatted by phone to hash out the timing of the endorsement announcement. “Just tweet it. I’ll retweet you,” Trump had told him.

The rollout went smoothly, but Massie’s endorsement didn’t get him the job in Trump’s Cabinet. He was recounting this to me in, of all places, a bridal suite inside a converted barn in his northern-Kentucky district. Massie had just delivered remarks to a friendly crowd in the wedding hall downstairs, part of an acrimonious campaign that, if Trump gets his way, will be Massie’s last. The president’s allies are spending big to defeat Massie in a May 19 primary and prop up Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL and a political novice whom Trump personally recruited as a challenger. Massie first won election to the House during the pre-Trump Tea Party era and has handily prevailed in competitive primaries before. But he is also aware of Trump’s unique hold on the GOP: When the president decides he wants a Republican out of Congress, he usually gets his wish. Polls have given Massie a lead over Gallrein, who is not well known in the district, but his advantage is far smaller than in his previous reelection bids.

Trump attacks Massie anywhere and everywhere, whether it’s on Truth Social (“A totally ineffective LOSER”), at an event in Massie’s district (“He’s the worst!”), or at the National Prayer Breakfast (“Moron”). He’s even impugned Massie’s new wife, accusing her of being “Radical Left” (Massie says that she voted thrice for Trump) and suggesting that Massie remarried too quickly after the death of his first wife.

Massie, by contrast, often talks about Trump less like he’s a sworn enemy and more like he’s a jilted ex who’s still a bit obsessed with him. “I don’t feel like I’m fighting with him,” Massie said. What Trump sees as betrayal—Massie’s drive to release the Epstein files and his opposition to core parts of the president’s agenda—Massie merely described as an occasional “policy disagreement.”

As he campaigns in a district that backed the president in 2024 by nearly 36 points, he’s urging voters to keep some perspective on his breaks with Trump. He insists that, far from being a Never Trumper, he’s a Mostly Trumper. In one ad, Massie points out their previous endorsements of each other and says, “I agree with President Trump nearly all of the time.” Another spot highlights his support for the Save America Act, an election bill and Trump’s top legislative priority. “This is going to be a referendum on whether it’s okay to vote with your party 90 percent of the time or whether you have to do it 100 percent,” Massie told members of the Grant County Republican Party inside the converted barn.

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

In Washington, Massie is known for his ideological consistency during his seven terms in the House—Trump is just one of several GOP leaders he’s crossed in the name of principle—and for relishing the attention that his squabbles with the president have attracted. But Massie takes pride in his willingness to defy Trump when so many in his party will not. He predicts that if he can survive Trump’s bid to defeat him, his victory will embolden more Republicans in Congress to stand up to the president. “There would be six to a dozen congressmen who are more liable to vote with their constituents instead of the party line,” Massie told me, saying that he had spoken with some of them directly but declining to name them.

Needless to say, this does not sound like a Republican who would have lasted long in Trump’s Cabinet. Massie admitted to some ambivalence about the prospect. He said that he used to joke about placing an important condition on an administration job. “I need a small jet capable of reaching Argentina on the tarmac, with enough fuel in it to get out of the country, if I work in his Cabinet,” as Massie told it, “because everybody’s going to get impeached or fired or go to jail.”

Massie came to Congress as a spending hawk, and more than a decade later, that remains his signature issue and the source of many of his disagreements with GOP leaders. “They say I vote ‘no’ a lot. But I really vote ‘Don’t spend,’” Massie told the gathering of approximately 100 Republicans in Grant County, which is about 45 minutes south of Cincinnati. He opposes foreign aid and voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year because of projections that its tax cuts would explode already ballooning deficits. Massie built a clip-on debt clock that he wears on his lapel—one of a few dozen inventions for which the former robotics engineer has or is seeking a patent. “You just spent like $100 million talking to me,” he noted to me, a taxpayer, nearly a half hour into our interview.

Left: Representative Thomas Massie wears a U.S. national-debt counter on his jacket. Right: A framed copy of the Epstein Files Transparency Act on display in Massie’s congressional office, in Washington, D.C., on April 21, 2026. (Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic)

Barely 40 when he was first elected to the House, Massie was pudgy and rosy-cheeked, with the kind of youthful appearance that often gets newly elected lawmakers confused for staffers inside the Capitol. “He looked like a teenager,” recalls Phil Moffett, a former GOP candidate for Kentucky governor who encouraged Massie to run and then chaired his campaign. Massie, 55, is a grandfather now. He appears slimmer and more weathered, with a short gray beard—a physical transformation that he jokes about in one of his ads.

Massie speaks with less of an obvious filter than most congressional Republicans. His impersonation of Trump, which he deploys frequently, more closely resembles the cartoonish, lip-puckering Alec Baldwin bit on Saturday Night Live during the president’s first term than it does James Austin Johnson’s more recent interpretation.

Within his district, Massie loves to tell voters how cheap he is. The first story he shared during his speech in Grant County was an elaborate yarn about the time he’d spent as judge-executive—essentially the mayor—of Lewis County in the years before he ran for Congress. The water heater at the county jail had broken down, leading the jailer to complain to Massie because the inmates were refusing to shower and “were getting kind of rank,” Massie said. Massie didn’t want to bill taxpayers the $12,000 quoted as the cost of a replacement, so he found a water heater on eBay for $5,500. To save more money, he installed it himself and then invited the inmates to strip the old water heater “for everything it’s worth” so that the county could sell the parts. “I know you were in here for stealing copper and whatever,” Massie said he told them, “so you probably know everything that's worth anything on that hot-water heater.” For good measure, they peeled the green inspection sticker off the old heater and slapped it on the new one. “They said, ‘Judge, you could go to jail for this,’” Massie said. To which he replied, “I’ll have a hot shower, though, won’t I?”

The prison tale reminds voters about the fiscally prudent conservative they first sent to Washington in 2012. Kentucky’s fourth district covers a chunk of the triangle between Cincinnati, Louisville, and Lexington in the northwest corner of the state and then stretches east through several rural counties close to the West Virginia border. Massie rode the tail end of the Tea Party wave, dominating a seven-way primary and a special election to replace a retiring Republican who was more closely aligned with the party establishment. Massie won over the same voters who, two years earlier, had elected Rand Paul to the Senate over a candidate championed by Kentucky’s longtime GOP powerbroker Mitch McConnell.

Ideologically, Massie resembled the dozens of Republicans who had recently arrived in the House; many were relative newcomers to politics who had run on pledges to cut taxes and spending, and to aggressively oppose the Obama administration. But few of them figured out Congress as quickly as Massie, who had grown up in rural Kentucky but earned two degrees in engineering from MIT. “It was obvious every time we were in a setting, regardless of who the audience was, that Thomas was the smartest person in the room,” Moffett told me. “He picked up on concepts so fast.” The appreciation for Massie’s intellect crosses party lines. “He’s brilliant,” says Representative Ro Khanna of California, a progressive Democrat who worked with Massie for months last year to pass legislation forcing the Trump administration to release the Epstein files. Khanna told me that Massie was “an incredible strategist” during the Epstein fight.

[Read: The “crazy” plot to release the Epstein files ]

During his first House campaign, Massie told The Cincinnati Enquirer: “I’m ready to be unpopular.” It’s a common refrain for a candidate running against an entrenched system, but Massie made good on his promise. Among his initial votes were a thumbs-down on a bipartisan deal to extend George W. Bush–era tax cuts and aid for states slammed by Hurricane Sandy. He joined 11 other Republicans in opposing John Boehner’s reelection as speaker. And lest Democrats think they might have a new ally, Massie made one of his first bills a proposal to lift a ban on guns in school zones, which he introduced just weeks after 20 children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut.

Massie would play a key behind-the-scenes role in ousting Boehner less than two years later, although he spoke of the episode with some regret. “We ended up with Paul Ryan, and things got worse,” he said. When dissident Republicans held up Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker in early 2023, Massie—who for once was not among the rebels—pushed them to seek changes to House rules rather than merely a new leader. The ordeal ended with McCarthy winning on the 15th vote and Massie landing a seat—somewhat reluctantly, he said—on the powerful House Rules Committee. That perch offered Massie an even deeper education on the arcana of congressional procedure, which he then put to use during the fight over the Epstein files. Working with Khanna, he devised a discharge petition designed not only to evade the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Trump White House but also to make it over to the Senate, where it eventually passed. “They obviously underestimated me,” Massie said. “If in 2012, when I was running, they knew what I was capable of, they would have spent infinite money to keep me from ever getting to Washington, D.C.”

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Trump and Massie clashed during the president’s first term. During the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, in March 2020, Massie forced every member of the House to defy stay-at-home orders and return to Washington for a vote on a $2 trillion relief package that both Republican and Democratic leaders had hoped to pass without a full vote. Trump called Massie “a third rate Grandstander” and urged Republicans to kick him out of the party. Massie ended up winning his primary in a rout.

The two men patched things up in 2024, but their truce collapsed soon after Trump took office. Massie might claim that he agrees with Trump “on nearly everything,” but he opposed the president’s biggest domestic priorities—the debt-ballooning tax bill and his tariff policy—and denounced as “not constitutional” Trump’s increased appetite for launching military strikes overseas without authorization from Congress. The Trump-Massie feud has proved awkward for the many northern Kentuckians who are die-hard supporters of both. None, however, can say that they are surprised by Massie’s positions. “Trump, I support him, but I never know what he’s going to do or say,” Gex Williams, a Kentucky state senator and close Massie ally, told me. “But Massie says or does the same thing today that he did when he got elected. I wish I could be as consistent as Thomas.”

To the extent that Massie has changed over the years, Williams said, he has become more comfortable in his political standing. “He was a little more reserved” earlier in his career, Williams said. “Now he seems to be more relaxed.” Massie is not shy about speaking out against Trump when he feels like it. He also shares with the president a taste for provocation; days after a deadly 2021 shooting at a Michigan high school, he posted a photo of his Christmas card, in which he and his family are holding rifles. “Ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Massie wrote. (Khanna, an ardent supporter of gun control, told me that he’d received the Christmas card in the mail; although appreciative, he keeps it in a drawer.)

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Trump and his allies began casting about for a primary challenger to Massie more than a year ago. To soften him up, a super PAC led by Chris LaCivita, Trump’s former campaign co-manager, started running attack ads against him last summer. Massie said that the president reneged on a deal to call off the ads in exchange for his support for a procedural vote advancing the tax-cut bill. In response to questions about Trump’s interactions with Massie over the past two years, the White House sent me a statement attacking him. Massie had opposed key parts of the president’s agenda, including border-wall funding and tax cuts for the middle class, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me, “because Thomas Massie cares more about peacocking for his radical Democrat friends and liberal media allies than delivering for the men and women of Kentucky’s 4th district.”

In their search for a primary challenger to Massie, the president’s allies eventually settled on Gallrein, who had not previously run for political office. Gallrein has told voters that Trump summoned him to the Oval Office and personally asked him to run, appealing to his sense of patriotism. At a rally last month, Trump described the recruitment this way: “I wanted just—give me somebody with a warm body to beat Massie. And I got somebody with a warm body, but a big, beautiful brain and a great patriot.”

In Grant County, the “warm body” who showed up to counter Massie wasn’t Gallrein. He had been scheduled to attend the event, a fundraising dinner for the local party, but his campaign informed organizers earlier in the day that he had to attend funerals instead, Eldon Maddox, the county GOP chair, told me. Although the party is officially neutral, Maddox is a strong Massie backer and hinted that Gallrein had pulled out of the event after he was told that he’d have to answer questions from the crowd. “It doesn’t play very well,” Maddox said. Gallrein’s absence fit neatly into the narrative that Massie’s campaign has put out about him: that the first-time candidate is ducking debates and other opportunities to interact with voters, content to let Trump’s allies drown Massie with attack ads on TV. (Gallrein’s campaign did not respond to interview requests.)

In place of the candidate, Gallrein’s deputy campaign manager, Jennifer O’Connor, nervously read a speech off her phone while Massie sat at a table directly in front of her. When she said that Massie had “voted against President Trump’s plan to secure the border,” he interrupted her. “False,” he said, loudly enough for the room to hear. “Please. I did not interrupt you,” O’Connor told him. “I didn’t lie about you,” Massie replied.

Massie seemed to have much of the crowd in his corner, but not everyone. Pamela Mann, a retired teacher and a tobacco farmer, told me that she had supported Massie in the past but was backing Gallrein this time. “I just don’t understand why he won’t support the president,” Mann said of Massie. She said that when she sees an important vote in which only a few Republicans have broken with the party, “I automatically know one of them is going to be Massie. That’s not why we send people like him to Washington.” A former chair of the county party, Mann had some doubts about Gallrein’s chances, however. “Running for office requires experience,” she said, “and Mr. Gallrein is obviously new to campaigning.”

Most of the Republicans I spoke with shrugged off the beef between Massie and Trump. “That’s a personal thing,” Leo Fell, a retired driving instructor, told me. “They’ll get back together.” He said that he’s voting for Massie despite occasionally disagreeing with him. “I understand everybody’s not going to be perfect,” Fell said.

Massie is banking on voters like Fell to carry him through next month: Republicans who know and trust him, and who haven’t seen much of Gallrein. He believes that his supporters are far more motivated to vote than his critics within Trump’s base. The president, too, doesn’t seem to have the political juice he once did; Republican turnout has sagged in special elections over the past year, and Massie has said that in his internal polling, Trump’s approval rating in the district has dipped to the low 70s; late in the president’s first term, that number was in the mid-90s.

Still, Massie isn’t projecting the same bring-it-on confidence that he did when I spoke with him last year. He insists that he’s okay with the possibility of losing. I asked whether this is fun for him. “I like a challenge,” he said. Then he paused for a moment. “It can be fun and stressful at the same time,” he said. Massie said that when people tell him they’re praying for him, he asks what specifically they are praying for: “If you’re praying for me to stay in the fight, and God answers your prayer, I’ll win my reelection.” If, however, “you’re praying for my soul, I’ll be on my farm next year and out of politics.”

The Posting Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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

On Monday morning, CNN reported that the United States and Iran had been on the verge of striking a deal to end the war when Donald Trump made a series of comments to reporters and on social media that undermined the talks. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate POTUS negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” complained one source, who apparently pleaded with his boss to stop.

This was Trump’s signal to begin binge-posting about the Iran negotiations. The Iranians may not have appreciated Trump’s stream-of-consciousness messaging, and apparently their American counterparts did not either. But one very important person did.

Trump can’t seem to refrain from touting his genius, especially when the subject is dealmaking, his professed speciality. And so, in a torrent of commentary, the president made the case that he is winning very greatly.

Already, despite the president’s surface bravado, an undercurrent of nervousness had emerged. Trump was favorably comparing his prospective deal with the Obama administration’s in 2015. “The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER than the JCPOA, commonly referred to as ‘The Iran Nuclear Deal,’ penned by Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden, one of the Worst Deals ever made having to do with the Security of our Country,” he wrote on Monday. Simultaneously touting your prospective deal while comparing it to the worst deal ever is a bit like saying, I’m a fantastic basketball player, much better than my late grandmother, who never played the game.

[Tom Nichols: Maybe Trump should not have given this speech]

In a follow-up post, five minutes later, Trump addressed concerns that the war had gone beyond his promised six-week deadline. His technique, once again, was to reframe expectations. “Despite World War I lasting 4 years, 3 months, and 14 days, World War II lasting 6 years and 1 day, the Korean War lasting 3 years, 1 month, and 2 days, the Vietnam War lasting 19 years, 5 months, and 29 days, and Iraq lasting 8 years, 8 months, and 28 days, they like to say that I promised 6 weeks to defeat Iran, and actually, from the Military standpoint, it was far faster than that, but I’m not going to let them rush the United States into making a Deal that is not as good as it could have been.” (Luckily, he seems unfamiliar with the Hundred Years’ War.)

In the same post, he proceeded to assert, “I read the Fake News saying that I am under ‘pressure’ to make a Deal. THIS IS NOT TRUE! I am under no pressure whatsoever, although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!”

Generally speaking, people who are not under pressure rarely have to (1) issue frantic, all-caps claims that they are not under pressure, or (2) promise that they will quickly deliver a deal that will cause them tremendous embarrassment if it fails.

Thirty-six minutes later, the president posted again. “I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well,” he wrote, before attacking the “Fake News” for suggesting otherwise. The president also claimed that the American naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is costing Iran $500 million a day. He would repeat this point three more times over the course of several hours, as if pleading with his counterparties to see fiscal reason. (Religious fanatics, alas, do not always respond to the same incentives as New York developers.)

The next morning, Trump posted, “Iran has Violated the Cease Fire numerous times!” By afternoon, however, all was forgiven: The president announced, non-desperately, that he was extending the cease-fire despite Iran’s repeated violations, “based on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured.”

[Read: One of these Trump threats is not like the others]

Iran’s internal fractures, which are very real and deepened by the decapitation strikes by the U.S. and Israel, have indeed made negotiations complex. By yesterday, the administration had decided to give the country through the weekend to resolve its regime schism. “Trump is willing to give another three to five days of ceasefire to allow the Iranians to get their shit together,” a source told Axios.

It is hard to believe that the Iranians could quickly resolve their deep-seated divisions even under optimal conditions. It is even harder to believe that a vague deadline of three to five days would meaningfully accelerate the timeline in which they could do so, given that Trump has relaxed his previous deadline despite Iran flouting the truce terms.

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that Trump “has authorized U.S. negotiators to consider a bargain that involves many of the same trade-offs one of his predecessors confronted.” Somehow, the great dealmaker, operating under no pressure whatsoever, might end up striking a pact similar to one of history’s worst deals ever. Can the terms be improved with a few more social-media posts?

Trump returned to Truth Social this morning to narrate the war. “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” he wrote. However, he continued, the strait “is ‘Sealed up Tight,’ until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!!”

According to the president, we are holding the world economy hostage until such time as Iran can resolve its internal struggle. Perhaps the problem here is not just Trump’s live commentary about his negotiating strategy, but the strategy itself.

Trump Voters Like Marco Rubio More and More

2026-04-23T08:00:00-04:00

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President Trump reportedly likes to go around asking aides about who his successor should be: J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio. If Trump were to ask his own voters the same question, he would, at least based on my recent experience, come away with a pretty clear answer.

I run weekly focus groups, and the moderators regularly ask Trump voters whom they would like to see inherit the party in 2028 and beyond. More and more, what we’re hearing in response is a strange new respect for Rubio. Although Vance might seem like a more natural MAGA heir, many Trump voters see Rubio as a stabilizing force who comes off a lot better than many of his peers inside the administration, including the vice president.

“Marco Rubio, I think, is an amazing dude,” said Ken, a Biden 2020/Trump 2024 voter from Georgia. “If anybody is left that we can see on the TV or C-SPAN that’s just genuine,” he said, “it’s Marco Rubio.” Ken called Rubio “a family man and still a stand-up politician,” and said, “He also is about putting America first, which I agree with.” (To protect participants’ privacy, we disclose only their first name.)

In a recent group of Republican Jewish voters, Boris from Texas called Rubio “a real statesman in my eyes.” Steve from Florida said, “Marco Rubio, my former senator, is doing great as secretary of state. He will be a great president too.” And Andrea from Georgia said, “Marco Rubio’s been, like, killing it from an international-policy perspective.”

[Read: Trump voters are over it]

This is not what I would have expected, based on all my years of listening to Republican voters, who tend to abhor politicians of the pre-Trump vintage. Rubio was the driving Republican force behind the last serious push for comprehensive immigration reform, in 2013. He stood as the avatar for the new wave of moderate, sunny-dispositioned conservatism that was supposed to inherit the party after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. He was a staunch defender of NATO and of America’s role as a force for global stability. His 2016 campaign slogan was “A New American Century.” (He was, I admit, my preferred candidate for much of the Republican primary that year.)

All of this is repellent to today’s Republican base, and anyone who has observed the past decade of American politics might have assumed that Rubio’s future political aspirations were DOA. Vance, who has spent the past several years reinventing himself as an isolationist, “America First” nationalist, seems more in step with the current iteration of the Republican Party. But that’s not what I’m hearing in the groups.

The first line of thinking among Rubio’s fans goes something like this: Because he has so many different jobs, he must be competent. Rubio currently serves as secretary of state and national security adviser, and until recently he served as acting USAID administrator and acting archivist of the United States. Voters see the memes tweaking Rubio for having such a laughable number of important titles and think he must be doing something right.

“He’s wearing multiple hats right now,” said Dave, a two-time Trump voter from West Virginia. “I think he’s doing a good job in his role. I think he speaks well.” He went on: “I’d prefer to see him continue to stay in one of these State Department roles. Or if Trump makes him the new ayatollah or something, maybe he can do that as well.”

Another reason voters seem to like Rubio: They see him as the “adult in the room.” This is understandable. Looking smart and sober is relatively easy when you’re surrounded by the likes of Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Even Trump himself—with his garbled speech and incoherent ramblings—makes his underlings seem more credible by comparison. All of that accrues to Rubio’s benefit.

“Marco Rubio, when you look at the totality of who surrounds Trump, and particularly as it relates to defense and international policy—he seems the most normal,” said Adam, a two-time Trump voter from California.

“He seems more human than a lot of the other characters,” Lateefah, a Biden 2020/Trump 2024 voter from Texas said. “Like Hegseth—I am not a fan of him, as well as Kennedy.”

Vance, by contrast, is getting more and more criticism from the voters who elected him. They’ve picked up on the fact that the vice president has had a bad month: squabbling with the pope, getting heckled at a Turning Point USA event, campaigning with Viktor Orbán just days before his historic defeat.

And then there’s the war in Iran. On the campaign trail, Vance positioned himself as the high priest of “America First” isolationism. But he has tied himself in knots to avoid criticizing the conflict. Not only that, Trump designated him to lead the peace talks, which collapsed in less than a full day, while the president attended a UFC fight with Rubio.

Inauthenticity is a kiss of death with today’s voters, and Vance’s future prospects appear to be dimming as Americans watch him shape-shift in real time.

“I loved his backstory. I read and liked Hillbilly Elegy,” Andrew, a Biden 2020/Trump 2024 voter from Pennsylvania, said in an April 8 focus group. “Since he’s entered politics, I don’t have a clear sense of what he personally stands for.”

Adam, the two-time Trump voter from California, told us in an April 2 group that Vance, in his Hillbilly Elegy days, “seemed like an interesting figure.” But, Adam said, “I think the well is poisoned. I think that he sold his soul in a way, and he’s adopting the divisive, dismissive stance that his boss does, to curry favor, secure his position. So unfortunately, he revealed a part of himself that there’s no returning from.” (Adam likewise has lost faith in the president.)

When we asked Ken, the Georgia voter who supported Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, about his preferred candidate for 2028, he said, “If you’re giving me a choice outside of Rubio, I would’ve said Vance, until it just seems like he lost his backbone.”

Rubio, too, has compromised his principles and remade himself as a Trump acolyte. But while Vance flails, Rubio is presenting himself as a ruthless executor of Trump’s will—most notably through his involvement with the successful capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. It also helps Rubio that voters’ memories just aren’t that long. Many young voters in our groups don’t remember Rubio from the Before Times. They see only the Rubio of today, and view him as a staunch and unapologetic Trump ally.

Sam from Minnesota, a Gen Z Trump 2024 voter, captured a common feeling that I hear among this cohort: “ I just don’t like Vance a lot. I think he has flip-flopped on issues. If you look at what he was about in 2018, 2019, or 2020, and you look at what he’s about now, it’s very, very different.” Asked who he’d like to see run in 2028, Sam said, “I’d love to see Marco Rubio.”

What I’m hearing in these groups, it’s worth noting, reflects the views of people inside Trump’s coalition who are mostly still riding with him. The hardcore “America First” crowd—followers of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes—are in a different place entirely. They are in open rebellion against Trump for the Iran war and its economic consequences, and they regard Rubio as complicit in those sins.

[Sarah Longwell: The disappointment of young Trump voters]

It’s way too soon to say whether Rubio is going to be the Republican heir apparent, but he might be the candidate who has leveraged the second Trump administration to his advantage the most. He has juggled his multiple high-level posts, and presented himself to the party faithful as a competent operator who is seen as, if not entirely honest and upright, then less of a disappointment than Vance. And he appears to enjoy Trump’s confidence, at least for now.

It can be tempting to read all of this and think that, in 2028, the GOP might be due for a reset—that maybe Rubio’s ascension will get the party back to its pre-Trump norm. Certainly a lot of the president’s defenders in the anti-anti-Trump camp would like to believe so.

They’re wrong. The party isn’t reverting back to Rubio; it’s Rubio who’s changed to meet the party. All it took for Rubio to get into the position he’s in was to sell out his principles, betray America’s leadership role in the world, and deliver on his boss’s authoritarian demands. He even reportedly put on oversize shoes to please Trump.

In 2016, Rubio called Trump a “con artist” and a “third-world strongman” who is running the “biggest scam in American political history.” He was right. He also said Trump “will never get control of this party.” He was wrong.

Trump’s Enormous Gerrymandering Blunder

2026-04-22T11:12:26-04:00

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When President Trump last summer implored Republicans to launch a nationwide gerrymandering blitz to pad their narrow House majority, the fight he started did not seem fair. GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much.

This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control. By some measures, Democrats have jumped into the redistricting lead, bolstering their chances of winning back the House majority in the midterm elections.

The battle is not over. The GOP-dominated Florida legislature will hold a special session next week to consider redistricting, and the Democratic victory in Virginia could help Governor Ron DeSantis win over lawmakers who are reluctant to press the Republican advantage too far. Officials in both parties expect the Supreme Court to issue a ruling in the coming months that will weaken if not eviscerate a key part of the Voting Rights Act, which would allow states such as Louisiana and Alabama to carve up districts now held by Black Democrats. (Such a decision would have an even larger impact in southern states come 2028.)

But for now, Trump’s move to open this new front in a centuries-old gerrymandering war between the parties looks like an enormous tactical blunder. Republicans have appeared taken aback by the ferocity with which Democrats have responded—and the speed with which they’ve set aside their drive to ban gerrymandering in the name of good government. In both California and Virginia, Democrats swamped the opposition in campaign spending, using the redistricting referenda to rile up a party base seeking any opportunity to push back against an unpopular administration. The margin of victory was much narrower in Virginia, where Republicans accused Democrats—wishfully, it turned out—of overreaching with a push to take 10 out of 11 seats in a state that had a GOP governor only a few months ago. (Democrats currently hold six of the state’s House seats.) “If they would have done a more measured map, they would have blown this thing out,” Zack Roday, a Richmond-based Republican campaign strategist, told me.

Like other GOP operatives I spoke with, Roday defended the White House’s gerrymandering push, however risky it has turned out to be. “Your job is to contingency-plan on all of these pieces. And I think they fully knew what could happen,” he said, calling the move, on balance, “a worthy gamble.” “You have to do everything you can to gain that advantage, given the cycle, given the environment that we’re in.”

Democrats joined this fight at a distinct disadvantage. The party had spent years not only warning about the evils of gerrymandering but backing legislation and ballot measures to prohibit the practice where they could. (A Democratic effort to pass a federal gerrymandering ban fell to a Senate filibuster in 2022.) States, including California and Virginia, had given power over redistricting to non- or bipartisan commissions, forcing Democrats to seek permission from voters to override the panels through expensive snap elections. Republicans, having never embraced redistricting reform in the first place, had no such limits in the states they controlled. All they had to do was pass new maps through GOP-dominated state legislatures. Texas was the first to move, as Republican lawmakers enacted newly drawn districts in August, overcoming a bid by Democrats to deny quorum in the legislature by fleeing the state.

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

In California, Democrats, led by Governor Gavin Newsom—seeking a political win ahead of a likely 2028 presidential bid—responded quickly and aggressively to the Republican gerrymander in Texas. They drew up new House lines targeting five GOP-held seats and buttressing several more of their own battleground districts. Voters endorsed the move overwhelmingly in a November referendum. Democrats enjoyed several advantages in California, beginning with a huge, deep-blue electorate. Another was timing: The election occurred at a moment when the GOP gerrymandering drive was peaking and offered voters angered by Trump’s moves to consolidate power their first opportunity to push back.

That edge had faded by the time the campaign arrived in Virginia, a lighter-blue state where voters had nevertheless just delivered a sharp rebuke to Republicans five months earlier. Democrats again significantly outspent the opposition, but Republicans used the highly partisan gerrymandering effort to tarnish the state’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, who had run as a bridge-builder focused on affordability. Democrats tried to replicate their winning message in California by imploring Virginia voters to “level the playing field” against Trump. But the recent struggles of the GOP’s own redistricting drive threatened to sap some of the urgency from the Democratic campaign in Virginia. After Republicans added seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, resistance within the party’s legislative caucuses blocked them from doing so in Indiana and Kansas.

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

Democrats had an opportunity to match or even exceed the total seats gained through gerrymandering—a prospect that seemed unthinkable when Trump launched his redistricting war last summer—but they did not prevail everywhere. Opposition from the state-Senate president in Maryland thwarted the Democrats’ bid to target the state’s lone House Republican, and an effort to pursue redistricting through the courts fell short in New York. That left Virginia, where, despite being outspent, Republicans were turning out in strong numbers after losing badly in November. Democrats held on, but the tight margin—with most precincts reporting, the referendum was winning by around three points—raised questions about whether national Republicans should have devoted more of their considerable war chest to the race. “I would have thought that this amendment would be passing by double digits,” Chaz Nuttycombe, the founder of the nonprofit group State Navigate and a close observer of Virginia politics, told me yesterday. He questioned the Republican strategy. “In all likelihood, they’re going to be losing four seats in Congress after tonight. So it’s like, why didn’t they get in on this?”

The redistricting race now moves to Florida, and Roday told me he was rooting for DeSantis to succeed in winning a new map to put Republicans back on top. “This is the way the world is now,” he said. “It’s 218 by any means necessary.” The only solace he took from the defeat in Virginia was the hope that Democrats might finally have to cede their claim to the moral high ground on gerrymandering. “This holier-than-thou notion that Democrats have,” Roday said. “That charade is over.”

What Abdul El-Sayed Doesn’t Get About Trump

2026-04-22T07:00:00-04:00

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Over the past 15 years or so, Democrats have won a lot of races because the opposing party’s primary voters decided to nominate right-wing ideologues (Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Kari Lake) rather than normal Republicans. In all of these races, the Republican establishment warned that nominating an archconservative would undermine their chances of victory, and was proved completely correct.

Now Democrats finally have the chance to do the same thing. In Michigan, a purple state that Donald Trump won twice, the physician Abdul El-Sayed is running a competitive race for the party’s Senate nomination. If successful, he would turn a very likely Democratic win into a jump ball.

El-Sayed has followed the classic strategy of adopting positions that appeal to a majority of his party’s voters—thus giving him an advantage over more cautious rivals—but that do not appeal to a majority of the general electorate. In El-Sayed’s case, those stances include supporting single-payer health insurance, abolishing ICE, and intensely criticizing Israel; at the same time, he positions himself as the most doctrinal left-wing candidate in the race.

[Jonathan Chait: Israel moderates are losing the Democratic Party]

The Middle East has become a special point of emphasis for El-Sayed, which makes sense: Israel is highly unpopular, especially among Democrats. The trouble with this issue is that it tends to divide the party’s base, especially in Michigan, which has large Arab and Jewish populations. The prominence of Israel as a campaign issue in 2024 cost Kamala Harris support from many Arab Americans (who blamed the Biden administration for supporting Israel’s war in Gaza) and many Jewish Americans (who blamed President Biden for attempting to restrain Israel).

The Democratic Party’s interest is to tamp down the importance of Israel. But El-Sayed’s best strategy to win the nomination is to play up the issue, which drives apart the party’s base and allows him to claim the biggest slice.

El-Sayed’s method of picking fights over the Middle East has included campaigning alongside the livestreamer Hasan Piker—a defender of Hamas, Hezbollah, and various Communist regimes. He has also campaigned with Amir Makled, a candidate for the University of Michigan’s board of regents who has shared pro-Hezbollah and anti-Semitic messages on social media. (El-Sayed has dismissed complaints about these comments as cancel culture, which is a very strange defense; nobody is saying that Piker or Makled should lose their jobs or platforms, only that El-Sayed shouldn’t tout their support.)

A candidate could potentially win statewide election in Michigan after soliciting endorsements from supporters of terrorism, but it won’t be easy. The Democrat’s likely opponent in November, former Representative Mike Rogers, presents as a mainstream Republican.

In response to concerns from fellow Democrats, El-Sayed has pointed to Trump’s ability to win two elections despite a long list of objectionable statements and positions. “I think there is this notion that electability is about being the least offensive,” he told CNN. “If that were true, why would Donald Trump have won the presidency twice?”

Many Democrats have indeed interpreted Trump’s success as proof that traditional electability—taking positions that most voters agree with, and avoiding positions they don’t—has little predictive value. Alas, this badly misreads recent political history. Trump abandoned his party’s heaviest baggage by promising not to cut Medicare or Social Security, causing voters to perceive him as more moderate than traditional Republicans. He benefited from years of marketing that depicted him as America’s greatest business genius.

Every candidate has a combination of assets and liabilities. Trump was able to defeat two opponents who were unpopular and did so despite, not because of, his noxious statements. Trump has inspired candidates on the left and the right to believe that they can dispense with the hard task of appealing to a political majority, and win instead by riling people up with offensive rhetoric. It doesn’t usually work. It hasn’t even worked especially well for Trump, who, after all, lost the popular vote two of the three times he ran.

[From the March 2026 issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]

The strategy might, however, enable El-Sayed to win the nomination. His greatest advantage is that he might not even need to win a majority of the Democratic primary electorate. He currently has two opponents, Representative Haley Stevens and State Representative Mallory McMorrow. A recent poll found the three candidates essentially tied, with Stevens at 23 percent and McMorrow and El-Sayed at 22 percent, and the remaining vote undecided. The same poll found that El-Sayed would trail in a two-way race against either Stevens (34 percent–25 percent) or McMorrow (34 percent–26 percent). If both of his opponents stay in the race until the election in August, El-Sayed could win the nomination even if most Democrats would prefer either of his opponents to him. General-election polling, meanwhile, suggests that Rogers has the best shot against El-Sayed.

The Republican establishment has spent a decade and a half pleading with Republican voters not to nominate crazy people for office in losable elections, only for the voters to routinely disregard the advice because they prefer a nominee who will fight hard. Indeed, when those candidates lose, their supporters tend to blame the establishment for undermining them, rather than admit that the establishment may have had a point. And when they win, which can happen even to the worst candidates, they conclude that they have disproved the conventional wisdom.

El-Sayed claims the difference between him and his opponents is that he’s brave. “It’s just the same lack of courage that Democrats deploy to argue as to why they should be taking money from corporations,” he said, “or why they should be hedging their bets on clear, obvious policies like abolishing ICE or guaranteeing health care through Medicare for All.” The actual difference is that his opponents are trying to beat Republicans, and he’s concerned only with beating Democrats.

Big Sky Crack-Up

2026-04-21T09:56:21-04:00

Updated at 10:50 a.m. ET on April 22, 2026.

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Jason Boeshore, a grain-elevator manager on the eastern plains of Montana, fired off a rocket this month to the private Signal chat he shares with the 23 other members of the state Democratic Party executive board. He demanded that leaders make clear in newspapers across the state that the Democratic Party would support only Democratic candidates in the fall elections. The response was swift and not to his liking. Shannon O’Brien, the chair of the party, wrote that her staff, not the board, would set the messaging strategy. Then she addressed the unspoken concerns at the heart of Boeshore’s request. “Listen if ANY of you EVER find yourselves questioning my intentions, please call me,” O’Brien wrote. “I will continue to move forward to get Democrats elected. There’s no hidden agenda.”

The problem for O’Brien is the belief among Boeshore and many other party stalwarts in Montana that exactly such a hidden agenda exists, pitting national, big-money Democrats—and maybe even some state party leaders—against the state Democratic apparatus. This internecine feud, full of rumors, speculation, and skepticism over the role of outsiders in state races, threatens to spoil one of the last best places for Democrats to pull a Senate majority from a difficult midterm map.

At issue is Seth Bodnar, a former University of Montana president who is running as an independent for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Steve Daines. Bodnar, 47, is young, moderate, a veteran, a Rhodes Scholar, and all in all the sort of person Montanans might elect in a year when Republicans are facing the prospect of steep losses amid President Trump’s declining popularity. Democratic mega-donors such as one of LinkedIn co-founders, Reid Hoffman; the cryptocurrency investor Michael Novogratz; and the Microsoft heir Rory Gates are all supporting Bodnar’s campaign, hoping he can yank the seat away from the GOP. Because Bodnar is running as an independent, it means part of his campaign in Montana is based on criticizing Democrats whose voters he needs to support him.

Even the candidates running for the Democratic nomination have been drawn into the drama. They, too, are criticizing their own party leaders just weeks before the June 2 primary and seeking to make sure that party bigwigs don’t try to clear a path for Bodnar to face the GOP nominee in November.

“There is clearly manipulation trying to happen there,” Alani Bankhead, a former Air Force intelligence officer and Senate hopeful who lives in Helena, told me. Reilly Neill, the front-runner for the nomination, told me that the state party needs to commit to not changing its bylaws that require it to back Democratic candidates, “because the chatter is that they are going to because the money is too good to pass up.” Both have sworn to run hard against Bodnar if they win the nomination.

Bodnar’s Democratic backers say he stands the best chance of winning in November, so even without a party label, he is worth supporting on the wink-and-nod assumption that he will help Democrats seal a majority, like Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, both independents who caucus with Democrats. In other words, the handwringers in the Montana Democratic Party need to get real. “For Democrats, Seth is the only viable alternative,” Matt McKenna, a Bozeman-based Democratic strategist who has worked for the Clinton family and four Democrats who have won statewide in Montana, told me in a statement. “Seth wins with a large majority of Democrats, a majority of Independents, and the Republicans who actually do show up and are sick of the partisan shitshow.”

That works only if rank-and-file Democrats swallow their pride and throw their support Bodnar’s way—a tough ask of a gossipy party in a frontier state where some current and former Democratic operatives call their regular Zoom meetings the “Giddy Up Club.” Former Governor Brian Schweitzer, a Giddy Up founder, told me that he’d had three phone calls with Bodnar before Bodnar announced, imploring him to run inside the party. When Bodnar declined, Schweitzer went on the attack. No independent can win in Montana, the former governor insists, given the significant share of Democrats who are going to vote the party line. The danger is that Bodnar splits the Democratic vote and the Republican sails through. Republicans have circulated an April internal poll, before much campaigning, that shows Neill pulling ahead of Bodnar in a hypothetical four-way general election.

“Seth Bodnar is a pretty good guy, and I understand that he is a Rhodes Scholar,” Schweitzer told me. “But he ain’t been on a lot of dirt roads in Montana, and that’s what it takes to get elected.”

Montana is a big state with a tiny population and big personalities—fewer people vote across its 147,000 square miles than live in Louisville or El Paso. But an anti-corporate, libertarian streak has long given the state an outsize role in federal elections, sometimes attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in out-of-state funding. Daines’s sudden retirement got Democrats salivating about the possibility of a win. There was also the party crack-up, which became public in January after former Democratic Senator Jon Tester sent around his own prickly text message suggesting his support for Bodnar if he ran as an independent. Tester was a loyal Democrat during his three terms. But the seven-fingered former dirt farmer with a flat-top haircut cast his party affiliation as a liability.

“You can send this around because I don’t care,” he wrote in the message, which was reported by the Montana press. “During my last two races the democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”

Days later, Bodnar stepped down as president of the University of Montana. Weeks later, he announced his campaign; Tester’s former pollster, his former political director, and the state party’s former spokesperson all signed on. Bodnar joined Act Blue, the Democratic grassroots tech platform, to raise money, hauling in $1.4 million in about a month. “I’m running as an independent because that’s who I am,” Bodnar told NBC Montana. His campaign, so far, has largely focused on the damage that Trump’s economic policies are doing to the state, with some jabs at the political status quo: “We don’t believe that here in Montana we have to settle for a broken political system.”

The Democratic whisper network went into overdrive. Some former Tester and Schweitzer aides speculated about secret plans to persuade whoever wins the Democratic nomination to then drop out of the race to consolidate support behind Bodnar. One story making the rounds involves a purported plot to have a state party convention in the summer, after the primary, to find a way to avoid an endorsement of the nominee or to leave the Democrats’ ballot line empty if the nominee were to be persuaded to step aside. “It’s becoming clear the chair of the Montana Democratic Party isn’t acting in conjunction with her board and answers to dark-money special interests,” Erik Nylund, a former regional director for Tester, told me.

[From the March issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]

Other members of the state party executive board denied any such intrigue and told me that the party has clearly communicated its commitment to the Democratic nominee. “Somebody has a fever dream that that is going to happen,” state Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers told me. “I think there is a lot of hand-wringing and there is not any reality there.”

O’Brien, the party chair, sees the drama as self-defeating when Democrats should be united in seizing the chance to regain power. The party also has a shot at the congressional district covering western Montana this year following the retirement of Republican Representative Ryan Zinke. O’Brien pointed to the huge turnout for “No Kings” rallies in the state. A recent annual fundraising dinner for the state party was oversubscribed. “As chair, I will support the Democratic nominee,” O’Brien told me. “To my knowledge there is no intention to change the rules to allow for support of anyone else.”

Bodnar has the never-failed résumé of a future senator: first in his class at West Point; former Army Ranger–qualified Green Beret with deployments in Iraq; and onetime corporate executive at General Electric. As president of the University of Montana, he reversed a six-year enrollment decline. His wife, also a Rhodes Scholar, befriended the former first daughter Chelsea Clinton at Oxford, and the Bodnars attended her 2010 wedding. They sat next to then–First Lady Michelle Obama at a 2012 presidential debate. Last year, before a University of Montana basketball game, Bodnar showed off his Ranger skills by rappelling to the court from the rafters.

He supports abortion rights, rails against tariffs, and says that Trump needs to seek congressional authorization for the use of force in Iran. His critiques of the Democrats echo those from inside the party itself: The culture wars are a distraction; transgender athletes should not have unfair advantages in competitive sports; and “Defund the police” is a dumb slogan and worse policy. Bodnar has called for a strong border. And, as a hunter, he opposes an assault-weapons ban, but he backs new red-flag laws to take weapons away from people who threaten their communities. “Seth saw his share of dirt roads in Iraq, putting his life on the line for our country,” his spokesperson, Roy Loewenstein, a former state party spokesperson, told me when I read Schweitzer’s zinger about Bodnar’s lack of familiarity with the byways of Montana. (Loewenstein declined to make Bodnar available for an interview.)

[Listen: Will 2026 be a fair fight?]

Bodnar’s advisers point to support from former Governor Marc Racicot and the strategist Reed Galen, who both left the GOP over their opposition to Trump, as a sign of the candidate’s bipartisan credibility. But the candidate demurs when asked about the most important decision he would likely make if he wins. The Senate operates as a two-party body; the party with the most votes appoints a majority leader who sets committee assignments and oversees legislative action. “I think we need new leadership in the U.S. Senate,” Bodnar said in a recent podcast appearance, a reference to both Republican and Democratic leaders. But he will not say which party’s new leaders he would support if elected. His advisers told me that Bodnar would go to Washington, negotiate the best deal for Montana, and not join either the Democratic or Republican caucuses. “I reject the notion that we have to accept a political system where you have to submit to a leader of a Party, vote the way you’re told, and engage in endless political warfare with the other side,” Bodnar told me in a written statement.

Republicans in Washington have attacked Bodnar, and Senate Democratic leaders have stayed silent. Bodnar’s Democratic supporters act as if he is a certain vote for their side. As soon as Bodnar entered the race, a Republican group cut an ad attacking him for running the university when a transgender track athlete competed in meets with other women, in accordance with NCAA rules at the time. Alex Latcham, who runs the super PAC aligned with Republican Majority Leader John Thune, described Bodnar as a registered Democrat—an affiliation that dates to when he was living in Connecticut in 2012. (There is no party registration in Montana, and Bodnar did not claim a party in 2014 when he lived in Florida.) “It is laughable to suggest Seth Bodnar would not vote for Chuck Schumer to be majority leader,” Latcham told me. Loewenstein, Bodnar’s spokesperson, responded: “Laughing at Montanans who are fighting the broken politics of Washington is exactly what we’d expect.”

One bright spot for Bodnar and the Democratic Party is that Republicans in the state are in their own mess. Daines surprised everyone by announcing that he would not stand for reelection minutes before the filing deadline and hours after Bodnar filed as an independent. Daines’s handpicked successor, the former U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme, who has never before run for office, was the only candidate who had time to enter the race, confirming to many Montanans the stereotype of national party grandees being dismissive of local democracy.

“That stunt threw everything on both sides of the equation,” Nancy Keenan, the former executive director of the state Democratic Party, told me. “Not only are Democrats in a snit, but Republicans are also in a snit.”

In a state more libertarian than partisan—abortion, recreational marijuana, permitless concealed carry are all legal—Democrats have had success here before. They claimed at least one, and often both, of Montana’s U.S. Senate seats from 1912 to 2024, and pulled off a 16-year run in the governor’s mansion from 2005 to 2021. In 2008, Obama came within 11,000 votes of winning. Then came the disruptions of Trump. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris got about 38 percent of the vote in 2024, dooming Tester, who ran seven points ahead of her and seven points behind his Republican opponent.

Tester’s defeat led some strategists in the state to de-emphasize party affiliation. Some Democrats backed failed ballot measures in 2024 that would have shifted to an Alaska-style ranked-choice voting program. Others explored adopting a model where lawmakers organize around issues rather than parties. A Democratic consulting firm, Fireweed Campaigns, founded by a former state Democratic Party official, recently began working to elect moderate Republican lawmakers in the hopes of building a post-partisan governing majority in the state legislature, earning rebukes from the state GOP.

In the summer of 2025, Fireweed convened Democratic leaders in Anaconda, Montana, for a pitch on why an independent would have a better chance of winning the state’s western U.S. House district in 2026 than a Democrat. That plan, according to two people familiar with the presentation who asked to remain anonymous, was contingent on finding a way to persuade the Democratic nominee to back out once an independent entered the race—a similar scenario to the one that some Democrats suspect is now at play in the Senate race. Tully Olson, a former Tester campaign staffer who now works for Bodnar, was employed by Fireweed at the time and was on the list of those invited to the meeting, according to a document I reviewed. Bodnar’s campaign said that Olson did not ultimately attend the meeting. (Lauren Caldwell, the founder of Fireweed, did not respond to a request for comment.)

In mid-April, Democratic activists began circulating a resolution among the state party’s executive board that would require the party to appoint a replacement within 72 hours for a Democratic candidate who drops out—one way to ensure that the party doesn’t just switch to backing an independent. Current rules are unclear on how quickly the appointment must be made, but it is also not clear that the state party could logistically arrange a nominating convention on such a short timeline. Some of the party faithful fear that national Democratic strategists and donors are throwing their money behind Bodnar to attract more money into the state, rather than help the party rebuild and take advantage of Republicans’ vulnerability.

“The tradition in Montana is that the top-of-the-ticket Senate races really do have coattails, and it matters for the overall organization of the party in the state. Seth Bodnar just completely screwed that up,” Ken Toole, a former Democratic lawmaker and state party officer, told me. “It’s a lot like burning down the barn to get rid of a few mice. The damage to the party is going to take a while to get over.”

[Read: Trump voters are over it]

Boeshore and others have pledged to keep raising the alarm. His frustration is such that he asked me to tell Montana voters to reach out to him directly so he can tell everyone in the state that the Democratic Party does not support independent candidates. “My email is on the website,” he told me. For him, the Bodnar independent experiment was being driven by “the revenants” of the old Democratic party. But there was a new party, “a new energy,” in the grassroots, waiting to emerge. So the fight would go on. And the fate of the Senate could hang on the result.

This article originally stated that California has a ranked-choice voting system. In fact, Alaska has such a system, not California.

An Extra-Embarrassing White House Correspondents’ Dinner

2026-04-21T07:00:00-04:00

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Even in the best of times, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an awkward and ethically fraught affair. Journalists spend the evening partying with the president and administration officials whom they’re supposed to cover rigorously and skeptically. I’ve been to the dinner several times over the years. It’s typically crowded and a little chaotic, and the ratio of non-journalists to journalists is about 10 to 1. The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.

These aren’t the best of times for White House correspondents or, for that matter, the First Amendment. And this year’s gala figures to be even more awkward and embarrassing than usual.

After declining all invitations to the event throughout his years in office, President Trump informed the White House Correspondents’ Association last month that he would be attending this year’s dinner. His surprising decision sets up a bizarre dynamic: On Saturday night, the president will break bread with the same people he’s spent a decade calling “fake” and “enemies of the people.”

[Andrew Ferguson: A republic too fractured to be funny]

Trump easily qualifies as the most anti-press president in the dinner’s 105-year history. In just the past 15 months, he has sued news organizations, threatened to jail journalists, and repeatedly suggested taking broadcast licenses away from TV networks that have reported stories he didn’t like. His administration has defunded NPR and PBS, hobbled Voice of America, and driven mainstream journalists out of the Pentagon. A few weeks after Trump assumed office last year, his administration took control of the White House press pool, enabling the president to dictate who covers him when he’s inside the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or at Mar-a-Lago. The WHCA, which had selected pool members for decades, objected to being pushed aside. The White House ignored its protests.

This state of affairs raises two questions: What explains Trump’s change of heart about attending the dinner? And why was he invited in the first place?

The second question is the easier one to answer. The WHCA has always invited the president to its annual dinner; Calvin Coolidge became the first chief executive to show up in 1924. Trump has accordingly been invited every year that he’s been president, including last year, after he commandeered the press pool. Trump’s motives for accepting the invitation, however, are harder to parse. During his first term, he made a big show of skipping the event, holding campaign-style rallies on the night of the dinner. (He boycotted it last year, too, but without the counterprogramming.) Now, for the first time as president, he’s suddenly all in. He posted his decision to accept the invitation on Truth Social in early March, writing that the WHCA had asked him “very nicely” and that the correspondents “admit that I am truly one of the Greatest Presidents in the History of our Country, the G.O.A.T., according to many.” The correspondents said no such thing, of course, but that’s Trump’s version.

Trump might have been encouraged by the WHCA’s choice of after-dinner entertainment. The organization usually hires a comedian to roast the president and the assembled reporters, but it announced in late February—a week before Trump said he would attend—that it would feature the “renowned mentalist” Oz Pearlman. Pearlman’s act is safely apolitical, which means that Trump won’t have to face barbs at his expense. (The WHCA’s president, Weijia Jiang of CBS News, declined to comment.)

The prospect of being made fun of has been an issue for Trump. As a guest, in 2011, he sat mostly stone-faced at his table as both President Obama and Seth Meyers fired zingers at him. The comedian Michelle Wolf’s grilling of Trump and his administration in 2018 (her opening line: “Like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with Trump, let’s get this over with.”) prompted some conservatives to walk out in protest. The following year, the WHCA avoided blowback by hiring the historian Ron Chernow as its speaker. The organization’s plans collapsed last year when the comedian it had hired, Amber Ruffin, referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” on a podcast a few weeks before the event. Amid criticism from the White House and elsewhere, the WHCA quickly unhired Ruffin and dispensed with a comedy routine altogether. Trump skipped the dinner anyway.

[Megan Garber: The slow, awkward death of the White House correspondents’ dinner]

Despite his public disparagement of the event (at one point, he even forbade subordinates from attending), Trump has privately been intrigued by it. In his 2021 book, Betrayal, the ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl writes that Trump toyed with the idea of coming to the dinner in 2020. Karl, who was serving as the WHCA president at the time, recounts that he was summoned to a White House meeting with Trump to discuss the president’s role. “Am I supposed to be funny up there?” Trump asked Karl. The president was inclined to come, according to Karl, but wanted the WHCA to get rid of the comedian it had already booked, Hasan Minhaj. Karl declined to negotiate, and Trump never followed up. The dinner that year was ultimately canceled due to the pandemic.

Trump may have come to the realization that the benefits of attending outweigh the risks. “I think he’s recognizing he only has so many more chances to do the things a president can do,” a former WHCA board member, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized by his employer to speak on the record, told me.

Trump will be both the guest of honor and keynote speaker, and the assembled press corps, their bosses, and their guests will be seated below him. With the nation’s 250th birthday approaching, he could use the occasion as an opportunity to mend fences, to put aside mutual antagonisms, and to declare a new spirit of cooperation—kidding, of course! Trump will clearly do none of those things. The more likely outcome is that he will heap scorn upon the journalists, who will have no choice but to sit and take it.

“In his second term, Trump is determined to ‘own’ every organization that opposed him or embarrassed him in his first term,” George Condon, a former WHCA president, told me. The Correspondents’ Dinner has never been known for the quality of its food. For the reporters and editors in attendance, this year’s meal might be particularly hard to stomach.

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

2026-04-20T07:00:00-04:00

At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.

Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.

No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.

In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.

[From the March 2024 issue: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.

So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and a comedian on board. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.

[Alexandra Petri: The 10 things the Bezoses are almost certainly grateful for each morning]

Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”

“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.

That’s how the weekend started. Here’s how it ended: My wife broke her wrist slipping on wet grass, and both children and I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. This is not a joke. One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two. Suffice it to say we have never been back to Campfire, nor have we ever been invited.

At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.

Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.

Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?

Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth.

[Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post]

Though we didn’t know it at the time, Bezos’s first marriage would be over a few weeks later. My defining impression of his wife that weekend was sadness, even though Bezos made a big show of performing the role of family man. In hindsight, it is that performance that sticks with me. The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.

[Adam Serwer: How America chose not to hold the powerful to account]

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The very powerful men who think introspection is dumb]

When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.

Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The conservative attack on empathy]

I finally met Bezos on the last day of Campfire, at lunch, after my wife had broken her wrist. I went over to thank him for having us, and he asked how our Campfire experience had been. I told him that it was great, but that unfortunately my wife had broken her wrist that morning when she slipped on the wet grass while kicking a ball with our 6-year-old son.

The night before, we’d all stood by the pool at the beach club watching a cadre of synchronized swimmers execute a flawless water routine. I had spoken with a famous novelist, who said, “I just don’t understand why I’m here.” A famous rock star was about to start an acoustic set. The famous chef had made paella. Somewhere deep under my skin, a brutal pox was beginning to form.

The next morning, my wife fell, and I found myself in a black SUV with a team of private-security contractors, who whisked us to the back entrance of a Santa Barbara emergency room, where she was seen and treated right away. We made it back in time to watch the Supreme Court justice Zoom in from Washington, D.C.

How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.

But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.

A few hours later, on the private plane home, a famous movie producer offered my wife a blanket. My children’s faces were covered in spots. Under my fingernails, red welts were beginning to rise.

The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.

“I’m finished,” yells Daniel Plainview, perched happily on the polished floor of his own celestial kingdom. Though he has just committed a crime, he has never felt so free.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “Everything Is Free and Nothing Matters.”

The Problem With Hasan Piker’s Einstein Story

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

Last week, Pod Save America, the popular podcast founded by former Obama-administration staffers, hosted the influencer and leftist provocateur Hasan Piker. A charismatic and pugnacious socialist streamer, Piker has become a flash point in a broader debate among Democrats over how far their party’s big tent ought to extend. Unsurprisingly, Piker’s hourlong interview generated controversy. Critics on the right and left highlighted his refusal to condemn Hamas. Others were upset that the influencer said he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” even as he reiterated his reticence to back a progressive politician such as Gavin Newsom over J. D. Vance.

But a very different part of the podcast caught my attention, because it illustrates the problem with the wrangling over Piker: It revolves around his contentious opinions about a narrow subject—Jews and Israel—while giving short shrift to his broader worldview and his tendency to be wrong on the facts. The issue is not whether to engage with figures like Piker; it’s how to do so in a way that’s genuinely informative.

[Read: The limits of the Democrats’ big tent]

The Pod Save America appearance offers a case in point. While discussing his personal opposition to Israel’s founding, Piker marshals an unexpected ally: Albert Einstein. “My assessment on Zionism as an ideology is not that different from Albert Einstein’s assessment of Zionism,” he tells the co-host Jon Favreau. The Jewish physicist, Piker said, “was actually asked to be the first president of Israel.” But Einstein, in Piker’s account, assailed the Israeli project from the start: He saw “the violence that the early Zionist brigades were engaging in” before “the IDF existed, before Israel existed,” and “wrote about what Zionism was turning into, and he warned that what he was seeing was exactly what the Nazis were doing.”

Most listeners probably took little notice of this historical riff. Favreau does not remark on it. But for me, it was a flashing-neon sign. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Einstein’s relationship to Judaism and Zionism, poring over the relevant documents in three languages on two continents. And just about every bit of Piker’s potted portrayal is either misleading or false.

Far from an opponent of the Zionist endeavor, Einstein assisted it for decades. In 1921, he raised money across America for the Hebrew University alongside Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization. In 1923, he delivered a guest lecture at the school’s campus in Jerusalem. Weizmann, meanwhile, was tapped to be the first president of Israel, in 1948; Einstein, who had not been in the running, congratulated him. “Long before the emergency of Hitler, I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong,” Einstein wrote to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947, in an attempt to persuade him to support the movement.

In 1951, the physicist hosted David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. When Weizmann died the next year, Ben-Gurion offered his position to Einstein, who declined, writing that he was “deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.” (The notoriously absent-minded professor explained, “I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.”) Shortly before his death, Einstein told an interviewer that he had “great hopes for the future of the Jewish state.” He even planned to deliver a speech marking the seventh anniversary of Israel’s founding in 1955—but died days before he could deliver it. He bequeathed his valuable papers and the rights to his name and likeness to Hebrew University.

None of this is to say that Einstein was an uncritical booster of the Zionist project. On the contrary, he was a sharp public antagonist of the Israeli right. This ideological orientation was likely another reason Einstein turned down the ceremonial role of the country’s presidency, which is meant to be nonpartisan. He was also a deeply reluctant nationalist. Before Israel was founded, Einstein advocated for a shared state for Jews and Arabs, writing in 1946 that “what we can and should ask” is for “secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.” But once Israel was established, Einstein strongly supported its continued existence, while insisting that its ultimate success depended on the pursuit of peace and fair treatment of the land’s Arab inhabitants. “International policies for the Middle East should be dominated by efforts to secure peace for Israel and its neighbors,” he wrote in the draft of his deathbed speech.

In other words, Einstein wasn’t an unapologetic Israel-right-or-wrong advocate or an ardent anti-Zionist, but something more interesting: a left-wing supporter of Jewish statehood who believed in Israel’s necessity but also in the fundamental rights of the region’s Palestinian citizens. This complex combination of commitments puts him in accord with many, if not most, Americans and American Jews today, according to survey data. In contemporary terms, one might call Einstein a liberal Zionist—the same category of people Piker has previously called “liberal Nazis.”

But listeners to Piker on Pod Save America will have learned none of this. The streamer’s cavalier characterization of the views of American Jews, living and dead, and his failure to genuinely reckon with what they think, help explain why some feel that Piker fosters anti-Jewish animus. But one need not reach a conclusion on the anti-Semitism question to arrive at the simpler determination that he speaks confidently about things that he does not know much about. And this phenomenon is not unique to Piker. It’s characteristic of the new-media landscape, which now includes smashmouth streamers and podcasters of all political persuasions who talk about everything but are experts in nothing, and whose incentives run toward incendiary virality rather than accuracy. Often, this means that these talkers leave listeners less informed than when they came in, as is the case here.

Such pitfalls should not stop journalists and activists from interviewing these influential actors; doing so is part of the job and essential for democratic dialogue. The question is not whether such people should be engaged, but how. Interviewers should educate themselves about an influencer’s past arguments and be prepared to dig into the details, as CNN’s Elle Reeve did when she exposed the far-right podcaster Candace Owens’s conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s killing. Tucker Carlson has broadcast elaborate Hitler apologetics and other anti-Semitic ideas; his interlocutors should be familiar with their refutations, and be able to raise them when confronting him.

Hosts could also bring on experts to complicate the simplistic narratives marketed by the streaming set: One imagines a medical researcher might have some thoughts about Piker’s recent claim that Cuba has come up with a treatment for Alzheimer’s that he alleges has been suppressed. Other interviewers might have someone else in the studio who is tasked with interrogating the claims of guests in real time. After all, even Joe Rogan has his producer serve as an on-air fact-checker; the people interviewing Rogan should too.

Other questions are worth posing to influencers such as Piker by those who are evaluating them as political partners. On Pod Save America, most of the run time was devoted to Piker holding forth about Jews and Zionism. This was less the fault of the show and more a response to the public discourse, which has obsessed over Piker’s every utterance on these subjects. But for the average voter considering the streamer as a potential ally, and wondering what the world would look like if he had more power, the tired anti-Semitism arguments obscure far more fundamental issues.

For instance, Piker has repeatedly exhibited a soft spot for left-coded expansionist authoritarian regimes. When he was asked recently if “there is a country that has done socialism in a way that you’d like,” he did not cite the Nordic states favored by the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders. He said, “China is probably the closest,” while acknowledging “plenty of issues within the Chinese system” that he did not detail before launching into praise of the country’s high-speed rail. Piker has likened China’s subjugation of Tibet to the North’s crushing of the South in the American Civil War, and argued that the takeover helped civilize the territory. (He has also compared Taiwan to the Confederacy.) He once referred to China’s mass-detention facilities for Uyghur Muslims as “concentration camps,” only to quickly revise that to “reeducation camps” and claim that they “are all closed now.” (They are not, and the detentions also continue throughout the formal justice system.)

[Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps]

Piker’s apologias for left-wing autocrats are not restricted to contemporary ones. Last month, he told his viewers that “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world.” And at the Yale Political Union this month, he declared that “the fall of the U.S.S.R. was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” The tens of millions of victims of the Soviet Union went unmentioned.

Talking with Piker about a political coalition to save American democracy without discussing his affinity for China’s rulers is like teaming up with Carlson without interrogating his praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin—or with Donald Trump without examining his outlook toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, only the debate over the latter tends to happen, such that Israel crowds out all other considerations, including extremely consequential beliefs that can end up going unchallenged. Favreau, the Pod Save America co-host, perceptively alludes to this very problem in his exchange with Piker. “Tucker Carlson’s a good example,” Favreau observes. “He’ll do, like, a very thoughtful critique of Israel and then suddenly, like, launch into a conspiracy.” The thing is, Carlson isn’t the only one whose Israel rhetoric attracts outsize attention that conveniently enables the rest of his ideology to evade scrutiny.

Many pundits and reporters are understandably unfamiliar with the oeuvre of some of the country’s biggest influencers. The content of these creators is spread out over incalculable hours of streaming video and is not easily searchable. But any productive conversation with or about these personalities requires an accurate understanding of their worldviews.

Perhaps liberal listeners align with Piker’s perspective on regimes such as China and the Soviet Union and consider his approach compatible with their fight against Trumpism. Perhaps they do not. But to make that call, they need to know what he actually believes. And that’s a conversation worth having.

California’s Blue Armageddon

2026-04-19T07:00:00-04:00

On a chilly Saturday late last month, I met Eric Swalwell at a Little League diamond near Capitol Hill, where the Bay Area congressman and his wife, Brittany, would be watching their 8-year-old son. Swalwell, who was running to succeed Gavin Newsom as the next governor of California, had been gradually rising above a Lilliputian cast of candidates and had acquired a strong scent of momentum in the race.

“Impeccable timing for you,” he’d texted me on my drive over. He attached a just-published Washington Post article reporting that FBI Director Kash Patel was seeking to release files relating to a decade-old investigation into Swalwell that had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing. If true, the Post story presented a publicity godsend to Swalwell’s campaign, further elevating his status as a nemesis of the vindictive president.

The family-guy tableau of the Little League game felt consistent with the wholesome image that the campaign had been straining to project of late, for reasons that would become clear soon enough. Our interview occurred on the same weekend that Swalwell released a video of him and Brittany holding hands on a boardwalk stroll, while she called him a “really great dad” and a “really good husband.”

As we sat together in the bleachers, Swalwell introduced me to Brittany, dropped the names of his better-known endorsers, and referred to Nancy Pelosi as his “work mom.” He also mentioned Adam Schiff, his former House colleague, whose trajectory into statewide office Swalwell had watched closely. Like Schiff, Swalwell had become a ubiquitous antagonist of Donald Trump—about as good of a credential as any for leading the de facto capital of Blue America.

“I am the only candidate whose name the president knows,” Swalwell told me.

[Read: Donald Trump’s gift to Adam Schiff]

A few weeks later, a lot more people know Eric Swalwell’s name, which has now been stained immeasurably. He is leaving Congress; his campaign is over, probably his political career too; and the California governor’s race is even messier than the colossal fiasco it had been before.

Swalwell’s collapse has been sudden and swift, if not surprising. Recurrent talk of bad behavior toward women had trailed him around Washington for years, and proliferated as he approached front-runner status. Late last week, the rumors detonated: Multiple women, one of them a former staffer, accused him of sexual misconduct, including sexual assault, unwanted advances, and explicit Snapchat messages. Swalwell admitted to “mistakes in judgment” but denied the allegations and vowed to “fight” them. In short order, he has been met with multiple investigations, and instant pariah status. (I reached out to him after the accusations came out but did not hear back.)

The fact that Swalwell was, until recently, the Democrats’ leading candidate for governor is itself illustrative of the race writ large. Or, as far as the people still running, writ small. The glaring lack of candidate talent, political skill, and personal appeal—let alone star power—has been the defining quality of the race. Bigger names, such as Kamala Harris and Senator Alex Padilla, opted not to run. Newsom is term-limited. Jerry Brown is 88. George Clooney lives in France.

Beyond the perverse pull of watching such ineptitude on display, the main allure of this campaign is that it could produce the ultimate man-bites-dog political result: the election of a Trump-aligned Republican governor in this bluest of states, concurrent with a national election that could produce the bluest of waves. Such a monumental upset would not occur because the two GOP candidates—Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and the British-bred commentator and strategist Steve Hilton—remind anyone of Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or any of the other larger-than-life Republicans in the party’s rich (if not recent) California tradition. Rather, a Republican win would represent an act of Democratic self-immolation, spectacular even by Team Donkey standards.

Here’s how the Democratic-lockout scenario could play out. California elections are winnowed through a so-called jungle primary, in which the top two finishers—regardless of party—advance to the general election in November. The current field has been crowded and stagnant for months, with eight major Democratic candidates (now seven). Until Swalwell dropped out, he, the billionaire investor Tom Steyer, and former Representative Katie Porter had each been polling in the low-to-mid teens. They were followed by a parade of single-digit laggards, including San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and former California Attorney General and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. Hilton and Bianco, meanwhile, were polling in the mid-to-high teens through the first week of April. If no Democrat exceeds the others before the June 2 primary, the Republicans could finish first and second, guaranteeing a GOP victory in November.

A big part of the Democrats’ problem is that the party’s top tier, such as it is, consists of deeply flawed candidates, each encumbered with distinct personality impairments.

Steyer ran for president in 2020, burned through a ton of cash, went nowhere, and is now attempting to spend his way to Sacramento. He has already saturated the state’s airwaves with more than $130 million in ads, which may or may not be enough to buy him a modicum of personal appeal. His one viral moment of the campaign so far was not pretty: A local TV reporter asked him how he would grade Newsom’s two terms, and Steyer became flustered before muttering forth with the worst possible explanation: “I haven’t followed it closely enough to give him a grade.” The Steyer campaign declined to make him available for an interview.

Porter, an economic-populist gadfly in the fashion of Elizabeth Warren, became a social-media sensation during her years in the House. She wielded her signature whiteboard at congressional oversight committee hearings while making mush of CEOs and Trump-administration officials. Not all of her viral moments have been flattering, however. There was an infamous video last fall of Porter berating a news reporter while terminating a local television interview, and another from 2021 of her cursing out a staff member during a Zoom call (“get out of my fucking shot!”). Porter expressed regret over the videos, saying that she “could have been better in those moments.” A Porter spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests to interview the candidate.

Then there is—was—Swalwell, who at this point has graduated to his own special classification of toxicity. With his exit, the Democrats’ flailing field might be narrowed slightly, and perhaps improved by subtraction, but very much remains a bottleneck of B-listers.

At the end of March, I headed out to Los Angeles to better understand this predicament. My arrival coincided with a scheduled primary debate at the University of Southern California—which, naturally, would become a steaming debacle in its own right.

Not long after the debate was supposed to start, I found myself in a musty warehouse event space in Boyle Heights, just east of the Los Angeles River. Republican Chad Bianco’s campaign had decided to go ahead with a watch party, even though a slight wrench had been flung into the evening: The debate had been abruptly canceled the night before.

[Read: How Tom Steyer built the biggest political machine you’ve never heard of]

I’d attended many debate watch parties in my career, but never one with no debate to watch. Not only that, the candidate we were supposed to be watching was present at the party.

“It’s very disheartening, very disheartening,” Bianco told me as he mingled among roughly 60 guests. Bianco described the whiplash of his last 24 hours: After being canceled, the debate had been briefly resurrected, canceled again, and nearly resuscitated another time before finally being euthanized for good. He parked himself in a corner to talk with a few reporters. His wife, Denise, stood next to him.

“How are you supposed to do a watch party if there’s nothing to watch?” I asked Denise, as Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” blared in the background.

“We’re celebrating!” she exclaimed.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked. “What are we watching?”

“We are watching Chad,” she said.

Chad looks like the sheriff he is: short-cropped hair, studded belt buckle, six-pointed-star badge, and an excellent mustache, which I complimented him on. “I know Steve wasn’t looking tough enough, so he grew a beard,” he said, referring to Hilton, his Republican rival. “He dresses like me now too. It’s kind of weird.”

“Are you guys friends?” I asked.

“No, I will never be friends with him,” Bianco told me. “He’s unethical and dishonest.” Bianco did not elaborate.

The non-debate debate at least provided a tidy distillation of this muddled campaign. The hosts—the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, KABC-TV Los Angeles, and Univision—had invited the five top-polling candidates and also a sixth, Mahan, even though he had been polling lower than many of the uninvited also-rans. This did not go over well among said uninvited also-rans. Villaraigosa and others pointed out that the Latino, Black, and Asian American candidates had all been excluded. Various activists, groups, and state lawmakers piled on. USC finally decided that the controversy was distracting “from the issues that matter to voters,” and the complainants declared victory. “We fought. We won! We stood up against an unfair candidate debate set-up,” Becerra wrote on X.

Another grievance about the debate was that Mike Murphy, the co-director of the Dornsife Center, is publicly supporting Mahan. Murphy told me that he is on leave from USC and had nothing to do with the event. The organizers, he explained, had faced a simple challenge: “How do you pare it down so it’s not a stupid circus?” Clumsily, in this case.

My basic approach to spending 72 hours in this stupid circus was to scramble around and visit with as many candidates and campaign-adjacent characters as I could. That included Murphy, a longtime Republican media strategist and raconteur, one of my all-time favorite campaign-adjacent characters. Murphy moved to Los Angeles in 2003, went full Never Trump, and has dabbled in screenwriting, podcasting, and TV punditry, as well as the odd Democratic campaign—i.e., Mahan’s. He invited me to a divey Chinese joint in the Palms neighborhood, Hu’s Szechwan, where he says he likes to keep office hours, like an old-school mayor in a back booth of a red-sauce Italian joint.

When I asked him to assess the candidates, Murphy wanted to make the point that they are all, figuratively, diminutive. But he was also aware that language sensitivities have heightened since, say, the 1980s, when pundits dismissed the Michael Dukakis–led field of Democratic presidential candidates as “the Seven Dwarfs.”

“I want to do a little-person joke without losing my career,” Murphy told me. “This thing is a Wizard of Oz wrap party,” he went on, not able to help himself.

He pivoted to safer rhetorical ground, noting that it’s near-impossible for candidates with little statewide name recognition to get traction in California, which is larger in size than Germany. “If you’re not famous or you don’t have a lot of money,” he said, “you’re a margin of error.”

Murphy believes that the Blue Armageddon result—both Republicans in the runoff—will not come to pass, a view that plenty of California politicos share. Their theory is that the Democrats idling in the margin-of-error lane will eventually start dropping out and rally around whoever the leading non-Republican is. But other than Swalwell, none of the remaining candidates has quit yet, and all of them make a similar argument: Voters are still not “tuned in” to the race, and those who are skew heavily to the undecided.

One candidate making that case is Murphy’s pick, Mahan, who in most polls sits in the low-to-mid-single digits. I met the boyish-looking, Harvard-educated mayor of San Jose at a café in downtown L.A. as he snacked his way through a plastic container of blueberries. Mahan, 43, entered the race late, at the end of January, after growing “incredibly frustrated with what the field was offering,” he told me. He has been trying to position himself as a results-oriented pragmatist who is not afraid to defy the party establishment, progressive groups, or Newsom himself.

Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty.

“What I’m suggesting—no, not suggesting—what I’m arguing with conviction is that we have to demand that our government do better,” Mahan said. He has become a chic choice for Silicon Valley types, good-government centrists, and the national media—California’s straight analogue to Pete Buttigieg. Like Mayor Pete, Mahan exudes high-minded, data-driven sophistication, with that special dash of “aw shucks” they teach at Harvard.

[Read: Katie Porter is tired too]

“A Democrat who talks about math,” Mahan told me. “Imagine that!”

Okay, let’s talk about math. As in, what happens if the weeks go by and Mahan does not see any significant addition or multiplication in his polling? Would he drop out then to help his party? Mahan maintains that he likes his chances. Democrats will eventually consolidate, he said. Around him.

“I plan to be the one,” he said.

Funnily enough, that’s what a lot of the math-challenged candidates say. This includes Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor, whom I met at his office in a Wilshire Boulevard tower, a clear view of the Hollywood sign out his picture window.

Villaraigosa is undeniably credentialed; in addition to running the nation’s second-largest city for two terms, he was speaker of the California Assembly in the 1990s. But he has not held any office since 2013. In the governor’s race—his second campaign for the job—he has consistently polled in the single digits and struggled to gain traction.

“Why do you want to do this?” I asked him.

Villaraigosa launched into his origin story (“Mark, this state’s given me more than I could have ever hoped for”), his litany of when-I-was-mayor selling points (“more housing, more schools, more community colleges”), and his explanation for why a 73-year-old politician with a heavily antiquated aura could become the next governor.

People are hungry, he said, for a leader who can bring this most diverse, dynamic, and populous state in the country together. California, after all, has only ever had one nonwhite governor—in the 19th century.

“I was everybody’s mayor,” said Villaraigosa, who seems especially fond of that trope of politicians claiming honorary status in certain identity groups (such as when the writer Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “the first Black president”).

“Jewish Journal called me the first Jewish mayor,” Villaraigosa boasted.

As best I can tell, this referred to a 2017 Jewish Journal article in which Villaraigosa identified himself as being “the Jewish mayor,” in addition to “the Muslim mayor” and “the Korean mayor.”

“I get introduced in the African American communities a lot of times as the second Black mayor,” he also told me.

I started to ask Villaraigosa whether he could be considered an Asian or gay mayor of Los Angeles, but he shot me a look, so I dropped it.

“You know the point I’m making,” he said. “I was a uniter.”

Unfortunately for Villaraigosa, few California voters seem to be uniting around the first Jewish and second Black mayor of Los Angeles.

From Villaraigosa’s lair, I headed to the patio of a fancy-pants hotel in Pasadena for the next stop of my tour de farce: a meeting with Steve Hilton before he had to head off to a fundraiser.

“I want to have a pee,” he announced after he walked in and introduced himself. Lots of traffic en route, very relatable. I was supportive.

Hilton returned a minute later, and seemed immediately amused by his circumstance: a Brit on a big adventure across the pond, a Republican somehow atop the governor’s race in California. “I’ve been leading or second in most of the polls,” Hilton told me. “There was one where I was fourth,” he added, giggling, “which is obviously a fake poll.”

On this day, Hilton was cheerfully annoyed by the canceled USC debate, which he blamed on the “inevitable whining” of what he called “the LPDs.”

“The low-polling Democrats were jumping up and down, ‘Racism, racism!’” said Hilton. “My line has been, they weren’t excluded because of race; they’re excluded because they weren’t doing better in the race.” He was clearly pleased with his cleverness.

Hilton is a different breed of American candidate. But he’s spent much of his life around politics, mostly in England. He is an Oxford-educated provocateur who was a top aide to conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. He moved to the United States in 2012; his wife, Rachel Whetstone, a British communications executive, has held top jobs at a Mount Rushmore of Silicon Valley firms (Google, Netflix, Facebook, Uber). Still, Hilton has never held or even run for office.

I wondered aloud whether there had ever been a governor of a U.S. state with a British accent. “I don’t think so,” Hilton replied, though he invoked Schwarzenegger, who very much had an Austrian accent. Hilton also noted, for the record, that both of his parents are from Hungary. Therefore, he sometimes jokes that since the last Republican governor in California was from Austria, electing Hilton would be like California’s version of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“So, I say, ‘You’ve had the Austrian, now the Hungarian.’”

“That’s a great message!” I assured Hilton.

Hilton calls himself “a pragmatic kind of person” and insists that his “whole campaign is positive and practical.” His main theme is that California is an object lesson in how Democratic excess can ruin an otherwise glorious state. “You’ve had 16 years of one-party rule,” he said. “Are you happy with the way things are? The answer is going to be no.”

This could be a solid strategy, except for one thing: Donald Trump remains the dominant figure in American politics, including in California, where he is especially loathed by the general electorate. If Democrats can avoid the two-Republicans outcome and Hilton winds up facing a Democrat in November, his opponent will be relentless in trying to tie him to Trump. Hilton sometimes shifts into the language of the Fox News host he used to be, for example, promising to go “FULL DOGE” on California if given the chance. I kept asking him about the president and how MAGA Hilton considers himself to be. He kept ducking. “The whole Trump thing is just a ridiculous distraction from fixing California,” Hilton said. “I truly am not ideological.”

[Read: The front-runner]

Hilton’s dilemma is that if he is too dismissive of the president pre-June, California Republicans and right-leaning independents—which includes a considerable pro-Trump contingent—could prefer Bianco, a much more unabashedly MAGA figure, with notes of extremism. Bianco was once a member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right anti-government group whose ranks were heavily represented at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (After his affiliation became public in 2021, Bianco said that he had left the group years before.) More recently—March—he took the bizarre step of seizing 650,000 ballots from the state’s 2025 election in Riverside County, saying that he was going to “physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported.” California’s attorney general called Bianco’s gambit “unprecedented in both scope and scale,” and the state’s Supreme Court eventually ordered Bianco to shut it down.

The real goal of Bianco’s “investigation” was likely to flutter his eyelashes at a certain connoisseur of bogus election fraud, the one sitting in the White House. But to no avail. Trump gave Hilton his “COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT” on Truth Social last week, calling him a “truly fine man.” Hilton dutifully went on X and said he was “deeply honored.”

He was, in all likelihood, deeply ambivalent.

Against his party’s interest, Trump had given Republican voters a reason to rally behind one candidate, and thus create an opening for a Democrat to advance to November. But although Hilton jumped into the lead in most polls taken afterward, Bianco remains close to the front of the pack. California Republicans held their convention last weekend, and neither candidate had enough support to earn the party’s endorsement.

Hilton still looked to be enjoying the stupid circus. If nothing else, he struck me as a rare sanguine Republican on a ballot anywhere in America this year.

In the days since Swalwell’s demise, no clear consensus has arisen about who will benefit and who will not. If there’s one area of agreement, it’s that the race remains an underwhelming hodgepodge of half-weights, has-beens, and, oh yes, a billionaire.

Steyer, largely on the strength of his limitless ad budget, seems to have inherited at least some of the emerging Swalwell momentum. He’s picked up a few endorsements (the California Teachers Association, for example), drawn some big crowds at campaign events this week, and, for what it’s worth, replaced Swalwell as the darling of the prediction markets. Trump even attacked “SLEAZEBAG Tom Steyer” on Wednesday, which in 2026 is probably the best attention that a Democrat, even a free-spending billionaire, can buy.

It does not seem obvious, however, that more publicity will make voters’ hearts grow fonder of a self-funded hedge-fund magnate whose last vanity campaign, for president, spent $345 million and won zero delegates. Meanwhile, at least one poll conducted after Swalwell’s exit showed a continued logjam at the top: Hilton at 17 percent, with Bianco and Steyer tied at 14 percent. Beyond that, the survey’s most significant development was probably Becerra climbing to 10 percent (tied with Porter).

The job of California governor has changed significantly during the Trump years, becoming more national than ever. Trump’s repeated incursions into the state—sending the National Guard into Los Angeles, denying federal funding, even endorsing calls for Newsom’s arrest—are likely to persist in some form. California voters will want their governor to be a “fighter-protector,” Swalwell had told me, in better days for him. “They’re asking, Who’s going to step in and fill the role?”

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

The last California governor’s race I wrote about was the 2010 campaign to succeed Schwarzenegger. I remember asking Jerry Brown, the eventual winner, how he would rate Schwarzenegger’s performance. Brown surprised me with his answer, crediting his predecessor with “making the job of governor bigger.” Reagan, Brown said, had also “added size” to the position. His point—I think—was that, in such a boundless and targeted state, the personality and perceived stature of the person in charge seemed to count for more than they would elsewhere. That’s only become more true in Trump’s second term.

On Friday, I asked Newsom himself what advice he would give the next governor in dealing with the president. “You know, it’s interpersonal with Trump, that’s how it starts,” Newsom told me in a Zoom interview. He said he would encourage his successor to fly to Washington, try to build some rapport; Newsom guessed that Trump would be receptive, in part to spite the departed governor.

“So you take advantage of that, the fresh air,” Newsom said, adding that it won’t last. “You’re dealing with an invasive species.” Inevitably, the president will try to bully the next governor if he senses he can. “His superpower, from my perspective, is exploiting weakness,” Newsom said.

I took a shot at getting Newsom to assess the race, and whether he believed any of the candidates was better suited than the rest to repelling the invasive species. But this he was reluctant to do. “I don’t want to get into the merits or demerits of people as individuals,” he said. “I think all of them are remarkably qualified in their own unique ways”—except for Hilton and Bianco (the latter of whom he called “the guy who tried to take all those ballots”). The governor referred to the wannabe Democrats as “an extraordinarily well-versed group” and also “just an interesting field.”

Newsom insisted that he’s not getting involved, or favoring anyone just yet. Nor does he seem to believe that the pileup of Democrats—and the prospect that it could result in a Republican governor—constitutes an emergency just yet.

I asked Newsom if he would endorse a Democrat before the primary.

“Only in a break-the-glass scenario,” he said, not elaborating on what that was, or whether it was getting close.

*Illustration sources: Anjali Sharif-Paul / MediaNews Group / The Sun / Getty; Jeff Gentner / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News / Getty.

The FBI Director Is MIA

2026-04-17T18:20:00-04:00

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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.

It turned out that the answer was still Patel. He had not been fired. The access problem, two people familiar with the matter said, appears to have been a technical error, and it was quickly resolved. “It was all ultimately bullshit,” one FBI official told me.

But Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations.

In response to a detailed list of 19 questions, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement that under Donald Trump and Patel, “crime across the country has plummeted to the lowest level in more than 100 years and many high profile criminals have been put behind bars. Director Patel remains a critical player on the Administration’s law and order team.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told me in a statement, “Patel has accomplished more in 14 months than the previous administration did in four years. Anonymously sourced hit pieces do not constitute journalism.”

The FBI responded with a statement, attributed to Patel: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.”

[Read: Trump’s purge may be just beginning]

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and private conversations, they described Patel’s tenure as a management failure and his personal behavior as a national-security vulnerability.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Some of Patel’s colleagues at the FBI worry that his personal behavior has become a threat to public safety. An FBI director is expected to be available and focused on his job—especially when the nation is at war with a state sponsor of terrorism. Current and former officials told me that they have long worried about what would happen in the event of a domestic terrorist attack while Patel is in office, and they said that their apprehension has increased significantly in the weeks since Trump launched his military campaign against Iran. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” one official said.

Patel arrived at the FBI in early 2025 as a deeply polarizing figure. He had risen from being a public defender in Miami to a congressional aide and, ultimately, a national-security official during the first Trump administration. During Patel’s confirmation hearing to be FBI director, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, expressed optimism that Trump’s nominee would implement much-needed reforms. “He’s the right change agent for the FBI,” the senator said, adding that the bureau was in need of “a big shake-up.”

Under questioning from skeptical Democrats, Patel vowed that “there will be no retributive actions” and that he was not aware of any plans to punish FBI staff who had been part of investigations into Trump. Democrats were not the only ones who were leery of Patel, who had a record of embracing far-fetched conspiracy theories—including the notion that the FBI and its informants had helped instigate the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to sabotage the MAGA movement. Several Republicans wavered on whether to back him. But a pressure campaign by the White House and its allies ultimately prevailed, and Patel was confirmed by a vote of 51 to 49.

Inside the FBI, which had been wounded by a number of scandals, many hoped that Patel could give the bureau a fresh start. But even many of those who had been enthusiastic about his arrival have since been disappointed. Officials said that Patel has been an irregular presence at FBI headquarters and in field offices, and that he has compounded the agency’s existing bureaucratic bottlenecks. Several current and former officials told me that Patel is often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations. On several occasions, an official told me, Patel’s delays resulted in normally unflappable agents “losing their shit.”

[Read: ‘It’s a five-alarm fire’]

Patel has also earned a reputation for acting impulsively during high-stakes investigations. He announced triumphantly on social media, for instance, that the FBI had “detained a person of interest” in the Brown University shooting in December. That person was soon released while agents continued to hunt for the killer.

Still, Patel has his fans. The president has been pleased by Patel’s efforts to purge agents who worked on January 6 cases and other probes into Trump. The president has also indicated that he is relatively unbothered by grumblings about Patel from within the FBI, according to White House and other administration officials. That’s not surprising: Patel views many of the bureau’s veterans as anti-Trump “deep state” agents who have worked against him and his followers. But Patel has, on occasion, earned the president’s ire. Trump has complained that the FBI director has seemed unprepared for TV appearances and that some high-profile investigations that he directed Patel to pursue have not moved quickly enough. These include inquiries into former Biden-administration officials and other political opponents.

Patel’s spotty attendance at the office and the eagerness with which he’s embraced the perks and travel that come with the job have also been sources of concern at the White House. Some in the West Wing have followed the headlines about Patel’s use of the FBI jet for personal matters—as well as the whispers about his love of partying—and said that they fear that Trump would react badly were he to focus on those storylines.

DOJ’s ethics handbook states that “an employee is prohibited from habitually using alcohol or other intoxicants to excess.” The department’s inspector general has warned that off-duty alcohol consumption can not only impair employees’ judgment; it can also make them vulnerable to exploitation or coercion by foreign adversaries.

Patel’s drinking is no secret. While on official travel to Italy in February, he was filmed chugging beer with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team following their gold-medal victory. The incident prompted the president—who does not drink and whose brother died following a long struggle with alcoholism—to call the FBI director to convey his unhappiness, according to two officials familiar with the call. But officials told me that Patel’s alcohol use goes far beyond the occasional beer. FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Many of the people who spoke with me said that they have been afraid to reveal their concerns about Patel publicly or through traditional whistleblower channels, because he has been aggressive in cracking down on anyone he deems insufficiently loyal. At Patel’s direction, FBI employees are polygraphed in an effort to identify leakers. One former official told me that bureau employees have been asked in these sessions for opinions about Patel’s perceived “enemies,” as well as whether they have ever said anything disparaging about the director or the president.

Patel has held on to his job in part because of his commitment to using the federal government to target political or personal adversaries of the president. In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters, Patel designated a list of government officials past and present that he alleged were corrupt or disloyal. In an interview that year on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel said that he planned to “come after” members of the media for their 2020-election coverage with criminal or civil charges. Patel has led a purge of people who he believes are anti-Trump “conspirators” or “enemies” within the FBI. This has included firing people, opening internal investigations, and pressuring agents to quit when they pushed back—or were perceived to have pushed back—against Patel’s demands or questioned their legality.

Some at the FBI are concerned that Patel’s behavior has left the country more vulnerable. One former senior intelligence official told me that there is a lack of experience at FBI headquarters and that the turnover rate is high in field offices, because of both voluntary departures and Patel-ordered purges. The result is an FBI workforce being asked to accomplish more with fewer resources, and with less direction from the top. “The instinctive level of muscle memory or discernment that is necessary to identify and counter a terror attack is missing,” the former official said. A current official described people inside the bureau feeling besieged and disillusioned—or even angry.

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

Days before the United States launched its war with Iran, Patel fired members of a counterintelligence squad that was devoted, in part, to Iran. The director said in testimony before Congress that the agents had been let go because their work investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents had placed them in violation of the bureau’s ethics rules. But multiple officials told me that they were concerned that the firings had been rushed and would leave the U.S. shorthanded at a crucial moment.

Patel has publicly proclaimed that the FBI needs to demonstrate that it is “fierce,” and officials I spoke with said that he is fixated on that image in private as well. He recently expressed frustration with the look of FBI merchandise, complaining that it isn’t intimidating enough. Officials have grown accustomed to such behavior, and they have learned to roll their eyes at it. But they said that the absurdity masks real concerns about what Patel’s leadership has meant for an institution that the country relies on for national security and the safety of its citizens. “Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public,” one official told me, “but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”

Jonathan Lemire, Isabel Ruehl, and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.