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THE U.S. SUPREME COURT DEALT a major blow to Donald Trump’s mass deportation program Tuesday morning in Trump v. Barbara with a 6–3 decision striking down his executive order that purported to end birthright citizenship.

But how much of a blow was it really?

I’ve been grappling with that question ever since the ruling came out on Tuesday morning. And in my various conversations with legal scholars and immigrant advocates, it is clear that the fear they felt coming into decision day has been only partially alleviated.

Yes, the Supreme Court’s decision upheld that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and “are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

And yes, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said “citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ . . . We keep that promise today.”

But step back from the prose and take note of the purpose. Roberts wasn’t making the case just to the public. He was making it to his colleagues.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh affirmed the judgment but dissented in part and did not join Roberts’s majority opinion.) In other words, four Supreme Court justices were willing to state that they do not believe birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution—a fact that would have shocked most legal scholars not too long ago.

So yes, the Court’s rejection of Trump’s order reveals the limits of his expansive and often illegal view of executive power that extends to modifying the Constitution via such orders. And yes, more than 250,000 babies born in the United States each year who would have been affected had the executive order been upheld, were not.

But opponents of Trump’s executive order still have future developments to fear. The door remains open to a future Congress restricting birthright citizenship through legislation, with only one justice needed to flip for that goal to be achieved.

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THIS ISSUE BECAME the stuff of 72-point headlines when, among the many executive orders Trump approved in the hours after being sworn in for his second term, he signed one attempting to abolish birthright citizenship.

Ratified in 1868 to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved black Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment makes those born on U.S. soil full citizens entitled to all the associated rights and privileges thereof and ensuring “equality under the law, regardless of race, ancestry, or parentage,” as the American Immigration Council puts it. The amendment overrode the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.”

Or as John Bingham, author of the amendment, once said, its purpose was to end the “horrid blasphemy . . . that this is a Government of white men.”

But that intention has been contested at times in history since. As Columbia University’s Mae Ngai, a historian specializing in immigration, told me, while the struggle over birthright citizenship is profoundly important, it is not new. She said today’s fight over the issue mirrors past episodes, such as the one in which Frederick Douglass challenged racialist and nativist positions in his famous 1867 lecture, “Our Composite Nation.” At the time, Douglass was speaking in opposition to attempts to restrict Chinese immigration and naturalization. He charged that post-Civil War American democracy must include all races.

This was the singular American identity the Trump administration sought to destroy.

“As the Trump administration lawyer said: We live in a different world today. And [Chief Justice] John Roberts said [during oral argument in April], ‘Yes it’s a different world, but it’s the same Constitution,’” Ngai noted.

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WHICH RAISES ANOTHER reason that Tuesday’s ruling from the Court has not been so widely celebrated by immigrant rights activists. There simply has been too much damage done in other areas to celebrate a thin reaffirmation of the Constitution.

This certainly is a rebuke of the Trump administration, Ngai noted, but it is one amid so many large-scale political and legal abdications. “If you look at birthright citizenship as a signature piece in the Trump agenda against people of color, they [Trump supporters] got everything else—mass removals, ‘build the wall,’ no asylum, even green card holders at risk—but they lost big on birthright.”

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, a pro-immigration group that rose out of Silicon Valley, described to me how the anti-birthright citizenship order had acted as a “heat shield” for the administration, helping it rebuff nationwide injunctions and draw media attention away from dozens of other policies that hurt thousands of people. Schulte warned that the fact the Court split over whether to rewrite the Constitution should “be of the deepest concern.”

“Winning is better than losing…” he added, trailing off.

The Trump team “knew everyone would scream the most because it’s so clearly unlawful,” Schulte told me, but “their efforts to rewrite the Constitution as they see fit—even if they end with a ‘loss’ today—have advanced their goals substantially. We should be clear-eyed on where they’re going to continue taking status from millions of people.”

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Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.) has seen the administration’s mass deportation machine up close at the Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey. Though she has an unfiltered view of the brutality of the administration’s policies in this area, she still sees profound importance in the Court’s rebuke to Trump and Stephen Miller.

“The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are the fruit of the Second Founding of this nation,” she said.

A struggle built in from our inception culminates with a Civil War. You have both black and white abolitionists recognize that we not only have to abolish slavery, one of the most horrific things mankind has done, but we also have to hardwire facets of freedom in perpetuity, with birthright citizenship as a cornerstone. Because freed slaves understood no one is born with less rights than another, which is one of the most important facets of our Constitution—of this Second Founding—and I’m disgusted this administration was willing to challenge it.

Democrats and immigration activists had broadly agreed that while the administration’s assault on birthright citizenship was dangerous—and still is, as mentioned above—its anti-birthright push was always likely to fail at the nation’s highest court.

Despite this reprieve for the hundreds of thousands of new Americans each year whose citizenship was threatened by Trump’s executive order, some of the immigration leaders I spoke with said the most consequential recent decision with immediate consequences for immigrants is the likely fatal blow the Court dealt to Temporary Protected Status late last week. Hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees are now facing removal despite the program that afforded them their status having been designed to prevent new administrations from destroying it on a whim.

Schulte told me he’d “heard people say TPS wasn’t the major decision”—but in many ways, it was.

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“The Largest Delegalization Campaign in History”

While waiting for Trump v. Barbara, I knew that if the Court overturned the executive order, many would see it as a win for democracy and a rebuke of Trump—both of which are true, as Mejia and others I spoke with affirmed.

But the mood among Democrats and immigrant rights advocates remains dark as they consider the plight of the million-plus people living in the country legally under Temporary Protected Status. TPS grants the Department of Homeland Security the authority to determine whether citizens of specific nations can remain and work in the United States if they’re unable to “return safely to their own country,” whether because of a natural disaster, violence, or some other extreme but temporary situation.

In last week’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe, the Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to cancel temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians. Like Tuesday’s birthright citizenship decision, this one was also 6–3.

Critics of the Mullin decision characterized it as a rug-pull for those affected: The Trump administration has been given a license to arbitrarily decide who gets to be an immigrant at any given time, reserving for itself the right to take away in an instant the legal status of a person who has followed the rules to get here.

The decision is insidious, and the potential scale of its consequences is enormous.

There are 1.3 million people living in the United States with TPS, Schulte told me.1 As of early 2025, around 100,000 people with TPS had spouses and children with U.S. citizenship, and some 390,000 U.S. citizen children have parents with TPS.

They are our neighbors—the people next to us in grocery store aisles or the pews. In places like Springfield, Ohio, they work in manufacturing and service industries; in places like South Florida, they work predominantly in health care and taking care of our seniors—our grandmothers, as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has powerfully written.

All of these people are now at risk of deportation. If we only account for TPS holders from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti, that’s still a “quarter million people who have been here since last century,” Schulte added.

The threat they face is dizzying. For example, TPS for people from El Salvador who had “continuous residence” in the United States since 2001 is set to expire on September 9. Will Trump continue to designate the country of his strongman partner and prison exporter Nayib Bukele as unsafe, which would problematize the return of these TPS holders? Not likely.

“There’s no precedent for the level of revocation of immigration status and people with such longstanding ties to the country,” Schulte said. In frustration, he slammed the Court for dismissing the argument that the administration’s words revealed racist reasons for canceling Haitians’ TPS status. “If there isn’t racial animus towards Haitian TPS holders, then those words have no meaning.”

Andrea Flores, who served as the director of border management on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, said the TPS decision marks a turning point for how seriously the world can take our immigration policies.

“The word of the U.S. no longer matters when it comes to immigration. No immigrant will be able to trust the policy of the U.S. government when they know the next president can delegalize them with the stroke of a pen,” she told me.

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THE EFFECTS OF THIS DECISION will reverberate across the globe, but they will be felt with special force in Latin America. In Venezuela, the decision on TPS comes, as CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez writes, “against the backdrop of twin quakes . . . the type of natural disaster that might prompt a review for TPS by DHS.” Horrifyingly, a hundred Venezuelans deported from the United States just hours before the earthquakes were housed in a hotel that collapsed after the shaking started. They are now missing.

The effects on the business community and on eldercare will take time to emerge, but they, too, will be profound.

“We strongly disagree with terminating Haitian TPS,” Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said on a conference call after the decision came down. “It’s economically destructive and morally wrong.”

Senior care providers who were also on the call said the decision was going to devastate the lives of a million American seniors who were going to “lose beloved caretakers who bathed them, fed them, and kept them company for years.” They noted that many vulnerable seniors have memory issues, making turnover in their caretakers particularly harmful.

Rob Liebreich, president and CEO of faith-based nonprofit Goodwin Living, described his feeling of “sadness that more of our older adults who need support in years to come won’t get the care they need.”

And a senior resident at Goodwin House Bailey’s Crossroads in Virginia named Rita Siebenaler told the call it was a “dreadful” day.

“This is not the way a civil society should treat its seniors or humanely treat immigrants to our country,” she said, urging Congress to press for extension of TPS.

Linda Couch, the senior vice president of housing policy at Leading Age, an association of senior care providers, said the United States is staring down a massive shortage of people in the aging care workforce. The advocacy group PHI puts the shortfall at close to 10 million workers.

Couch said there are no replacements lined up for the skilled caretakers being forced out as a result of the decision.

“People can lose their jobs overnight and there is no workforce waiting in the wings that can replace these professionals,” she said.

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THERE ARE FEW DISREPUTABLE GENRES I unironically love quite so dearly as the vigilante flick. Putting a random man or woman into a maelstrom of disorder and watching them sort it out with muzzle flashes and hot lead is cinema in its purest, darkest form: a channeling of the social id in ways that can be both rousing and discomfiting, ways that reveal not only how the world works (or doesn’t), but who we are.

The urban chaos of the 1970s led to Michael Winner’s trilogy of Death Wish films with Charles Bronson, an increasingly deranged orgy of violence that often owed more to the dream logic of a nightmare than feature filmmaking. On the classier side of the spectrum, you get stuff like Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington’s Equalizer trilogy, a series of films in which an Oscar-caliber actor is tasked with answering questions like ‘How many ways can you kill a scumbag in a Home Depot?’ You want a woman-led iteration? Might I interest you in Jodie Foster’s The Brave One, Jennifer Garner’s Peppermint, or Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown?

I preface my review of Citizen Vigilante with this disclaimer so you’ll understand that I’m no snob when it comes to this sort of movie. I’d rather watch James Wan’s Death Sentence than any of his better-known and more successful horror films; the only Steven Seagal movies that are any good follow the three-word rule of Hard to Kill/Marked for Death/On Deadly Ground. Hopefully, then, you’ll believe me when I say that the problem with Citizen Vigilante is not that it’s rancid, fascistic dog shit. Worse than that: It’s incompetently made dog shit.

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THAT THE GERMAN DIRECTOR UWE BOLL made an idiosyncratically incompetent film is not particularly surprising, given that he is generally known for idiosyncratic incompetence. Often described as one of the worst directors ever to make films—a constant refrain that led to him literally beating up critics in a boxing ring—Boll first gained prominence as a director of awful video game adaptations, singlehandedly setting back the video game movie genre by decades with stinkers like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne.

Boll’s career exists largely thanks to a combination of quirks in the film industry, namely the DVD boom of the early 2000s in which sales to video rental houses like Blockbuster could make nearly any movie profitable if it was produced for little enough, and a German tax loophole that led to massive rebates for financiers. Since the collapse of both of those trends, he’s tended toward outrage cinema with movies like the sardonically 9/11-themed Postal and 2013’s Occupy Wall Street–minded Assault on Wall Street, a movie that suggested the bank bailouts should be met with mass shootings.

Citizen Vigilante has a ripped-from-the-headlines quality that feels even more ripped than usual thanks to the heavy and obvious use of ADR, a technique by which dialogue is dubbed into a film to add jokes or provide extra background. For one extended sequence, the camera alternates between the backs of the heads of Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer), the titular citizen, and Judge Reinhold1 (Roni Lepej), a magistrate he has drugged and kidnapped, and Reinhold’s lolling face. Over these images, we hear Sanders ranting about the judge releasing a pack of gang rapists because they are immigrants who “just had an adjustment issue.” Watching the movie, you couldn’t help but wonder if Boll saw the outrage over stories like this one about a psychologist suggesting “gang rape may have been a way to vent ‘frustration’’ due to ‘migration experiences and sociocultural homelessness’” and was like ‘Okay, we’ve got to shoehorn that in there, it doesn’t matter how shoddy it looks.’

Shoddiness is the keyword with this film. Even though you instinctively know it’ll look like a cheap hunk of junk, you’re still kind of surprised how bad the computer-generated blood spatters are; the degenerate in me yearns for the more pleasing (and more expensive) practical effect of exploding blood squibs. In another sequence, Boll seems to have paid to flip a car and then, for some reason, superimposed the worst explosion you’ve ever seen on top of it, the CGI fire assaulting your eyes like so many migrant supercriminals whose stab wounds lead to fountains of fake blood flowing from the necks of our beautiful, endangered mothers.

This slipshod quality also applies to the narrative, which is functionally nonexistent. In your traditional vigilante movie, the movement of action is pretty straightforward: Trauma combined with official indifference leads to one man taking justice into his own hands. But Citizen Vigilante begins in medias res, with people singing the praises of the unnamed vigilante citizen on social media while news reports hammer home the deadly plague of migrant rapist murderers. Sanders has suffered no trauma; he’s mostly just annoyed by what he sees. His distaste for disorder is almost aesthetic. Instead of a normal narrative, Boll disjointedly interweaves different strands of the story from slightly different moments in the film’s chronology, lending the film a sort of chaotic presentation of reality that coheres only when we pause long enough for Sanders to explicitly state the film’s themes.

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If I were inclined to make a case for this film on an artistic level, I would suggest this incompetence is intentional, that Sanders is a madman driven to murder by the ravages of social media’s context collapse. And make no mistake: He is quite mad. This is the sort of guy who goes to a brothel and gets distracted mid-thrust by black mold, leading him to spend thirty seconds explaining the importance of ventilation to a woman more concerned about collecting $30 for shifting to a second position after coitus resumes. Say what you will about Armie Hammer,2 the man’s got movie-star good looks and a thousand-yard stare that will freeze you to the bone. Sanders is as deranged as Paul Schrader’s Travis Bickle or Alan Moore’s Rorschach, a lonely man whose online journaling makes your skin crawl.

No wonder, then, that he’s become a hero to Elon Musk—whose social media platform hosted a full, freely available version of the film, and who has repeatedly used his own account, the biggest in the world, to promote the movie—and to other lonely men whose online ravings render them unfit for decent society.

IT IS WORTH TAKING THE SUCCESS of this film seriously if only because the entire genre is a useful window into social anxieties. The success of the Death Wish movies is pretty self-explanatory in the era of a pre-Disneyfied Times Square. But the last twenty years of Hollywood have been dominated by the superhero genre, a supersized form of vigilantism that often tried to square undemocratic exigencies with the needs of the polity; I would not be the first to suggest that this entire multibillion-dollar cinematic movement was a response to the trauma of 9/11, the masterpiece of which is The Dark Knight.

It’s been amusing to watch the right-wing intelligentsia rally behind Boll’s trashterpiece, given his own contempt for their current standard-bearer. In a 2018 interview on director Joe Dante’s podcast, he mocked the people who voted for Trump: “He was lying and lying and lying. And his politic [sic] is only to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. But the people don’t know that. Because it’s kind of a fascist channel with Fox News. . . . Just spreading out lies, like blurring the facts, and that should be shut down.”

This is almost literally the plot of Citizen Vigilante. But Boll is an inveterate populist, and the film’s ire is directed much more pointedly against the judges who free rapists and the cops who try to stop Sanders than it is toward the immigrants themselves. One pack of gang rapists is murdered, yes, but Boll spends much more time with Sanders preparing to gun down an entire SWAT team (or whatever the Interpol equivalent is), leeringly filming them getting blown apart once they arrive at his rental home. The filthy migrants aren’t really the problem, you see; it’s the people who excuse the filthy migrants who must be dealt with.

Which is why the film has inspired noted South African expat Elon Musk and others to openly call for the murder of those officials who do not act strongly against the arrival of the swarthy hordes. I typically shy away from using the word “fascist” to describe a work of art I dislike, but this picture’s proponents are actively calling for a night of long knives against cultural traitors, so I think it fits.

This is why attention must be paid to the success of this movie. And it is a viral success, thanks to the publicity of Musk and others; as I write this, it’s currently the number-one movie on Amazon’s rental charts and the number-two movie on Apple’s. It doesn’t really matter that the movie is, objectively, pretty terrible: The subject matter is striking a chord. And simply ignoring public sentiment on this front is unlikely to make it go away.

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• David's Newsletter on one-party rule

• David on the purging of Gen. Donahue

• More on the Broadview case in Chicago, from David

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1. “Winning”

On the one hand, yes, it is very nice that the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s BLATANTLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL order to unilaterally end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.

This is nice in the same way that it is nice when a person walking past you on the street doesn’t pull out a gun and shoot you.

The Court’s majority followed the Constitution. Yay. Let the celebrations begin. Give each of the six justices in the majority a cookie.

On the other hand: The fact that three justices took the anti-constitutional side of this fight is evidence that the Court itself cries out for reform.

Let’s not play make-believe. There was no “case” here. The Trump administration has lost this argument at every single level. The lower-court judges who heard the case were gobsmacked that the Trump administration would even try to end birthright citizenship via executive order.

It started in January 2025 when a district court judge granted a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of the policy.

“This is a blatantly unconstitutional [executive] order,” Judge John Coughenour said. He was not done:

I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.

Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made? There are other times in world history when we look back, as people of good will, and say, “Where were the judges? Where were the lawyers?” And frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.

Coughenour is not one of your socialist DEI judges—he was appointed by Ronald Forking Reagan.

Six months later, in July 2025, Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W. Bush appointee in the District Court of New Hampshire, granted certification for the class-action lawsuit that would challenge the administration’s policy.

Another version of the case, State of Washington v. Trump, was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It ruled against Trump as well.1

The majority, upholding a lower court’s injunction, ruled that the lower court had “correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional.”

The first time the Trump administration was able to find any judge, anywhere in America, to state that it had the ability to do away with birthright citizenship was when it got to the Supreme Court.

And then it found three of them.

2. Reform

What does it mean when a third of the Court wants to blow up the Constitution?

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The Court Is (Kinda) on Trump’s Side

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump has never been what you might call a subtle thinker, and his reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Trump v. Slaughter was characteristically blunt.

“90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed,” the president exulted. “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!”

Many Trump foes have come to view this Court as a doormat for the president. This is dramatically overtorqued: The Court hasn’t been afraid to cross Trump on some of his biggest priorities, from the 2020 election to his signature “Liberation Day” tariffs to his mass deportation regime. Just yesterday, in a separate case, SCOTUS dealt Trump a major loss on the issue of mail-in ballots, ruling that he could not prevent states from accepting ballots postmarked by election day where that practice is consistent with their laws.

But there’s no question that this conservative Court has one ideological priority that aligns perfectly with Trump’s own. They see the independent agency structure—in which Congress impanels some regulatory body, gives them broad policy-setting and enforcement authorities, and insulates them from political accountability by setting up mechanisms that make their members difficult to fire—as inherently dubious under the Constitution.

Their decision in Slaughter yesterday, which greenlights Trump’s firing of a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, is the culmination of this view: Wherever Congress carves off portions of the executive power and enshrines it in regulatory bodies,1 the president must have the broad ability to hire and fire at those bodies, since the Constitution stipulates that he is the individual in which the executive power rests. Moreover, the logic goes, if the president is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” as the Constitution requires, he must have the power to remove people who are not faithfully executing the laws.

Trump, of course, cares little for these constitutional niceties. His view of presidential power has always been simple: The more the better. “I have an Article II,” he famously said in 2019, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Whether the Court’s theory of the unitary executive is faithful to the Constitution or not, it’s plain that it sets this president up to do even more damage in the immediate term—and it’s hard to fault too much those who feel that the Supreme Court should look down from the horizon a bit to put up a little more hashtag #resistance to the would-be authoritarian we’ve got right this minute.

Still, the president’s exultation may not last long. He is, of course, too solipsistic to see it, but he isn’t going to be the president forever. In his shortsightedness, he has grown obsessed with changing the direction of the country via executive power alone. Twice now, he has come into office with Republican supermajorities in Congress, poised to remake the nation’s laws in durable ways. What does he have to show for it? A couple of tax-cut bills, one per term. Trump continues to show remarkable disdain for the sausage-making and horse-trading of the legislative process; just yesterday, he dismissed his own administration’s housing bill as “a yawn.”

But after he leaves office, his laws will be all he can count on remaining. Yes, the Supreme Court has made it easier for Trump to remake the government in his image for now. But they’ve done just as much to make it easier for the next Democratic president to blot out that image once he’s gone.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Who Gets to Claim 1776? If the republic is to last another 250 years, Americans need to see themselves in its origin story, argues LINDSAY M. CHERVINSKY (who will be joining MONA CHAREN for the next episode of the Bulwark Book Club later this week!).

• The American Revolution Was So Much Weirder Than You Think… Alongside the Enlightenment reason we associate with the founding, there were mystics, occultists, and conspiracy theorists, writes NICOLE PENN.

• The Wheels Are Coming Off Putin’s War… Amid fuel shortages, military unrest, and a strangled Crimea, the Kremlin dictator’s attempts to project confidence do nothing of the sort, reports CATHY YOUNG.

• GOP Senator Cassidy Nukes Trump, RFK Jr., and Pulte… On Bulwark Takes, WILL SALETAN gives his take on Sen. Bill Cassidy’s remarkable CBS interview.

Quick Hits

NO-BID BALLROOM: Donald Trump once said that the construction company he’d picked for his East Wing ballroom project was willing “to do it for nothing.” But Clark Construction will, of course, be getting a little more than that. The Washington Post reports this morning that the builder got a no-bid contract for up to $500 million for the project “in an unusual arrangement that sidestepped typical contracting procedures designed to control costs”:

The White House routed the contract through the Executive Residence, the document shows, an office that is exempt from rules that require federal agencies to solicit competitive bids and disclose details to the public. The office is typically responsible for routine repairs, entertainment expenses, and the purchase of furniture, art and other items for the executive mansion. . . .

The East Wing contract is the latest example of the administration turning to no-bid deals to hasten a Trump-style makeover of the nation’s capital, which has included handpicking firms to upgrade Lafayette Square next to the White House and to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

There’s no reason to believe that Clark Construction is playing dirty: The Post notes that its three-percent profit margin so far is in line with the norm for large government projects. But it’s just the latest example of the White House spurning the usual process for the sake of convenience and speed—at least until they run into trouble in the courts. And it gives yet more evidence to the lie, told repeatedly by Trump, that the ballroom would cost nothing to the taxpayer.

Federal-dollar penny-pinchers can take heart at one thing, however: Trump has been paying bizarrely close attention to certain nuts-and-bolts spending decisions in this case. “On March 4, days after the start of the war with Iran, Trump personally negotiated the price of concrete to be provided by one of Clark’s wholly owned subsidiaries, according to a summary of the terms that notes his involvement,” the Post notes. “The summary indicates the price, initially more than $47 million, dropped $2.3 million during the negotiation.” Art of the deal!

GALLEGO DOUBLE JEOPARDY: Rumors of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations have swirled around Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) in recent weeks,2 but a Senate ethics panel cleared him yesterday of any wrongdoing, writing that they “did not find evidence that [his] actions violated Federal law, Senate rules, or related standards of conduct.”

Donald Trump’s Justice Department, however, wants to take another look. Axios reported yesterday that Gallego is now under federal investigation—again for supposed campaign finance violations reportedly stemming from his use of campaign funds for travel with his family.

Gallego isn’t taking it sitting down. “Trump is targeting Sen. Gallego while the most weaponized Department of Justice in history is turning a blind eye to Trump’s unprecedented corruption,” a spokesman told Axios. “It’s the least surprising news of the week that this comes immediately after the Senate Ethics Committee cleared Senator Gallego of right-wing smears pushed by the administration.”

ME AND MY BIG MOUTH: Remember when Donald Trump used the pretext of a government shutdown to try to freeze billions in federal funding for blue-state infrastructure projects, particularly in New York? Yesterday, a federal judge permanently blocked the move, ruling that the Transportation Department’s stated reason for the freeze—which supposedly involved checking it for forbidden DEI policies3—had been somewhat undercut but Trump’s own statements bragging about cutting the funds himself: “It’s terminated because the Democrats are so foolish. . . . Right now, there is no funding, because it’s up to me.”

“Defendants make no attempt to justify their actions as consistent with the governing federal regulations,” Judge Jeannette Vargas wrote in her ruling. It’s our latest reminder of a grim Trump-era comfort: If it is our lot to suffer through an honest-to-God attempted authoritarian takeover in America, at least we can console ourselves that the authoritarian in question is genuinely dumber than rocks.

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IF WE TAKE 1776 AND 1787 as the bookends of the American Revolution, defined by the founding documents that emerged during each of their summers, it’s easy to forget that these years were also marked by angels and demons.

A few months after Thomas Jefferson handed over the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress, a young New England woman by the name of Jemima Wilkinson fell deeply ill and nearly died. When she recovered, she claimed that she had ascended body and soul into heaven, where she spoke with archangels before returning to earth reborn as a genderless being called the “Publick Universal Friend.” She would spend the war years as an itinerant, preaching abolitionism, humanity’s universal salvation, and the impending apocalypse.

Eleven years later, as the Constitutional Convention sweatily debated the question of congressional representation in Independence Hall, a mob paraded an old woman accused of being a witch through the streets of Philadelphia before beating her to death. The Pennsylvania Evening Herald reported on the woman’s sorry fate with shock, and frankly a bit of embarrassment. “It is hoped that every step will be taken to bring the offenders to punishment in justice to the wretched victim, as well as to the violated laws of reason and society,” its editors huffed. The American colonies had ceased legally prosecuting witchcraft in the 1730s, and what else had the new nation fought for but to, as another newspaper put it, “emancipate[] itself from the superstitions of authority”?

When we think of the American Revolution and the period leading to the drafting of the Constitution, what often comes to mind is an impression of metaphysical orderliness—of intellectual connections to the parallel Enlightenments occurring in England, Scotland, and France; of principled and articulate leaders (many of whom embraced rationalistic belief systems such as Unitarianism and Deism); of mathematical and mechanistic metaphors and arguments; and of an appeal to natural rights and common sense.

But common sense is a door that swings two ways, suggesting at the same time both a universal standard of reasonableness and an individual’s particular claim on the truth. When the revolutionaries enshrined “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as unalienable rights, they created the conditions for a remarkable array of political and civic institutions to emerge that gave specific meaning and shape to these freedoms. But freedom is always wont to seep out of its various containers. The world the Revolution created was certainly one of state and federal constitutions, organized religion, voluntary associations, and material progress, but it was also one of miracles, syncretic beliefs, conspiratorial thinking, and the magic of crowds. The Revolution was, in a word, weird.

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ALTHOUGH THE WITCH TRIALS that made Salem, Massachusetts, famous suggest that the American colonists harbored hatred and fear of the occult, Christianity was not the only belief system that made its way across the Atlantic from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians have shown that religious and political leaders in both the northern and southern colonies possessed an array of works on alchemy, astrology, and magic in their libraries. Books like John Baptista Porta’s Natural Magick, Thomas Tryon’s Pythagoras: His Mystic Philosophy Reviv’d, and Thomas Vaughan’s Magia Adamica blurred the lines between the study of the natural and supernatural. Such an interest wasn’t limited to elites. Almanacs full of astrological predictions were popular among all classes of colonial society, and printers lamented that readers just wouldn’t buy almanacs that omitted diagrams of the zodiac.

As always, the religious practices of ordinary folk were a point of contention for American religious leadership. As Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and the many other Protestant sects that made a home for themselves in the colonies grew, built churches and seminaries, and intertwined with colonial governments over the course of the eighteenth century, their ministers denounced occultism more and more furiously, even as their flocks continued to embrace some of its practices.

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In his carefully researched 2017 book on magic and miracles in the early Republic, Adam Jortner argues that the popularity of fortune-telling and grimoires persisted beyond the last few decades of the eighteenth century. Works like The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book (supposedly published by “Chloe Russell, A Woman of Colour of the State of Massachusetts”) and Ebenezer Sibly’s New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology underwent multiple printings and circulated well into the antebellum period. Sibly even included a birth chart for the United States in his Illustration of the Celestial Science, suggesting that the new nation had been born under auspicious planets that forecast “wisdom, strength, and unanimity” in its politics, “extensive and flourishing commerce,” and “prosperity amongst the people.”

The enduring popular interest in witches, fortunes, and “countermagic” (charms and spells that drew on Christian prayers to ward off demonic influences) disturbed many American commentators who subscribed to more modern and orthodox views on matters of science and religion. In a democratic republic where the vote had been extended to the majority of white men (and, until 1807, even some white women), nothing was more dangerous than voters who, as one nineteenth-century piece of doggerel put it, could with “fanatic zeal” empower candidates who appealed to their fascination with “brimstone, and fire, and supernatural war.”

And while empirical approaches to knowledge were ascendant by the start of the nineteenth century, many Americans still acted as if they lived in an enchanted age. They kept hauling some women suspected of witchcraft before befuddled judges until well into the 1830s (along with some men, like “Gullah” Jack Pritchard, whose reputation as a necromancer certainly informed aspects of his trial for participating in the 1822 Vesey slave rebellion). And they consulted others for folk remedies and glimpses into the future for many decades after.

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EMPIRICISM COULD SWING BOTH WAYS. On May 19, 1780, seven days after the British had captured Charleston in a massive military setback for patriot forces, the midday sky across the New England coastline turned black. Witnesses recorded the unnerving phenomenon from states ranging from Maine through New Jersey, including figures as disparate as the Publick Universal Friend and the prolific diarist and Revolutionary War soldier Joseph Plumb Martin. Many interpreted the event as a sign of the end times not just for the patriot cause, but for the entire world.

Far from inaugurating Armageddon, New England’s “Dark Day” (likely the result of a massive forest fire) became known more for beginnings than endings. After worshipping in secret for half a decade, a Quaker offshoot sect led by an English woman named Ann Lee interpreted the meteorological oddity as the signal to begin publicly proselytizing in the nascent United States. Lee and the “Shakers,” who viewed her as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, believed that they had been bestowed with the kinds of spiritual gifts that the Twelve Apostles had received at Pentecost, including the abilities to heal the sick, exorcise the possessed, and speak in divine tongues. As Molly Worthen notes in her recent history of charisma in the United States, they “transformed direct revelation into a ritual practice available to average people, not just anointed prophets.” The American Revolution had turned the world upside down and Heaven with it.1

The Shakers are just one example of the larger democratization of American Christian belief and practice that got turbocharged by the United States’ refusal to create an established church at the national level—a decision most states incorporated into their constitutions during the early republic. The denominations that flourished during this “Second Great Awakening,” such as Methodists and Baptists, emphasized the importance of appealing not just to minds, but to hearts. The American Revolution gave birth to an energetic and intoxicating culture of revivalism that spoke to ordinary Americans’ desire to find individual transcendence through communal worship—especially worship that pushed the boundaries of emotional and physical experience.

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Among the most famous of these early revivalists was Lorenzo Dow. Only loosely affiliated with the Methodists, the long-haired, poorly dressed, and wild-eyed Dow crisscrossed the United States in the early nineteenth century preaching a gospel of “common sense,” drawing on both traditional Methodist teachings and the deeply anti-institutional Jeffersonian politics of the era.

Dow too claimed to have direct contact with angelic and demonic beings. He believed Americans were living in both an “Age of Inquiry” and an “Age of Wonders” that combined signaled the new nation’s role as a refuge from authority in any form—political, religious, or otherwise. His revival meetings featured crude humor, witty banter, clever theatrics, tales of folk miracles, and calls for the audience to dance and surrender their bodies to the influence of the holy spirit. Describing the contagious nature of these “jerking exercises” in his journal, Dow captured the democratic character of this religious ecstasy:

I have seen Presbyterians, Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, Church of England, and Independents, exercised with the jerks; gentleman and lady, black and white, the aged and the youth, rich and poor, without exception; from which I infer, as it cannot be accounted for on natural principles, and carries such marks of involuntary motion, that it is no trifling matter.

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OF COURSE, THERE ARE THOSE who looked upon these ‘festivals of democracy,’ as a visiting Frenchman dubbed them, with alarm. Critics included Yale-educated and Federalist-aligned Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers like Timothy Dwight and Lyman Beecher, who fretted that untrained ministers like Dow would corrupt the spread of Christianity in America with “quackery.” But even the fusty Federalists weren’t immune to brushes with the fantastical. John Adams and many of his Federalist allies spent the late 1790s collectively obsessing over fears that a quasi-Masonic international order known as the “Bavarian Illuminati” had fomented the French Revolution and was plotting to overthrow the new U.S. government. Jefferson, for his part, characterized Adams’s administration as a “reign of witches” before spending much of his own presidency and early retirement convinced that Federalists were conspiring to restore monarchy in America.

The late historian Gordon Wood argued that the penchant for conspiracy theories among the Federalists (and some of their opponents) in the early republic emanated from their prevailing belief in “a rational moral order and a society of deliberately acting individuals who controlled the course and shape of events.” This belief, Wood clarified, was neither unique to Americans nor one that could endure entirely uncontested in a modern, rapidly growing, and increasingly complicated nation, where the connection between individual intention and the effects of one’s actions grew ever more muddled.

But what might be distinctively American is the extent to which the belief that men and women are in control of their own destinies has stubbornly persisted in the United States. It’s been almost the default epistemological posture among most Americans over the past 250 years. Some may speak compellingly of the mechanistic and impersonal systems that govern our lives, but many Americans continue to insist on the weight of their own agency and interpretive authority, no matter how weird the world becomes.

The world has indeed only gotten weirder since a young John Quincy Adams concluded that “a strange combination of the powers of imagination and reason” had to explain why so many of his fellow Americans believed in “ghosts, spirits, fairies, witches,” and other supernatural agents. Over just the last three decades, the American-led internet revolution has made us both more interconnected and disconnected than ever before, accelerating the contagiousness of conspiracy theories both very new and very old. One such digital conspiracy led a mob to launch the first successful assault on the U.S. Capitol since the War of 1812 in response to the election loss of a reality-TV star raised on a version of the prosperity gospel, who has since regained the presidency. Imagine explaining that to Adams.

Then again, perhaps he wouldn’t be that surprised. He seemed to understand that a revolution against the old world did not spell the beginning of disenchantment in the new world but rather the opposite. Even today, as participation in organized religion is in freefall, atheism in the United States is stagnating while nondenominational Christianity and belief in astrology, neopaganism, “manifesting,” and other forms of hyperpersonalized spirituality remain vibrant. As we stand on the cusp not just of the nation’s semiquincentennial but of a new revolution in artificial intelligence, is it any wonder that so many expect to find a divine spark within the machine? Since the birth of the United States, Americans have believed that by stretching out their own hands, they can tap on God’s shoulder.

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A FEW YEARS AGO, when there was still some leeway for acts of public dissent in Russia, some protesters against the Kremlin’s imperialist policy toward Ukraine carried signs that flipped the patriotic slogan Krym nash, “Crimea is ours,” into Nam krysh—a humorous abbreviation of the slang phrase meaning “We’re done for.”1 Today, nam krysh seems prophetic: The occupied peninsula that became the (stolen) jewel in Putin’s crown in 2014 finds itself under a Ukrainian blockade that has all but cut it off from the Russian mainland—and, since Friday, under a state of emergency.

Starting in May, the vaunted “land bridge” by which Russia supplied occupied Crimea, the Novorossiya highway, turned into a death trap for trucks due to unrelenting Ukrainian drone attacks. Since then, other strikes have targeted bridges and taken out ferry operations. Severe fuel shortages are the blockade’s tangible result. Sergey Aksyonov, the Kremlin-installed governor of Crimea, recently announced a complete halt to gas sales to individual car owners; fuel is reserved for public transit and official vehicles. Power outages have become widespread; the latest reports show that food shortages are already starting. The Crimea vacation long coveted by Russians has become a nightmare. Recent data from travel websites show that nearly 80 percent of hotel bookings on the peninsula have been canceled. While a few brave or stupid souls are still heading to Crimea, far more people are getting out. Thousands of cars have been lining up at the Crimean Bridge (a.k.a. the Kerch Strait Bridge, famously attacked multiple times by Ukraine) in the direction of the mainland, with hardly any traffic the other way.

The Ukrainian effort to turn the Crimean peninsula into “an island,” in the words of Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, has marked a new chapter in the war, in both symbolic and practical ways. Russia’s Krym nash moment—the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, immediately followed by the Russian incursion into the Donbas—was the beginning of Putin’s proposed reconquista of Ukraine. Moreover, the Crimea grab was almost universally seen as de facto irreversible even by those who were optimistic about the prospect for Ukraine to recapture its other occupied lands. Today, while no one believes Ukraine could recapture the peninsula soon, the occupation powers are beleaguered.

In his televised address last Wednesday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that the actions taken to isolate Crimea were part of a “carefully calculated operation” intended, with help from Ukraine’s Western allies, to “force Russia to choose peace.” Some Russian propagandists saw this statement as a signal that Ukraine was preparing an actual military operation to recapture Crimea. That seems doubtful: Such an operation would be extremely costly at a time when Ukraine still faces significant manpower shortages on the frontlines. One possibility, however, is that if supply lines are cut off, the Russian military contingent on the peninsula may be forced to evacuate—opening the way to an unresisted Ukrainian capture that would, in effect, be a reversal of Russia’s bloodless seizure of Crimea in 2014. (As the saying goes, history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.)

What’s not in doubt is that Ukraine has succeeded in turning Crimea from Russia’s prize into a liability. And it’s part of a larger Ukrainian strategy: The next day, on Thursday, Zelensky announced that he had approved a forty-day “operation of influence” against Russia, coordinated with Ukrainian intelligence and intended to force Moscow to end the war.

A creeping sense of nam krysh is spreading far beyond Crimea. The recent Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries in Moscow, which produced apocalyptic images of plumes of smoke and flames rising over the city and shut down a key gasoline-producing facility for at least the next six months, became a rude wakeup call for many Muscovites who have clung to the belief that the war won’t come near them except on television. (And it keeps coming near: Thursday, a missile alert was issued in the Moscow region, with residents advised to shelter indoors.) What’s more, it’s not just in Crimea that Ukrainian strikes against the Russian oil industry are causing a fuel crisis. As of June 24, reports Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, 55 of Russia’s 83 regions had either government-imposed restrictions on gasoline and diesel fuel sales or caps imposed by private companies. Shortages have also been observed in nearly all remaining regions. Some commentators have recalled the late John McCain’s 2014 comment that Russia is “a gas station masquerading as a country”—which greatly offended Russian patriots at the time—and acidly noted that the gas station has run out of gas. At this point, it’s bidding to buy gasoline from Kazakhstan—and getting turned down.

Video clips in which Russian motorists report shut-down gas stations and multi-mile-long lines at the few that remain open are proliferating faster than Russian propaganda can churn out talking points about hysteria and hype. “I don’t want to start trouble, especially here on my page, but I’m afraid that we’re in for hard times, lean times. God forbid, of course, but these are hard times,” says one man in such a video, waiting in line for forty minutes after making the rounds of six other stations. In another clip, a man curses about thieves siphoning off gas from his tank a day after he filled up. Meanwhile, a woman who seems sincerely perplexed inquires, “Hey guys, what’s going on with the gas stations? I don’t watch the news. Where are people filling up? What’s happening? The lines everywhere are a kilometer long.”

Here’s a tip for you, lady: Find a news source outside the Kremlin propaganda machine.

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MEANWHILE, RUSSIAN FORCES remain mostly stuck on the frontlines, even if Putin keeps telling audiences that the war is going well and that “our boys are pounding them every blessed day.” Yes, the Russians may succeed in taking the city of Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region after an eight-month siege, which could potentially clear the way toward Sloviansk and Kramatorsk (though any Russian attacks on those cities would run into heavy fortifications). But Ukrainians have their own battlefield successes, such as forcing Russian troops off the Black Sea’s Kinburn Spit peninsula, an important foothold for control over critical waterways. And right now, Ukrainian strikes inside Russia—not only on oil facilities but on military targets such as munitions factories—are creating a powerful sense of Ukrainian momentum. It’s not just drones, either: Ukraine’s new long-range Flamingo missiles, introduced last fall and touted as an alternative to the American Tomahawks, have just taken out a key military-industrial site in Volgograd that manufactured everything from artillery systems to ballistic and nuclear missiles launchers.

There are also growing signs of discontent in the Russian military. On June 25, two days after the third anniversary of mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny, a blogger and Ukraine war veteran named Aleksandr Lunin posted an angry, expletive-laden Instagram video describing horrific abuses endured by Russian soldiers on the frontlines: extortion by commanding officers, sadistic punishments, de facto murder by suicide missions. That in itself is nothing new, but Lunin, who claimed to be speaking on behalf of unnamed military and security officials, also demanded a televised meeting with Putin in which he could tell the country about the reality of what was happening in Ukraine. And he warned that if such a meeting was not granted, “the army will turn its weapons against the Kremlin.” The video had 11 million views in the first twenty-four hours and got hundreds of thousands of likes.

The next day, Lunin (whose identity has been confirmed) backtracked a little, claiming that his statement had been misunderstood as a threat of mutiny and appearing to withdraw his demand for a meeting—which, evidently, has not saved him from arrest. But, despite the internet crackdown, or perhaps because of it, the video has gone viral on Russian social networks.

Other viral videos appear to show forcible conscription raids in which men are grabbed in the streets, beaten, and coerced into signing army contracts. With a severe shortfall of volunteers, there is also talk of a new round of mobilization in the fall, a move Putin has resisted ever since the partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 led to a tangible rise in discontent.

It’s hard to get an accurate measure of popular sentiment about the war in Russia, given that people have gone to prison for liking posts critical of the war and that people in a fear-based society are prone to be skittish even in anonymous polls. As Israel-based dissident video blogger Maxim Katz has quipped, most Russians, asked what they think of Putin or the war, hear the question as, “Are you overjoyed about everything that’s happening, or do you want to get eight years in the slammer?” Nonetheless, the polls, such as they are, do show growing levels of war fatigue. Independent Russian journalist Farida Rustamova reports that internal polling conducted by the United Russia party in May showed over 60 percent saying they wanted to war to end in one way or another. Open polls, too, show growing support for a peace agreement—though with such caveats as Ukrainian recognition of Russian sovereignty over captured territories. (Again, it’s hard to say to what extent such answers are chosen as politically acceptable.) In United Russia’s closed focus groups, Rustamova’s sources told her, many people expressed readiness to accept an end to the war—even what of those sources euphemistically put it a “non-victorious outcome.”

And, even in official polls, the ratings for Putin’s ruling United Russia party (currently with around 33 percent approval) have dropped so low that the Kremlin’s siloviki—top military and security officials—have been reportedly pushing Putin to cancel or postpone September’s elections for the Duma. Apparently, there are fears that the anti-United Russia landslide could become (with apologies for quoting Donald Trump) too big to rig.

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A MEASURE OF RUSSIA’S FLOUNDERING fortunes in Ukraine can also be seen, perhaps, in international support. Donald Trump is currently in “Ukraine is fighting well” mode, while Marco Rubio says that no U.S.-Russia agreements were made in Anchorage last year. Also, U.S. sanctions on Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, waived during the war in Iran, appear to have been restored. Of course, everything could change the next time Trump has another chat with Putin, or for any other reason; but it’s worth noting that over in the Kremlin, at least, they seem to be in genuine Et tu, Donald? mode. At a June 23 press conference, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov darkly insinuated, in an “I don’t even want to suspect it” way, that last year’s Alaska summit may have been just a ploy to buy more time for Kyiv. (No, but it’s a nice thought.)

And there’s trouble brewing in Belarus. On Thursday, in a meeting with Russian ambassador to Minsk Boris Gryzlov, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko emphatically said that while Belarus “stands with Russia,” it will resist any efforts to draw it into the war—and made it plain that the efforts were coming from Gryzlov. This would be standard rhetoric for the canny Belarusian strongman—except for one detail. Since the start of the war, Lukashenko’s insistence that he was not involved in it went hand in hand with providing low-key logistical support to Russia. Since last December, that logistical support included relay stations on the Belarus/Ukraine border that helped guide Russian drone strikes on Ukraine. Then, on June 19, Zelensky issued an ultimatum to Lukashenko that if those stations were not disabled, the Ukrainians themselves would act to remove them. Three days later, Zelensky told the press, citing reports from Ukrainian intelligence and armed forces, that the relay stations were now offline. Ukrainian drones, it seems, make Ukrainian ultimatums much more persuasive. A subsequent Putin-Lukashenko summit at Putin’s Valdai residence ended in a boilerplate statement about discussions of “trade and economic cooperation” and “regional security issues.”

Could it be that Lukashenko—who, in the words of expatriate Russian political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin, is a “political animal” with a fine nose for power—can smell Russian defeat?

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ON SUNDAY, PUTIN GAVE AN INTERVIEW to one of his favorite propagandists, Pavel Zarubin—often dubbed a “court journalist” because of his access to the Kremlin dictator—reiterating, yet again, that Russian troops were on a forward march in every combat zone in Ukraine. In a pathetic display that even many pro-war bloggers mocked, Putin tried to show his grasp on the situation by rattling off the names of specific towns, villages, and even streets—and not only got the facts wrong but even garbled a name, referring to the Ukrainian river Oskol as “Stary Oskol,” a town in Russia’s Belgorod region. He claimed that Russian troops were close to seizing the town of Kupyansk, whose supposed capture was celebrated by the Russian military and by Putin himself at least twice earlier this year.

And what about the Ukrainian strikes inside Russia? Mainly a psy-op, Putin explained, but Russia was already working on better air defense systems. Crimea? Sure, gas supplies were low, but deliveries by both land and water were imminent (he didn’t explain how) and the problems would be resolved. As for fuel problems on the Russian mainland, Putin said, “we are currently observing some shortages, but they are not critical.”

On the same day, а viral video showed a man in the Novgorod region waiting in a long gas station line after trying his luck at two other gas stations railing against “those who spread bullshit that everything is fine.” At the end of the 34-second clip, the man’s rant turned more personal. “Vova ought to be bent over for this!” he yelled, using the common nickname for Vladimir. “Bend him over right there on Red Square!”

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MOST REPUBLICS FAIL by 300 years. For the United States to survive another 250, Americans must care about our revolutionary inheritance and what it actually means. This July Fourth offers an opportunity to encourage Americans to see themselves in the revolutionary story, to embrace the founding legacy, and to launch a civic renaissance.

We are the only nation in the world based on an idea. There was no roadmap to follow without the shared ethnic, racial, or religious base underpinning other nations. Americans have, from the beginning, debated what the idea means and squabbled over how best to pursue it.

The founding generation declared independence, drafted the Articles of Confederation, threw them out a few years later when they failed, adopted a new Constitution, passed a bill of rights when the Constitution was found lacking, and ratified additional amendments in the first two decades to close legal loopholes. Their legacy is not one of perfection but rather of innovation, experimentation, and reform.

Subsequent generations picked up that mantle. They embraced the challenge to make the nation just a bit more perfect. We have not achieved perfection—and never will; it is not attainable—but the founding generation inspired our predecessors to inch toward it. Only recently has that legacy of innovation, and the history of our revolutionary origins, fallen by the wayside.

A poll conducted this past spring found that just 48 percent of American voters planned to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. Even more troubling, the numbers split along partisan lines: 65 percent of Republicans reported having plans to celebrate while only 37 percent of Democrats said they did. Another survey, conducted in 2024, found low support for democracy among young Americans, with 31 percent of the 18-to-29-year-old respondents saying they don’t believe in democracy, while just 36 percent said they believe democracy can address the issues currently facing the country.

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SOME OF THIS DISAFFECTION reflects general despair about the nation’s future (and indeed, the latter poll was likely skewed somewhat by being conducted just days after the last presidential election). But it is far more likely that many Americans won’t celebrate July Fourth because they don’t see themselves in the Revolution—because its legacy feels irrelevant to them in the twenty-first century. Few women have found themselves in the chunky history books released just in time for Father’s Day. People of color have felt excluded by “the Founders,” a phrase that conjures a club of dead white men. Recent immigrants often see little connection to Americans who lived centuries ago.

All of which is ironic, since women, people of color, and immigrants were essential to the Revolution’s success.

Women experienced every facet of it. They wrote, cooked, nursed, fundraised, and marched. In 1772, Mercy Otis Warren published a blistering satire in the Massachusetts Spy attacking royal authority and stirring Patriot sentiment. Over the following four years, she composed additional plays and other writings that built support for the cause. After Lexington and Concord in April 1775, women served the Continental Army as laundresses, cooks, seamstresses, and nurses—one authorized for every ten soldiers and paid $2 a month.

Elite women played vital roles in sustaining morale. Martha Washington and other officers’ wives wintered at military headquarters, enduring hardship alongside their husbands, organizing gatherings, comforting homesick soldiers, and helping transform rough encampments into functioning communities. In the spring of 1780, the women of Philadelphia formed the Philadelphia Ladies Association, raising $300,000 in Continental dollars, purchasing linen, and sewing over two thousand shirts for the army.

Immigrants like Alexander Hamilton and Baron von Steuben fought for both the ideals of the Revolution and the possibility of a better life for themselves. Their patriotism was not produced by the location of their birth but rather was born of a commitment to the future United States.

For black soldiers, individual liberties and those of the nation were irrevocably intertwined. Some historians estimate that some regiments of the Continental Army were 25 percent black. They fought with incredible valor for their own freedom and for the country, and changed how some of their commanders—including George Washington—thought about slavery. Black volunteer regiments from Saint-Domingue willingly joined the war alongside white militias in Savannah to fight for the Patriot cause against the British.

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DISCUSSING THESE ASPECTS of the story of the founding era does not replace, challenge, or diminish the glorious success of the ragtag Continental Army, the leadership of George Washington, the bravery of the delegates of the Continental Congress, or the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson. Instead, the contributions of women, immigrants, and people of color bolstered and empowered leading white men. Their stories are deeply intertwined, just as ours are today. The Revolution belongs to all Americans and is the product of sacrifices, bloodshed, and lives wagered on this radical idea by Americans of all stripes.

Telling this story is not about checking a “DEI” box or complying with a political litmus test. It is about the future of the nation. If we want our republic to survive another 250 years, we need all Americans to know our origin story and believe it is worthy of fighting to preserve.

If we fail to uphold the founding legacy—if we stop trying to make the nation more perfect—our institutions will calcify, public trust will plummet further, and the republic will fail. Republics aren’t enforced with military might or hereditary succession. They depend on citizens upholding institutions, norms, and customs that form our civic tapestry. We need more than 40 percent of Americans to be committed to this cause.

July Fourth gives us a chance to inspire, engage, and recommit. Enjoy the barbecue, watch the fireworks, spend time with the people you love. But what if this year is not a peak but a starting point? What if 2026 launches a decade of civic renaissance? As we observe the revolutionary anniversaries leading up to the Constitution’s 250th birthday in 2037, how might the founding legacy of innovation challenge and inspire us? What steps can we take to leave the nation a little more perfect?

In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Perhaps in 2026 we should say, we have it in our power to forge a more perfect union.

Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. She is the author of Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic and The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. Substack: Imperfect Union. Social media: X, Bluesky, Threads.

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TWO WEEKS AGO, Ben Shapiro announced the hiring of the Daily Wire’s explosive new star: “Mat Nuclear,” a 19-year-old internet-debating wunderkind.

“We wanted to bring him on board to be a person who just debates,” Shapiro said, promising that Nuclear (unclear if that’s his real name) would host a nightly debate livestream where he would “take on all comers.” Perhaps Shapiro wanted to get in on the Jubilee fad. Perhaps he saw something of himself in young Nuclear—a whipsmart young conservative willing to just annoy the shit out of everyone.1

Perhaps he was just out for blood. After all, Shapiro made clear that Nuclear’s main mission was to take down white nationalist Nick Fuentes. And Nuclear seemed all in. In another video last week with Daily Wire hosts, he had said Fuentes was part of an anti-Western civilization coalition with a “hyperfixation on Israel.”

The longstanding feud between Fuentes and Shapiro is clearly ideological. But some of the motivation here may also be economics. The Daily Wire has been battered by overspending and the loss of personalities like Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, both of whom have since turned on Shapiro. Most importantly, Shapiro has struggled to connect with a Gen Z conservative audience that is increasingly critical of Israel and uninterested in the now-middle-aged white conservatives who make up most of the Daily Wire cast.

By comparison, Nuclear is black, versed in internet debating bloodsports, and the rare young person willing to defend AIPAC—exactly the kind of unique character who could help Shapiro in his ceaseless online battles.

Unfortunately for the media mogul, it didn’t work out that way. On just his first stream for the Daily Wire, Nuclear accidentally

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• John’s Substack

• John’s long-running pod, Slate’s “Political Gabfest”

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1. Johnny KGB

I hope you read the headline in a thick, fake Russian accent because that’s how the voice in my head read the news of the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Donald Trump’s case against E. Jean Carroll.

In case you’ve forgotten: In 2023, Carroll won a civil lawsuit against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation and was awarded $5 million in damages. Trump was also found civilly liable for defaming Carroll in a second trial that concluded with a jury awarding her $83.3 million.

Trump had appealed the $5 million verdict to the Supreme Court on grounds that amounted to—I am not kidding—because I’m president. Trump’s lawyers said that the SCOTUS should overturn a jury verdict that had already survived lower court appeals because of “highly inflammatory” evidence that had been admitted1 and—again, I am not kidding—“This mistreatment of a President cannot be allowed to stand.”

This was not a legal strategy, obviously. It was client service. Trump wanted to fight the case all the way to the very top to get out of paying Carroll and there were lawyers happy to write words he would enjoy reading and bill him for their time.

Even with this ruling on the $5 million, I expect Trump will continue to appeal the $83.3 million verdict. That’s the sort of spiteful SOB he is.

Good for E. Jean Carroll. She’s the one woman who beat Donald Trump. She deserves her money and our admiration.

But what I want to talk about is the Supreme Court. Because this ruling will be submitted as evidence that the Court is “balanced.” Which it is—in an extremely false way.

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“The arrangement is hardly an outlier,” the Times reports. “One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.” Total federal funding to these companies, per the Times, exceeds $8.9 billion. Happy Monday.

The Humbug Harrumphs about Hormuz

by William Kristol

What is one to make of the last few days’ military and diplomatic developments in and around the Strait of Hormuz?

On Thursday and then again on Saturday, Iran attacked commercial ships that were transiting the strait in a manner that was not to their liking. The United States responded with military strikes against Iran. Iran retaliated against U.S. military assets in the region.

This military tit-for-tatting happened amidst a cacophony of competing understandings of the much-heralded memorandum of understanding signed two weeks ago. It turns out that an agreement that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” is subject to very different interpretations of “arrangements” and “best efforts.” The United States thinks “safe passage” should mean free passage. Iran thinks that if Iran can “make arrangements” it’s allowed to . . . make arrangements. Who could have known there would be disagreement on this point?

But the bottom line is that this is what a messy but unacknowledged surrender by the United States of America to the Islamic Republic of Iran looks like. And this is probably what the New Normal will look like. It will consist of on-and-off military tit-for-tats; endless diplomatic squabbling and propagandizing; a Strait of Hormuz that is quasi-open but not reliably so, and is mostly so at Iranian sufferance; no resolution with regard to Iran’s nuclear program; and at the end of the day an Iranian regime that is emboldened, American allies that are uncertain and dispirited, and a United States that is unable to exert its power or will decisively.

It’s not good. But it’s where we are.

You can go big-think in interpreting all of this. You can point out that this state of confusion and embarrassment is a logical conclusion to America’s misbegotten and failed war in Iran, which in turn is a culmination of a reckless new foreign policy that has precipitated the end of the American-led world we’ve benefited from for some eighty years. You can then speculate gloomily on the dangers and disorders that are likely to follow.

This might lead you to go high-brow and poetic, and quote the conclusion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Or, you could focus not on the global big picture but on the foolish acts of one individual, President Donald J. Trump. You could emphasize his personal role in bringing about this sad state of affairs. In this case you might rather want to go middlebrow and cinematic, and quote from the climactic scene of the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz:

“Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz! . . .

Do you presume to criticize the great Oz? . . .

The great Oz has spoken!”

[Toto pulls back the curtain]

“Oh, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain . . .

Yes, I’m a humbug.”

And to illustrate the extent that we are now governed by a blustering humbug, you might want to go on to cite Saturday evening’s Truth Social proclamation from the great and powerful Donald J. Trump:

United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist! President DJT

You could then note that having to strike Iranian missile and drone sites “AGAIN!” shows how false were the administration’s early claims of decisive and overwhelming victory. You could point out how unlikely it is that Trump can “militarily complete” the job he started. You could suggest that this latest instance of Trumpian bluster does more to highlight than to cover up his weakness in this moment. And you could emphasize how foolish and reckless was his choice to start this war.

So citing T.S. Eliot is apt: We are at an important, even world-historical moment.

And citing L. Frank Baum (as re-worked by Metro-Goldwin-Mayer) is also apt: We are being led by a humbug.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Mega-Prison Politics… A new generation of right-wing outsiders is triumphing across Latin America, writes MICHAEL ALBERTUS.

• The Questions That Could Sink Todd Blanche… On The Bulwark on Sunday, Former Pardon Attorney LIZ OYER joins BILL KRISTOL to discuss Todd Blanche, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

• Yes, the Cuts to USAID Have Killed… Elon Musk dismisses the human toll of the Trump administration’s gutting of U.S. foreign aid—but it’s real and it’s measurable, argues LAUREN DOBSON-HUGHES.

• This Reporter Calls Trump—And He Answers! On the Mona Charen Show, ED LUCE joins MONA CHAREN to dig into Giorgia Meloni’s public dressing down of Trump, the UK’s political chaos, and the fallout from Trump’s Iran war.

Quick Hits

THE SCORPION AND THE FROG: While opinions of Israel have been souring on both the left and the right for years, Israel’s government thought it had a solid thing in its relationship with the Trump administration. But the war in Iran has shaken that confidence, Politico reports:

The vice president of the United States set the stage last week, telling Israel it has almost no friends left in the world, and that it should think hard before turning on the one it has.

But the problem for Israel is much bigger than JD Vance, according to seven people, including U.S. and Israeli officials and others familiar with the relationship. Instead, they say, Vance is only the face of the new normal, in which Israel’s status as an American ally doesn’t stand above all others.

Israel had expected when President Donald Trump came into office that his America First foreign policy would include “an exception” for Israel, said an Israeli political adviser.

“That was never going to hold. We were never going to be able to stay for four years as an exception to everything else America does in its foreign policy,” the adviser said. “When the clash came, Israel was naive to think that we would be able to be exempt from those expectations.”

Read the whole thing.

SHAFTING THE PARKS: We’ve been rolling our eyes at Donald Trump’s vanity construction projects, at the White House and across D.C., for more than a year. But a new report in the Atlantic reminds us these projects are more than an embarrassment and an eyesore. They’re also sucking up funds for the National Parks—including more than $100 million in visitor fees collected at the country’s national parks—while forcing those same parks to go without:

Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”

“The president is prioritizing D.C. at the expense of parks throughout the country,” Emily Douce, a lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “There is $24 billion of maintenance needs throughout the National Park Service system, and adding these new vanity projects just adds to the need.”

That’s on top of the fact that Trump originally claimed he’d be paying for some of these renovations, like a project to repave the pathway between his West Wing residence and the Oval Office with polished African granite, out of his own pocket. “Paid for by me,” Trump said of the $689,000 renovation, ultimately funded by taxpayers. Populism!

GAVIN HEARTS ANTHROPIC: Frontier AI company Anthropic is still squabbling with the federal government. But Politico reports they’re making up ground in other government work: California just struck a deal with Anthropic to expand the chatbot’s use throughout the state government. Here’s Politico:

Newsom’s deal seeks to drive broader adoption of Claude by cutting the AI chatbot’s price in half for state government agencies, as well as Californian cities and counties that decide to take advantage. The terms also include free workforce training and technical support from Anthropic staff.

This March, Newsom signed an executive order meant to raise standards for AI companies seeking state contracts and allow California to separate its procurement process from the Trump administration.

While that order could directly challenge the federal government, Newsom’s administration says the new Anthropic deal was not intended as a rebuke or response to Washington.

Given Newsom’s obvious presidential ambitions, his decision to lean in on AI is particularly interesting: Odds are he’ll be among the most bullish on the technology in an environment where voters are shaping up to be pretty hostile to it. Read the whole thing.

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Cheap Shots

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THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE OF LATIN AMERICA has changed dramatically. Within the span of several weeks, two of South America’s largest democracies have elected leaders from the far right. In Peru, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the dictator who governed the country between 1990 and 2000, has apparently won a razor-thin runoff against leftist Roberto Sánchez. In Colombia, far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella defeated the candidate backed by the outgoing left-wing government of Gustavo Petro. These results follow a landslide victory in December by far-right candidate José Antonio Kast in Chile.

Latin America is a complicated place, and each of these elections has its own national dynamic. But taken together they tell a larger story of a resurgence in right-wing politics across the Andes.

These elections are more than just a pendulum-like conservative reaction to the prior, often controversial episodes of left-wing rule in each country. Rather, the rightward shift is a product of deeper forces reshaping the political landscape across the region: a spiraling security crisis fueled by drug trafficking and organized crime, a migration shock centered on Venezuela, and the political wreckage left by COVID-19, which included the erosion of incumbent and traditional parties and economic volatility.

A new generation of right-wing politicians has learned—both from each other and from the Trump playbook—how to weaponize these forces to their advantage. And they have seized on the opening provided by mainstream parties that are either in collapse or that have earned a reputation for their incapacity to deal effectively with crime and migration. The question now for the defenders of liberalism globally is whether and how this can be contained.

Keiko Fujimori has acted as if she’s Peru’s president-in-waiting for a decade and a half, and the return of her family to power has been anxiously anticipated since her first presidential run in 2011. Fujimori’s victory in this election caps her fourth attempt to win the presidency and comes at a time when the country’s institutions are in shambles.

Peru has cycled through nine presidents in the last decade, every one of them impeached, convicted, jailed, or driven from office under a cloud of scandal. The country’s democracy has slid in tandem and according to V-Dem it now scores at around the same level to where it stood in the 1980s as it struggled to emerge from military rule and to contain a domestic insurgency. The party system is effectively nonexistent in the country. Instead, parties are mostly legal shells leased to ambitious individuals, with shifty membership rolls, no coherent ideologies, and weak roots in society. Thirty-six candidates ran in the first round of this year’s presidential election, and the two finalists together captured less than 30 percent of the vote.

Against the backdrop of this democratic hollowing, Peru’s security crisis has escalated dramatically, driven by the growth of illegal gold mining—now valued at roughly seven times the country’s cocaine trade—and by the spillover of drug trafficking organizations from Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador through Peru’s porous northern and eastern borders. Homicide and theft are on the rise and extortion has become rampant. The Peruvian Congress, rather than rising to the challenge, passed legislation in 2024 that barred prosecutors from investigating crimes with prison terms of six years or less and limited the ability of police to seize explosives from illegal miners.

At the same time, Peru has taken in over one million Venezuelan migrants, many of whom have settled in the dusty peripheries of Lima and are working in the informal economy. Most Venezuelans arrived in the late 2010s as Venezuela’s economy imploded, but that may not be the last wave. The country’s massive earthquake last week could fuel yet another wave of migrants fleeing desperate conditions.

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While research shows that Venezuelan migrants commit crimes at lower rates than Peruvians themselves, the public perception—amplified by the media and hardened by high-profile incidents—runs sharply in the opposite direction. Much as Donald Trump has shown in America, this perception has been a windfall for the right.

Keiko Fujimori leaned into a tough-on-crime agenda during the campaign that was inspired by her father’s fight against domestic terrorism in the 1990s. She also invoked the Nayib Bukele model in El Salvador to push for a militarized crackdown on gangs and crime and the construction of top-security mega-prisons to house dangerous criminals. Simultaneously, she has staunchly defended Peru’s market-led economic framework that has delivered the country solid, if unequal, economic growth. That is attractive to many Peruvians in a country that suffered from a post-COVID inflation spike, as well as the right’s base in the middle and upper classes.

Fujimori’s biggest asset is the one thing none of her rivals possess: a durable national political organization. She is nothing if not politically shrewd. If she can successfully crack down on Peru’s expanding criminal networks, she will gain public support and could preside over a political stability the country hasn’t seen in years. That would cement her position. And given her family’s authoritarian instincts, it is not hard to imagine she will attempt to entrench herself in ways that further erode an already weakened democracy.

COLOMBIA’S ELECTION OF DE LA ESPRIELLA, a political outsider with a Bukele-style iron-fist political platform, was driven by a similar logic, though the security situation in the country is far different from Peru. For decades, Colombia has struggled with leftist guerrillas, paramilitaries, and a growing number of criminal organizations that have driven civilian deaths and mass displacement. The country’s drug trafficking organizations have extended into Ecuador, penetrated Peru, and stretched into Central America.

The outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, had hitched his political fortunes to a “total peace” strategy: simultaneously negotiating with guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and criminal organizations. But few of these negotiations bore fruit. Violence persisted, armed groups expanded their control, and homicides crept up in important areas of the country. By the time voters went to the polls, Petro’s approval ratings had collapsed. The country’s economic trajectory had also underperformed expectations under Petro.

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Migration has only complicated these issues. The Venezuelan migrant crisis has hit Colombia, which neighbors Venezuela, harder than almost any other country in the region, with millions crossing the border. Armed groups on the border have recruited Venezuelan migrants in considerable numbers as cheap foot soldiers. And even though, as in Peru, research shows that Venezuelan migrants commit crimes at lower rates than Colombians, Colombians widely believe the opposite is true. Meanwhile, Colombia’s traditional political parties have been in long-term decline. COVID supercharged the anti-incumbent and anti-establishment sentiment that was already building.

THE RIGHT-WING VICTORIES in Peru and Colombia were presaged in part by Chile’s election of far-right president José Antonio Kast late last year. Despite Chile’s history of stability and political moderation since the 1990s, it too has been overwhelmed by the forces sweeping the region. Kast coasted to an impressive election win on a platform centered almost entirely on crime and migration. He explicitly modeled his security approach on El Salvador’s Bukele and promised to build a wall (ring a bell?) on the northern border with Bolivia to stem illegal migration. His administration is already digging deep trenches in the desert along its northern border with Peru.

Chile’s crime surge is real, even if modest by regional standards.. And hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan and Haitian migrants have provided a convenient scapegoat. Meanwhile, previous president Gabriel Boric’s economic record was underwhelming: growth was anemic, inflation spiked in the aftermath of COVID, and many Chileans reported a desire to emigrate.

TO A DEGREE, these wins should not have come as a surprise. The relentless focus on security and political positioning as an outsider with sharp economic instincts has become the template for the resurgent right across the region. Javier Milei won Argentina’s presidency in 2023 by channeling popular fury at economic mismanagement into a libertarian shock-therapy platform. Daniel Noboa won Ecuador’s presidency in 2023 by running as an anti-crime outsider in a country that had been convulsed by cartel violence and prison massacres, deploying the military against gangs in a move that proved enormously popular and won him re-election in 2025. All of these leaders ran on order, competence, and the argument that the left had had its chance and wasted it. Kast, Fujimori, and de la Espriella absorbed those lessons. They also had a new champion in their corner: the Trump administration.

Washington has tilted strongly toward right-wing governments across the region, treating ideological alignment as a substitute for the democracy promotion that had anchored U.S. policy. It pressured Peru’s interim government over purchasing F-16s in the runup to elections. It has warmly embraced Bukele in El Salvador as a model for the region despite its democratic collapse—even sending migrants to his prison. It has celebrated Milei as a free-market visionary and funneled loans to his administration to boost his political fortunes. And it toppled Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and is tightening the noose on Cuba, two standout leftist governments in the region. The message this sends to ambitious politicians across the hemisphere is that Washington’s approval, investment, and strategic partnership are available in exchange for cooperation and ideological alignment—and that the other option is a hammer.

Still, we should be careful about grand pronouncements. The recent elections in Peru, Colombia, and Chile do not guarantee a lurch toward authoritarianism. Peru’s constitutional arrangement makes it genuinely difficult for any president without considerable congressional majorities to consolidate power. Fujimori will face thin majorities and a legislature accustomed to removing presidents. Colombia’s institutions are more resilient than its recent chaos suggests. Kast faces a factionalized Congress in both chambers that will require him to bargain with the opposition to pursue his agenda, and Chile’s poor and middle-class urban residents, its socially liberal younger voters, and its indigenous Mapuche communities may bridle under his presidency in ways that could reignite the massive protests that rocked the country in 2019 and 2020.

At the same time, the risks to democracy are real. The Bukele model of mass incarceration and military deployment on the streets—and, frankly, the security improvements and political boon it can deliver—has been gaining fans among citizens and politicians alike from Santiago to Lima to Bogotá. The combination of weakened institutions, metastasizing organized crime, and a Trump administration that has abandoned democracy promotion creates conditions in which democratic backsliding can happen quickly.

Latin America has been here before, electing leaders who came to power promising order and then delivering something darker. Whether democracy can survive that now, in a moment when the external guardrails have been removed and the internal ones are already eroding, is a question that will define the coming years. But whatever happens, it is unlikely to remain confined to the region.

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Michael Albertus is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025). He writes the newsletter The Good Society.