I HAVE SPENT MUCH OF THE TRUMP ERA warning against the cynical assault on the so-called “deep state” and the reckless effort to hollow out public institutions. However, there is one national security bureaucracy I would gladly see abolished, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The ODNI was supposed to coordinate, clarify, and impose accountability on the intelligence community. It hasn’t. Now, under Director Tulsi Gabbard, the problem is no longer merely bureaucratic, but political. The office that was meant to safeguard intelligence from fragmentation has become another perch from which intelligence can be politicized and bent toward partisan narratives. If this administration wants to dismantle something, it should start here.

The DNI was created after September 11th in the familiar Washington cadence of crisis, panic, and performative reform. Politicians needed to show they had “fixed” the intelligence failures that preceded the attacks, so they built a new layer atop an already sprawling intelligence community. The result was a classic Washington solution, a bureaucracy designed to prove that something had been done, whether or not it actually solved the problem.

After more than two decades, ODNI has become what many intelligence professionals feared it would be: an additional bureaucracy with vague authority, uneven leadership, and a persistent tendency to complicate rather than improve the work of intelligence. ODNI is an entire bureaucracy of middle management, neither doing the work of intelligence itself, nor consuming intelligence to make policy decisions. And worst of all, the “Office of the Director” was designed around a person rather than a mission.

The case for the DNI after September 11th rested on the claim that the attacks happened because the agencies “failed to connect the dots.” There was some truth in that. The 9/11 Commission identified organizational fragmentation, poor information-sharing, and institutional stovepipes as problems that contributed to the attacks. It recommended a new national intelligence director to manage the intelligence community and serve as the president’s principal intelligence adviser. In the heat of a presidential campaign, Congress rushed through the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, creating the DNI (and by extension the ODNI) and separating the role from the CIA director, who had previously been the president’s chief intelligence advisor.

But the public story was far cleaner than the real one. The pre-September 11th failures were not failures of wiring diagrams. They were failures of political leadership, urgency, policy, domestic intelligence, imagination, and accountability. The FBI’s inability to function as a true domestic intelligence service mattered. So did the lack of high-level political attention to al-Qaeda before the attacks. Political leaders in both parties sought to avoid blame, and the eventual “fix” allowed Washington to look busy without confronting the hardest questions.

The mythology that grew out of the 9/11 Commission was that the disaster proved the need for a DNI-like structure. The facts are far less clear. The commission’s report dodged many of the hardest questions, declined to assign direct accountability to senior officials or agencies, and translated a complex failure of policy, domestic intelligence, bureaucratic culture, and political attention into a cleaner story about institutional sharing.

That is a classic Washington story. Blame is assigned to no one—especially not the politicians of both parties who ignored warnings about Islamist terrorism for years. An idea already on the shelf becomes “reform” without accountability. Bureaucracy accretes. September 11th did not prove that America needed a DNI. It proved that political leaders failed to act with urgency, that the FBI was not built for the domestic intelligence mission, that agencies hoarded information, and that Washington would rather reorganize boxes than assign responsibility. The DNI was not the necessary lesson of the terrorist attacks. It was the most politically convenient one.

The 9/11 Commission rightly warned that the intelligence community needed better integration, but the office Congress created was less an answer to a specific intelligence problem than a political compromise dressed up as reform. The DNI did not become the clean, small coordinating body many imagined. Instead, it became another bloated Washington institution, adding meetings, products, turf fights, and bureaucratic rituals that made coordination more cumbersome rather than more effective. A system this large certainly needs someone to set priorities, deconflict collection, and force agencies to share information. But that does not require a cabinet-level superstructure. A small professional staff inside the National Security Council, or a lean intelligence management office with real budget-review authority could have done the job.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was born in the heat of national trauma and presidential politics, that alone does not make it illegitimate. Some institutions created in crisis prove their worth. ODNI has not. To many collectors, foreign partners, and practitioners, it has proved confusing, irrelevant, and often faintly ridiculous, a bureaucratic layer more likely to prompt a shared eye roll than respect. In Washington, the ODNI duplicates work. It reviews, edits, massages, and reissues intelligence that originates elsewhere. For example, the President’s Daily Brief, once a CIA product, is now, under the ODNI’s auspices, a community product. That sounds sensible until one considers what happens when every agency fights over inclusion, phrasing, emphasis, and risk. Intelligence should be coordinated, but it should also be sharp. Too much coordination can become sanitization. By the time everyone has had a chance to soften the edges, what reaches policymakers may be less a judgment than a consensus memo. The DNI has not become the indispensable intelligence chief, but merely another voice in an already crowded room.

The DNI’s defenders argue that someone must stand above the agencies. In theory, yes. In practice, the office never truly did. The Department of Defense—which houses the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and intelligence enterprises within all five military services—retained enormous control over the intelligence budget and major collection agencies. The CIA retained operational power and direct presidential access. The FBI reorganized to strengthen its domestic law enforcement-intelligence hybrid role. The DNI was asked to be supreme coordinator without command authority sufficient to make that supremacy real. In his writings and commentary, former Israeli Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy expressed his view that the person above the agencies should be the president, and adding a layer of bureaucratic apparatchiks over the top of the people who actually do the work just weakens America’s national security.

THAT PROBLEM WOULD BE TOLERABLE if the DNI had insulated intelligence from politics. Instead, the office has become especially vulnerable to politics because it is so far from a distinct operational culture. CIA has flaws, but it has a mission: recruit sources, steal secrets, pursue hard targets, and conduct covert action under law. NSA, NGA, NRO, and DIA all have missions. The DNI has a role. And we are learning that roles are easier to politicize than missions.

Worse, the current DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, lacks the experience, character, and competence the role demands, leading some to joke that, in this administration, DNI stands for “do not invite.”

The intelligence profession depends on an ethic that is simple to state and hard to practice: speak truth to power. Former CIA and NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden has warned about the danger of the “post-truth” political environment for intelligence services. Intelligence officers are trained to search for facts in a world of ambiguity. They are not equipped to compete in a partisan marketplace where the winning product is the most useful narrative or political weapon rather than the most accurate assessment.

That is why the recent performance of the ODNI is so alarming. Gabbard’s tenure has made manifest what was always structurally possible, the transformation of an “honest broker” into a political amplifier. The ODNI’s press releases under Gabbard have included highly charged claims about alleged conspiracies tied to Trump impeachment fights, using the language of partisan combat and culture-war nonsense rather than offering sober intelligence assessments.

The problem isn’t just that the current occupant is malicious and incompetent. The problem is that the office is uniquely suited to this kind of misuse. The DNI has prestige, access to secrets, and the aura of community-wide authority. But because the DNI does not run the core collection agencies in a meaningful operational sense, a politically minded DNI can spend less time improving intelligence and more time curating narratives and sifting through the combined work product of the whole intelligence community for partisan hand grenades to throw at their opponents.

The problem predates Gabbard. Richard Grenell’s brief turn as acting DNI during the first Trump administration showed how easily the position could be handed to an unserious political loyalist with thin intelligence credentials.

Other DNIs—even those who were serious public servants—have struggled with relevance, access, or authority. “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” but a government office of this much responsibility should not be designed to work properly only when led by someone of unusual competence and restraint. Institutions must be designed for the people who may someday occupy them, not only for the people we wish would occupy them. The DNI fails that test.

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ABOLISHING THE OFFICE WOULD NOT MEAN abolishing intelligence coordination. It would mean admitting that the current model is the wrong one. As David Ignatius argued recently, budget coordination could be moved to a small, professional intelligence-management office modeled more like the Office of Management and Budget. Community-wide analytic standards could be maintained by a compact board of senior career analysts. The president could receive intelligence from the CIA director, supported by an interagency deputies process, while the national security adviser ensures that dissenting views are heard.

Congress would also need to do its job. One reason Washington creates new offices is that it does not want to perform sustained oversight of old ones. The intelligence committees should force agencies to share relevant information, punish failures to do so, and protect dissenting analysis. They should also stop treating intelligence as a partisan weapon whenever it becomes inconvenient. No organizational chart can fix political cowardice.

The DNI was supposed to make the intelligence community more coherent. Instead, it has too often made it more cumbersome, more political, and less accountable. The office was created in haste, justified by an oversimplified diagnosis, weakened by compromise, and preserved by inertia. Now it has become soiled by cheap partisan point-scoring that puts the interests of the DNI herself over the interests of national security.

The DNI has had its chance. The experiment failed. Abolish the office, preserve the functions that matter, and return intelligence to the professionals whose job is not to serve a party, a president’s ego, or a cable-news storyline, but the security of the republic.

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ASIDE FROM MARCUS AURELIUS, Epictetus, Seneca, and maybe Zeno of Citium, there is no name more commonly associated with Stoicism than Ryan Holiday. He’s the author of several hugely popular books that introduce the ancient philosophy to a general audience and offer practical tips on how to incorporate its wisdom into everyday life, including The Obstacle Is the Way and The Daily Stoic. The latter is also the name of Holiday’s podcast and newsletter, as well as his Instagram and YouTube pages, which have a combined 5.4 million followers and subscribers.

In a recent interview, Ivanka Trump expressed her admiration for Stoicism. “Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is so informative on so many levels,” she observed. “He once wrote that the soul becomes dyed the color of its thoughts. And I think about that all the time.” In a video response, Holiday acknowledged that Ivanka got the quote right and seems to understand a core principle of Stoicism. But that’s where the plaudits ended. Ivanka is “just not living or acting in accordance with it in any way.” He addressed her directly: “If you did, you’d have an intervention with your dad.” He continued: “The only similarity you have with the Aurelius family is that you’re a Commodus! And so are your shitty brothers.”

An immediate consensus formed in the MAGAsphere that Holiday had “crashed out” and allowed his TDS to override his Stoicism. Noted philosopher and expert on ancient thought Michael Shellenberger1 declared that “What Holiday demands of Ivanka contradicts the Stoic philosophy he claims to teach.” This argument hinged on a single line from Meditations: “For many things are done by way of discreet policy; and generally a man must know many things first, before he be able truly and judiciously to judge of another man’s action.” Shellenberger continued:

Holiday does not entertain the possibility that Ivanka has thought carefully about her relationship to her father, that she has considered and rejected the path of public denunciation, or that her loyalty might itself reflect a moral commitment. Instead, he assumes that her silence about her father proves her unethical.

Shellenberger is welcome to his fantasy about all the good work Ivanka is doing behind the scenes, but the rest of the world can see that she served as an adviser during the first Trump administration; hasn’t said a word about the corruption, cruelty, and authoritarianism of the second; and happens to be married to a man who is using his connection to the president to make gigantic piles of money.

Jared Kushner is a ubiquitous presence in American negotiations in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, and he isn’t shy about blending business and diplomacy. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve [Witkoff] and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner told CBS. He’s trying to raise $5 billion for his private equity firm from Middle Eastern governments even as he represents the United States in the region. The color of Kushner’s soul appears to be dyed green, but I’m sure Ivanka has given him a stern lecture about the Stoic virtue of placing the pursuit of justice over self-interest.

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MAGA activist Chris Rufo attacked Holiday, too. He quote-posted a clip of Holiday giving a speech about the brutality of Trump’s immigration crackdown, which included these comments:

My 9-year-old tried to make a sign this morning that said “Fuck ICE,” and I’m both proud and horrified. I’m proud of him; I’m horrified at them. . . . There are children my boy’s age in detention facilities without their parents. There are children my boy’s age who are afraid to go to school. Their parents are afraid to go to work.

Rufo presented Holiday’s statement of entirely appropriate moral alarm as an unhinged rant: “Imagine building your persona around studying the lives of the great Roman emperors and then adopting the language and mannerisms of a hysterical middle-aged woman who binges NPR and invents stories about her brave-and-stunning daughter resisting Trump. Ruthkanda Forever!”

This is rich coming from Rufo, who worked himself into a righteous frenzy last year when Cracker Barrel changed its logo. The “Cracker Barrel campaign,” he declared, was all about “creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’” He concluded with a great battle cry: “The Barrel must be broken.”

Imagine, if you will, building your persona around being a fire-breathing culture warrior and collapsing into hysterics because Cracker Barrel updated its logo. Holiday gave a personal speech about the horror of seeing unmasked agents of the state throwing people—including American citizens—into unmarked cars and dragging them to detention centers without informing their families or legal representatives. Rufo threw a fit about a comfort-food restaurant changing its branding.

The concept of Stoic virtue is foreign to Rufo, who has built his career as an unscrupulous MAGA demagogue. During the presidential debate with Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump declared that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the cats . . . they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Vice President JD Vance admitted that the whole story was a lie designed to generate attention: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” The same day Vance made this confession, Rufo published an article titled “The Cat Eaters of Ohio.” If Rufo attacks your political judgment and rhetoric, there’s a good chance you’re doing something right.

Holiday’s MAGA critics seem to assume that Stoicism preaches political quietism, but this isn’t true. Meditations is crammed with insights about the importance of civic responsibility, especially for those in power. When Aurelius warned that the soul will be dyed the color of one’s thoughts, he also gave himself a reminder that Ivanka might want to reread: “Take care not to be Caesarified”—or “stained purple,” as Holiday’s own site puts it. Some of Aurelius’s political observations were remarkably progressive for his time—he called for a “polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech.” Perhaps Ivanka urged her father to review this Stoic appeal as he attempted to have his political opponents thrown in prison for constitutionally protected speech, but I doubt it.

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HOLIDAY IS RIGHT TO INVOKE the Meditations to condemn Trump. Aurelius challenged populism and the “obsequious courting of the mob,” so it isn’t hard to imagine what he would think of Trump’s Truth Social feed. Like the other Stoics, Aurelius was a cosmopolitan—a tradition worthy of revival as Trump tramples the liberal international order. Part of Holiday’s frustration with Ivanka is that her father is about as close to a perfect inversion of Aurelius as it’s possible to imagine.

Aurelius has contempt for praise, while Trump ravenously seeks it, demanding tribute from allies, lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize, and slapping his name and image on everything (including, ominously, the Department of Justice in Washington). Aurelius urges leaders to take full responsibility when things go wrong, while Trump had never taken responsibility for any bad outcome in his life. Aurelius believes it is morally necessary to do good with no expectation of reward, while Trump is only capable of thinking in transactional terms about how his actions will ultimately maximize his own personal benefits.

In his response to Ivanka, Holiday says, “Nobody loves seeing people talk about Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism more than me. This is what gets me out of bed in the morning. My life’s work is getting people to pick up Meditations. So, that’s awesome, I love to see it.”

But he couldn’t help but grimace at the spectacle of Trump’s daughter—who has benefited from his corrupt, authoritarian presidencies in innumerable ways without uttering a whisper of public criticism—congratulating herself for embodying Stoic virtue. “It’s not real, and it’s totally missing the point,” he said. Many influencers would view the president’s daughter talking about their thing as a marketing opportunity, and Holiday could have participated in Ivanka’s charade by celebrating her interest and inviting her onto the Daily Stoic. He could have parlayed her enthusiasm to expand his reach by capturing the MAGA podcast listeners who plump the audiences of mega-hit shows like the Joe Rogan Experience. He certainly didn’t have to risk alienating members of his own audience who may not share his politics; plenty of canceled subscriptions (attested in outraged X comments) could have been avoided if he had simply remained silent.

But Holiday has never shied from politics, and his audience should regard his moral candor as a sign of integrity and trustworthiness—not hysteria or Trump-hating derangement.

In April last year, Holiday was scheduled to deliver a lecture to the sophomore class at the U.S. Naval Academy. Before his talk, he was asked to cut remarks he had prepared about the removal of hundreds of books from the Nimitz Library—part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blitzkrieg against wokeness in the military. Holiday refused, and his lecture was canceled. In an essay for the New York Times about the ordeal, Holiday argued: “No people at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are.” This was a time when institutional surrender to Trumpism was rampant: America’s biggest companies, law firms, media organizations, and universities were capitulating to the administration’s demands. Holiday had to “choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life to speak at,” and he chose to resist suppression in the name of that message.

When I first encountered Holiday’s work, I wondered whether his brand of meme-able public philosophy had value—was Holiday an important popularizer of Stoicism, or was he doing the philosophical equivalent of putting up motivational posters? But after reading and following his work for a few years, I’m certain the answer is the former. And this realization owes much to Holiday’s refusal to shrink from politics at a time when any true understanding of Stoicism would demand that he turn to face it more directly.

It’s a common misconception that Stoicism asks people to retreat from the public square and serenely accept injustice as an inevitable part of human life. Many seem to reduce the philosophy to a kind of ancient self-help program. Holiday is using his influence to dispel these misconceptions, and this has the added benefit of urging a large audience to take politics more seriously at a time when the stakes for American democracy couldn’t be higher.

Watch a fall 2025 conversation between Holiday and The Bulwark’s Tim Miller on the ancient forerunners of the bootlickers in the Trump administration, and another from 2023 between Miller, Holiday, and JVL about being a dad.

Perhaps this can serve as inspiration to other popular influencers who do generally apolitical work, but who are also deeply concerned about the institutional and cultural rot of Trumpism. For people in this sort of position who are worried about how their audiences might react to a more overtly political message, now is the time to set that reservation aside. They could face a backlash, of course—but they might also discover that many in their audiences appreciate the authenticity. But more importantly, they would be doing their own part to rescue American democracy from a would-be tyrant.

Any mass political movement must appeal to citizens who aren’t especially interested in politics. One reason Trump won in 2024 was his marshaling of influential but often relatively apolitical supporters, which is why his political opponents have been desperately searching the internet for Resistance Joe Rogan. But Resistance Joe Rogan doesn’t exist—precisely because the mass appeal of influencers who are defined by politics is automatically truncated in an extremely polarized country. Instead of constantly trying to find and harpoon this elusive white whale, opponents of Trump should lower their nets in pursuit of smaller but more plentiful fish. They could invite millions of Americans into the pro-democracy movement through thousands of channels that aren’t overtly political. As Trump’s approval rating continues to collapse, it’s time to pull as many frustrated Americans as possible away from quietism and toward civic engagement, responsibility, and action. That’s what keeping a free republic requires.

There are signs that this groundswell is already happening. The organizers of the No Kings protest in March reported that 8 million Americans participated, which would make it among the largest single-day protests in American history. When the Trump administration flooded the streets of Minneapolis with thousands of masked federal agents, citizens spontaneously organized a city-wide campaign to support their neighbors by reporting on ICE movements and providing food and other essentials to those in hiding. “I’ve never protested in my life,” one Minneapolis resident told a reporter. “I got work in the goddamn morning, just like everybody else.”

Many Minnesotans who had work in the morning braved the cold to capture on video horrors like the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. This footage then went viral—as Nicholas Grossman noted in an article for Liberal Currents, “Reddit was swamped with information about Minnesota, as anti-ICE posts dominated the main feed, and appeared in discussions of just about any topic. Knitting, biking, comic books, pop music, you name it.” Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel observed an explosion of political content from “normie, i don’t really talk about politics accounts.” He cited a golf influencer who posted a video from the driving range with the caption, “Reminder that this is a golf account, but golf is political because you can’t golf if you’re murdered by masked agents of the state.” Formerly apolitical influencers are increasingly willing to risk controversy to condemn authoritarianism, and the example set by big names like Holiday can inspire others.

Holiday isn’t a political pundit. He has dedicated his life to introducing Stoic wisdom to millions of people. But he recognized that this mission was no excuse to avoid politics—in fact, his Stoic principles required him to speak up. To put it in Stoic terms: He isn’t just talking about doing the right thing, he’s doing the right thing. We can hope that other influencers will follow his lead.

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IN APRIL, LAWYER MARK MCCLOSKEY bowed out of his quixotic quest to win reparations for January 6th rioters.

Denizens of the internet may remember McCloskey from a widely debated (and even more widely memed) incident from six years ago, when he and his wife brandished guns in front of their St. Louis mansion as Black Lives Matters protesters walked by. More recently, in his day job, McCloskey spent over a year working with fellow lawyer Peter Ticktin, a high school classmate of Donald Trump, attempting to win some kind of payment for the J6ers who fought Capitol Police officers and trashed Congress.

But last month, sick with what he would later describe as a terminal lung disease, McCloskey said the effort to make the rioters whole would have to go on without him.

“Due to personal reasons, I am unable to continue the fight at this time,” McCloskey wrote to his clients on April 10.

Then something miraculous happened. On May 14, ABC News reported that Trump would drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and instead accept a settlement for $1.7 billion to create a fund to pay victims of what his administration has called Justice Department “weaponization.” That money could very well go to former January 6th defendants, perhaps with a cut to their lawyer along the way. Who’s to say?

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Well, wouldn’t you know it, just a day after news of the settlement broke, McCloskey announced that he had started to feel a lot better, telling clients in another letter I obtained that his “personal prognosis is not as bleak” as suspected. Divine intervention at its most miraculous: He could work on their cases once again.

“With God’s help and your prayers, we can prevail!” McCloskey declared.

The convenient timing of McCloskey’s return to health has not gone unnoticed in the fractious world of January 6th participants, with some reparations-hungry rioters mocking him for coming back right when the money looks set to start flowing. Meanwhile, according to a series of bitter emails from the two lawyers that I reviewed,

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Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller.

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• Monday's "Morning Shots"

• Lauren on how the Dems should respond to an aging Trump's health issues

• Bill's "Bulwark on Sunday" with Rob Flaherty, Kamala's deputy campaign manager

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THE ABRUPT DECISION by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to halt the planned deployment of roughly 4,000 American troops to Poland—and the broader announcement of withdrawing another 5,000 troops from Europe—has rattled allies across the continent. According to a recent report in Politico, even Pentagon officials were caught off guard. “We had no idea this was coming,” one U.S. official reportedly said, as European and American leaders spent the next twenty-four hours trying to determine whether additional surprises from head office were on the way. Russia surely welcomed the move.

None of that should reassure anyone.

I spent years helping redesign America’s military posture in Europe, including serving as commander of U.S. Army Europe as the command completed the previous major restructuring of forces on the continent in 2011. My biggest concern about this latest decision is not the force reduction itself. Military posture decisions come and go; every administration has the right to review deployments. What concerns me is the apparent lack of strategic coherence surrounding this one—and a growing misunderstanding in Washington about what American forces in Europe are actually there to do.

Military posture decisions are more than moving men and women around a map. They are strategic signals. And when commanders are surprised, allies are stunned, and adversaries are encouraged, the signal is backwards.

This is especially true in Poland, one of NATO’s strongest and most reliable allies. Poland spends heavily on defense—it has been modernizing its armed forces at an extraordinary pace since 2004, incorporating Abrams tanks, PATRIOT air defense systems, and F-16 fighter jets into its military organizations. It has also consistently aligned itself with U.S. strategic objectives and hosts American troops willingly. It’s the only country in Europe that has come close to meeting the goal 5 percent of GDP while also subsidizing American forces that serve on its soil.

Poland is hardly alone. Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and the Baltic nations have also spent the last decade building increasingly capable militaries with American support, equipment, advising, and training. Those partnerships were not accidental. They were the result of sustained American engagement designed to strengthen NATO’s eastern flank after Russia’s aggression in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. That was part of the long-term strategic plan when I was the commander, and it was exceedingly successful.

But now, Warsaw is scrambling for answers, and, really, every ally in Europe is also beginning to ask the same question: What exactly is America’s strategy?

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THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S PUTATIVE explanation only deepens the uncertainty. The force reduction discussion seems linked to to frustration with European opposition to President Trump’s Iran operation. Germany, among others, expressed concern or hesitation about supporting U.S. actions in the Middle East, President Trump became upset, and then suddenly troop reductions followed close behind. Managing alliances this way is extraordinarily dangerous. These actions aren’t part of thought-out process; they seem to be policy on a whim.

The leaders of our allies make decisions based on their own national security requirements, constitutional processes, coalition politics, and the support of their populations—just as American leaders should. Our allies are partners; they do not function as automatic extensions of the White House. Democracies debate military action. Democracies weigh risks differently. Democracies sometimes disagree, even among close allies. That is not a flaw in our alliances; it is how sovereign nations operate and engage with other allies.

The way Trump treats deployments as political rewards and punishments based on whether allied governments publicly support a particular American operation is strategically shortsighted. Worse, it misunderstands who actually benefits most from America’s military posture in Europe. The fact—and the strategy—is that the force structure in Europe today exists primarily for the strategic benefit of the United States.

Too many Americans still view U.S. forces in Europe through a Cold War lens. They imagine huge garrisons sitting idle on old bases, detached from modern security realities. Any caricature of American troops in Europe sitting around drinking beer and eating schnitzel while taxpayers foot the bill is profoundly wrong.

After the close of the Cold War and then in the aftermath of September 11th, the United States purposefully redesigned our force posture in Europe. Far from “occupation,” our European stationing provides America with forward positioning, operational reach, and alliance access. It is critical for logistics infrastructure, intelligence integration, and our rapid response capability across multiple theaters. Europe is a launching platform for American global operations.

Our bases in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere support U.S. missions far beyond Europe itself. Those installations provide access to the Middle East, North Africa, the Arctic, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. They support air mobility, missile defense, intelligence operations, cyber activities, medical care, prepositioned equipment, naval operations, and command-and-control functions that would be extraordinarily difficult to replicate from the continental United States.

Europe is not a strategic burden. It is one of America’s greatest strategic advantages. And that advantage is built not just on bases or equipment, but on relationships.

These relationships extend far beyond the words in a treaty or the polite choreography of a high-level tête-à-tête. One of the least understood missions of American forces in Europe is theater security cooperation. TSC is a constant process of training, planning, exercising, coordinating, and building interoperability with allied and partner nations. U.S. forces in Europe routinely work with forty-nine European countries, many of the friendly nations among the fifty-four countries that make up Africa, and dozens of partners in the Middle East. Those relationships are not symbolic diplomatic exercises. They are designed to create strategic and operational capability, making America’s military—and those of our allies—stronger.

American service members are constantly engaged with partner nations. These might be during multinational exercises, logistics rehearsals, intelligence coordination, missile defense integration, aviation operations, cyber collaboration, medical planning, and joint leader development. Whatever the specifics, these interactions build familiarity, access, confidence, and trust with partners who may someday fight alongside American forces—or provide critical access during a crisis somewhere in the world. Once lost, trust in the United States cannot simply be re-won—or worse, demanded—at the last minute. And we certainly cannot deploy trust like we deploy forces.

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WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN WHAT HAPPENS when America reduces its engagement in parts of Africa and other developing regions. Nations like China have aggressively moved in to fill the vacuum—offering infrastructure projects, military cooperation, economic investment, and political influence where American presence and leadership once carried enormous weight. Those relationships matter strategically, not only today, but for decades into the future. Influence abandoned rarely remains unclaimed.

Another misunderstanding behind this latest decision is the assumption that U.S. forces in Europe conduct standalone operations, as though American capabilities exist apart from the broader alliance structure. That is not how NATO works. The alliance is a complementary, interconnected system. American forces are one critical piece of a much larger operational puzzle that includes an awesome array of varied allied capabilities and sustainment networks spread across dozens of nations. NATO training exercises are designed specifically to integrate those capabilities so that multinational forces can operate together effectively in crisis or combat.

The sudden removal of a major American combat element from that structure, doesn’t just reduce one nation’s troop numbers. It weakens the collective capability of the alliance itself—both operationally and psychologically. Training plans are disrupted. Readiness cycles are affected. Interoperability suffers. Deterrence weakens because the visible integration of allied combat power is part of what makes NATO credible in the first place.

All of these issues are especially true when it comes to armored forces.

When I commanded in Europe, a major debate involved whether the United States should retain a permanently stationed armored brigade on the continent. I argued strongly that we should, to complement the wheeled Stryker Brigade we had in Grafenwöhr, Germany, and the rapidly deployable Airborne Brigade located in Vicenza, Italy. Others believed the risk of moving the Armored Brigade could be managed and the capability could be retained with a rotational model that reduced our permanent footprint and infrastructure costs. Ultimately, the permanently stationed armored brigade in Vilseck, Germany—a base we had significantly upgraded—was replaced with a rotational armored brigade combat team. In 2010, those rotational brigades were included in our operational plans and long-term strategy for the continent.

An armored brigade combat team is not a token force. It consists of heavy tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, large artillery systems, engineers, logistics units, maintenance formations, and thousands of soldiers trained to conduct high-intensity combat operations. These are precisely the kinds of capabilities being used every day in Ukraine today.

By supplying a yearly rotational model, American armored forces were able to partner with NATO allies who still maintained significant tank formations. It also showed Russia that we still retained an armor punch continuously on the continent. The approach created flexibility and broadened interoperability across the alliance. But it only worked if the rotations remained predictable, continuous, and credible. As the commander at the time, I was promised by the Department of Defense and the Obama administration that this rotation would be sacrosanct.

Now, even that compromise is unraveling due to the petulance of the secretary of defense.

The brigade that was scheduled to deploy to Poland had already spent months preparing to replace the outgoing unit. Troops and equipment were already beginning to move when the mission was abruptly halted. That is not simply a matter of changing numbers on a briefing slide. It disrupts our military, our allies, and our serving families simultaneously—all while undercutting our deterrence messaging. This is precisely the kind of uncertainty that adversaries exploit.

Europe is a forward operating platform that gives the United States enormous military, diplomatic, and strategic advantages. During my years in Europe, we often described America’s relatively small forward presence as allowing us to “fight above our weight class.” Reducing that posture without a clearly articulated strategy is not a demonstration of strength. It is admitting short-sightedness.

You cannot casually remove pieces from a system like that without consequences. Especially not impulsively. Especially not without consultation. And especially not while allies scramble for explanations and Russia celebrates the outcome.

It is a warning sign of strategic confusion.

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1. Freebird

On Friday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced that he would commute Tina Peters’s sentence.

On the one hand, this is a tiny thing. Inconsequential. If we make it out of this period, then it will hardly be worth a footnote in the history of Trumpism.

On the other hand, what Gov. Polis did for Peters is everything. It is the foundational question about how liberalism responds to an illiberal attack.

And I’m going to swerve and tell you that I’m not really sure what I think about it. This might seem like an easy call—but it only seems that way.

Is pardoning Tina Peters the best expression of liberal values? Or is it dangerous capitulation to an illiberal threat? I want to talk through this, together and I’m going to drive you crazy with my on the one hand, on the other hand, on the other other hand routine.

My ask is that whatever your priors are, put them aside to start. I want to give you the best case for every side.

Just a warning: Usually this newsletter is locked for Bulwark+ members. I’m leaving it open for everyone today because it’s important. If this is the kind of discussion you find value in, I hope you’ll consider joining us.

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Okay. Let’s go.

On the one hand, it seems like a slam-dunk that Polis has done something terrible.

In 2018, Tina Peters was elected County Clerk in Mesa County, Colorado. She was 62 years old and had never held elected office before. Her professional qualifications were slim—she went to an un-accredited correspondence college and had sold “natural health” supplements. She seems to have been a flight attendant for some period.

Her life in that moment was at a crossroads. In 2017, her son died in a parachuting accident and her marriage was falling apart. She and her husband divorced and she later became embroiled in a civil lawsuit with him. Her only living child, a daughter named Cayce, would eventually enter the suit on the side of her father. Make of that what you will.

Oh, and Donald Trump had just become president.

This was the moment Tina Peters chose to enter politics.

After the 2020 presidential election, Peters became convinced that massive voter fraud had stolen the election from President Trump—not just nationally, but specifically in Mesa County.

It is worth noting here that Mesa is a Republican stronghold and even though Joe Biden won Colorado by 13 points, Trump won Mesa by 28 points.

So Peters believed that some sort of fraud in her home county prevented Trump from winning by . . . even more?

This belief was insane. Let’s compare the results in Mesa County from 2016—a year in which, as far as I can tell, Peters never claimed there was any fraud—to 2020:

2016:

• Clinton: 21,729 votes (28 percent)

• Trump: 49,779 votes (64 percent)

• Other: 6,146 votes (8 percent)

2020:

• Biden: 31,536 votes (35 percent)

• Trump: 56,894 votes (63 percent)

Just look at the numbers—the Mesa results in 2020 were broadly in-line with 2016. The big difference was that the 2016 third-party voters went for Biden in 2020.

Did Peters truly believe that there had been massive voting fraud in the 2020 election in Mesa? There are only three possibilities:

1. She did not genuinely believe there was fraud.

2. She did genuinely believe there was fraud, because she is too cognitively limited to understand basic math.

3. She did genuinely believe, because she was not in full control of her faculties.

Whichever answer you pick, we can safely say—again, just based on her acceptance of the 2016 results as valid—that her belief in election fraud was not made on a reasonable basis.

Anyway: Peters went all-in on the idea of election fraud and then committed a number of crimes while attempting to “prove” this non-existent fraud. She used her office to turn off security cameras that monitored the county’s election machinery and then granted access to the machines to an unauthorized person.

Some months later, various conspiracy theorists published data stolen from the Mesa County voting machines. Peters was eventually indicted on ten counts relating to her abuse of office.

Her criminal trial was eventful. She continually fired her lawyers and was, at one point, held in contempt for lying to the judge. Eventually she was convicted on seven counts. She was unrepentant throughout. Literally the day after she was convicted, she appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast to keep pushing her nonsense.

In sum: Peters was guilty as sin. She did not have a one-time lapse in judgment. She engaged in coordinated criminal behavior over the course of many months. She showed no remorse for her crimes.1

Why would Polis commute her sentence?

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2. Details

On the other hand, Mother Jones—Mother Freaking Jones!—makes a compelling case that Polis acted in the interests of liberalism. Because you have to look at the details of what happened after Peters was convicted.

Jeremy Schulman points out that Peters was sentenced to nine years in jail. (Polis’s commutation cuts that to four and a half years.) Why was she given such a lengthy sentence? Because the trial judge, Matthew Barrett, explicitly said he was dropping the hammer because her crimes were committed in the service of election denial. Here’s Schulman:

Among other things, Barrett accused Peters of peddling “a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”

“So the damage that is caused and continue[s] to be caused is just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis,” Barrett declared. “And it’s particularly damaging when those words come from someone who holds a position of influence like you.”

Which at the very least creeps up on First Amendment protections. Again, here’s Schulman:

Last month, three Colorado appellate judges—all of whom were appointed by Polis’ Democratic predecessor—unanimously threw out Peters’ prison sentence, declaring it a clear violation of her First Amendment free speech rights. They ordered Peters to be resentenced, but Polis intervened before that could happen.

“It is apparent that the [trial] court imposed the lengthy sentence it did because Peters continued to espouse the views that led her to commit these crimes,” the appeals court concluded. “The tenor of the [trial] court’s comments makes clear that it felt the sentence length was necessary, at least in part, to prevent her from continuing to espouse views the court deemed ‘damaging.’”

In other words, Peters should have been sentenced for what she actually did, not the bizarre conspiracy theories she espoused. She can be punished for the crimes she committed in her illegal quest to expose non-existent election fraud. But she can’t be punished for loudly voicing her beliefs.

What Polis did, then, was to stand fast for liberalism. He didn’t pardon Peters; he merely commuted her sentence because he was protecting the First Amendment. This is the entire point of the First Amendment and the rule of law: to have processes in place to safeguard the rights of even the worst people. And Polis wasn’t swooping in out of nowhere. The courts were already headed in the direction of reducing Peters’ sentence. Polis was acting in the interests of justice using a power explicitly granted to him by his office for such purpose.2

We hold to liberalism not just when it gives us what we want, but even when it gives us results we do not like. That’s practically the definition of the liberal order.

How are we doing so far? Are you convinced? Well hold on . . .

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3. Context Collapse

On the other other hand, that nice story about Polis standing up for liberal values—even when they are unpopular—really only works when you strip the Peters case of all context.

Let me give you just the tiniest bit of context:

• The president of the United States threatened the state of Colorado with financial harm if Gov. Polis did not get Peters out of jail, one way or the other. Therefore it is impossible to say whether Polis came to his decision on principle, or because his state was being extorted.

• The Department of Justice is currently pursuing criminal charges against James Comey for having posted a picture of seashells arranged in the characters “8647.” So the First Amendment is being adhered to on a pretty selective basis.

• The Trump administration is using masked agents of the state to attack and detain people in a manner so lawless that there have already been more than 10,000 court decisions issued against the regime.

In other words: The federal government that Tina Peters supports takes the exact opposite view of free speech that Polis takes. The federal government is also engaged in a widespread pattern of violent lawlessness. And because of the overt threats made against the state of Colorado by Peters’s patron, the “interests of justice” have been irrevocably muddied.

This is one of those cases where if you know a little bit, it seems obvious that Polis was wrong. If you know a lot, it seems obvious that Polis was right. And if you know absolutely everything . . . well.

Let’s talk about that.

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It all boils down to a question about how seriously you take the illiberal project.

If you think that it is not possible for Trumpism to succeed; that [gestures broadly] all of this is roughly normal; that 2026 is no different from 2000, or 1980, or 1960, or 1900?

Well, then, you’re probably where Polis is. You think it’s a forgone conclusion that our current moment is just part of a pendulum swing; it’s coming back around; all’s well that ends well.

On the other hand, if you think that this moment is more unique—that it is closer to the unsettled post-war period of 1865, when a lot of liberal assumptions about America were suddenly up for grabs?

Then you may think Polis is a naïf. You may be asking yourself, right now, “Is liberalism a suicide pact?”

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I am in this latter class of alarmists. I do not think that 2026 is like 1980 in any meaningful way. I judge that America has moved to a place where a post-liberal order is more than just theoretically possible.

But I’m also open to the idea that liberalism must hold to liberal values, ideals, and processes as it combats illiberalism. No matter how unsatisfying, or even repugnant, that might feel.

To paraphrase the novelist Eli Cash:

Everyone knows that liberalism isn’t a suicide pact. What this essay presupposes is, “What if it is?”

At the end of the day, we’re not having a moral argument about Tina Peters. We’re having a prudential argument: Which liberal value is more powerful against illiberalism?

Demonstrating the supremacy of process and commitment to free speech of all kinds?

Or demonstrating the supremacy of accountability before the rule of law?

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Having written all of this, I think I know where I land on this specific case. I think Polis is incorrect and Peters’ fate should have been left to the legal process. I think that Polis has made a dangerous demonstration of weakness that destined to embolden liberalism’s enemies and persuade exactly no one who was on the fence about.

But I’m open to persuasion.

Here’s my ask for the comments: Tell me where you land, but then tell me what circumstance could make you change your mind.

For instance: I’m inclined to say that Polis should not have commuted Peters’s sentence. However, if Trump had not threatened the state of Colorado, or if Peters had recanted and shown contrition for her crimes, then I might be where Polis is.

For this exercise, I want everyone stretching to see and understand the other side of where they are.

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Hey fam -

Thank you all for your thoughtful questions on the last Triad Video Mailbag. We’re planning another one for Friday, May 22.

In the previous edition, we covered:

• How might the UAE leaving OPEC impact the petrodollar?

• Is left-wing populism is the right move for Democrats ahead of 2028?

• Should we expand the House of Representatives to counteract gerrymandering?

• Why does Jasmine dislike Rahm Emanuel?

• What is JVL’s complicated history with Tucker Carlson?

• Why didn't JVL vote in New Jersey’s special election?

• What can Americans can be proud of today?

• . . . and more of your burning questions.

You can watch our first two installments of “Ask JVL” here.

Leave us questions for our next edition of “Ask JVL” in the comments on this post. We’ll pin this to the top of the Triad channel on the site and remind you of the link throughout the week.

Ask JVL

Questions can be whatever is on your mind. Was there something JVL needs to explain more from a recent Triad? Something he hasn’t dealt with lately that you’d like to hear more about?

If you posted a question last time that didn’t get picked, feel free to post it here again. There were so many good, worthy questions.

Before you pose a question, please look through the existing questions and upvote (by clicking the 🩶) those you most wish to explore, and thread your replies if you have similar questions or follow-ups. Upvoted comments float to the top, letting us know what’s most important to the community for us to answer.

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Live by Trump, Die by Trump

by William Kristol

“This is the party of Donald Trump.” So Sen. Lindsey Graham proclaimed on Meet the Press yesterday, in the wake of Sen. Bill Cassidy’s defeat in the Louisiana Republican primary. Graham is right. The Republican party is unquestionably and unambiguously Trump’s party. And the GOP will be dragged down by him, burdened by his dead weight, as it sinks this fall beneath the political waves.

As Graham was confirming that the GOP is Trump’s party yesterday, CBS News released its latest survey, conducted by YouGov, of more than 2,000 adults last week.

The first question asked was, as usual, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?” Here are the answers from this poll so far this year:

January 2026: Approve 41 percent, disapprove 59 percent.
February 2026: Approve 40 percent, disapprove 60 percent.
March 2026: Approve 39 percent, disapprove 61 percent.
April 2026: Approve 38 percent, disapprove 62 percent.
May 2026: Approve 37 percent, disapprove 63 percent.

Yes, the movement of American public opinion away from Trump has been frustratingly slow. But unlike in the last half of 2025, when Trump’s numbers were basically stable at around 41 percent to 59 percent, the movement this year has been real. The decline to 37 percent approval (and the climb to 63 percent disapproval) has been slow but steady, gradual but inexorable. One percentage point a month adds up. (And this morning, a new New York Times/Siena poll has very similar numbers, with Trump at 37 percent approval, 59 percent disapproval.)

When you dig into the CBS poll, it gets worse for Trump. Separating those who approve or disapprove of Trump strongly from those who do so only tepidly, here’s what you get:

Strongly approve: 20 percent.
Somewhat approve: 17 percent.
Somewhat disapprove: 11 percent.
Strongly disapprove: 52 percent.

Sitting at 20 percent vs. 52 percent among the voters with the strongest opinions is not a strong position.

And when asked, “How much do you think Donald Trump cares about the needs and problems of people like you?” Americans responded:

A lot: 18 percent.
Some: 17 percent.
Not much: 14 percent.
Not at all: 51 percent.

These are very bad numbers for Donald Trump. And these are very bad numbers for the Republican party.

As Ron Brownstein points out, “Trump is consistently in a much deeper hole now than other recent presidents who had bad mid-terms.” A party’s performance in a midterm, especially when that party has controlled both the presidency and Congress for the preceding two years, tends to correlate pretty reliably with the president’s approval rating. This makes sense. After all, in November, voters have to decide whether they want the next Congress to continue to go along with that president or to check him.

And that correlation will presumably hold all the more tightly when the congressional party is visibly tied at the hip to their president. Which, as Lindsey Graham said yesterday, today’s Republican party is.

So for all the complexities of the tasks we face confronting the ongoing disaster of Trump and Trumpism, the short-term political task today is pretty simple. The pro-democracy movement has to try to continue to drive down Trump’s approval, to the degree possible. At the very least, it has to get out of the way as Trump’s own actions lead to public disapproval.

And the short-term task of the Democratic party is also pretty simple: Tie Republican incumbents and candidates as tightly as possible to their president. This means among other things making them vote over and over for Trump’s unpopular policies and for his unpopular vanity projects. The best way to make sure Trump’s enablers pay a price is to make them continue, visibly and embarrassingly, enabling their leader. (And if some of them grow sick of doing so, or decide it’s in their political interest to allow a little space between themselves and the president, all the better. Some coverage of “Republicans in disarray” would be fine too.)

The closest parallel to this year could well be 2006. Republicans went into those midterms with control of both houses. Most polls had President George W. Bush around 37 percent approval on election day. Democrats took control of both houses, gaining thirty-one seats in the House and six in the Senate. They won the national popular vote in the House by eight points.

Trump and his party will be able to do a lot of damage over the next six months. They’ll be able to do a lot of damage for the subsequent two years even if Democrats do win Congress. But perhaps the tide has turned.

I haven’t gone all Victorian poetry for a while, so if you’ll permit the indulgence, I’ll close with some lines from Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say not the struggle nought availeth”:

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main,

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

Christian Nationalists Hit the Mall

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday, a consortium of right-wing Christians gathered on the National Mall for “Rededicate 250,” an event billed as “a National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” I would have liked to attend the event, to deliver you a firsthand report on the vibes, but I was prevented: I spent my Sunday at church.

Online later, however, I got the gist. “Rededicate 250” was what you’d have expected from this crew: a full-throated embrace of the MAGA iteration of the faith by the Trump administration, an uneasy amalgam of rudimentary Christian doctrines summoned up to bless smashmouth Trumpian politics. A host of administration officials and allies spoke via recorded video or from the stage: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, House Speaker Mike Johnson. Even Trump was beamed in on video to read some Scripture—a recycled video from a few weeks ago, it turns out, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind.

Over and over, the speakers hammered the inseparable connection between the defense of the faith and the aims of the modern Republican party. They, the onstage speakers, were on the side of the angels—and no one had any doubt who was on the opposing team.

“We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes, and the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this great nation,” Johnson said. (Ostensibly, he was praying.) “These voices insist to the young and impressionable that our story, the American story, is one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure, and that this story can only be understood through the lens of our sins. Father, we reject that.”

MAGA Christianity: Now featuring 100 percent less repentance of sins!

Others were even less subtle. Author and radio host Eric Metaxas—long one of the most insufferable voices on the Christian right—exulted that “it’s hard to believe it took two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand.” (He later claimed that this, as opposed to his usual Trump-worshiping shtick, had been a joke.)

I have to give the organizers credit for one thing: They were smart to pick the date they did. Two hundred fifty years ago yesterday, as the American colonies barreled toward war with Britain, the Continental Congress proclaimed a national “Day of Fasting, Prayer, and Humiliation,” declaring it the “indispensable duty of these hitherto free and happy colonies, with true penitence of heart, and the most reverent devotion, publicly to acknowledge the over ruling providence of God; to confess and deplore our offenses against him; and to supplicate his interposition for averting the threatened danger, and prospering our strenuous efforts in the cause of freedom, virtue, and posterity.”

Christianity and America have always stood both in harmony and in tension: The faith is in the country’s bones, yet the country has chosen from the beginning to hold faith and politics forcibly apart. In another universe, this event could have been a very different affair, along the lines of the longstanding National Prayer Breakfast—a bipartisan rededication to the importance of humbling ourselves and seeking the wisdom, blessing, and grace of God.1 But that approach has been dying a dual death: increasingly pushed aside for MAGA Christianity boosterism on the right, increasingly abandoned to die a death of neglect on the left.

It constantly dismays me to see my faith so deployed in modern right-wing politics—stripped bare, deracinated, cheapened into a bauble of cultural-political identification. We love our Christians, don’t we folks? I also worry that we are seeing a vicious cycle. In the minds of many irreligious types on the left, these sorts of charlatans are increasingly the only “Christians” they see. The more tightly the religious right tries to tie Christianity to the doomed and dying MAGA project, the less they can be surprised if whatever movement vanquishes MAGA turns out to be hostile not only to MAGA, but to Christianity itself.

This, of course, would suit the charlatans just fine: Their pitch to believers relies on them being, to a significant extent, the only game in town. But for those believers who made their peace with Trump for years on the spurious argument that he was the only thing standing between them and a political movement hostile to their faith, I worry that they may meet their destiny on the road they took to avoid it.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• How Corrupt Is Trump? Here Are the Numbers… He’s the swampiest swamp creature ever, writes MONA CHAREN.

• The Hard Right Hates Neil Gorsuch… It’s all about the constitutionalists vs. the nativists, explains Daniel Ruggles.

• Ending the War Will Require Force… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN survey a wide range of jackassery, from Trump’s attack on longtime Mitch McConnell aide Robert Karem and his mismanagement of the Defense Department to the Iran intelligence leak, the Trump–Xi summit, Trump’s designs on Cuba, and the implications of Turkey’s newly unveiled ICBM.

• What Can ‘A Man for All Seasons’ Tell Us About Today? SONNY BUNCH joins MONA CHAREN to talk about the 1960s classic that was a conservative touchstone.

• From Bunker Hill to Normandy, JD Vance Is Wrong About America… On How to Fix It, REP. JAKE AUCHINCLOSS joins JOHN AVLON to lay out a new “patriotic center” for Democrats—from taxing social media companies to fund education, to rebuilding America, fixing housing, confronting China, regulating AI deepfakes, and reclaiming patriotism from Trumpism.

Quick Hits

DOWN GOES CASSIDY: Donald Trump may have shed basically every non-Republican voter from his coalition by now, but that’s cold comfort for the Republican elected officials he’s decided to punish. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) limped to a distant third-place finish in Louisiana’s GOP primary Saturday, capturing only 25 percent of the vote—a stunningly poor showing for a Senate incumbent. Two MAGA challengers, Rep. Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a runoff without him.

Cassidy, a doctor and two-term senator, now approaches the end of his political career as a cautionary tale in the impossibility of living with one foot in the MAGA camp. He earned Trump’s undying enmity in 2021, when he was one of seven GOP senators to vote to convict the president in his impeachment trial after January 6th. But he also made periodic, wan attempts to shake Trump off his vengeance tour—most notably, by convincing himself last year to set aside his misgivings and vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services. It didn’t work: Kennedy quickly and remorselessly broke the vaccine-policy promises he made Cassidy in exchange for his vote, and Trump made sure to crush Cassidy in his primary anyway.

The question now is how Cassidy will choose to spend the eight months before his term ends. At this point, he truly has no reason left to make nice with the president, who issued a gloating Truth Social post after his defeat: “His disloyalty to the man who got him elected,” Trump wrote, “is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!”2

“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our Constitution,” Cassidy said in his concession speech. “And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power . . . that person is not qualified to be a leader.”

THE PARLIAMENTARIAN VS. THE BALLROOM: Senate Republicans’ plan to earmark a cool billion for Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project has run into a familiar and formidable foe: the Senate parliamentarian, the once-obscure functionary who is tasked with ruling what can and can’t be passed under simple-majority budget-reconciliation votes—and therefore along party lines. NBC News reports:

“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” Senate Democrats said after their meeting with the parliamentarian. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.” . . .

It’s not clear if Republicans can rewrite the provision in a way that would fully resolve the parliamentarian’s issues. The budget resolution detailing what can be included in the bill only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

If Senate officials again find the ballroom project falls under the jurisdiction of a committee other than those two, Republicans may be forced to leave that funding out of the bill, as they likely won’t find the 60 votes needed to overrule the parliamentarian.

Read the whole thing.

ENERGY SHOCKS WORSENING: It’s been clear for a while, and it’s getting clearer: The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is a bonanza for American energy producers and a catastrophe for American energy consumers. As energy shocks pile up around the world, more and more international buyers are clamoring for American oil and gas—and with producers unable to just snap their fingers and pull enough out of the ground for everybody, an international bidding war is now underway for every single barrel. The Wall Street Journal has more:

For now, the U.S. has been able to meet needs at home and replace some of the missing Gulf barrels. No nation in the world’s history has ever exported as much energy: It shipped 14.2 million barrels of crude and products a day late last month—the rough equivalent of one out of seven barrels consumed globally in ordinary times.

But trouble is brewing. U.S. oil producers are barely stepping up their output, refineries are running at full-throttle, and domestic stocks are getting depleted fast. The upshot: American consumers are set to keep paying more for fuel to stay inside the U.S.’s borders.

“This is all just going to end so badly,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at commodities- and shipping-data provider Kpler. “We have to essentially get squeezed to the point where prices move higher to stop the barrels leaving.”

Read the whole thing.

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Cheap Shots

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SUPREME COURT JUSTICE NEIL GORSUCH is in the crosshairs of the far right. During a media blitz this month to promote his new children’s book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence, Gorsuch repeated the same message over and over: The United States is a “creedal” nation—that is, a nation unified by common belief in rights, liberties, and democratic institutions. Yes, he explained, we are a people with a singular “heritage,” but it’s one of ideals, not ethnicity. Being an American requires not lineage, but belief.

It was a gentle rebuke of nationalism—and it drove the hard right nuts.

Americans largely agree with Gorsuch that, when it comes to citizenship, belief in American ideas trumps genealogy. In an earlier dispensation, his comments would have been taken as an innocuous, even saccharine, idealism about the nation’s founding and self-rule—totally typical for a conservative jurist.

But we are not in that earlier dispensation. Gorsuch’s repeated references to “creed” exposed a stark divide between far-right ideologues (with their nativist America First agenda) and the conservative originalist old guard. For decades, the right has campaigned to fill courtrooms with self-professing originalists. Now, that old guard—personified by Gorsuch, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—is something of a wild card on the Supreme Court. And it’s causing tension, especially as the court gets ready to rule on birthright citizenship.

I admit to experiencing a bit of schadenfreude watching nativists fume at Gorsuch. But the clash over an American “creed” portends something dark as well, to the degree it shows deep tensions between the extremist, illiberal right and its originalist predecessors. The hard right is ascendant and has courted key privileges in the Trump presidency. The originalist core of the conservative movement holds a critical institutional advantage on the bench of the Supreme Court and other courts that insulates originalists from insurgent populism. Who wins this battle will fundamentally redefine America.

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The frenzied reaction to Gorsuch’s creedal comments shows just how much nativist existential panic has pervaded the hard right and turned its denizens against originalism. The Daily Signal’s Bradley Devlin called Gorsuch’s rejection of an essential “common culture” at the Founding “patently absurd.” Far cruder, the anti-democratic pseud Curtis Yarvin tarred Gorsuch with “cuck energy,” and feeling a certain “warmth as he gives away your country to South Sudanese bvll,” using a term drawn from cuckoldry porn. Devlin and Yarvin have staked out two poles of the nativist attack on Gorsuch. They did so while supplying little evidence for their historical and psychological claims.

But none is needed to get the point across. Their absurdities and exaggerations echo Vice President JD Vance’s admitted strategy of creating “stories so that the American media actually pays attention.” The message of the anti-creedal right is meant to summon an apocalyptic vision: Choose us or choose chaos.

Other critics rebuked Gorsuch by suggesting he had dismissed America’s more explicitly cultural heritage. Responding to an interview given by Gorsuch, the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson cast the American Founding as the work of “men who shared a common culture” that was “derived from England and Christian Europe.” In Davidson’s terms, American identity is only for those who adopt this white, Protestant culture “as their own.” In a more cutting evaluation, Jeremy Carl, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and failed Trump nominee for a senior role at the State Department, said Gorsuch’s rejection of nativism indicated the “broad intellectual failure of the conservative legal movement.”

It’s hard to make sense of this hard-right rage at Gorsuch and the conservative legal establishment. After all, hasn’t the Supreme Court largely enabled the Trump administration? Perhaps it’s psychological. The way Gorsuch downplays ethnic and cultural heritage contrasts starkly with the White House’s willingness to deliver on nativist rhetoric and policy priorities. The backlash to Gorsuch’s remarks reflects how much the hard right has come to expect the federal government to respond to and promote their interests.

But conservative jurists like Gorsuch seem to deny the hard right the recognition they’ve won from the Trump administration. Gorsuch’s mild, indirect rebuke to the nativist “heritage American” crowd suggests that liberals’ view of the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority—as beholden to hard right impulses or factions—is incorrect or at least incomplete: At least some members of the high court continue to owe allegiance to the Constitution.

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THE ANTI-ORIGINALIST OUTBURSTS in response to Gorsuch mark a change on the right. Originalism has been the guiding light of the conservative movement’s legal ambitions for decades. There are several variations, but in essence, originalism pursues the “original understanding” of a law or constitutional provision. The legal doctrine broadly defers to the intention of the authors or arbitrators of our nation’s laws or statutes; or, depending on your flavor, the common usage and understanding of terms in the law at the time it was enacted. The purpose of originalism is to narrowly limit the application of an amendment, law, or statute.

Conservatives saw strict adherence to the explicit verbiage of the Constitution as the best corrective to the expansions to civil rights and state capacity associated with the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. For their part, liberal critics have often depicted originalism as a thinly veiled attempt to return to something resembling the social order of the founding, with the franchise largely restricted to white male landowners, and anachronistic political tools ill fitted for the conflicts and crises of the modern polity. After all, the Founders wrote the Constitution for a country that couldn’t imagine interstate highways, let alone the internet and air travel.

Originalism may have logical limits (wouldn’t true originalism require overturning Marbury v. Madison?), but the legal approach broadly reflects conservatives’ belief that history is theirs and that the Constitution can—indeed, must—be interpreted authoritatively on their terms. Even if they don’t know originalism by name, 88 percent of grassroots conservatives polled in 2014 at the tail end of the Tea Party movement said the Constitution should be interpreted as written. Only 14 percent of liberals said the same.

Within constitutional law, originalism has become so prominent that some liberals have proposed their own version of the theory. Originalism has even shaped the liberal bloc of the Supreme Court. While under questioning from conservative senators in her confirmation hearings in 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson acknowledged that “the Supreme Court has made clear that when you’re interpreting the Constitution, you’re looking at the text at the time of the founding and what the meaning was then as a constraint” on the Court’s authority.

Yet, for all their preeminence within the conservative movement, the originalists are of limited use to conservatives. Originalism is a largely backward-looking measure intended to mitigate liberalism. As a legal strategy, conservatives developed originalism to respond to the institutional disadvantages they faced in the courts up through the 1980s and 1990s. During the 2000s and 2010s, conservative justices overturned many provisions dating back to the so-called “rights revolution” led by the Warren Court. Since then, the conservative majority on the Court has made good on many of the right’s longstanding aims, including overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, striking down the Chevron doctrine deference to federal agencies’ interpretation of law in 2024, and, last month, gutting key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. There is little left for originalists to unmake, leaving right-wing activists with the tempting question: What could conservatives create if they left originalism behind?

Gorsuch’s comments have had the effect of taking this desire for creative constitutional innovation and tossing it into the Trump administration’s institutional subterfuge. Trump has shown, especially in his second term, that there are few constitutional norms he won’t challenge. His is, in many ways, an anti-originalism presidency.

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WHILE THE MAGA HARD RIGHT may find the current Court, with Gorsuch on it, not entirely to its liking, they will find it hard to do much about it. There is little public appetite for removing judges and justices. Public opinion may not shift away from originalism so easily either. For conservative evangelicals especially, constitutional originalism seems natural and obvious, akin to reading an inerrant, literal Bible.

Some on the right will blast justices like Gorsuch as RINOs in attempts to sway their behavior, but charges of RINOism are only effective when there are sufficient carrots and sticks. A member of Congress tarred as a RINO is liable to be primaried. The same threat cannot be levied against a justice serving a life term. Only one Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Chase, has been impeached by Congress, and that was in 1804 (and he was acquitted anyway).

America’s constitutional design is intentionally conservative. The courts are minoritarian and unelected, which mitigates the impact of constantly fluctuating popular opinion. Some legal groups have formed around nativist and “America First” causes, but such groups must contend with benches already full of liberal justices and conservative appointees reared on originalism. For better or for worse, originalism’s slow seep into both conservative and mainstream constitutional law will not be easily undone.

Undoing originalism will take the sort of time that the hard right doesn’t think we have. As Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, put it, conservatives must fight “not for moderation, but for rupture.” Rupture “is what opens the door to renewal.” The deep sense of urgency in this dissent emboldens far-fetched rhetoric. As right-wing influencer Mike Cernovich wrote on X: “If Justice Gorsuch has his way . . . over one million anchor babies currently living in China” will flow into the United States to act as “spies with the same citizenship rights as you and me.”

Fearing their time is running out, the hard right may turn to an increasingly aggressive strategy: breaking things. Trump seems to be preparing to do so. On May 10, the president posted on Truth Social that Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, both of whom ruled with the majority against his unilateral use of tariffs, should be “loyal to the person that appointed them” and rule against birthright citizenship. (Such rhetoric about Supreme Court justices would be treated as a five-alarm fire from any other president; in the case of Trump, it’s entirely unsurprising.) Trump also floated the idea of packing the court, a strategy oft-entertained by presidents wanting to impose their will on the judicial branch. But the votes aren’t there in Congress. And even if they were, what mechanism would the president have to ensure the justices he packed the Court with were loyal to him—beyond the threat of more and more Court packing until he got his desired result?

The hard right’s best chances for rolling back (or overcoming) originalism may lie beyond the courts themselves. While SCOTUS seems hesitant to overturn birthright citizenship, its conservative bloc has empowered the president to carry out many of the hard right’s nativist ambitions, including deportations to third countries. Moreover, the Court has emboldened federal immigration officials, mainly ICE, to detain people over suspected immigration status, a practice derisively referred to by critics as “Kavanaugh stops.”1 So long as the Court permits the president to limit the due process and equal protection rights of American citizens and immigrants alike, nativists may be able to avoid a full-on confrontation with the courts and legal stricture.

But that’s an uncertain status quo. Fundamentally, originalists accept the democratic constraints of the Constitution and believe them to be a core component of America’s political tradition. Once an intellectual minority, conservative originalists have prevailed; their mode of constitutional interpretation has become the prevailing standard of legal thought. Postliberals and their nativist fellow travelers, on the other hand, have begun to reimagine the American state without any such constitutional guardrails. That such a conservative Supreme Court justice as Gorsuch—and a Trump nominee at that—can so enrage the far-right through the word “creed” tells us just how tenuous things have become and how dystopian the hard right’s worldview really is.

THIS IS THE TRUMP ERA, which means if you blink, you will miss another shattering example of unabashed corruption. I don’t usually write about the same topic twice in a row, but the latest revelations of Trump’s wanton, shameless profiteering from the White House cannot go unremarked. The phrase “drain the swamp” will go down in history as a bitter irony. The latest outrage against the public—and since I started typing this sentence there have surely been more—concerns Trump’s stock trades.

When I was being considered for a job in the Reagan White House, I had to reveal every cent I had ever earned from any job or investment (which was simple since I had no money), and everyone else who worked for the administration had to do the same. It was a pain, but I was happy to do it, knowing that I would be serving in an honest government. High-ranking officials like cabinet secretaries with substantial portfolios put their assets in blind trusts during their public service. “Blind” meaning the principal had no control. And though the ethics rules do not apply to the president, past presidents put their funds (with the exception of U.S. treasuries and mutual funds) into blind trusts anyway for appearances’ sake. The reason is obvious, but since this is a time of foggy ethics, let’s spell it out: Government officials are in a position to steer policy and award government contracts in ways that benefit or harm private interests. By requiring blind trusts, we minimize the chance that a decision-maker is swayed by the opportunity for private gain.1

Trump, naturally, defied this ethical norm outright. We learned from NOTUS last week that he went on a share-buying spree in the first months of this year, purchasing stock in companies that were about to get lucrative contracts. On January 6, Trump purchased between $500,000 and $1,000,000 (financial disclosure forms require a range, not exact figures) in Nvidia stock. A week later, the Commerce Department announced permission for Nvidia to sell chips to China. He also purchased stock in AMD, another AI chip maker, right before they too were granted the right to sell in China. Also in January, Trump purchased shares of Palantir for between $65,000 and $150,000, days before that company secured a billion-dollar contract to provide services to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump bought shares in Axon, a taser-manufacturing firm. Coincidentally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a plan to spend $200 million over five years on new tasers.

A White House spokesman helpfully explained that “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public . . . President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest.” That is the definition of a conflict of interest. What do they take us for?

Remember the special forces guy who was caught betting on Polymarket before Nicolás Maduro’s capture? This dishonest master sergeant participated in the operation and apparently used his inside knowledge to bet $30,000 on the timing of Maduro’s fall, netting more than $400,000, because, lucky guess, he was right.

There were other suspicious bets placed on Polymarket just before major developments in the Iran war. Almost inexplicably well-timed bets were placed just before Israel’s attack on Iran, before the United States started bombing, before a ceasefire was announced, and at other key moments. Many accounts, some opened only hours before, made tidy sums. Who else in the Trump government may have made these bets? Did the president, ever grasping for lucre, take advantage of this ultimate form of insider trading?

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IT’S WORTH NOTING that there was no “swamp,” at least not in the way Trump claimed. There are huge inefficiencies in the federal government, along with redundancies, waste, and overspending. But the main issue was never that the “swamp” denizens were siphoning off government funds for their private yachts. The chief corruption in Washington before Trump came along consisted of elected representatives unwilling to make tradeoffs between tax cuts and spending, thus creating ballooning deficits.

Old-school corruption was comparatively small-scale. In 2015, the United States scored 76 (where 100 is clean and 0 is totally corrupt) on Transparency International’s ratings, the sixteenth-least-corrupt nation in the world. Today, we are ranked sixty-fourth and dropping.

Before Trump came to dominate our politics, there was corruption—no nation is without it—but his constant howls about America being a “Third World nation” were not remotely true. Yet under his maladministration, we are making rapid progress in that direction. He crows that the United States is “respected” in the world now. Does he really believe that people respect kleptocracies? We are becoming more loathed than respected.

The American Bar Association offered a partial list of the pay-to-play transactions in the first few months of Trump’s second term. Coinbase contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, while its major investors, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, together contributed another $6 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC. In the early days of Trump’s second term, the SEC dropped an enforcement action against Coinbase. Other crypto players—Ripple, Robinhood, and Gemini—apparently seeing how the game is played, also made large contributions to Trump’s super PAC and were also rewarded by the SEC dropping charges. Ditto for Justin Sun, who purchased $75 million worth of World Liberty Financial tokens (putting money directly in the Trump family’s pockets). Not only were criminal charges against Sun dropped, but he was invited to a private White House dinner for top purchasers of WLF tokens.

When it’s too late to drop charges, pardons are for sale. A woman who donated $3.5 million to the MAGA super PAC was able to get a pardon for her father, who faced charges of bribing Puerto Rico’s governor. A healthcare executive who attended a $1 million-a-plate fundraising dinner with Trump secured a pardon for her son, Paul Walczak, a nursing-home owner who pleaded guilty to tax crimes. The pardon freed him from prison and also from the obligation to pay $4.4 million in restitution to his victims. There are many others: Changpeng Zhao, Trevor Milton, Joseph Schwartz, Lawrence Duran, and David Gentile—thieves, fraudsters, and swindlers all. A whole cottage industry has sprung up consisting of grifters taking fees for getting pardon petitions to Trump’s desk. You may not have thought of Rod Blagojevich lately, but having received a pardon from Trump himself, he’s now in the business of lobbying Trump on behalf of others. So are Keith Schiller, George Sorial, Jack Burkman, Jacob Wohl, and Ches McDowell.

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WHICH BRINGS US TO THE PUTRID “deal” that is apparently in the works to “settle” Trump’s lawsuits against the U.S. government. Recall that Trump brought suit against the Department of Justice for the Mar-a-Lago search and the Russia investigation, and against the IRS for the unauthorized release of his tax returns (which wasn’t the IRS’s doing). His original ludicrous ask in the IRS suit was $10 billion (two thirds of the IRS’s annual budget) along with $230 million for the other inconveniences. As the judge in the IRS case observed, Trump was sitting on both sides of the table, and thus there is no actual case, just an undisguised attempt to loot taxpayers. She asked for briefs on this question due by May 20. Rushing to beat the deadline in which sanity might prevail, the administration announced that a deal is in the works to avoid the court altogether and hand Trump $1.7 billion in taxpayer dollars for a gargantuan slush fund. Under the terms of this deal with himself, Trump would agree to drop the $10 billion and $230 million suits in exchange for $1.7 billion to compensate anyone who claims to have been injured by what Trump considers the Biden administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department.

It’s just as grotesque as you imagine. Trump is reaching his grubby hands into the largest till in the world, the U.S. Treasury. Along with an apology from the IRS, the arrangement would also guarantee that the IRS would never audit any member of the Trump family ever again. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger described it:

The members of the commission overseeing disbursements [of the $1.7 billion] would serve at Trump’s pleasure, and he’d be able to remove them without cause at any time. The commission would have no obligation to disclose its decision-making process for how to disburse the money.

And then, of course, there’s the unbearable rottenness of the purported settlement fund itself: the shamelessness of Trump keeping a backdoor way to profit from it personally, the utter absence of any oversight controls that would even allow him to plausibly argue that the money will be spent justly, and the completely topsy-turvy travesty of creating a slush fund for January 6ers and other MAGA villains in the first place.

The Trump administration already gifted $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt. Michael Flynn and Carter Page received $1.25 million each. We can see where this is headed. Among others, the January 6th rioters, all pardoned, will now cash in. Will that include those who’ve subsequently been convicted of other offenses, including possession of child porn? That will probably depend upon whether they can make large purchases of Trump crypto currency.

The damage to our civic culture is incalculable. Nations with high levels of corruption suffer from a suite of pathologies from crime to inequality to low growth to unhappiness. And what can’t be measured but is no less real is the deep sense of shame that living in a corrupt country engenders. The achievement of a well-run, honest government is something to be cherished. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are witnessing the trashing of a carefully constructed, hard-won system. The United Arab Emirates is now less corrupt than the United States. So is Uruguay. And that was before the latest orgy of plunder.

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EACH AND EVERY ACT OF THEFT and corruption is bad in itself and damaging to our national project. It’s something else too—an offense against those who desperately need government help.

If Trump succeeds in looting $1.7 billion from the Treasury, consider what that money could have been spent on. In round numbers, that cash could:

• fund vaccines for children in developing countries for thirty-three years.

• fund PEPFAR for two and a half years.

• restore funding cut by DOGE for medical research on deadly pathogens like hantavirus and Ebola.

• restore Medicaid funds that were cut in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

• pay the salaries of 7,000 immigration judges for a year.

• employ 40,000 home health care aids for one year.

• buy replacements for some of the munitions Trump burned through in the feckless Iran war.

• purchase 2,600 Stinger missiles or about 6,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles.

• fund research to expand the use of mRNA vaccines (cut by RFK Jr.) which have shown promise against RSV, HIV, and flu (in addition to the aforementioned Ebola).

• fund studies or demonstration projects on mitigating the effects of climate change.

• invest in biotechnology and defenses against future pandemics.

The list of worthy projects that would benefit the public, not just the kleptocrat in the White House, is nearly endless.

Trump’s claim that he would “drain the swamp” is a cosmic joke. His administration is an ongoing shakedown of the American people.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP IS RARELY SEEN IN PUBLIC these days without a thick layer of nude-colored makeup slathered on the back of his right hand.

His aides have (unconvincingly) attributed the makeup, which conceals discoloration that resembles bruising, to the sheer number of hands the president shakes and to the aspirin he takes. But recently, Trump was photographed with both hands puffy and lathered—even though he obviously hasn’t become an ambidextrous greeter of White House visitors.

That’s not all. Trump’s been to see a dentist three times so far this year without explanation. Last fall, he told reporters he received an MRI but didn’t say—or, at times, seem to know—what for. He’s repeatedly bragged about acing cognitive tests, raising questions about why he’s taking so many in the first place. His ankles have been visibly swollen. He keeps a fairly light public schedule, especially compared to his first term. There have been multiple occasions where he has appeared to fall asleep during televised White House events—episodes aides insist are just prolonged blinks. Yet despite all that, Trump refuses to be transparent about his health.

The aging of the president is arguably among voters’ chief concerns, and it’s a subject the news media is discussing with increasing openness. And the many questions about Trump’s age and health would seem like quick and easy fodder for Democrats. After all, the president, like all of us, is dying. He’s the oldest person ever elected to the office1, and turns 80 next month; it’s totally reasonable to scrutinize his mental and physical state. Yet as Democrats make their case ahead of the midterms, Trump’s health rarely comes up—at least in public.

The age and health of the president are almost never mentioned in Democratic press conferences or in hits on cable news. Neither the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee nor the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have posted about Trump’s age on their X accounts. When House Leader Hakeem Jeffries briefly suggested that the Oversight Committee investigate the president’s health, the emphasis was quickly dropped. Instead, the party has focused its political efforts on Trump’s corruption and inability to lower costs.

Operatives and lawmakers say there are several reasons for this reticence, but mainly they admit

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Eric on the Reagan Defense Build Up (Gift Link):

https://thedispatch.com/next-250/peace-through-strength-reagan-250/?gift_key=e0d7f3be6686eb5a&gift_ref=3886671&utm_source=giftlink&utm_campaign=membergift&utm_medium=copy_link

Eric on Turkey’s New ICBM:

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Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

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DONALD TRUMP ON MONDAY hosted a forty-minute Oval Office event focusing on maternal health, and mostly it got attention because he seemed to nod off in the middle of it.

But the president and his invited guests also got some news coverage for the intended message, which was about a series of initiatives like reducing the cost of some fertility drugs, and launching an informational website called Moms.gov. These are supposed to demonstrate, as one attendee put it, that “President Trump wants to make America the best place to have a baby.”

That’s a laudable goal, though it would require an awful lot of policy work.

Both the maternal and infant mortality rates in the United States are the highest among economically advanced countries, according to analyses by the Commonwealth Fund. And when UNICEF last year rated several dozen nations for child well-being, the scores for the United States were terrible, way behind the world leaders: the Netherlands, Denmark, and France.

Those facts may come as a shock to anyone used to hearing about those other countries as socialist hellholes. But spend time in the countries of Northern and Western Europe and you’ll see all the ways people living there benefit from universal health care, cash support for newborns, guaranteed paid leave for new parents, and heavily subsidized childcare.

Several U.S. presidents have tried to replicate versions of those supports here, piece by piece. And some have made real headway.

Today, millions of young children and their mothers have health insurance because of Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act. Child poverty fell dramatically—if, alas, temporarily—thanks to Joe Biden and the income support measures that he signed into law as part of his pandemic-relief efforts. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society is the reason so many millions of low-income families can enroll in Medicaid and Head Start. Richard Nixon got behind a substantial increase in food assistance for young families.

Trump is well on his way to creating his own legacy when it comes to maternal and child well-being. But it’s not the kind his predecessors left. Whatever the modest contributions of the initiatives he was touting in the Oval Office last week—and “modest” is a generous description—they aren’t the real story about what the president has done for young families with children.

No, the real story is about what Trump has done to young families with children, by downsizing or undermining some of the most important programs on which many of them rely. And because it’s a big, sprawling tale that involves several programs—not to mention wonky policy details—it may be easiest to follow the way it would affect a typical family as it grows.

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So you’re having a baby. . .

If you care about improving maternal and child health, the place to start is with prenatal care.

Research makes a strong case that women who get proper care in pregnancy are less likely to develop gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, and other health problems. They are also less likely to give birth to low-birthweight babies, which is a big risk factor for all kinds of poor child health outcomes—up to and including death in infancy.

Exactly how big an impact prenatal care has is the subject of ongoing debate, because the subject is tough to study. The same goes for how much health outcomes for pregnant women and newborns truly depend on insurance status per se. But there’s plenty of evidence that people with insurance are better off in other ways, including financially. People who have coverage are less likely to fall behind on rent, or to run up debt.

For most of the last decade, the United States has been making steady progress at getting people insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act’s creation (under Obama) and then its expansion (under Biden). The one interruption was during Trump’s first term, when progress stalled for a few years. But that was just a preview of what’s happening now, thanks primarily to the $1 trillion taken out of Medicaid over the next decade as part of Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”

Trump and the Republicans have defended their cuts by saying (among other things) that they are merely targeting waste—and that the whole point is to preserve the program for people like pregnant women who really need it. They have also noted that pregnant women are, by definition, not subject to the law’s controversial work requirements.

But there’s good reason to think that the cuts will end up affecting pregnant women anyway, partly because the financial pressure the cuts place on states will force them to scale back outreach or special services that target the most at-risk parents. That’s in addition to the fact that, historically, work requirements have reduced enrollment by ensnaring people in paperwork, so that even people who qualify for exemptions end up without insurance anyway.

“With the punishing amount of administrative burden that’s on state Medicaid agencies, it could take three, four months to sort that out,” Sarah Gordon, co-director of the Boston University Medicaid Policy Lab, told the New York Times after the cuts became law last year. And three or four months out of a nine-month pregnancy can make a big difference.1

So you just had a baby. . .

Nutrition is another big factor in prenatal health, as it is for postnatal health—and especially for young children. At least in theory, improving nutrition is supposed to be a priority for this administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks about it all the time!

But the focus for Kennedy has been ultraprocessed foods and artificial dyes. A far more important issue for many pregnant women and their soon-to-be-born children is whether they can simply pay their grocery bills. And like access to health care, that too is becoming a lot more expensive because of historic cuts to food assistance Trump and Republicans have enacted, including many that impose new paperwork requirements that in theory are there to stop fraud.

Those cuts are also part of the One Big, Beautiful Bill. But unlike the Medicaid cuts, they are already having a visible and substantial effect. Enrollment in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, has fallen by more than 10 percent since a year ago, according to newly released federal figures. That works out to more than 4 million people, with nearly 700,000 losing benefits in just the latest month captured by the data.

Enrollment has already plunged by nearly 50 percent in Arizona, where—as a recent ProPublica article reported—implementation appears to be farthest along.

“We’re seeing people being denied when they can’t provide the additional documentation the state is requiring, stuck in backlogs because the state doesn’t have the capacity to process the additional paperwork, being denied because they can’t get through on overloaded phone lines for required interviews,” Katie Bergh, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me recently.

Not all of the current enrollment decline is because of the Republican cuts. Some of it is a reversion to pre-COVID pandemic levels, following the expiration of rules that Biden put in place to ease enrollment. But there’s plenty of evidence that the cuts are a big factor, according to Georgetown University economist Diane Schanzenbach, just as there’s plenty of evidence that they will end up hurting women and children.

“The research backs up what you and I would think of as common sense,” Schanzenbach, coauthor of a groundbreaking paper on the subject, told me in an interview. “If you have enough resources to get the food that they need as they’re growing up, they grow up to be both healthier and more academically inclined, so they’re more likely to finish high school and get a job.”

And it’s not just the food-assistance cuts already in law that could affect infants. It’s the cuts that could still become law in the future. Trump’s budget for 2027 calls for reducing spending on an initiative that covers produce for people in the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food program.2

“WIC is targeted at the youngest children, when their brains are developing,” Schanzenbach said. “I’m just kind of speechless to think about cuts there.”

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So now you have a young child. . .

The evidence linking health insurance and nutrition to the well-being of young children is, if anything, stronger than it is for pregnant women. “The literature shows that expanding Medicaid to kids increases use of preventive care, reduces mortality—and pays itself back by age 30 in increased tax collections,” Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist whose CV includes foundational research on the impact of Medicaid, told me via text.

But it’s not just health insurance and food that families need for their kids. They also need childcare—or, at least, support for parents who stay at home. Not so long ago, Trump seemed to recognize that. During his first term, he talked frequently about the importance of paid leave and childcare, hosting White House events where his daughter and then-close adviser Ivanka Trump helped to preside.

But that was then. This time around he’s barely mentioned the subject, except the time a few weeks ago when—in the midst of justifying the cost of the war in Iran—he said “We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of daycare.”

And while he and the Republican Congress haven’t reduced spending on early childhood programs the way they have health and food assistance, the Trump administration has repeatedly disrupted funding streams for both the federal subsidized childcare program (which states operate) and the Head Start program (which the federal government operates directly).3

It has done so through a combination of executive actions—like slashing the Health and Human Services staff that oversees grants, slowing the distribution of money to providers that operate on paper-thin margins. And just this past week it finalized new rules for subsidized childcare that could make financial survival for providers even more precarious, by paying them based on day-to-day attendance rather than enrollment.4

Here, too, there’s ample reason to believe that reducing childcare support will have adverse effects on children, especially among the low-income children for whom a nurturing program—or a more intensive Head Start program—might equip them with the tools to succeed in school and at work much later in life.5

That’s not to say these and other supports for mothers and children always work well. Sometimes there really is fraud. And many times the programs could simply be more efficient. All of this matters given that a real tradeoff of these programs is their cost: Creating anything that approached a European-level welfare state would require a bigger tax base, including—almost certainly—finding a way to get more revenue from the middle class.

“It’s certainly not the case that every single program is going to have the beneficial effects we hope it’s going to have—that’s one reason we need to do careful research,” Harold Pollack, a widely respected and cited University of Chicago poverty scholar, told me.

But Pollack was quick to add that “we know that when it comes to health care for children generally, educational inputs for children, for those we’ve got a good evidence base showing they’ll be beneficial.”

Making America a great place to raise kids is an admirable goal. But it requires more than a PR summit. It requires adding rather than taking away resources—not to mention the commitment of a president who cares enough about the subject to stay awake.

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