IN 1935, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO GERMANY William Dodd warned the State Department of the “virtually dictatorial powers over Protestant Church matters” the new Nazi Minister of Church Affairs possessed. Describing the ecclesiastical resistance to Adolf Hitler’s desperate grasp for the keys to the kingdom, Dodd added that “the brunt of battle has been borne chiefly by the Reformed, or Calvinist, wing of the Church whose members find National Socialist totalitarian claims incompatible with their belief in sole responsibility to individual conscience.”

Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” and its heretical Deutsche Christen movement were defeated, of course, in a victory for Christians who believe in a future for all nations.

But eight decades later, a new National Christianity is being debated right here in our own country and in the Reformed Protestant tradition that Dodd once praised for holding the line against the Nazis. Ominously, some of those involved in establishing this new movement aren’t even certain the score was settled correctly last time.

The latest real-world skirmish over the ever-amorphous Christian nationalism erupted this June at a conference in Ogden, Utah, titled “The War for Normal” and organized by fledgling religious publisher New Christendom Press.

The world quickly learned from various posts on X what exactly passes for “normal” in these circles when a self-described Nazi employee of Antelope Hill, a small publishing house infamous as the preeminent North American publisher of fascist texts, was caught hawking pro-Hitler materials, including books published by the Nazi Party’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS.

Blake Callens, a writer and early public critic of Christian nationalism, has noted that “one can consider authoritarian Christian Nationalism to be fringe enough that it will never gain traction within the broader American system while being keenly aware that it is a growing movement within the conservative church.”

As Christians, we find that Callens’s warning speaks to us directly. One of the presenters at the conference, Zachary Garris, is a minister in our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, and we feel a pressing duty to speak out about this malignant ideology. Because if the Nazi materials on the Antelope Hill table can teach us anything about history, it’s the danger of what a fringe movement can do if reasonable people remain silent.

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After some of the flags, banners, and rhetoric used during the January 6th riots highlighted the place of Christian iconography in far-right resistance to democratic norms, critical interest in the concept of Christian nationalism ballooned. There’s an irony here: Mainstream media accusations of the menace of Christian nationalism encouraged the hard right to own the moniker for themselves.

Advocates of the term range from evangelicals to Orthodox Christians, who never seem able to agree on an exact definition, leaving alarmed pundits struggling to hit a perpetually moving target. Gen-Z shock influencers like Nick Fuentes, a Catholic, have called themselves Christian nationalists as well. Hop online and ask ten people what Christian nationalism means, you’ll get eleven answers—and maybe a death threat or two.

Though percolating for a while, the movement really crystallized late in 2022, when the political philosopher and Presbyterian Stephen Wolfe published The Case for Christian Nationalism in the same month that Gab CEO Andrew Torba and co-writer Andrew Isker released a bestselling, though less authoritative, volume with a similar name. Wolfe began to systematize the term, and his book has become something of a manifesto for disaffected Protestants looking to restore, in their view, biblical forms of nation, patriarchy, and—in its most scurrilous forms—race relations.

Since then, Christian nationalism has become a clickbait gold rush. The movement, heavily online but simultaneously entrenched in small groups and churches, has developed its own media ecosystem of influencers, podcasts, films, merchandise. It also has its own style of performative aesthetics. Beards, demonstrating patriarchal authority and hiding poor “physiognomy,” are omnipresent. Christian nationalism has sometimes overlapped—in terms of adherents and imagery—with other rapidly evolving movements and subcultures, such as “tradwives,” “redpilled” online spaces, and the “manosphere.” For example, it’s not unusual in Christian nationalist circles to encounter the slang term “soy” as a pejorative for unmanliness, extrapolating from a semiserious belief that soy-based foods are a testosterone-lowering marker of coastal liberalism. You can even compete in Christian nationalist athletic events.

Though much can be gleaned from books like Wolfe’s and Torba and Isker’s, this far-right movement is best understood by witnessing their behavior in the wild.

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WHICH BRINGS US back to Ogden.

Conference headliner Brian Sauvé is perhaps best known for his podcast “Haunted Cosmos,” which explores cryptids and the paranormal from an alleged scriptural perspective, offering debatable conclusions such as, maybe, “Mermaids are real.” He’s also a chart-topping Christian musician and the pastor of Refuge Church, which also hosted the approximately 1,500 people interested in hearing from Christian nationalist influencers like Wolfe and Isker about the battle for normality.

The conference, which was extreme enough in its own ways, was dwarfed by attention in Christian and then secular spaces on Antelope Hill—which was not only a vendor but a sponsor of the event. In addition to the SS material, the Antelope Hill table also featured The Sword of Christ, a volume Sauvé and his copastor and podcast cohost Eric Conn admitted to owning and praised as “anti-Zionist” in their hour-long response video. The book contains the bizarre assertion that Christianity explicitly condemns interracial relationships. Nowhere in the response did the pastors condemn Antelope Hill; instead, they affirmed the importance of publishing “historical” sources. (Clearly not committed to historical accuracy, Antelope Hill has been caught editing anti-Christian passages out of at least one of its volumes.)

The debacle has turned many potentially sympathetic conservatives against the most ardent Christian nationalists. Daily Wire cofounder Jeremy Boreing fired back at the crowd during his weekly show, drawing attention to the “hype video” with pro-Hitler iconography shared by Refuge Church’s Eric Conn. Meanwhile Erick Erickson tweeted that “Watching the racists run from the Nazis to maintain their credibility within the church is funny. They’d be saying nothing had others not put up the pictures.”

But the scandal doesn’t seem to have hurt New Christendom in far-right circles. In fact, they seem unrepentant. Wolfe responded to the controversy stating he was looking forward to next year’s conference. The following week, JD Hall, a disgraced journalist popular in Christian nationalist circles praised New Christendom Press to Tucker Carlson’s viewers.

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IT’S TEMPTING TO DISMISS shocking occurrences like Ogdengate as the excesses of a few fringe Protestants. But let’s step back and put this story in a wider historical context. Protestants helped shape this country in definitive ways from before its birth, with seemingly minor religious sects at times decisively informing the United States’ political institutions and culture. Within just our Reformed tradition, Presbyterians founded Princeton University in 1746; three decades later, some loyalists to the British crown would decry the American Revolution as a fundamentally “Presbyterian Rebellion.”

While often a force for good and social reform, American Protestantism has a mixed record with white supremacy. Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy and civil rights minister John M. Perkins testified to how Christ’s people can, in the words of the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like waters.” But, sadly, many of their contemporaries rejected this call, either participating in atrocities like slavery and segregation or looking the other way when their coreligionists did. This tendency to sanctify or at least excuse racism scarred Baptist, Presbyterian and other denominations with regional divorces. There are tragic historical linkages between conservative Protestant theology in the United States and racism, as Christians have read their political preferences and racial prejudices into scripture.

In the past half century, a new faith militant has emerged in American politics. Often mocked, belittled, and underestimated, the Religious Right became a powerful force in conservative politics. Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr., who once declared from the pulpit that integration “will destroy our race eventually,” cofounded the Moral Majority, its name an implicit claim that politically divisive (if not outright intolerant) fundamentalism was, in fact, ‘normal.’ This at-times Righteous Gemstones–type movement—just consider the mess Falwell inherited when he took over his disgraced peer Jim Bakker’s TV and family resort ministry—helped elect President Ronald Reagan in 1980. Thirty-six years later, Jerry Falwell Jr. bestowed then-candidate Donald Trump with his blessing. His endorsement in the 2016 primary marked a turning point for evangelicals, who ultimately rejected other Republican candidates whose beliefs and values more closely resembled their own to embrace instead an adulterer, con artist, and slum lord with an established history of racial discrimination.

In some ways, Christian nationalism is a reaction to Trump. While his success seems to suggest an electoral pathway for culturally conservative, authoritarianish politicians, his (at best) cultural Christianity has provoked the ire of Reformed and restless radicals who don’t like a president who participates in Diwali celebrations or uses AI to compare himself to Jesus Christ. This new religious faction longs for a national figurehead with personal discipline, for a religious-political movement that feels more “intellectually” dignified, for a vision of American family life plucked from a 1950s advertisement. And so, like a cancerous cell metastasizing into an unwitting patient’s blood, Christian nationalism has begun to spread.

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POLITICAL MOVEMENTS LIKE THESE require careful diagnosis.

Many conversations around Christian nationalism frame it as an evangelical Taliban seeking to legislate its narrow interpretation of the faith into a secular American society. This evokes images of Gilead, the hyperpatriarchal theocracy from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that has in the last decade become the subject of increasingly cringey political cosplays. The comparison can be overdrawn; critics of this framing may dismiss attempts to connect the contemporary United States to Gilead as fictional fearmongering, and in turn, they may rightly argue that there’s really nothing wrong with Christians voting their consciences in a true democracy. But those critics would do well to consider that Christian nationalism does not simply mean passing laws informed by Christian values, even if its proponents frequently depict it that way.

“Nationalism” is the operative part of the term. As Stephen Wolfe himself admits, “Christian nationalism is a Christianized form of nationalism or, put differently, a species of nationalism.” It’s in this definition—this shifting of emphasis away from Christ and toward the nation—that the insurmountable gulf between nationalism and Christianity becomes clear.

As an ideology, nationalism was born in the turmoil of the French Revolution, where for the first time in European history the state was explicitly designed as an instrument of a nation (or ethnie). The eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder defined a nation by its pre-existing cultural and linguistic bonds. Only five years after Herder’s death, Johann Fichte presented a more radical proposition: “It is only by means of the common characteristic of being German that we can avert the downfall of our nation which is threatened by its fusion with foreign peoples.” These were existential terms that treated the nation as an organic whole under threat by alien bodies. Like a certain yet-to-be born Austrian painter, Fichte believed that “love of fatherland” must take precedence over any traditional objectives of the state, including peace, property, personal freedom, and “the life and well-being of all.”

In his book Nationalism, the late British historian Elie Kedourie argues that nationalism must be distinguished from patriotism (the love of one’s country) and even from xenophobia (the fear or dislike of the outsider), since “Neither sentiment depends on a particular anthropology and neither asserts a particular doctrine of the state or of the individual’s relation to it.” Nationalism does; it offers “a comprehensive doctrine which leads to a distinctive style of politics.”

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What does this mean for Christianity? In such divisive times, it may be best to consult the source material.

The Apostle Paul clearly instructs: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul affirms Christianity as an evangelical faith that seeks to graft all believers on to the Tree of Life. John of Patmos depicts this very tree in the book of Revelation, explaining that “the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” The words of Christ himself leave no room for national vanity. He does not elevate the nation or, perhaps more meaningful for a first-century Jew, kin-networks, above the well-being of all. Instead, he preached, “For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister, and mother.”

This theme is repeated in On Christian Doctrine, where the great bishop and theologian Augustine argues that “every man is to be considered our neighbour, because we are to work no ill to any man.” When faced with these verses and arguments, contemporary Christian nationalists often argue that Paul’s admonition to the Galatians applies only to the Church. But such a cramped notion contradicts the Gospel answer to the age-old question: Who is my neighbor? As John Calvin elaborates in Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Our Saviour having shown, in the parable of the Samaritan, that the term neighbour comprehends the most remote stranger, there is no reason for limiting the precept of love to our own connections.” In short, the Kingdom of Heaven has no Favoritvolk.

Stephen Wolfe even admits his ideas are outside the bounds of purely scriptural reasoning: “Whether ethno-nationalism is good or bad is a question of political philosophy, not a question of theology,” he recently wrote on X.

When they are being coy, some Christian nationalists suggest that by “Nationalism” they simply mean “the existence of nations.” But this attempt to simplify only smuggles in the very thing at issue: what constitutes a nation? Is it some primordial, pre-existing group of people, defined by ties of blood and soil and culture, which is the dominant view of the bearded Christian nationalists? Or is it a constructed, fluid, changing thing, which to them sounds unmoored and postmodern? The Christian nationalists who use the mealy-mouthed term “Heritage American” believe it is the former, and, like Fichte, that a nation must restrict or bar immigrants who supposedly cannot assimilate.

This racialism, if not outright racism, has always been just below the surface of Christian nationalist discourse. Addressing the 2024 New Christendom Press conference, Wolfe bemoaned the harms brought to America by immigrants who “make their living in the United States . . . but whose hearts remain in Mexico or Africa or the Vatican or the Levant.” And further claimed “hyphenated Americans” are treated as more human than Heritage Americans, who are denied a place to call their own.

Today’s Christian nationalists are desperate to recover a mythical Protestant past. But they are also back-reading recent political developments into Christian history. Their movement has more in common with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European nationalism than, say, the type of people-group with whom God made his covenant in the Book of Exodus. As Kedourie writes, “the very word nation has been endowed by nationalism with a meaning and a resonance which until the end of the eighteenth century it was far from having.”

Even for conservative believers, there remain many paths besides Christian nationalism; a variety of views on political theology that preceded this movement and will outlast it, and faithful Christians would do well to seek them while avoiding the errors of Christian nationalism’s current prominent proponents.

Our own denomination, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, has given us much hope: A study committee within the denomination released a report that scholar Matthew D. Taylor characterizes as setting “theological boundaries against Christian nationalism using the denomination’s own confessional standards.” It includes a defense of the values of liberal democracy, which, the report states, have “secured genuine goods, including protections for religious liberty, limitations on arbitrary political power, recognition of human dignity, and the expansion of certain civil and political rights.” The report also makes explicit denunciations of ethnonationalism and Kinism, the fringe belief in some Reformed circles that God has ordained the separation of the races and commands segregation.

There is no need to discard other explicitly Christian political philosophies, such as the Reformed tradition that informs this PCA report, for eighteenth-century European nationalism. That wolf may arrive dressed up in sheep’s clothing—or, indeed, the Lamb of God’s.

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Philip D. Bunn is an assistant professor of political science at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. His research has been published in Political Research Quarterly and American Political Thought, and his reviews and essays have appeared in Plough Quarterly, Comment Magazine, and the University Bookman, among other publications.

Eli McGowan is a Presbyterian Christian who grew up around the world in a large military homeschooling family. He holds a BS in government from Liberty University and an MFA in film and television from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He currently freelances as a producer, cinematographer, and lighting director in the motion picture industry. He also serves as an adjunct professor of Visual Art at Covenant College. He has broken a number of stories about Christian nationalism on X. He and his family live in rural Appalachia and are second-generation homeschoolers.

Emily McGowan is an Army brat who grew up to study 1960s protest music and write dystopian fiction. After earning a BS in government from Liberty University and an MFA in writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design, she became an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Bryan College, where she also serves as an administrator, journal sponsor, moot court coach, and literary contest organizer/emcee. When not nursing her Diet Coke addiction, she enjoys travel abroad, thrifting, and spending time with her family.

REPORTS SUGGEST MAJ. JASON WATSON struggled with his decision; he understood there could be serious professional consequences. Nevertheless, on July 1 he appeared on the steps of the United States Capitol wearing the uniform of an active-duty Air Force officer and called for the impeachment of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Over the past few days, many Americans have praised Maj. Watson’s conscience and his courage; others have condemned his actions. The Air Force has announced an investigation that will determine whether his conduct violated military law or regulations. That process ought to proceed fairly and deliberately, without political interference or premature conclusions.

Regardless of how Maj. Watson’s individual case is ultimately resolved, the public debate surrounding it reveals that many Americans do not understand the obligations of military service in a constitutional republic. Much of the discussion has centered on whether he had a moral obligation to speak. While that is an understandable question, it is not the only one. The more important question is whether an active-duty officer may use the authority and symbolism of the nation’s military uniform to advocate for a partisan political outcome. On this, the American profession of arms has been remarkably clear and consistent for generations.

Personally, I do not question Maj. Watson’s sincerity or his struggle with the decision. Every commissioned officer should wrestle with questions of conscience. Throughout my career, I expected fellow professionals to think deeply about the moral implications of military service, their expression of beliefs, and their actions. This sort of critical reflection is necessary: Soldiers are required to question unlawful orders, seek legal advice when confronted with ethical dilemmas, and possess the moral courage to stand against actions that violate the Constitution, the law, or the values of the profession. Conscience is not merely compatible with military service, it is indispensable to it.

But conscience alone has never been the standard by which commissioned officers are judged. Professional responsibility is. Because that distinction—between personal beliefs and the commitments of military service—has defined the American profession of arms since the founding of the republic. American citizens are entirely free to disagree about whether a president deserves impeachment, but military personnel—especially officers—are not free to employ the prestige of the uniform to advocate that position publicly.

During more than three decades in uniform, I commanded at every level—from tank companies eventually up to the United States Army Europe. At each one of those commands, political neutrality was an essential element of military professionalism. Every election cycle brought reminders from every level of commanders and Department of Defense directives governing political activity. Young lieutenants and privates learned that they retained the right to vote, contribute to political campaigns, write their elected representatives, and privately hold whatever political opinions they wished. But they also learned there were clear lines they could never cross while serving in uniform.

These boundaries are not to protect presidents from criticism. They are a bedrock of American civil-military relations, designed to protect the Constitution from any risk or perception that the U.S. military had become a political force. We did not teach these principles because a certain party leader occupied the White House. We taught them because every officer serves the Constitution first, and also because civilian control of the military depends upon armed forces whose loyalty is beyond political question.

One of the officers who occupies a key position in the pantheon of apolitical advocates and one who most influenced my own understanding of that obligation was General George C. Marshall. Marshall certainly held personal political opinions. There is proof he privately disagreed forcefully with President Franklin Roosevelt on many occasions, and later did the same while serving President Harry Truman, and then others after retiring from the Army. But while wearing the uniform, Marshall never sought to enlist the public in political disagreements. His influence came from offering candid military advice in private, then faithfully executing lawful decisions once civilian leaders had made them. Marshall understood that the Army’s credibility depended not upon winning political arguments but on earning the confidence of the American people through disciplined professionalism.1

Wearing the uniform is also central to this current discussion. Had Maj. Watson appeared in civilian clothes, speaking only as a private citizen without comment on his rank or position in the Air Force, the legal and professional analysis would be very different. Instead, he chose to appear in uniform. Because of that decision, to most Americans, he is no longer simply Jason Watson; rather, he appears to represent the United States Air Force itself.

The uniform does not belong only to the individual wearing it. It also represents every airman who has earned the privilege of wearing it before him, every airman serving beside him today, and every young American who will wear it tomorrow. It represents thousands of officers and enlisted personnel whose political views undoubtedly span the entire American ideological spectrum. Some may agree with Maj. Watson’s views; others certainly do not. Appearing in uniform inevitably invites the public to associate the institution with the individual’s political advocacy—precisely why the Department of Defense has long prohibited active-duty service members from engaging in partisan political activity while in uniform. The restriction protects the institution and the Constitution, not any politician on any given day.

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Some citizens have written to me commending Maj. Watson as exceedingly brave, suggesting he should perhaps even be viewed as a whistleblower. That argument misunderstands both military law and the purpose of whistleblower protections. Congress established those protections to encourage service members to report fraud, abuse, waste, violations of law, or dangers to public safety through designated constitutional channels, such as inspectors general, members of Congress, and other authorized authorities. Those protections exist because institutions must never punish individuals for exposing genuine wrongdoing through lawful means.

Maj. Watson’s public advocacy for the impeachment of the commander-in-chief while wearing the nation’s uniform is something entirely different. It is not a question of whether Maj. Watson believed he was acting morally. The issue is whether he chose a method long prohibited because it risks undermining public confidence in an apolitical military institution. Sincerity does not transform political advocacy into a protected action.

Others have suggested to me that if an officer sincerely believes the president is violating the Constitution, citing as an excuse that, because we are in “different times,” speaking out publicly becomes a moral obligation. That argument also misunderstands the profession. Military officers are never expected to abandon their conscience, and there are mechanisms in place to raise concerns and report misconduct. And if they feel they cannot, in good conscience, continue serving, they should resign their commissions and continue their protest as civilians. Those mechanisms exist precisely because the profession recognizes that officers will sometimes confront profound ethical dilemmas.

What the profession does not permit is using the authority of the uniform itself as part of a political platform. The First Amendment does not cease to exist at the entrance to military installations, but officers must voluntarily accept professional restrictions on how they exercise certain constitutional rights. The nation gives military officers responsibilities unlike those of any other profession: command over Americans’ sons and daughters, stewardship of enormous public resources, access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets, and, when necessary, the lawful application of deadly force. In return, officers accept obligations that extend beyond those imposed on ordinary citizens.

Those obligations are sometimes uncomfortable, occasionally requiring extraordinary personal restraint. They may even demand officers remain publicly silent when they feel strongly about political events unfolding around them. That silence should never be mistaken for indifference or cowardice. More often, it reflects a conscious commitment to preserving the institution they have sworn to serve.

Some readers will undoubtedly disagree with this proposition because they admire the moral courage that they believe Maj. Watson displayed. I understand that reaction. Moral courage is one of the military profession’s defining virtues. Yet moral courage does not exist independently of professional judgment. Every profession establishes ethical boundaries governing how its members exercise their responsibilities. Doctors may not violate patient confidentiality because they believe doing so serves a greater good. Judges may not campaign publicly on behalf of litigants whose cause they personally support. Journalists must not fabricate evidence in pursuit of a story they believe is true. Likewise, military officers may not employ the prestige of the uniform to advance partisan political objectives, regardless of how sincerely they hold those convictions.

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THE AMERICAN MILITARY has earned extraordinary public trust over nearly two and a half centuries. That trust has survived wars, political crises, social upheaval, and changes in administrations. Part of what sustains that trust is that the public has consistently believed that its armed forces belong to the nation rather than to any political party or ideology. Such confidence has not emerged by chance. It has been built through generations of officers and enlisted personnel who understood that the uniform represented something larger than themselves.

I do not know what disciplinary action Maj. Watson ultimately may face, nor should anyone outside the military justice process presume that outcome. He deserves the same fairness, due process, and careful consideration afforded every American service member. The investigation will determine whether his conduct violated any one of several articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Department of Defense policy, or Air Force regulations. That final determination belongs to commanders and military legal authorities—not to anyone who recommends how the military should act as a profession.

The vital issue of civil-military relations is why Maj. Watson’s story matters. It is not ultimately about one Air Force officer, one president, or one political controversy. It is about preserving a constitutional tradition and a professional military ethos that has distinguished the American armed forces since the beginning of our republic. The cloth of our country is not the service members’ to use for personal political convictions, no matter how deeply they are held. It belongs to the republic, and the first duty while wearing the uniform is to ensure that every American, regardless of party, belief, or ideology, continues to feel confident that it always will.

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POLITICO REPORTED ON MONDAY AFTERNOON that Graham Platner’s ex-girlfriend said he “forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections.” Immediately after the story was published, Platner, the Democratic nominee in the race for Maine’s Senate seat, posted an uncomfortable video denying the allegations without making clear whether he would drop out of the race.

He should, and not just on moral grounds. Because before this story was published, Maine voters in our focus groups told us that they would likely abandon Platner over this exact type of scandal.

Back on June 3, we held one such focus group with Maine women who had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. This group was convened six days before Platner clinched the nomination, and one day before the New York Times’s initial exposé on Platner, in which numerous former girlfriends called him “toxic,” “unsettling,” and “physically threatening.”

There had already been months of talk about Platner’s bad behavior at this point, including about his Nazi tattoo. But many in the group were still planning on supporting him. So we asked them what would make them change their vote.

The answer:

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• Monday's "Morning Shots"

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JVL’s mother-in-law passed away last night. JVL texted me and Tim in the middle of the night to let us know about her passing and to say that he couldn’t write The Triad this week.

I scrolled up and looked at the picture JVL had sent us over the weekend of his entire family camped out in the living room, surrounding her and keeping vigil.

And I had a thought: Readers of this newsletter obviously know a lot about JVL, because he weaves his life into his writing. But there’s something about him you might not know.

JVL loves people.

Yes, I know. His assessment of “The People” in this newsletter is often bleak, occasionally bordering on misanthropic. But it’s always a little funny to me, because IRL no one loves individual people harder and with more devotion than JVL. Someday I will convince him that “people” are just lots of individuals.

You know the maximalist way he’s always making pronouncements both on the pods and in his writing? “WE’RE ALL DOOMED,” “AMERICA IS OVER.” Ironically, that’s also how he loves people. Pedal to the metal. He’s always telling me, in totally benign contexts, that he’d take a bullet for me—which is lovely, but not the required response to asking him to get a sub for The Secret Pod while I’m traveling.

The Bulwark community gets to see a lot of our friendship on display. But there are always a few minutes before and after we tape, where we talk about the things not fit for public consumption. And over the last couple of months we’ve mostly talked about his mother-in-law.

JVL really forking loved her. He loved her in a do-anything, be-anywhere, drop­-everything-for-her kind of way—which is why he’s going to be taking some time away from The Triad.

But here’s the thing. JVL loves lots of people like that. Obviously his wife and family. But also a bunch of us here at The Bulwark, starting with Bill. As many of you know, JVL and I hardly knew each other when The Bulwark started, and the whole bit about us being “best friends” was sort of a way of breaking the ice, because it was weird to be recording a two-person podcast with someone I hardly knew, and even weirder to be building a whole new publication with him.

But now I also think maybe he was manifesting the future. Because if you looked at the people I talk to most, it wouldn’t be silly to guess that JVL and I were actually best friends from way back, the way Tim and I are.

Now the three of us are enmeshed in each other’s lives in ways we couldn’t have imagined when The Bulwark was just getting started.

In fact, the three of us are on a text chain that is an endless mix of work conversations about The Bulwark and our lives. We have a separate chain that includes JVL’s wife.

JVL’s love for people is so strong that by sheer force it encompasses those around them—their own families and loved ones. It can’t be contained to a single person.

Tim and I were recently in Aspen together and were talking about JVL behind his back. And Tim said that “JVL’s devotion to his mother-in-law is almost hard to process because . . . who loves their mother-in-law that much? Usually when you hear about mothers-in-law, it’s in the context of a complaint. I mean I have a great mother-in-law but I’ve never heard anyone in my life be so effusive or committed to their spouse’s mom.”

Tim said it almost makes you wonder if there is an angle of some kind, or if it’s a trick JVL is trying to play on God so he can get into heaven. How can Mr. ‘Falcon Heavy Into the Sun’ also be the person who only takes off work to tend to an ill mother-in-law or do favors for church friends? But that’s the thing with JVL, it’s not a trick, it’s just Maximum JVL Guaranteed, no matter the circumstance.

That’s our boy.

Currently, JVL and my wife are having an ongoing text conversation about coordinating pinball machines. (Do you think either of us were considering a pinball machine before JVL decided they were mandatory for a life well lived? We were not.) And JVL has managed to become best friends with my real-life best friend, with whom he often shares details about his life prior to sharing them with me. I’m not saying they’re closer than I am to either of them, but as JVL might say, I’m not not saying that.

He’s like a cranky love bomb that has, over the years, somehow become my work husband (which is the only kind of husband of interest), business partner, podcast cohost, editor of my book, and perennial gut-check. Also, for all of our disagreements, he’s the best writer I’ve ever encountered. No one who is as good as him is as fast as him. And no one who is as fast as him is as good as him.

I know a bunch of you all who get this newsletter have felt JVL’s love, and become his friends. I’m sure you have stories of him responding to an email you never expected anyone to read, or giving a detailed and thoughtful answer to a question you had, or convincing you to spend too much money on a new watch.

Just like the time, against my vociferous protestations, he sent my kids an inflatable bouncy house during the pandemic. Obviously it turned out to be an endless source of joy and occasional headbumps, which gave me the opportunity to shout “Get up! You’re fine!” at regular intervals. Which was fun for me.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but we’re really lucky to have JVL. The fact that he puts out this newsletter five days a week—plus all the podcasts and videos and everything else he does—is a testament to how much he loves this community, and how hard he loves in general.

Honestly, that’s all I wanted to say. This is a JVL appreciation post. We love you, man.

If you want to do something nice for JVL and his family, his mother-in-law was a big fan of this charity, and I’m sure it would mean a lot to them if you guys wanted to send something their way.

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Andrew Egger is off for two weeks, but somehow we’ll keep this newsletter going until he gets back. Happy Monday.

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America Lives Abroad

by William Kristol

Well, it’s July 6. And I think I can say this with some confidence: Donald Trump tried to hijack our 250th anniversary, and he failed. Both the Declaration of Independence and our subsequent history turned out to be too weighty and too elevated to yield easily to Trump’s insane grandiosity and insistent mediocrity.

Before his July 3 speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump posted a video that showed a kind of golden sculpture of the mountain, with his image added to those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Trump’s voiceover on the video claimed, “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The president did protest too much, methinks. Deep down, or not even that deep down, he knows that in years to come, no one will think he is in their league. To say the least.

Then there was Trump’s July Fourth extravaganza. For all of his narcissism, even he knew it was a flop. As soon as he returned from the Mall, Trump turned frantically to Truth Social. He posted over 100 times on July 5, lauding his own achievements, attacking his opponents, and generally behaving like someone who sensed that the 250th anniversary, despite or because of his attempts to hijack it, made him look small. Former BBC foreign correspondent Nick Bryant , who covered American politics for decades, put it well: “On America’s 250th birthday, Donald Trump was dwarfed by history.”

And he was dwarfed by the World Cup. Trump’s 250th anniversary sport of choice was the ugly gladiatorial spectacle he hosted at the White House for his eightieth birthday on June 14. Three days later, the World Cup matches began throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. We’ve had three weeks of enjoyable and often memorable contests. Who now remembers the unpleasant cage matches on the South Lawn?

Trump’s behavior over the weekend was also dwarfed by the example set by the first American pope. On July 3, Pope Leo XIV accepted a Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He spoke live from the Vatican to a crowd gathered in front of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted—and which Trump did not choose to visit.

As the chronicler of Pope Leo, Christopher Hale, points out, “The pope opened his remarks with a sentence no previous pope could have spoken: ‘As a son of this great country, founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty and of a better life for themselves and for their children, I join you in asking God’s blessings upon America’s future.’” Leo continued by emphasizing that, in fulfillment of the Founders’ vision, America became “a byword for freedom, as the country opened its doors to successive waves of immigrants, enabling them and their children to play their part in shaping the future of the nation.”

On Independence Day itself, the Pope made a remarkable visit to the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where many migrants from Africa to Europe have landed—and in hopes of reaching which so many have perished. You can read Hale’s moving account of the pope’s visit and his remarks here.

I trust—but I also believe—that Leo’s vision of America will end up prevailing over Trump’s.

This evening, President Trump will fly to Ankara, Turkey, for the annual NATO summit. For more than 75 years, NATO has been a distinctive American contribution to world peace as well as being an instrument of American greatness. We’ll have to hope that Trump doesn’t do too much more damage to NATO or further embarrass the United States on the world stage.

But we’ll also be able to watch and listen to another president, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who embodies the principles of NATO and really of the United States, better than our president. After the summit, a bipartisan congressional delegation will head to Hungary to meet with new Prime Minister Péter Magyar, a recent example of a fighter for liberal democracy prevailing over its antagonists. Needless to say, Trump won’t be there.

The American founders. The first American Pope. Zelensky and Magyar. It is their spirit that captures the true meaning of our 250th anniversary. It is their spirit, if I can adapt William Faulkner’s line from his 1950 Nobel Prize address, that will not only endure but will prevail.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Withdrawing Troops From Europe Is a Policy in Search of a Problem… The Pentagon’s force posture review seems designed to justify a policy already well underway, writes MARK HERTLING.

• A Belated Appreciation of John Adams… In the July episode of The Bulwark Book Club, MONA CHAREN interviews presidential historian LINDSAY CHERVINSKY about her book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic.

• Voters are Sounding More and More Like Trump on Birthright Citizenship… He lost in court. But he’s bending reality to his warped point of view, reports SARAH LONGWELL, fresh off some focus groups.

• Donald Trump Is Bringing Back ‘Death Panels’... There’s a good kind and a bad kind, and it looks like we’ll be getting both, observes JONATHAN COHN.

• America’s 250 Great (and Awful) Years… On The Focus Group podcast, HEATHER COX RICHARDSON joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss voters’ complicated relationship with patriotism this year, and the lessons of history for rebuilding from the Trump years.

Quick Hits

RED CARD REVERSED: We laughed, collectively, when FIFA President Gianni Infantino bestowed upon Donald Trump the first ever peace prize issued by the soccer federation. But we’re crying with joy (though, let’s be honest, we’re all just a bit aghast) now that Trump has put his well-earned FIFA credentials to good use. The president reportedly called Infantino last week to talk about the red card given to U.S. striker Folarin Balogun during the game against Bosnia-Herzegovina. The card meant Balogun would be suspended for the round-of-sixteen match against Belgium.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, FIFA reversed the suspension citing its rules that lets its disciplinary committee “fully or partially suspend the implementation of a disciplinary measure” and place a player on probation instead.1 Something like this hasn’t happened in a World Cup since 1962—which hasn’t gone unnoticed by THE REST OF THE WORLD, which is wondering what integrity is left in this tournament.

The White House is doing the bare minimum of spin right now, insisting it was not pressuring Infantino, so much as just trying to get a read on what had happened. But the actual level of resources and attention this behind-the-scenes effort involved makes you wonder if the planning for the Iran war received similar care. And Trump, predictably, couldn’t help but crow. After posting an old photo of himself and Macaulay Culkin at some press event featuring the World Cup trophy, he authored another bleet thanking “FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!”

THE YEAR OF EPSTEIN: It was one year ago today that the country finally received the answers it had been clamoring for about Jeffrey Epstein, his years-long criminal conspiracy, and his connections to powerful and influential people inside and outside the government. Trump’s FBI and Justice Department declared that:

[W]hile we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.

And with that, the entire controversy died down and no one asked any more questions, or even thought about it ever again. Certainly not the president, or the FBI director, or former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who lost her job because of her mishandling of the “modified limited hangout” strategy that culminated in that infamous July 6, 2025 memo.

And certainly not Todd Blanche, who was intimately involved in all of the strategizing around the release of the Epstein files, as documented most recently in the book Regime Change. Blanche, who was deputy attorney general at the time, is now up for confirmation to be attorney general. And his hearings in the Senate are next week. Let’s see how much scrutiny he comes under for his role in handling the Epstein scandal, or if Republicans mention it at all.

SOCIAL INSECURITY: Neither party understands Social Security—how it works, or why it’s in trouble. As Joe Perticone wrote last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson stumbled awkwardly on the “third rail of American politics” when he suggested the House might reform the program to maintain its solvency if Republicans keep control next year. But . . .

Johnson continued to leave it unclear exactly what he’d do about that waste, fraud, and abuse, which, frankly, is not as prevalent as he and other Republicans often insist. But any proposed reform would almost certainly involve further restricting eligibility for those programs to exclude more of their current beneficiaries—along the lines of what Republicans did with Medicaid last year.

Tackling “waste, fraud, and abuse” won’t cut it (so to speak). And neither will wishing the problem away. In the Atlantic, Jessica Reidl explains what both parties get wrong about Social Security:

Let’s start with progressives. Their framework argues that Social Security is primarily an anti-poverty program for senior citizens. And those benefits, the story goes, are endangered by an inexplicable quirk in the law that applies Social Security payroll taxes to only the first $184,500 in annual wages (a figure that rises annually with wage inflation). Eliminate the cap, apply Social Security taxes to all wage income, and Social Security will automatically be funded for generations and could even pay for large benefit expansions.

The first problem with this argument is math. . . .

The conservative misunderstanding of Social Security is widely available in Facebook memes. These voters will tell you that an individual’s Social Security payroll taxes are stored in a trust fund—an extensive government savings account—until they retire, when those savings are returned to them in monthly checks. And because seniors are simply being repaid from their earlier contributions, the system would never have run a budget deficit were it not for the greedy politicians who raided the trust fund or all of the illegal immigrants who stole trillions of dollars from the program. Thus, simply repaying the trust fund and deporting the immigrants would restore Social Security to permanent solvency.

Obviously, none of this is accurate.

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THIS WEEK, AS NATO LEADERS gather in Ankara, Turkey for their annual summit, the Department of Defense is continuing a comprehensive review of America’s force posture in Europe—i.e., what forces the United States maintains there, what their capabilities are, and where exactly they’re stationed or deployed. The goal, according to a DOD publication, is “that the alliance will pull its own weight in terms of defense funds spent and that Europe will take the lead in maintaining its defense.”

The debate over force posture risks becoming an exercise in counting brigades and troop numbers rather than evaluating strategy—especially when it’s connected, as it inevitably will be, to the administration’s poorly explained and apparently vindictive decisions to withdraw troops from Europe or rebase them around the continent. Military posture is about far more than the number of soldiers stationed on the continent. It is principally about preserving America’s ability to act—militarily, diplomatically, economically, and politically—when the next crisis arrives.

It seems entirely likely that the result of this review—which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said could take less than six months—will be further reductions of American forces in Europe. That may be appropriate, though having participated in the last two meticulous reductions of forces in Europe, I have my doubts. The bigger issue is that Secretary Hegseth and his aides seem to have arrived at a “solution” before they’ve taken the time to study the problem. Reducing American forces in Europe for its own sake doesn’t seem to be a strategic goal; rather, it’s a policy in search of a rationale.

Simply put, force posture should be where strategy connects resources and geography. The process of deciding force posture should translate national objectives into airfields, ports, headquarters, logistics hubs, transportation networks, training areas, pre-positioned equipment, alliances, and military formations around the world. The positioning of America’s military should be the ways and means to preserve American freedom of action. A force posture review should never begin with a map covered in unit symbols, but with a strategy—a goal and a plan for achieving it. Before we ask where American forces should be stationed, and in what numbers and strengths, we first should ask what options will be necessary and useful to future presidents in an emergency.

Strategists rarely ask, “Where can we move forces?” They ask, “What capabilities must we preserve, and from where can they best influence events?” One approach measures success by counting troops. The other measures success by preserving national options.

SERVING FOR MORE THAN A DECADE in Europe—as a planner, a division commander, and ultimately as the commander of U.S. Army Europe—I participated in two of the most significant force posture transformations in modern American military history. The first followed the end of the Cold War, when America’s permanent Army presence in Europe declined from nearly 300,000 soldiers to roughly 90,000 as the Soviet threat disappeared and a democratic Europe emerged. The second occurred about a decade later when the Army force on the continent was reduced from approximately 90,000 soldiers to about 34,000.

The shortest, simplest way to describe those strategic changes is in numbers—as I’ve just done. But simply counting heads does more to obscure than to explain those force posture decisions and their effects.

We replaced large, permanent formations with units specifically designed to ensure mission accomplishment, with new facilities, rotational armored brigades, expanded pre-positioned stocks so equipment remained in theater, modernized and world-class multinational training centers, strengthened strategic mobility, and stronger military relationships with new allies and partners that had once stood behind the Iron Curtain.

The objective was never simply to reduce numbers. In fact, the reduction in personnel stationed in Europe can best be described as a simple consequence of the real goal, which was to reduce spending while preserving—and in many respects expanding—America’s strategic flexibility in a changing new security environment.

That experience reinforced one lesson above all others: Successful force posture reviews are measured not by how many units disappear from a chart but by whether the nation gains or loses strategic options. Every decision was aimed at expanding America’s freedom of action during the next crisis. (As I’ve written before, I thought at the time that some of the decisions we made were misaligned with the security environment and the national interest. Even a good process can’t prevent mistakes and errors.)

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BECAUSE FORCE POSTURE IS ABOUT the country’s overall national security goals and our government’s response to potential crises, the review process should not belong to the Defense Department alone.

Military leaders understandably focus on readiness, capabilities, and operational requirements. But force posture influences every element of national power. The Department of State understands how military presence affects diplomacy and alliance management. Treasury and Commerce appreciate how security commitments shape investment, trade, industrial cooperation, and economic resilience. The intelligence community will evaluate how allies and adversaries interpret and respond to American force placement decisions. Congress authorizes resources, exercises oversight, and represents the American people in determining long-term national commitments. Our allies themselves will also have legitimate perspectives because the infrastructure, access agreements, and relationships that underpin American power have been built together over generations, and those governments will also place their security forces to complement U.S. basing locations.

A force posture review worthy of its name should reflect all those perspectives. If it doesn’t, it risks becoming a manpower exercise rather than a strategy review.

Some will argue that Europe has become wealthy enough to defend itself. Others will contend that China—not Russia—is America’s defining strategic challenge, and there should be a visible “pivot” to locations in the east. Still others will correctly observe that many European governments underinvested in defense for years while relying heavily upon American capabilities. Each of these arguments contains elements of truth. But they also overlook important history.

The effort to encourage greater European defense spending did not begin with President Trump. Debates about burden sharing in European defense can be traced back as far as NATO’s 1952 meeting in Lisbon, when allied leaders realized that the European NATO members wouldn’t be able to raise the regular forces necessary for their defense, and would rely instead on America’s nuclear arsenal. More recently, in June 2011, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates delivered a remarkably candid speech in Brussels warning NATO leaders of a “dim if not dismal future” if alliance members failed to reverse declining defense investment. Such prodding from the United States continued throughout the Obama administration and became significantly more urgent after Russia’s illegal seizure of Crimea in 2014. President Trump intensified that pressure through much sharper rhetoric, but the strategic objective remained consistent across administrations: Encourage European allies to assume greater responsibility for their own defense while preserving the alliance that magnifies American power.

By many measures, that strategy and the related pressure has worked over the last decade, over four administrations.

Because of this, and the increased Russian threat, European defense spending has increased dramatically. Allies have expanded military production, rebuilt ammunition stockpiles, modernized command structures, strengthened air and missile defenses, and invested in capabilities that had atrophied following the end of the Cold War. Those developments represent one of NATO’s most significant strategic successes of the past decade.

Some now argue that these improvements justify reducing America’s own presence in Europe. But that suggestion misunderstands why American forces are stationed there in the first place. They are not there simply to defend Europe, but to enable America, provide us global flexibility, while meeting our strategic objectives.

Military power rarely operates within neatly defined political boundaries. Logistics certainly do not. Europe’s mature network of ports, airfields, headquarters, maintenance facilities, transportation infrastructure, intelligence architecture, and allied relationships has become one of America’s greatest strategic advantages. During operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly every major deployment, sustainment mission, casualty evacuation, and redeployment flowed through that network. More recently, the conflict with Iran once again demonstrated how indispensable those command relationships, logistics hubs, intelligence capabilities, and transportation systems remain.

The same logic applies to the Indo-Pacific. Any future confrontation with China would demand simultaneous operations across multiple theaters while protecting the homeland, reinforcing allies, sustaining global supply chains, and maintaining commitments elsewhere around the world. A quick perusal of the histories of the world’s great powers, from Rome to the British Empire, shows that great powers do not have the luxury of focusing on a single region. They compete through global networks of alliances, infrastructure, logistics, economic capacity, and strategic geography. Europe remains one of America’s strongest nodes in that worldwide network. Weakening it would not strengthen America’s position in Asia; it would diminish America’s ability to respond everywhere.

Force posture, therefore, should never be viewed as an accounting exercise. It should be seen as an exercise to provide strategic flexibility.

Every headquarters retained, every training area modernized, every logistics hub protected, every pre-positioned equipment site maintained, every access agreement renewed, and every alliance strengthened expands the choices available to future presidents. Every unnecessary and haphazard reduction narrows those choices. Once abandoned, headquarters, training areas, logistics hubs, repair facilities, equipment stocks, access agreements, and alliances cannot be recreated during a crisis. They require years—often decades—of diplomacy, investment, trust, and cooperation to rebuild.

Over Independence Day, Americans gathered with family and friends, watched parades and fireworks, reflected on our nation’s founding, and honored generations of men and women who have defended the freedoms secured nearly 250 years ago. Yet our independence itself was never achieved in isolation. Throughout our history—from the Revolution to World War II, the Cold War, and into the twenty-first century—America’s greatest strategic successes have depended not only on military strength, but on geography, partnerships, and alliances patiently cultivated over generations.

For nearly 250 years, America’s security has depended not only on the courage of those in uniform, but on the wisdom of the civilian and military leaders who decide where those forces should stand, whom they should stand beside, and what strategic options they would preserve for those who followed.

That is the responsibility facing today’s leaders. And the decisions deserve to be guided by strategy, informed by history, and measured not by the next budget cycle or the desires of a few, but by the needs of the next generation.

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A MAJORITY OF THE SUPREME COURT decided last week to follow the obvious, black-letter text of the Constitution and uphold birthright citizenship. This should not have been a close call.

But the ruling—a 5–4 decision that Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship was unconstitutional—showed that the justices were torn. And they’re hardly alone. When we conducted a focus group with Donald Trump voters on the eve of the decision, participants expressed an alarming degree of skepticism toward the nearly 160-year old legal precedent.

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This was a group of Florida women who voted for Trump in 2024. Here’s Debbie:

This kind of thinking is grounded in the zero-sum mentality that Trump has always used to frame the issue of immigration. Foreigners take, Americans lose out. Many participants in the focus group viewed immigrants as a threat to the country and a drain on our resources, which is something like the median position for Republican voters today. Here’s Dianna:

Still, in this group, there was broad support among participants for those who come to America “the right way.” Here’s Tatiana, who emigrated from Ukraine and recently became a citizen:

Tatiana has seen this process from the inside. But oftentimes voters are not familiar with the byzantine, years-long, bureaucratic nightmare that is our immigration system. They just know that there is a process for citizenship, and they think that people should follow it.

This is what I call the moral alibi. In these voters’ telling, they are not hostile to immigrants coming to America. It simply becomes a process question: one about fairness and rules, as opposed to a question about being pro- or anti-immigrant.

Even so, the average Republican voter still isn’t nearly as hostile to immigration as Trump and Stephen Miller. Voters contain multitudes, and many sympathize with the plight of immigrants. Cyndi said she worried that Trump’s approach to immigration would endanger people who became citizens the right way, like her son-in-law, who earned his citizenship in high school:

She went on:

It’s something to think about as we think about global goodwill as well, when you start kicking people out of our country. And why are you doing it? Do you actually have a reason for it?

The attempt to end birthright citizenship was the administration’s most audacious effort yet to rewrite the Constitution around Trump’s warped view of immigration. And even though it failed, it has clearly further moved the frame of the debate. Many rank-and-file Republicans now sound a lot more like Trump and Miller on immigration than the immigration squishes/reformers whom I grew up admiring <cough, Marco Rubio, cough>. Immigration hawkishness spurred Trump’s rise in 2016 and propelled his return to office in 2024. And it is going to be a litmus test for any GOP presidential aspirant in 2028 and beyond.

That is likely to be Trump’s lasting legacy on this issue. He lost in court, but he won the debate inside his coalition.

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Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, host of The Focus Group podcast, and author of How to Eat an Elephant, out on September 8.

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Blast from the Past

Back in the long-ago days of 2009, when Barack Obama and the Democrats were in the middle of their grueling fight to pass what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act, they adopted a proposal under which doctors who sat down to discuss end-of-life planning with patients could bill Medicare for the time.

It was a bipartisan, seemingly innocuous, plan. The idea was to make these conversations easier to arrange, so that people would have more agency over how they spend their final days. Then a conservative commentator named Elizabeth McCaughey discovered the provision in the legislative text.1 And all hell broke loose.

McCaughey went on Rush Limbaugh’s show and insisted the provision would “absolutely require” doctors to meet with patients, advising them on how to “decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care . . . all to do what’s in society’s best interest or in your family’s best interest and cut your life short.” She went on to write a New York Post column called “Deadly Doctors” in which she claimed Obama health care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, who supported the idea, wanted to ration care for people with Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities.

The swipe at Emanuel, an oncologist and bioethicist who had been writing about how to help the kind of families he had seen as a practitioner, was as egregious as the description of the provision was dishonest. But McCaughey’s argument took on a life of its own in the right-wing universe, especially after former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin got involved and started talking about how the legislation was allegedly proposing to create “death panels.”2 Eventually Democrats removed the end-of-life provision entirely. But the smear campaign had a lasting impact. Polling from the research organization KFF found that in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law, four in ten Americans still believed it had death panels.3

I am writing about that history now because death panels are back—only this time, it’s not coming from the Democrats. It’s coming from Donald Trump and his top health care advisers.

A new regulatory proposal from the Trump administration,

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For The Bulwark Book Club for July, Mona interviews presidential historian Lindsay about her book Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic.

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Read Lindsay’s essay “Who Gets to Claim 1776?”

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🚨OVERTIME🚨

🎆Happy 4th, everyone!🎇 I trust some of you have been enjoying the World Cup like I have. I was sad to miss Friday’s excellent matches due to a road trip! Cabo Verde? Amazing stuff. Egypt in PKs? Mohamed Salah’s panenka? Brutal.

While I’ve been worried about my Cleveland Guardians… during World Cup Madness, these last few walk off wins against the White Sox have allayed my fears (for now.)

New here? Need some help? Try our new help center! It has quick answers to the questions we hear most often.

America in the World… Jay Nordlinger argues that America’s global example depends on living up to its founding ideals of liberty and equality.

Phil Edwards went to The Villages… A report from America’s baby boomer “utopia.”

How the coney… became a Cincinnati favorite. (Vince Guerrieri, Ohio Magazine)

Comment discussion prompt: What’s something out of the ordinary you’re doing this July for America 250 (if anything)?

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—30—

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THE VERY HEART OF AMERICA’S political tradition, the Declaration of Independence articulates many of the tenets that have shaped and guided the United States since 1776. So, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, let us recall that it offered principles not only for domestic politics but for the international arena as well.

Most of us are familiar with the Declaration’s invocation of natural rights and popular sovereignty as the legitimate basis of government. But what is perhaps less well known is the Declaration’s vision of international order: a vision of sovereign states accountable to their own people, equal to one another, but with both rights and duties to other states. It took centuries to construct such an international order, however imperfectly, but it has served both America and the world well. Because Donald Trump and his appointees and advisers neither understand nor appreciate this achievement, his administration is haphazardly dismantling this vision and abandoning the document that has been America’s political and moral compass.

To understand the Declaration’s guidance on international order, let’s begin with the way it appeals to the “opinions of mankind” by submitting facts “to a candid world.” In doing so, the signers of the Declaration sought the recognition of other nations as a legitimate sovereign state in its armed struggle against imperial Britain. The signatories notified the world that America was assuming “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature” entitled it by dissolving ties with Britain.

Underpinning these steps is the idea, embedded in the Declaration, that governments lawfully and legitimately derive their power from the people, and are instituted by the people for their safety and happiness. To make these claims, the authors of the Declaration—Thomas Jefferson, joined in a committee by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—drew on the cosmopolitan ideas of John Locke, as well as lesser-known figures like Algernon Sidney. Both men argued that popular sovereignty was the truly legitimate basis of sovereign states. But the authors of the Declaration also drew on a leading theorist of the law of nations: Emer de Vattel, who argued that just as sovereign states derived their legitimacy from free and equal persons, in the international sphere, “free and independent states are moral persons” equal to one another in rights and duties. This is the basis of the law of nations.

In its appeal to the international community, the Declaration catalogued the acts of George III that violated the rights of Americans, claiming they amounted to “despotism.” In republican thought, resisting such despotism by force of arms was justified by natural law as well as the law of nations. George III’s despotic acts included domestic complaints, such as his refusal to “assent to laws” for the “public good” and his dissolving of representative institutions. But there was also an international component. The King obstructed “the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners,” as well as “refusing to pass” laws to “encourage” migration. Other grievances included George III’s sending “swarms of Officers to harass our people” while protecting these officers “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit,” violating the sovereign rights of the colonists.

In light of these facts, the Declaration absolved the colonies of any allegiance to Britain and let the world know that Americans were taking up their rightful place in the international order. They would be “Free and Independent States” with the “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

With its focus on natural rights and liberty, the Declaration’s vision of international politics is intertwined with its vision of domestic politics. Just as a sovereign people is bound by the moral standard that all human beings are created free and equal and endowed “with certain unalienable Rights,” so too are sovereign states bound by standards of justice—ones that transcend their borders and require them to respect the sovereignty of other states that are in turn accountable to their people.

Following Vattel’s The Law of Nations, the Declaration offered a vision of liberal order at home and abroad. As Vattel argued, “nations being composed of people naturally free and independent” ought to be treated as if they were themselves “free persons who co-exist in a state of nature.” Other states followed this view of popular sovereignty at home and the law of nations abroad. Venezuela, for instance, issued its own Declaration of Independence on July 5, 1811, asserting its independence from imperial Spain based on the popular sovereignty of its people. The Venezuelan patriotas let the world know, as America had, that it was taking its rightful place as a “free and independent State” in the international order.

THE AMERICAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE pointed to a world of natural rights where sovereign states would be responsive to their people at home and respectful of other sovereign nations abroad. To put this in modern terms: liberal constitutional government at home aligns with international law and order abroad, drawing, as they do, on the same basic justifications and reinforcing one another.

This vision of domestic and international order may seem aspirational, but the authors of the Declaration were not naïve idealists who saw nations as inherently benign. They were, after all, engaged in an armed struggle against Britain, which was violently trying to impose its will on them. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and the other revolutionaries were acutely aware that states could abuse their people at home just as they could be aggressive abroad.

Nor, despite its high-minded principles, did the Declaration’s vision disregard the fact that states act in self-interested ways. On the contrary, the liberalism of the Declaration, both at home and abroad, was tough-minded, starting from self-interest (though a long-range and enlightened sense of self-interest). The republican ideas that inspired the Declaration recognized that sometimes war was necessary: the right of revolution meant the use of force to preserve and protect sovereignty was just. In his Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney even speculated that a republican government would be better prepared to wage war than a monarchy precisely because of its connection to the people. And Vattel, even while pointing to the duties nations owe one another, insisted that “the duties that we owe to ourselves” are paramount. The Declaration’s radical vision of democratic self-government shaped American thinking about both war and foreign policy—a standard not always lived up to, but one that was appealed to by American leadership, even as it was also chastened by it.

Abraham Lincoln summed it up as “LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT” (a rare case of Lincolnian all-caps). Lincoln’s hope, beyond refounding America as a nation “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” included the creation of a moral code of warfare to govern Union troops during the Civil War. This became a precursor to the Geneva Conventions on the basis that war, like international politics, should be governed by rules.

In August 1941, shortly before America entered World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill set forth a vision of the post-war world in the Atlantic Charter. The charter committed both America and Britain to wage war against authoritarianism, while also committing each nation to the principles of democratic self-government for all peoples. This commitment included not seeking territorial expansion as part of the war effort, as well as liberalizing international trade and the freedom of the seas. The charter, which echoed the Declaration, became the basis of the liberal international order America helped craft after the war. That order, which set the terms for a sustained period of international growth and cooperation, reflected a recognition that moral principles can serve an enlightened self-interest that is the basis of justice at home and abroad.

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DONALD TRUMP IS ABANDONING the Declaration’s principles abroad, just as he has abandoned them at home. By insisting that his own personal morality is the only thing that binds his power, Trump offers a caricatured version of the “might makes right” outlook Lincoln rejected. White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller dresses up Trump’s nihilistic grasping as wise and prudent realism governed by “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a more refined, diplomatic version of this vulgar realpolitik at the Munich Security Conference this past February, which even included a nod to values shared by liberal democratic governments. Yet Rubio rooted sovereignty not in the political ideals that drew his parents to America as immigrants from Cuba, which he dismissed as “abstractions,” but in the sort of ethnic nationalism on display in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which he immediately visited after his speech in Munich. It seemed lost on Rubio that in 1938, Munich was the site where Britain and France sacrificed Czechoslovakia to feverish German claims of nationhood and ethnocultural identity. The undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, a preening realist, similarly dismissed the “cloud-castle abstraction of the rules-based international order.” States, he insisted, should act on interest and not on sentiment.

Indeed. But what is America’s national interest? How should it be determined?

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While it masquerades as sophisticated realism, the Trump administration’s myopic vision of the global order is at odds with America’s genuine self-interest in a world of self-governing nations. It downgrades American ambition to that of a regional bully, threatening to not only make America less prosperous and secure, but also less powerful. The administration does so because it neglects the fact that standing up for democratic ideals and international institutions both inherently and practically serves America’s national interest. It neglects the very basis of how we, as a free people, determine our national interest—as if the “iron laws of history” determine American interests rather than democratic deliberation.

Is it any surprise that the fiasco in Iran began with no debate about American interests and no consultation with American allies, only an insistence on American power? The result of the Trump administration’s realist bluster and reflexive use of force is a diminished sense of American power, the suffering of the Iranian people, and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a once-free sea lane that is vital to global economic interests. This is just one of countless instances where an insistence on “American First” has made America less secure and less prosperous. In a similar fashion, Trump’s purported economic realism has led to an erratic approach to tariffs, driving allies like Canada and Europe closer to China. As with Iran, the result will make Americans less prosperous and less secure. Even more, “America First” highlights that we are an unreliable ally and trading partner, making it difficult for the next administration to remedy such harm. The “iron laws of history” teach that other nations will follow their self-interest, which is likely to turn on creating partnerships that don’t depend on America.

Living up to and fostering the moral principles of the Declaration embedded in the international order has been an ongoing struggle (and on occasion, it has invited a crusading spirit that is at odds with liberal order abroad and American interests at home). The rules-based post–World War II international order that America has championed led to unprecedented peace and prosperity. It has made America both more secure and more powerful, and it did so because enlightened statesmen like Roosevelt, Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower recognized that liberal democratic ideals and multilateral institutions like NATO could best serve American interests.

This is also a world that America has obligated itself to—in many instances by law. The founding generation knew that international treaties could be valuable. As a result, Article VI of the Constitution makes treaties the law of the land. It’s a law that the Trump administration has a constitutional obligation to follow. America’s obligations to NATO, including to Greenland, therefore, are a matter of law that the president, under Article II of the Constitution, must “take care” to “faithfully” execute. (Yes, George Washington warned about “permanent alliances” in his Farewell Address, but read the whole thing: You will see he not only rejects “infidelity to existing engagements,” but he also advocates “justice towards all nations” as it will be worthy of “a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.” This is a supercharged liberal view of international order.)

Let us remember that America bound itself to these laws and treaties not at a moment of weakness, as Trump would have us believe, but at a moment of world-striding strength. In doing so, America’s leadership offered a far-sighted vision of our national interest, one best served by a world that attempted to adhere to rules and respected democratic self-government in other nations. A weak man is setting out to bring down this order, degrading America because he does not understand that our deepest political traditions are what make it great.

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George Thomas is Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College and author, most recently, of The (Un)Written Constitution.