Give Peace a Chance

by Andrew Egger

Last August, with Texas sprinting toward a Republican partisan gerrymander and California threatening to respond with a gerrymander of its own, I lamented that “Republicans and Democrats alike are dropping all pretense of high-mindedness and rushing to crank out the most screamingly lopsided gerrymanders their population maps can sustain.” Trump and the GOP had started this fight, “but voters in both red and blue states will be worse off for it.”

We hadn’t seen anything yet. This week’s Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which all but ended the legal mechanism of majority-minority districts across the South, promises to ratchet up our ongoing partisan redistricting total war to heretofore unimaginable levels.

There’s been plenty of end-of-democracy hand-wringing on the left over the Callais decision—some reasonable, some silly. There were good reasons why Congress felt the need to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to protect black voters’ political franchise in the segregated South, where white politicians were then actively straining to dilute their power along explicitly racial, not merely partisan, lines. Still, there’s a reasonable argument to support Justice Samuel Alito’s conclusion that the way some courts had chosen to apply the VRA over the years had become preposterous—finding that if a state’s population could support a racial gerrymander creating a certain number of majority-minority districts, it was bound by law to do so.

But reasonable or unreasonable, the decision’s effect on the gerrymandering fight—if current trends continue—is going to be extreme. Freed from the legal regime that forced them to leave a number of Democratic districts in place, Southern Republicans will stroll easily into new districts that they will draw to take as many as nineteen formerly Democratic House seats.

Many Democratic groups are pledging to continue the fight-fire-with-fire approach they’ve carried out successfully over the last year. The voting-policy group Fair Fight Action is arguing this week that Team Blue could theoretically fight Republicans to a draw ahead of the 2028 elections by pushing hard for Democratic gerrymanders in seven additional blue and purple states: New York, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.

“Democrats have a clear path to neutralize this GOP power grab if they want to take it,” Fair Fight Action’s Max Flugrath told the New Republic yesterday. “This is the ‘break glass in case of emergency’ moment for American democracy.”

Color me skeptical. Fair Fight Action’s proposal relies on a lot of cheerful assumptions about the outcome of the 2026 midterms, about various state legislatures’ willingness to knife fight, and about the ability of further mid-cycle gerrymanders to survive the courts. More than that, though, it shines a megawatt spotlight on the problem that Gerrymandering Total War has presented for the anti-Trump, pro-democracy coalition. You’re just never going to convince me—and more important, you’re never going to convince a critical mass of Americans—that the only way to save democracy in this country is by gerrymandering the shit out of every state that is willing to give Democrats an ounce of political power.

Many Democrats contend their hands are forced. They’d be willing to take up federal legislation to try to stop the gerrymanderers, or at least to take weapons out of their toolkit; the problem, they say, is that Republicans won’t support such measures.

But why stop trying? The gerrymandering tit-for-tat has grown so extraordinarily stupid over the last year, so bad for voters of both parties across the country—and it threatens to get so much worse in the years to come—that it seems the very least congressional Democrats could do is to strain to find some anti-gerrymandering measures on which there’s an appetite for bipartisan agreement. Incumbents hate regular re-gerrymanders, which scramble their districts and risk their long-term political prospects: the state of perma-redistricting that Gerrymandering Total War promises is something they regard with dismay. This is true of Republican incumbents too. Democrats should go kick their tires.

Maybe no such measures exist; maybe congressional Democrats would be banging their heads against the wall looking for them. But at least they’d be banging their heads against the wall in support of actual improvements. Simply gerrymandering as hard as Republicans are to fight them to a draw is an extraordinarily grim idea of a best possible Democratic—or democratic—future. We should all demand a little more.

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The Lovely Month of May

by William Kristol

Cheer up. It’s May.

For one thing, this means it’s no longer April. And no less an authority than the formidable T.S. Eliot assured us back in 1922 that “April is the cruellest month.”

The month of April of 2026 had its cruelties. From Donald Trump’s executive branch to the Supreme Court to the Republican party in Congress and state houses, the assault on our liberties and our democracy didn’t let up.The replacement of Pam Bondi by Todd Blanche seems to be resulting in what President Trump intended—an even more vigorous weaponization of the Justice Department than before. The Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, and Republicans at the state level moved feverishly to alter the electoral playing field for November. The Republican Congress continued to be committed to not exercising its constitutional responsibility for matters of war and peace, and to getting more funds to ICE and the border patrol with no reforms of their practices.

And they’re not stopping. Trump may have to beat an ignominious retreat from Iran—but he could well try to compensate by invading Cuba or Greenland. The Republicans in Congress will try to jam through everything they can while they’re still in charge. The Trumpist kleptocrats in government will try to steal everything they can get their hands on. And the Trumpist apparatchiks will try to tighten their control over everything they can within the executive branch, and to intimidate everyone they can outside of the government, in business and the media and the private sector. In sum: Trump and his Republican party have plenty of levers for the exercise of authoritarian power and oligarchic greed, and they remain determined and ruthless in trying to exercise them.

So in that way, “April” is not over.

But one does have the sense, as we enter May, that the wind is finally in the Trumpists’ faces, not at their backs. Trumpism seems less fated to be triumphant than it has been.

As the polls show, Trump is weaker than he’s ever been as president. The Iran “excursion” has been a disaster—and while that’s bad for the country and the world, it has exposed him as a commander-in-chief who’s both reckless and feckless. Inflation is up and broader economic prospects aren’t great—and while that too is bad for the country, it’s also bad for Trump. And it’s bad for his party’s prospects in the midterms, which seem worse than ever, despite their efforts to try to alter the playing field in every way possible, as Andrew described above.

And it’s now increasingly possible to glimpse a world in which the authoritarian axis of Trump and Putin and Xi may not succeed in shaping events. Ukraine has held its own against Russia. Viktor Orbán was defeated in Hungary. Perhaps the future will be shaped by the patriotic liberalism of Volodymyr Zelensky and Peter Magyar.

Who knows? There are challenges a-plenty. But some things are looking up, and surely we’re entitled after the last eighteen months—the last ten years—to a moment of hope.

So on this first day of May, I turn away for at least a moment from the stern and gloomy visage of Eliot. I appeal instead to the good cheer of the lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner and the composer Frederick Loewe, the pair who brought us so many great musicals, including My Fair Lady and Camelot.

For as Guenevere explains in Camelot,

Tra la, it’s May, the lusty month of May
That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray
Tra la, it’s here, that shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear . . .
It’s mad, it’s gay, a libelous display
Those dreary vows that everyone takes
Everyone breaks
Everyone makes divine mistakes
The lusty month of May.

Perhaps this May could be the month when we succeed in forcing Trumpism and authoritarianism to go astray. Perhaps this May we could start to turn the corner away from a path to an authoritarian future. Perhaps this May we could begin to see ahead of us a future that, if not mad and gay, is at least decent and free.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Free Speech Warriors Who Now Love Cancel Culture… As Trump once again calls for Jimmy Kimmel’s firing, many purported defenders of the First Amendment have betrayed their signature cause, observes CATHY YOUNG.

• How Democrats Can Have a Better Conversation About Israel… It starts with asking better questions, writes former U.S. Ambassador to Israel DANIEL SHAPIRO.

• ‘Madman Theory’ Confronts a Real Madman… Pretend irrationality has long been a part of U.S. foreign policy. Now we have the real thing. BRIAN STEWART reviews James D. Boys’s new book on “madman theory” from Nixon to Trump.

• The Fan-Driven Distribution Company… Legion M cofounder Jeff Annison on getting movie lovers in on the financial action, reports SONNY BUNCH on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood.

• SCOTUS Profoundly Changed Elections—Mid-Vote… KATE SHAW joins SARAH LONGWELL to explain Louisiana v. Callais, the final shoe to drop in the high court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

Quick Hits

OUT MEANS OUT: Casey Means is a wellness influencer, a MAHA-movement heroine, and an RFK Jr. ally—but she won’t be U.S. surgeon general. On Thursday, the White House abruptly yanked her nomination, replacing her with radiologist and Fox News contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier, a more unambiguously pro-vaccine choice.

Since her nomination, Means had raised eyebrows with her history of kooky new-age online content—think blogs about “full moon ceremonies,” “spirit guides,” and “plant medicine experiments”—but it was her halting testimony on vaccines in her Senate confirmation hearing that really doomed her nomination. While stating that “vaccines save lives,” Means repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether she would recommend Americans get vaccinated for measles and flu.

That was apparently enough to lose the vote of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), himself a physician and a vaccine advocate.1 In a Thursday Truth Social post, Trump blasted Cassidy as “a very disloyal person” for standing in the way of a “strong MAHA warrior”—but he ended up giving Cassidy what he wanted anyway.

Saphier will be Trump’s second nominee for surgeon general to be plucked from the ranks of Fox News. He was forced to withdraw his first choice for the position, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, amid suggestions that she had embellished her résumé and credentials.

ONE NICE CHANGE: You know what senators and their staffs shouldn’t be doing? Insider trading on prediction markets. Interestingly, the Senate agrees. Here’s Politico:

The Senate Thursday unanimously voted to ban senators and their staff from trading on prediction markets, a practice that has come under growing scrutiny on Capitol Hill in recent months.

The resolution, spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), prohibits senators and staff from using prediction markets. It goes into effect immediately.

“United States Senators have no business engaging in speculative activities like prediction markets while collecting a taxpayer-funded paycheck, period,” Moreno, who spearheaded the resolution, said in a statement.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who supported the measure, called on House Speaker Mike Johnson to pass similar rules in the House—and said he would work to pass legislation constraining administration officials, as well.

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Todd Blanche Has a Thom Tillis Problem

by Andrew Egger

Start with the obvious: The felony indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for supposed threats to murder the president—based on nothing but a photo of seashells spelling the phrase “86 47,” which he posted to Instagram last year—is a naked act of political prosecution and a grotesque abuse of the powers of the Justice Department, and everyone involved knows it.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the driving force behind the indictment, knows it. Under ordinary circumstances, a seasoned prosecutor like Blanche1 would suffer untold torments rather than be subjected to the humiliation ritual his indictment of Comey has kicked off. The acting AG spent yesterday poker-facing his way through TV interviews: When asked in a CBS News interview if he had “proof that the FBI director knowingly and willfully threatened the life of the president,” Blanche responded that his proof “is in the fact that the grand jury returned an indictment.” Should a MAGA influencer’s mirror-image 2022 post to “86 46” also have been charged as a murder threat? “I have no idea whether there was an investigation into the other times that that post has been made and whether that investigation yielded different results,” Blanche spluttered. “This investigation that we undertook resulted in a two-count indictment.” The proof that he should have been indicted is that they indicted him.

FBI Director Kash Patel also knows the indictment is a farce. To answer the question “why now” with an answer beside the obvious—that Donald Trump is cranky and getting an enemy’s scalp would cheer him up—Patel was forced to pretend that reading an Instagram post, pretending it constituted a death threat, and charging it accordingly required a major FBI investigation: “This has been a case that’s been investigated over the past nine, ten, eleven months. These cases take time.”

Even Trump, who cares so little about free speech that he thinks lawmakers who remind his troops not to obey unlawful orders should be punished by death, struggled to keep a straight face on this one. Did he really think his life was in danger based on Comey’s post? “Probably. I don’t know,” Trump said. “You know, based on what I’m seeing out there, yeah. People like Comey have created tremendous danger, I think, for politicians and others.”

This, of course, is the whole point of the humiliation ritual. Blanche and Patel are the supplicants who badly want something from the president: Blanche to be tapped as Trump’s permanent AG, Patel to keep his job despite widespread reports Trump is tiring of him. It’s their job to grovel and squirm. Trump, on the other hand, needn’t bother so much. After all, who’s he got to impress?

A year ago, that might have been all there was to say on the matter: Trump and associates make mockery of federal government, rule of law; stay tuned for more outrageous depredations tomorrow.

But things are different now. The Trump administration no longer looks irresistible and unassailable in such matters. Politically, the president is the weakest he’s ever been; legally, his political-retribution investigations have been going down in flames one after the other. And it’s not impossible that Blanche could end up losing his shot at the permanent attorney general spot in the very act of trying to bootlick his way into it.

If Trump nominates Blanche, he’ll need to get the approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee to move forward, which means he’ll need the unanimous approval of committee Republicans. And it just so happens that one Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee is North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis—who is fresh off his victory in leveraging his vote to get the White House to drop yet another phony political prosecution into Fed chair Jerome Powell. (More on this from Catherine Rampell below.)

Might Tillis not run the same play again, should Trump attempt to tap Blanche for the top Justice spot? Yesterday, Tillis sounded deeply skeptical about the Comey indictment. “I searched to the end of the internet last night,” he told reporters. “I can’t find one example where the number 86 had anything to do with any violent threat.”

It’s unbelievably shameful that any such ultimatum over Blanche likely comes down to the judgment of Tillis alone, given that the Senate Judiciary Committee is stuffed with supposedly staunch free-speech defenders. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)—a literal first-amendment lawyer before he launched his political career—sneered on Fox News yesterday that “you can’t tell me, when [Comey] arranged those shells on the beach that day and posted that picture, he just innocently didn’t know what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a onetime Tea Party give-me-liberty firebreather, hasn’t weighed in on the indictment. But given his active support for the last baseless felony charges against Comey, it’s hard to imagine he’ll take a different path this time around.

But hey: The bleakness of it all being down to Tillis should just remind us how good it is that we’ve got a Tillis around at all. In the prosecution of Powell, he’s been a shining reminder that the Trump administration isn’t as all-powerful as it would like to pretend—and that all it takes to back them down sometimes is a little backbone. So how about it, Thom? One more song, for old times’ sake?

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Jay Powell’s on Board

by Catherine Rampell

Contrary to popular opinion, true statesmen still exist. At least they do over at the Federal Reserve.

Jerome Powell’s term as Fed chair ends in two weeks. But on Wednesday, during his final press conference as chair, he announced he wouldn’t yet be riding off into the sunset. Instead, he’ll stick around, continuing to serve as a regular member of the Fed board “for a period of time to be determined” even after he’s no longer the boss.

This is an unusual decision. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent decried the “violation of all Federal Reserve norms.” Trump claimed Powell just “can’t get a job anywhere else.” (Powell is 73 and had previously planned to retire.)

However angry MAGAland may be, though, they can’t claim to be surprised. Powell had said last month that he planned to stay until the Justice Department’s obviously politically motivated criminal probe into him was “well and truly over, with transparency and finality.”

Since then, he has gotten at best mixed messages about whether that would ever happen. In mid-April, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro dispatched her goons to “inspect” a Fed renovation project (in violation of a court order) as part of the investigation into Powell. Then, as it became clear that Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) would continue to block Trump’s pending Fed chair nominee until the Powell investigation was over, Pirro finally announced last week that her office would “close” the probe—or, at least, that it was handing it over to the Fed inspector general.

But the Powell probe is only “closed” in the same sense that the Strait of Hormuz is officially “open.” Which is to say: Trust neither pronouncement, at least when coming from this administration.

After all, in the same statement announcing her suspension of the probe, Pirro added that she would “not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so.” Trump then announced: “It’s not dropped.” And it sounds like Pirro will still appeal the judge’s ruling quashing her prior subpoenas, at least based on comments Tillis made on Sunday.

Despite Trump’s insistence that the investigation into Powell is on, Tillis still caved, voting to advance Trump’s next chair pick, Kevin Warsh, out of committee—the last serious hurdle before his confirmation.

But Powell is less credulous than Tillis. Which is perhaps understandable, given Trump’s penchant for prosecuting other perceived enemies on similarly flimsy grounds, such as seashell photos.

In the press conference yesterday, Powell said he planned to keep a “low profile,” not be a “shadow Fed chair.” “There’s only ever one chair of the Federal Reserve Board,” Powell said. “When Kevin Warsh is confirmed and sworn in, he will be that chair.”

Powell said he’s staying precisely because of the persistent attacks on the Fed’s independence—specifically, the “legal actions,” rather than the “verbal criticism by elected officials” (also once considered anathema).

“I worry that these attacks are battering the institution and putting at risk the thing that really matters to the public,” he said, “which is the ability to conduct monetary policy without taking into consideration political factors.”

This is exactly the right message.

Powell is staying to prove that Fed officials cannot be bullied. Lest you think this is about somehow saving his own skin, note that his decision to stay may well make him a bigger Trump target in the months and years ahead. That’s because Powell cannot stay indefinitely; his term as a member of the Fed Board of Governors ends on January 31, 2028. So even if he stays as long as possible, he’d nonetheless be exiting while Trump is still in office—and still controls the DOJ.

Plus, Trump has said he may try to push Powell out well before then, just as the president is already trying to fire another Fed governor, Lisa Cook.

The Cook case is pending before the Supreme Court, and Warsh has refused to say whether as Fed chair he would continue Powell’s defense of her tenure. Warsh also refused to say whether the DOJ investigation into Powell was politically motivated.

How exactly a “low-profile” former Fed chair might get along with a newly-minted Fed chair remains to be seen. For his part, Powell showed grace at the press conference, saying he would take Warsh at his word when the latter pledged his devotion to Fed independence. Powell also said he planned to support his successor however possible.

Frankly, Warsh will need all the support he can get. He’ll arrive in his new leadership post with a near-impossible task: delivering the interest rate cuts Trump expects, just as Trump’s war in Iran has jacked up price growth and thereby made rate cuts much less justifiable. To wit: Right now markets are not expecting any further rate cuts for at least the next year.

Hopefully Warsh’s spine is as steely as Powell’s.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Real King Schools the Would-Be King… Charles III delivered a veiled message that Trump probably missed, observes MONA CHAREN.

• The Supreme Court Hacks Away at the Voting Rights Act Yet Again… Get ready for new fights over racist gerrymandering, writes KIM WEHLE.

• Did Trump Make an Ominous Shift on Iran? On the flagship pod, JOHN HEILEMANN joins TIM MILLER to discuss how Trump has backed off his promise of a short war, and why he’s making pretty wimpy threats against the regime.

Quick Hits

CHECKING IN ON THE MARGINAL VOTER: The ongoing crash in Donald Trump’s popularity is creating more and more opportunities for Democrats to consolidate power in the House of Representatives this November—or so one might imagine. But Lakshya Jain, data guru at the Argument, makes a possibly counterintuitive observation this week: Although Trump’s approval rating has fallen by a net seven percentage points since February, Democrats’ position on the generic congressional ballot has been stable over the same period. They led Republicans by 6 points among registered voters two months ago, and they lead Republicans by 6 points now.

On a certain level, this is to be expected. The lower Trump’s approval sinks, the more conservative we should expect the next marginal voter he loses to be. The more conservative that voter is, the less we should expect them to immediately swap from supporting Trump to being willing to pull the lever for Democratic candidates. And this is especially true if that voter cares a lot about issues like crime and public order where—despite everything—Republicans still enjoy a polling advantage.

Such voters might, however, be likelier simply to stay home the lower Trump goes. “The Democratic lead among voters who said they’re actually likely to vote in 2026 sits at 10 percentage points, which would imply the biggest blue wave since at least the 1980s,” Jain writes. But Democrats shouldn’t get complacent: “Strong midterms can be deceptive. Many of the voters who sit out 2026 will show up in 2028 (low-propensity voters tend to show up more in presidential years), and if Democrats are still fundamentally mismatched on important issues like crime, that risks a much greater chance of being reexposed.”

Read the whole thing.

THE WRITING WAS ON THE WALL: Right before we hit send on this newsletter, Maine Governor Janet Mills announced that she was suspending her campaign. In a statement, she cited the inability to raise campaign funds as the reason for her decision. But that’s sort of a proxy for the fact that her candidacy was lagging in enthusiasm behind Graham Platner, the oyster-farmer progressive populist who has been the surprise candidate of the cycle. Mills’s departure from the race sets up a Platner vs. Susan Collins contest in the fall. And though it helps Mills avoid a potentially embarrassing primary defeat, it doesn’t spare embarrassment for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who put in a lot of time and effort to convince Mills to run in the first place.

TOO GOOD TO QUIT: The Trump administration is in a bind. Earlier this year, it burned its bridges with the AI company Anthropic, canceling its government contracts, deriding its leadership as a bunch of radical-left loons, and trying to smear it as a danger to national security by labeling it a “supply-chain risk”—a label typically reserved for untrustworthy software companies with ties to hostile governments.

But the administration has been losing the breakup. Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, is turning out to be the sort of tool governments will ignore at their peril, given its apparent talents cutting through suboptimal cybersecurity defenses like soft cheese, and a quiet clamor is growing inside the government to get busy using Mythos to strengthen those defenses.

Trump and Co. want to allow this—but they also don’t want to have to eat crow over their ludicrous earlier attacks on Anthropic. Thus, Axios reports, the White House is trying to find a way to, as one source put it, “save face and bring em back in.”

To no one’s surprise, it appears that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his under secretary for research and engineering, former Uber executive Emil Michael, remain the most truculent against an Anthropic thaw. “While key players at the Pentagon are dug in on this issue,” Axios reports, “other stakeholders believe the fight has been counterproductive and are ready to find an offramp.” Read the whole thing.

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Reading Trump’s Mind

by William Kristol

Christ. It’s four in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep. I dunno why. I mean, that state dinner for King Charles went fine. And I still look good in white tie!

So why can’t I get back to sleep? I’m getting like that goddamn Macbeth in that play Ivanka made me see. Macbeth was a tough guy. I liked him. But I guess it didn’t end well.

I gotta be honest. I do know why I can’t sleep.

For one thing, the dinner was okay, but I knew all along what the King was thinking: “Really? This is the best they can do?” A “state dinner”? The King doesn’t have state dinners. He throws state banquets. And he doesn’t live in some run-down White House with 132 rooms. He lives in Buckingham Palace. A palace. With 775 goddamn rooms.

And I can’t even get a ballroom added to this dump.

We tried pushing for the ballroom after that assassination attempt over the weekend. But maybe we laid it on too thick? It doesn’t seem to be convincing anyone. And some of the idiot Republicans in Congress are making it worse. They decided to try to suck up to me by saying the government should pay for it. Dunces. I’ve said over and over the ballroom wouldn’t cost the taxpayers anything!!! So now it’s gonna be, “First Trump raised your gas prices, and now he wants you to pay for his ballroom.” That’s just great!

Congress is such a pain in the ass. I was trolling when I told the guys to post that picture this afternoon of me and Charles together, with the caption “TWO KINGS.” But goddamn it—it would be good to be a king.

If you’re king you can ignore Congress. And you can ignore the polls. And now they tell me there’s a new poll that shows 17 percent of my voters say they regret their vote. And they say the war with Iran was the number-one reason, followed by the economy.

Well, shit. Those are connected! Look at the goddamn gas prices. And that goddamn strait they didn’t warn me about.

The Iran thing, that’s the real reason I can’t sleep. What the hell am I going to do?

I gotta get out of there. They keep telling me I have to stay the course and raise the pressure and get the nuclear dust out and not let Iran have any control over the strait. But two months ago they told me it would all be easy. I don’t believe a thing they tell me anymore.

Am I becoming Jimmy Carter? Am I becoming Jimmy Fuckin’ Peanut Farming Carter? That’s like the opposite of being a king.

I gotta get out. But I can’t look weak. Gotta look tough. Especially if you’ve gotta back down, you gotta declare victory. Can’t look like I’m a loser or a sucker. Can’t let people listen to the goddamn German chancellor saying I’m being humiliated by the Iranians!

But Merz was right when he said, “I hope that this ends as quickly as possible.” So do I. Maybe I can get lucky to get out of there without too much damage to my brand.

But it’s tricky. Get out too quickly and things go to hell. Stay too long and . . . things go to hell. So I’ll keep on blustering for a while, like I did with that Truth Social post I just put up:

That’ll help. For a while.

And I’ve got to tell Karoline to get the word out that I’m preparing for an “extended blockade” of Iran. I gotta look determined for a while.

But in reality I’ve got the intel guys looking at what would happen if I just declare victory and call it a day. I can’t believe they leaked that one. Gotta get rid of Tulsi.

Venezuela was so great. But then this thing! I can’t believe I let Hegseth talk me into it. Gonna get rid of him, too. JD’s a slippery character, but I gotta admit, he was right about Iran. And I’m not putting his guy Driscoll in to replace Hegseth—can’t trust him. But who can I trust?

Because trust is what matters. Especially as the election nears. No. Not the midterms. I’m thinking about 2028.

You see, the best thing about being a king is you don’t leave office. And I’m not gonna. Gotta focus on that. This year’s gonna be rough. But 2028 is the prize. After that the White House becomes a Palace. Trump Palace.

[A smile spreads across Trump’s face as, at 4:30 a.m., he drifts off to sleep.]

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The Scandal at ‘Stars and Stripes’

by Mark Hertling

The Pentagon’s recent decision to remove the Stars and Stripes ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, may look like a minor personnel move, but it isn’t. It’s more of a signal about how the Department of Defense views independent information within the force, and how it may be attempting to erase the line between journalism and messaging.

Stars and Stripes is a newspaper that occupies a unique place in American military life. It’s funded by the Pentagon but protected by Congress, and it operates as an independent news organization for U.S. troops overseas. That independence was hard-earned over decades, and the ombudsman is charged to protect that independence—serving as a watchdog for readers and ensuring the paper remains free from any command influence.

Smith’s firing, reportedly after she voiced concerns about editorial pressure, raises a basic question: Was the problem performance, or was it independence itself?

During my years in uniform, particularly when serving overseas, Stars and Stripes was more than just a newspaper. It was often the only American paper consistently available at our bases. Soldiers read it, shared it, folded it into rucksacks, debated its stories, chuckled at their favorite comics, and reviewed the baseball box scores from the games that ended outside their time zones. In combat zones, its value was even more pronounced. Sometimes the paper arrived three or four days late, coming in with supply convoys or carried by a senior sergeant as a way to boost morale. Troops would grab it as soon as it showed up, passing it around. It was a connection to the military and the country they served—and importantly, it was a source they trusted.

Stars and Stripes has long employed and published stories from a mix of its own experienced reporters—many embedded with units or deeply familiar with military life or local activities and actions of various units—and it has carefully intermingled those stories with selected content from respected independent organizations like the Associated Press. The outside stories were never chosen for political effect, but for relevance and newsworthiness—providing troops abroad a credible world view without the filter of official messaging. That mix mattered. It reinforced the idea that what soldiers were reading was journalism, not institutional narratives.

Most soldiers understand that Stars and Stripes is not linked to their chain of command. The paper reports on problems, questions, and decisions, presents the soldier’s view, and offers a fuller picture of events than might appear in official briefings. That distinction matters in a profession where information is often tightly controlled and where clarity can mean the difference between success and failure.

The U.S. military is built on the principle that its own forces—and the citizens they serve—deserve access to accurate, unvarnished information. That’s not just a democratic value protected by our Constitution; it’s a warfighting advantage. Leaders make better decisions when information flows honestly, and units perform better when they understand the reality around them.

Influence operations—what the military used to call psychological operations—have a very different purpose. They are directed outward, toward adversaries, to shape perceptions, degrade morale, and influence behavior. They are tools of competition and conflict, used against an enemy.

The difference is important, because those two concepts are not interchangeable. One is about informing your own people. The other is about influencing a foe.

When the lines between the two begin to blur—when internal information channels start to look more like messaging platforms than independent sources—it results in skepticism. Troops are not naïve. They know the difference between being informed and being misled. And once they begin to question the credibility of what they’re reading, they start looking elsewhere for the news. Alternative sources—accurate or not—are always available. If trusted outlets lose credibility, they are quickly replaced by less reliable ones. That creates a vulnerability not just in morale, but in operational understanding.

Recent reporting suggests the Pentagon has been moving to reshape Stars and Stripes—reducing reliance on independent wire services in favor of internal reporting, emphasizing themes aligned with the Defense Department’s priorities, and now removing the ombudsman. None of those steps, taken individually, is inherently problematic. But taken together, they point toward a shift from independent journalism toward controlled messaging. That changes the nature of the publication. And soldiers, as smart as they are, will be able to tell the difference.

The United States military has long demonstrated that it is strong enough to tolerate—and benefit from—independent reporting within its ranks. That’s part of what distinguishes it from the forces of authoritarian regimes, where information is tightly controlled and dissenting views are suppressed. There is confidence in our force, in our leaders, and in our system. Undermining that independence sends a different message.

It suggests a preference for narrative over reporting, for control over transparency. It risks weakening one of the quiet but essential connections between the military and the nation it serves.

Stars and Stripes has never been perfect. But it has been a reliable, independent voice for American troops—a source of information, a connection to home, and occasionally, a mirror held up to the institution. That’s what Jacqueline Smith was there to protect. This may seem like a small story, buried in the chaos of daily news. But inside the force, it touches something fundamental: how information is delivered, and whether it is trusted.

In any military, that distinction matters more than most people realize.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• State Dept. Finalizing Plan to Put Trump Picture on U.S. Passports… The new design would mark yet another U.S. government property upon which the president has plastered his likeness, BENJAMIN PARKER reports.

• We Still Haven’t Answered the Basic Questions of the Iran War… The old lessons still apply to modern war, observes MARK HERTLING.

• How Péter Magyar Toppled Viktor Orbán’s Illiberal Regime… By reviving Hungary’s liberal traditions, argues H. DAVID BAER.

• The Loons and the Loyalists Running the DOJ… On the flagship pod, CAROL LEONNIG and WILL SOMMER join TIM MILLER to talk about the rot at the top at main Justice.

Quick Hits

WELCOME TO HELL: Now that Donald Trump has agreed to drop his government’s buffoonish criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump’s nominee to replace him, Kevin Warsh, finally has a clear path to confirmation.

Warsh may live to regret it. As Politico notes, he’s inheriting a monster pile of economic difficulties to slog through:

[Walsh will] take over a central bank that has been beset by political battles with President Donald Trump, who has relentlessly pressed for lower interest rates and threatened to fire Powell and another Fed governor for cause—a power that the Supreme Court will soon weigh in on.

Against that backdrop, the Fed faces crucial dilemmas on everything from the war’s economic fallout to the potential tectonic effect that artificial intelligence will have on jobs. And Warsh—a Trump nominee who faces a close confirmation vote Wednesday by the Senate Banking Committee—is poised to be the one who will have to see them through.

“Right now, you’ve got different signposts pointing in 18 different directions, and you have to decide how they will interact with each other,” said Martha Gimbel, the executive director of Yale’s Budget Lab. “Thoughts and prayers to them all.”

Read the whole thing before the Senate Banking Committee votes to advance Walsh’s nomination today.

PETE OFF THE LEASH: For the most part, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has managed to avoid tough questions about the conduct of the Iran war, giving his frequent military press briefings in front of a new-look Pentagon “press” corps entirely constituted of MAGA-influencer suckups. That will change today when Hegseth heads to the Hill for a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on the Pentagon’s annual budget request. The administration is seeking a 50 percent jump in defense spending, to $1.5 trillion. Here’s ABC News:

The appearance—the first before Congress for Hegseth since the war in Iran began in February —lands just two days before a 60-day deadline to wind down hostilities.

It also comes amid intensifying questions on the Hill about how quickly the Pentagon is depleting weapons stockpiles, and as lawmakers continue to scrutinize Hegseth’s unusual spate of firings of senior defense officials without a public explanation.

Questions over civilian casualties in the Iran war, as well as whether the U.S. was properly prepared for retaliatory strikes, and broader questions over the strategic rationale for the conflict, are likely to be a key part of committee members on both sides of the aisle questioning of Hegseth, multiple congressional aides explained.

Hegseth is an easily irritated loudmouth with a career’s worth of TV jabbering experience—safe to say we can expect plenty of fireworks.

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Where’s Steve?

by Andrew Egger

In yesterday’s newsletter, Bill warned us all to brace for more attempts by the White House to use Saturday’s dreadful attempted mass shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to immediately press its political aims. That’s just what we saw yesterday—but perhaps not in the way we’d expected.

In the White House and on Capitol Hill, the response to the attack quickly consolidated into two demands.

The first involved Trump’s longed-for East Wing ballroom. All legal attempts to prevent its construction, the president and his Justice Department demanded, must immediately cease. For good measure, despite months of Trump insisting the project would be privately funded, some Republican lawmakers insisted Congress must now allocate hundreds of millions of dollars for its construction.

The second involved Trump’s latest TV nemesis, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. Two nights before the attack, Kimmel had joked on his show that First Lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.” On Monday, both Trumps accused Kimmel of “a despicable call to violence” and demanded his immediate firing. “People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate,” Melania wrote. “It is time for ABC to take a stand.”

All this was very silly. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an event hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the White House; it will not take place on the White House grounds whether Trump gets his ballroom or not. And Kimmel, as he insisted last night on his show, had obviously not been making a call to violence, but a silly age-gap joke about the president’s much younger third wife.1

But set that aside. Of far greater note than these trifles is what the White House isn’t doing in the wake of the attempt—at least not so far, at least not in public.

Think back to the last big, rallying moment for the right. After the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk, Trump did some of the same things he’s doing today—right down to picking a fight with and about Kimmel. But that wasn’t all. Trump’s government also immediately pledged to launch a whole-of-government mobilization against what it described as the “domestic terrorism” of the political left.

This broad effort had a single architect and public cheerleader: Trump adviser Stephen Miller. In the days after Kirk’s killing, Miller was omnipresent on X and on cable news, where his declarations of war were sweeping, ecstatic, apocalyptic. I wrote at the time:

Last Thursday morning, less than 24 hours after the shooting, Miller tweeted out a thesis statement. “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country,” he wrote, “which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.” This ideology has “one unifying thread,” he added: “the insatiable thirst for destruction.” . . .

“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” Miller ranted. “And we are going to do that, under President Trump’s leadership. I don’t care how. It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

Miller made a promise: “The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

You might have expected the latest assassination attempt of the president would have Miller back out there again, pressing his case. But we haven’t been seeing as much of Miller lately, on TV or online. (His last original tweet was more than a week ago, on April 20.) In fact, he’s gone to ground for quite some time. His one big attempt to wage total war against his perceived enemies, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis that culminated in the deaths of two protesters, proved a massive political liability. Miller found himself forced to beat a tactical retreat. He hasn’t abandoned his political goals, but—as the New York Times reported this month—he has found it prudent to let others make the pitch to a country that plainly isn’t buying what he’s trying to sell.

Miller, who remains one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, can obviously still do plenty of damage behind the scenes. But it’s interesting that now that he’s unable to lead the messaging charge himself, the White House’s response to political violence seems in some ways to have collapsed in on itself. Absent (so far) are any disciplined attempts to use the outrage over the attack to deal damage to the left. Instead, the Washington Republican response has followed the contours of the president’s own ridiculous—but far more harmless—obsessions: his personal vanity projects and grievances against one particular TV personality.

In a weird way, the whole thing shows how much better off we are today—from the point of view of the weaponization of the federal government—than we were six months ago. A government where Stephen Miller is playing hurt turns out to be far less dangerous than the alternative.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Right-Wing Lies, Left-Wing Violence… The WHCA dinner gunman and what the data actually say about political rage, observes CATHY YOUNG.

• Trump Called It ‘White Genocide.’ Now the White People Are Flocking Home… The president’s ravings about South Africa are comical. But their effects aren’t, writes HOLLY BERKLEY FLETCHER.

• Orbán Rigged the Game—and Still Lost… On The Mona Charen Show, DALIBOR ROHAC joins MONA CHAREN to analyze Hungary’s stunning rebuke of Orbán and implications for other democratic nations.

• Could the Florida Gerrymander Blow Up on the GOP? On Bulwark+ Takes, friend and former colleague MARC CAPUTO joins SAM STEIN to discuss Florida’s new redistricting map—and the legal storm it’s about to trigger

Quick Hits

GERRYMANDERING TOTAL WAR CONTINUES: Democrats pulled narrowly into the lead in the mid-cycle redistricting wars after Virginia’s gerrymander was approved last week, but the victory may be short-lived. Yesterday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a new map for his state that could give Republicans as many as four additional House seats in the midterms. The supermajority-Republican Florida legislature enters special session today to consider it.

DeSantis’s gerrymander is both legally and politically risky. It openly defies redistricting standards passed by Florida voters in 2010, which have been used to successfully challenge maps in the past. But the Florida Supreme Court, which is stuffed with DeSantis appointees, has signaled a reluctance to enforce the “Fair Districts” amendments recently against the governor. DeSantis is additionally betting that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule against the constitutionality of considering race in redistricting—something he says the current map unacceptably did.

Meanwhile, back in the Old Dominion, Democrats are holding their breath to see if the Virginia Supreme Court will allow their new gerrymander to go into effect. The court, which is considering the question of whether Democratic lawmakers cut procedural corners in hustling the question onto the ballot, heard oral arguments yesterday.

ROUNDUP CRACKUP: The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday heard oral arguments in a suit against the maker of the weedkiller Roundup—a landmark environmental case that has significant political repercussions for the Trump administration, too.

The Court is hearing a case from a Missouri man named John Durnell, who argues that years of Roundup use caused him to develop lymphoma. Bayer, the German conglomerate that purchased Roundup creator Monsanto nearly a decade ago, has argued in court that it should be protected from state-level civil claims over a product that the federal Environmental Protection Agency has ruled is safe to use. A ruling is expected this summer.

The case is fraught for the Trump administration, which joined the lawsuit on Bayer’s side last month—to the outrage of the MAHA wing of the president’s coalition. Understandably, the group united around the conviction that megacorporations are poisoning the environment and the population have well-developed views on whom they support in the fight between the chemical company and the man who accuses it of giving him cancer. If Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still shares their concerns, however, he’s keeping it to himself.

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Some quick bookkeeping: Sam and Will Sommer will be going live on YouTube and Substack at 10 a.m. EDT for MAGA Mondays—albeit a bleaker one than usual in the wake of Saturday’s attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Happy Monday.

How Trump Intends to Exploit the Moment

by William Kristol

I should begin with the obvious: I condemn Saturday night’s act of violence at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and I am grateful that no one, including President Trump, was killed.

Last Wednesday, after the vote here in Virginia on redistricting, I wrote that I was proud to be part of “a movement that does what it has to do—peacefully and legally and democratically—in defense of fair elections and liberal democracy.” I repeat: “peacefully and legally and democratically.”

We should be proud to be part of a civic and political movement that unequivocally rejects violence. Which this pro-democracy movement does. To take one example, the No Kings homepage states that “A core principle behind all No Kings events is commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.”

So when MAGA propagandists try to tar eight million Americans who peacefully and lawfully exercised their right of assembly last month at No Kings protests, using a report that shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen may have attended one of those protests, we should dismiss the smear with scorn.

We should also be proud to be part of a movement that doesn’t make light of violent attacks on political opponents, as President Trump and his supporters did after the 2022 assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. We should be proud to be part of a movement that doesn’t celebrate the death of public servants, as President Trump did a month ago: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

And we should be proud to be part of a movement that will not be cowed by attempts at intimidation. The pro-democracy movement will resist efforts by this administration and its MAGA minions to use Saturday night as an excuse to criminalize political dissent, silence legitimate criticism, and curtail our civil liberties.

Such efforts got underway within hours of the shooting at the Washington Hilton.

On Sunday morning, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, “I don’t think this should be lost on anyone . . . that we have a third assassination attempt on President Trump—in that same week we learn that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been paying and generating hate.”

I’d say in response that I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that this is mere demagoguery in defense of the baseless indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and in defense of using Congress’s investigative powers, as Jordan intends to do, to abet DOJ. Of course Jordan doesn’t quite say that there is any connection between the shooter and the SPLC. But he implies one that should not “be lost on anyone.” This is pretty classic McCarthyism—or, for that matter, Trumpism.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) tried to use Saturday night’s incident as an excuse not just to get new funding for the Department of Homeland Security but to increase the power of the Senate Republican majority: “At a moment of national danger, if Democrats refuse to fund DHS, I would say this would be the time to nuke the filibuster for good.”

In fact, Democrats are refusing to provide new funds not for the whole of DHS but merely for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, neither of which has anything to do with Saturday’s shooting, but which have a lot to do with the administration intimidating opponents. But Trump wants more money for those agencies, and he wants to get rid of the filibuster. This fake “moment of national emergency” is the excuse.

And Speaker Mike Johnson intends to try once again this week to move legislation in the House reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any real civil liberties safeguards.1 Expect to see him and his lieutenants use this “moment of national danger” to try to overcome opposition to the bill, even though there’s no connection between Section 702 and the events of Saturday night.

More broadly, we should expect a sustained effort in the days and weeks to come to intimidate and silence critics of the Trump administration in the same vein as the notorious National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” issued after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There will be attempts to justify further investigation, chilling, and criminalizing of speech as part of a crackdown on “domestic terrorism.” According to NSPM-7, one of the “common threads animating this violent conduct” is “anti-Christianity.” So President Trump has already called Cole Tomas Allen “anti-Christian”—though as it happens he was active in a Christian group at college, and spends considerable time in his manifesto trying to justify his actions by appealing to scripture.

But the Trump administration will use any excuse to further batter American democracy, and so there will be plenty of demagoguery directed at us this week.

The pro-democracy movement shouldn’t, and won’t, yield to any of this. The Trump administration’s agenda is as noxious as ever, and it remains right for us to oppose it as vigorously as ever. The defense of civil liberties and the rule of law is as important today as it was before Saturday night. The true moment of national danger we face is Trumpism, and there is no reason to hesitate or waver in opposition to it.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• White Supremacy on the Right… On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL and THOMAS JOSCELYN went live to discuss white supremacy in the online Right and why they’re obsessed with attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center.

• Can Iran Take More Pain Than Us? On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN review an extended buffet of jackassery before turning to the current state of affairs in Iran.

• AI Is About to Eat Your Job… On How to Fix It, JOHN AVLON speaks with ALANNA McCARGO to explore a surprisingly old idea that could fix a very modern problem: What if workers actually owned a piece of what they build?

Quick Hits

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: After nearly two months of war in Iran, American and Iranian negotiators are seemingly locked in stalemate. Iran is treating the Trump administration’s bedrock demand—that it give up its store of enriched uranium and abandon efforts to enrich more—as a non-starter at least until the end of the war, but the White House says the war can’t end without Iranian nuclear concessions.

Over the weekend, Trump canceled a planned trip to Islamabad by his lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff,2 citing “too much time wasted on traveling” and “too much work.” “We have all the cards, they have none,” Trump insisted. “If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”

Iran is making plenty of calls—just not, it seems, to us. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spent Sunday meeting with officials in Oman, the AP reported, working to drum up regional support for a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz that would permanently lock in Iran’s wartime practice of extracting tolls from ships trying to transit the waterway. And today, Araghchi is in Russia to conduct “necessary coordination” with Vladimir Putin’s government, which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the conflict so far.

Despite diplomatic progress grinding to an apparent halt, and despite the continued closure of the strait, Trump seems loath to end the ceasefire he unilaterally extended last week. Oil prices, which earlier this month sagged in anticipation of the conflict’s end, are now pushing back toward their wartime highs: Brent crude was trading above $107 a barrel this morning.

JUSTICE DROPS POWELL INVESTIGATION: Negotiations over Iran weren’t the only staredown that went poorly for the president this weekend. As we wrote this month, the president’s plans for the Federal Reserve have been held in a stranglehold by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who was refusing to confirm Trump’s new nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, until the president dropped his ridiculous, pretextual criminal investigation of the current chair, Jerome Powell. On Friday, Trump finally bowed to the reality that this investigation, which was intended to hasten Powell’s departure, was actually risking prolonging his tenure. The Justice Department, sock-puppet U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced, was closing up its Powell investigation.

In announcing this change, Pirro and Trump were forced to walk a fine line—communicating to Tillis that they were backing down while insisting to the MAGA base that they were sticking to their guns. In a Friday post, Pirro said she had referred the matter to the inspector general of the Federal Reserve. “I expect a comprehensive report in short order and am confident the outcome will assist in resolving, once and for all, the questions that led this office to issue subpoenas.” She added that “I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so.”

But of course the facts have never warranted doing so, and the Federal Reserve’s inspector general does not report to Pirro or to the Justice Department. Nor is that office’s occupant, Michael Horowitz, a run-of-the-mill MAGA flunky: In fact, he has a longstanding reputation as a fair and by-the-book government watchdog.

The referral to Horowitz exists for one reason only: so that Trump can insist, as he did Saturday, that the investigation is “not dropped.” Tillis was happy to bank the win.

“The U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal investigation into Chair Powell was a serious threat to the Fed’s independence, and it needed to end before I could support Kevin Warsh’s confirmation,” he wrote yesterday. “I take the Department of Justice at its word: the investigation is closed. . . . With these assurances, I look forward to supporting Kevin Warsh’s confirmation.”

HORRIBLE PEOPLE ALERT: In the immediate aftermath of the attempted attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Trump tried to strike a magnanimous tone toward the journalists with whom he’d just shared a highly unsettling experience. It didn’t last long.

In a Sunday evening interview with CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell, Trump remained even-keeled, even subdued—right until O’Donnell asked him about his reaction to the shooter’s calling him a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” Instantly, Trump’s whole demeanor changed. Here’s Politico:

“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people. Horrible people,” Trump said. “Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody.”

O’Donnell interjected, “Oh, do you think he was referring to you?”

But the president blew past her question, declaring, “I’m not a pedophile.”

Trump bristled at what he seemed to deem an insinuation about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who was not mentioned by name in the manifesto or by O’Donnell. “You read that crap from some sick person,” the president said. “I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated.”

It’s reasonable to object to O’Donnell’s raising the profile of a would-be murderer’s manifesto by asking the president to weigh in on its accusations. But Trump’s instinctive shoot-the-messenger response was telling too: No wonder White House aides go out of their way to avoid bringing him bad news.

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As ever, the president is spending his evenings focused on the most pressing matters at hand:

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Sure, he’s said some variation of this fifty times over the last month—but maybe he just wasn’t petulant enough before. Happy Friday.

Open the Strait. Shut Down Trump.

by William Kristol

On March 21, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours. The strait did not “FULLY OPEN” within forty-eight hours, or for that matter, within the next two weeks. By April 5, Easter Sunday, the “very stable genius” who is our president had lost patience. He proclaimed that two days later, April 7, “would be “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Well, Iran did not open the strait on April 7. And more than two weeks since, after a few days in which a few ships were able to pass through the strait, it is once again closed.

But that’s okay with Donald Trump! Because he’s now apparently in favor of keeping the strait closed. Yesterday morning, Trump adjusted his persona from that of a deranged, genocidal maniac to that of an interested if somewhat befuddled commentator. “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” he informed us. “They just don’t know! The infighting between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY!”

But not to worry. Trump reassured us that “We have total control over the Strait of Hormuz. No ship can enter or leave without the approval of the United States Navy. It is ‘Sealed up Tight,’ until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

So the Trump administration supposedly has total control and is using that control to seal the strait up tight. The president had been demanding, rather stridently, that it be opened pronto. But “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson explained in 1841. Trump is no little statesman or philosopher or divine. He is, per his defenders, playing nineteen-dimensional international chess. He’s apparently closing the strait in order to pressure Iran—at an indeterminate point in the future—to open it.1 In any case, before Trump began his war the Strait of Hormuz was open. As of this morning, April 24, eight weeks into the war, it is closed.

Which is bad! It’s contrary to our national interest in many different ways. It’s doing a lot of damage to the global economy. And it’s reinforcing the lesson that Iran’s key chess move in this war, a pretty simple and two-dimensional one that was entirely foreseeable, has succeeded. And when this is all over, the world will remember that Iran’s gambit worked, and that Iran can make this move again in the future.

This is a very bad outcome. Even if we get lucky and end up stumbling into a not-too-terrible short-term accommodation when the strait reopens thanks to various fuzzy agreements and murky accommodations, no one is going to forget that the Iranian regime has established the principle that it can close the strait. Nor will the world fail to notice that Trump launched a war that has failed to achieve its goals (whatever they actually were), undercut our standing in the Middle East, further damaged our alliances in Europe, drawn down our military stocks in Asia, and above all exposed our commander-in-chief as an increasingly unstable, foolish, and reckless old man flailing about on the world stage.

For his part, Trump seems to have decided just to pretend that real damage isn’t being done to the global economy, and to ours, and he’s just going to move on to other matters.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Trump is still plenty active on Truth Social. But his posts and reposts late last night and early this morning are attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center, on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for allegedly organizing the investigation of his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, and on “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” for criticizing the Border Patrol and ICE. At 6:23 p.m. yesterday, Trump shared the important news, “I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL!”

Earlier in the day, at the White House, Trump spent time claiming that the crowd he convened on the Mall on January 6th was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s in 1963. Today he’ll presumably be focused on sharpening the attacks on the media that he’s planning to deliver at Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The fact that Trump is bored by his war is good, insofar as it means he’s somewhat less likely to try truly reckless and irresponsible things that would unleash a chain of events that would be even more damaging to our nation and the world. A demoralized Trump is safer than a megalomaniacal one.

But the mania is still there. And as it becomes increasingly clear that his excursion into the Middle East has been disastrous in so many ways, as voters from Hungary to Virginia weigh in against him, as a midterm debacle for him looms, Trump’s desperation will merge with his megalomania to produce threats to our democracy more dangerous than ever.

It would be good if the seaways for global shipping were reopened as soon as possible. But it’s up to us to continue to work as urgently and effectively as possible to choke off the all-too-many political pathways to Trumpist authoritarianism.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Hungary Proved That Liberalism Can Win… Péter Magyar ran against authoritarianism, not the price of eggs, reports MATT JOHNSON.

• Hegseth’s War on the Press Is a War on the Pentagon’s Credibility… All the news that fits the narrative, observes PATRICK GRANFIELD.

• The Anti-Prestige Prestige Show: Why The Pitt Is the Cure for What Ails TV. It’s good art and healthy business, writes ZANDY HARTIG.

• FRIDAY REVIEWS: SONNY BUNCH offers both a review of Michael and an interview with Lou Diamond Phillips about his riveting new film, Keep Quiet.

There are still tickets available for the Bulwark Live shows in California next month! Get yours here.

Quick Hits

THE CARD NOT TAKEN: Remember the Trump “gold card”? When the president announced his buy-your-residency program for foreigners last year, he bragged that he was expecting heavy demand for the applications priced at $1 million a pop: “We anticipate the TRUMP GOLD CARD will generate well over $100 Billion Dollars very quickly,” Trump wrote in September. “This money will be used for reducing Taxes, Pro Growth Projects, and paying down our Debt.”

So far he’s only a little bit off—about five orders of magnitude. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Thursday that exactly one person has so far been approved for a “gold card” visa to date, per Bloomberg News. Hundreds more, he claimed, are still in the pipeline undergoing what he described as “an extraordinary vet.” (Coming soon, perhaps: Gold Card Premium Plus Accelerated™—all the benefits, half the fuss!)

Many observers have long doubted whether Trump’s gold-card program would attract takers, especially given that other immigration pathways, like an EB-5 investor visa, already exist for foreigners willing to splash down some cash to establish residency in the United States. These doubts seem to be proving true—and it’s looking like the money for reducing Taxes, Pro Growth Projects, and paying down our Debt will need to come from someplace else.

WHERE DO THEY FIND THESE GUYS?: Hung Cao, the new acting Navy secretary following the ouster of John Phelan, doesn’t have much (any?) experience running large organizations, handling budgets, working with defense contractors, or dealing with D.C. politics and bureaucracy. But he does have something far more coveted in today’s MAGA politics: a long history of saying truly insane things on right-wing podcasts.

“There’s a place in Monterey, California called Lover’s Point,” Cao told pastor/podcaster Sean Feucht in 2023, while running for Senate in Virginia. “The original name was Lovers of Christ Point. Now it’s become, they took out the Christ. It’s Lover’s Point. And it’s really—Monterrey is a dark place now, a lot of witchcraft, and the Wiccan community has really taken over there. . . . We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”

Cao also seems to share Pete Hegseth’s obsession with anti-woke military recruitment. “When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” Cao said during a 2024 debate. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds.” No word yet on the state of alpha-male and alpha-female retention in the Navy during Cao’s brief tenure.

TROUBLE IN CRYPTO-PARADISE: The president’s crypto ventures have long been among his most hilariously and openly corrupt—a giant “BRIBE ME” sign hung out over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. These days, even some of his biggest investors are starting to agree. Here’s Reuters:

Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun on Tuesday sued World Liberty Financial, the digital currency venture co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his sons, ​alleging that World Liberty illegally froze his holdings of tokens issued by the company.

Sun alleged in the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, that World Liberty secretly installed tools to ‌prevent the sale of his tokens after they became tradeable in September 2025. The lawsuit also alleges that World Liberty threatened to “burn”—or permanently delete—his holdings, even while they were in Sun’s digital wallet.

Sun, the Hong Kong-based founder of the Tron cryptocurrency, bought $45 million of WLFI tokens—some 3 billion—and was later awarded a further 1 billion tokens after being named as an advisor to World Liberty, the lawsuit said.

One imagines it’s a hard lesson for Sun, who seems to have fallen prey to the same misimpression as so many of Trump’s business partners—the best marks are the people who think they’re in on the scam.

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Maybe the resistance party should give up on restoring their battered reputation and just lean in. “Vote Blue: Odds Are You Hate Us Less.” Happy Thursday.

Old Man Yells ‘Rigged Election’

by Andrew Egger

It’s remarkable that it’s become so unremarkable to say: Yesterday, the president of the United States claimed that an election outcome he disliked had been the result of election fraud.

“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” Trump fumed . “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’ Where have I heard that before—and the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory!”

Even in the crowded catalog of Trump’s bogus fraud claims, this one stands out as laughable. The entire substance of the claim is that the election was fraudulent because Virginia’s biggest counties, with the most votes to count, took the longest to count them. “Longest” being a relative term: the race had been called within two hours of polls closing.

Yet even within that two-hour window, some Trump allies were already laying the predicate for Trump’s argument: “New Virginia election results show opposition to the Democrats’ redistricting plan now leading 53% to 46%,” Laura Loomer’s show account Loomer Unleashed tweeted at 7:49 p.m. Tuesday. “However, Democrat controlled Fairfax County, one of Virginia’s most populated counties, still refuses to release its election results. Sadly, a swing could be coming soon.”

But at no point had allegations of misconduct come from any actual on-the-ground Republicans. No one in the Fairfax County GOP alleged any funny business yesterday. Party Chair Katie Gorka—wife of C-list Trumpworld figure Sebastian Gorka—decried the Democrats’ “hollow, shameful victory,” but made no allegations of fraud. When I reached out to the county party to get her response to Trump’s allegation, she did not reply. I live in Fairfax County, so just for fun I swung by the party office to see if anyone there had heard about any fraud: the friendly pair of front-desk volunteers I talked to, Bob and Nancy Hoyler, said that “we haven’t really heard anything about that.” (Then again, Bob added, “they never tell us anything.”)

Nor were the White House or the Republican National Committee eager even to attempt to substantiate Trump’s claims. When I asked where specifically the president was claiming fraudulent votes had been counted, a White House press aide simply referred me back to his post. RNC spokeswoman Kiersten Pels, by contrast, pivoted to attacking the fairness of the gerrymander—again without touching the substance of Trump’s claim.

“46 percent of Virginians voted Republican in the last federal election, yet Democrats are rigging the system to cling to power and silence voters they can’t win over,” Pels said. “This map is an unconstitutional partisan power grab designed to disenfranchise millions of voters and tilt the playing field.”

Hey guys! Your boss doesn’t just think the measure was unfair! He thinks Democrats literally dropped in fraudulent votes and stole the election! Isn’t anyone going to look into this?

Figuring out what to make of all this requires us to hold two ideas in friction at once. On the one hand, this is all faintly silly old-man-yells-at-cloud stuff. Trump’s brain is so cooked that he immediately believes that literally any election result that fails to go his way must have been the result of fraud—to the point where even his own aides seem faintly embarrassed at having to cover for him.

And yet we can’t ignore the fact that he’s managed to pull a large chunk of the country and all the dizzying powers of the federal government down into his own mania as well. It’s difficult to overstate just how widespread truly kooky election-integrity beliefs have become within Trump’s GOP: Just this week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 46 percent of voters, including 82 percent of Republicans, and 38 percent of independents, think there are “large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections.”

What Trump and his allies have created over the years is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing base of electoral nihilists. In past cycles, convincing such people that the fix was in usually required the mass propagation of specific lies: rigged voting machines from Venezuela, 2,000 Mules-style ballot-stuffing operations, batches of phony ballots snuck into the count by dastardly poll workers. But now this crowd’s cynicism has achieved orbital velocity; it no longer requires additional thrust. When Trump points at any given election and shouts “rigged!”, he no longer needs anything resembling a smoking gun: A giant chunk of the electorate is ready to go along.

Six years ago, Donald Trump attempted the most brazen theft of a presidential election in our lifetimes—a full-court legal and extralegal press to deny his defeat and stay in the White House that culminated in a deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol. And he keeps taking actions to remind us explicitly of his total lack of remorse: Pardoning every January 6th criminal, pursuing criminal charges against those who stood in the way of his theft attempt, enforcing a government-wide soft ban on anybody acknowledging that he actually lost.

We’re not going to see a “Stop the Steal” effort in Virginia, where the president and his allies actually have a decent chance of defeating the new gerrymander in court. (Yesterday, a circuit court judge gave them an early victory in a decision blocking the map from going into effect; Democrats, of course, are appealing.) But every stupid, baseless allegation of fraud the president makes should be another flashing warning sign. He’s tried it before. He’d do it again.

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The King, the Tyrant, and Jeffrey Epstein

by Jordan Ferdman

On Monday, the king and queen consort of England will visit the United States to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our independence. If Trump and King Charles III want to talk politics, they can discuss the Anglo-American special relationship and the important role each country plays in the policies of the other. If they wanted to keep it light, they could talk about Scotland, where Trump owns golf clubs and Charles III is, well, the king. One topic they likely won’t broach, though, is the one that offers the starkest juxtaposition of the United States and the former mother country: our leaders implicated in the Epstein files.

Powerful and influential men of many lands found their names in the Epstein files, but the United States has been singularly lenient in its handling of those implicated. The embarrassing contrast between the United States and the United Kingdom is worth pausing on.

In short: King Charles threw his younger brother to the wolves. Trump can’t even bring himself to fire Howard Lutnick.

Former Prince Andrew’s arrest in February marked the most significant development in the Epstein case since the conviction and imprisonment of Epstein’s longtime accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. It was the first time since 1647—more than a hundred years before American independence—that a senior British royal had been arrested. And just in case there was any ambiguity about how Charles felt about his brother’s alleged crimes, he unceremoniously stripped Andrew of his titles and honors.1

In Virginia Giuffre’s memoir recounting her experience as a survivor of Epstein’s trafficking, she wrote that Andrew behaved “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright.” It’s likely Andrew did believe it, and maybe even likelier that he believed that his birthright was both to commit the crime and to evade punishment for it. Charles III, an hereditary monarch whose coronation included his anointment with holy oil symbolizing his divine right to rule, made clear to Andrew that abusing people is not, in fact, Andrew’s birthright. Andrew thought—perhaps with good reason—that the law was something that applied only to other people. For nearly 400 years, that might not have been a bad bet.

At its core, the American experiment rejected the premise of unchecked, absolute power. “Governments,” proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”—not from birthright.

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” accused the Founders in reference to King George III, Charles III’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.2 But today it’s the American president who has “in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”—including by extending more sympathy and dignity to the men implicated in the files than to the girls they abused.

The contrast between Trump and Charles III inverts American exceptionalism in the ugliest way. We should not be exceptionally indifferent to our leaders’ transgressions and crimes. We should not be exceptionally tolerant of sex trafficking and child rape.

As we prepare to celebrate our milestone birthday, we ought to—maybe with gritted teeth—embrace the irony of this discrepancy in accountability. Across the pond, a prince, stripped of his titles and banished from the palace, was arrested for his affiliations with Jeffrey Epstein. At home, our aspiring king directs the most shameful coverup in American history from the Resolute Desk.

—Jordan Ferdman is a researcher at Longwell Partners.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Putin’s Propagandists Scramble to Respond to Celeb Critic… ‘The common people are afraid of you’—and they’re angry, too, reports CATHY YOUNG.

• Who Sees Vivek at Ohio State? Standard MAGAs, America First groypers, internet trolls, and a mime duo—that’s who, as JIM SWIFT reports from Columbus.

• Can Trump Avoid Humiliation in Iran? On the flagship pod, SAM STEIN joins TIM MILLER to discuss Trump’s humiliation, share their new cabinet rankings, and wonder: Is there a way to stop Kushner from making deals with Sharia law countries?

• Trump’s AWFUL Polls, GOP’s Gerrymander Faceplant, WHCD Drama… KATIE COURIC joins JVL and BILL KRISTOL to talk about Trump’s dismal approval polling, the GOP’s failed attempt to gain an edge in the House via gerrymandering, and the upcoming White House Correspondents Dinner.

Quick Hits

NEVER SAY NEVER: Even in our deeply stupid era, the idea that Donald Trump might pardon Jeffrey Epstein associate and convicted sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell seems almost too preposterous even to contemplate. And yet, well, here’s the GOP chair of the House Oversight Committee frankly admitting many of his own members are in favor of such a thing, per Politico:

Members on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are divided over whether President Donald Trump should pardon Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her cooperation in the panel’s Epstein investigation, Chair James Comer said in an interview Wednesday. . . . When asked whether he believed it was a favorable deal to issue a pardon in return for Maxwell’s testimony, Comer said, “A lot of people do.”

“My committee’s split on that,” he added, declining to name who on the panel supported granting a pardon. “I don’t speak for my committee.”

Comer himself, for the record, disapproves. Read the whole thing.

STRAITJACKETED: And now for your regular vibe check, courtesy of the New York Times, on the Strait of Hormuz:

The number of ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz has become a barometer of how the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is affecting the global economy. On Tuesday, after nearly eight weeks of war, that number was one, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Then Wednesday, more ships tried and Iran attacked two cargo vessels in the strait.

“They are reminding us that their threats to attack ships are genuine, and that’s enough to suppress traffic through the strait,” said Rosemary Kelanic, a director at Defense Priorities, a research organization focused on foreign affairs. Ships linked to Iran have passed through the strait, ship tracking data shows.

The problem for the United States and the world is the same as ever: Iran doesn’t actually need to be able to exercise control over every ship passing through the strait to keep it in a state of near-permanent stasis. All they have to do is stroll out every few days or so and shoot at some craft that’s trying to transit without their permission—which is enough to raise the risk of transiting above what shipping companies find acceptable.

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Yesterday morning, with White House officials set to depart for Pakistan for further peace talks with Iran and a two-week ceasefire on the verge of expiring, Donald Trump issued one of his now-standard threats: “I expect to be bombing” Iran within a few days, he told CNBC’s Squawk Box, “because I think that’s a better attitude to go in with.”

Iran, however, seems to be putting less and less stock in such threats—and it’s hard to argue they’re wrong to do so. Yesterday afternoon, Trump suddenly announced he was unilaterally extending the ceasefire despite a lack of diplomatic engagement from Iran “until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”

Iran’s response, per an adviser to Iranian Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf: “The extension of the cease-fire by Donald Trump has no meaning.” Overnight, Iran said it seized two ships that were attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Who’s in charge around here again?

Programing note: For this week’s episode of Command Post, Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be going live on Substack and YouTube at 10:30 a.m. EDT. Happy Wednesday.

Two Cheers for Gerrymandering (For Now)

by William Kristol

The Muse of History can be capricious. We don’t remember Elbridge Thomas Gerry (1744–1814) of Massachusetts as an important early supporter of the American Revolution. We don’t recall that he served in the Second Continental Congress, where he was not only a signer of the Declaration of Independence but a leading advocate of it. We don’t know that a decade later Gerry was elected to the first House of Representatives, where he was involved in the passage of the Bill of Rights.

We remember his name—alas!—only because later on, as governor of Massachusetts, he presided over a highly partisan redistricting by the state legislature. A local newspaper compared the shape of one of the new state senate districts to a salamander, coining the term “Gerry-mander.” And so we have memorialized this impressive Founder with the term “gerrymandering.”

When the history of the democratic resistance to Trumpism of 2026 is written, yesterday’s vote in Virginia will be called a ratification of gerrymandering. And not unfairly. The new maps approved by the voters have some salamander-like qualities in pursuit of a likely gain of four Democratic seats and a 10–1 Democratic congressional delegation for the state.

But just as Gerry’s redistricting deserves to be remembered as only one act in an impressive political career, so yesterday’s vote was merely one act in a broader patriotic effort. The Trump administration started the mid-cycle redistricting wars in the summer of 2025. Over the next several months Republican legislatures in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, and Missouri (themselves gerrymandered to ensure lopsided Republican majorities) passed new maps to produce increased Republican representation from their states in Congress.

Would Democrats and anti-Trumpists respond only by hand-wringing and eloquent op-eds decrying the unfairness? No. California acted first, with a voter-approved congressional redistricting in November 2025. And last night, Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing the state legislature to temporarily reshape the commonwealth’s congressional districts, which had been drawn by a nonpartisan redistricting process in 2021. Maps drawn by a bipartisan commission will return after 2030.

Last night’s vote was close, with about a 3-point margin in favor of the referendum. It wasn’t an easy sell. Virginia voters had approved the nonpartisan redistricting process in 2020 by a two-to-one vote, and there was unhappiness among even Democrats and anti-Trumpists at having to resort to this unattractive counter-measure here to what Republicans had done elsewhere. There were also voters in central Virginia unhappy at being stuffed into districts that would be dominated by Northern Virginians, and likely represented by someone from Northern Virginia. And the anti-referendum campaign was sophisticated, making what appeared to be a case for good government, not for Donald Trump.

Still, the referendum passed. And so the bottom line is this: Democrats and liberals have likely wrestled Republicans and Trumpists to a draw—possibly even to slightly better than a draw—in the great redistricting war.

It’s an impressive achievement. Democrats are often thought to be hapless competitors in rough-and-tumble politics. Liberals are often thought to be unwilling or unable, in Robert Frost’s memorable formulation, to take their own side in a fight. But Democrats held their own in this contest of political hardball, liberals stepped up and fought back in this bare-knuckle political struggle.

I’d add that the fact that many Democrats and liberals were unhappy about having to resort to temporary gerrymandering is to their credit. It’s good to be part of a movement that is reluctant rather than exultant when it has to embrace a somewhat unsavory expedient. But it’s also good to be part of a movement that does what it has to do—peacefully and legally and democratically—in defense of fair elections and liberal democracy.

If I can close by returning to our friend Gerry, I’ll point out that no less of a figure than John Adams said of him in 1776 that “If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.” Virginia’s exercise in counter-gerrymandering was a contribution to making the liberties of America safer against the gates of a Trumpist Republican party. The Founders, including Gerry, would be pleased and proud. We should be too.

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Undue Command Influenza

by Mark Hertling

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced that he is discarding mandatory flu vaccinations for U.S. service members. It may appeal to an anti-vax political base, and it may sound minor in the abstract—part of what Secretary Hegseth described as “restoring freedom to the joint force.” But “freedom” also comes with civic and community obligation, especially in a profession built on individual and group responsibility. In military units and on military bases, individual choices have immediate and cascading consequences for the health and readiness of others.

Consider how other high-performance organizations or facilities with throngs of people in close contact handle contagious illnesses. If a professional sports team has a player with the flu, that athlete often isn’t welcomed into the locker room or told to push through practice. He’s isolated to prevent the spread of the virus.

Consider a daycare center or an elementary school where a policy like Hegseth’s became commonplace. Parents would have justifiable questions. Classrooms are enclosed. Kids share space, air, and germs. One case becomes five, then fifteen. Teachers get sick, as do parents. Learning suffers, and families, especially those with vulnerable members, feel the ripple effects.

No serious organization would accept that risk. The military is a serious organization that does all it can to prevent such outbreaks because they know the repercussions—especially when sending people home or spacing them out aren’t options. Many soldiers live in barracks, train in formation (or share tight crew quarters in a tank, submarine, or aircraft), eat in shared dining facilities, and operate in close quarters every day. Additionally, troops who are married have families who live in base housing, send their kids to base schools and child care, attend religious services, and interact in a closed environment where exposure compounds quickly. What spreads in one unit rarely stays there.

I’m not a doctor, but as a former commander, I know that medical protection and ensuring the care of troops are critical tasks—and they’re unlike those in a normal private-sector company. In the military, health is not just an individual matter. It’s a readiness issue. That distinction is important.

In civilian life, getting the flu is usually an individual inconvenience—missed work, a few days of recovery, perhaps a ripple effect within a household or office. In the military, illness spreads rapidly across formations. One soldier shows up sick to morning physical training, and within days, an entire unvaccinated platoon would likely be degraded. Maintenance slows. Training schedules slip. Leaders spend time managing symptoms and manning rosters instead of preparing for missions. Scale that to a battalion or brigade, and the impact becomes operational. For units in training, missed days due to illness mean less preparation for the next fight, which could lead to higher casualties or mission failure. For units in combat, the consequences can be even more severe.

Commanders have long understood the implications of keeping their units healthy. That’s why routine vaccinations have never been about bureaucracy—they’ve been about illness prevention and military readiness. Not every flu case is severe, but the cumulative effect of many cases, spreading quickly through formations, creates a predictable and avoidable degradation of capability.

Good leaders don’t ignore predictable risks; they mitigate them.

There’s also a deeper issue at play: trust. Service members accept that their profession carries hardship, threats, and danger. They also trust that their leaders will reduce unnecessary risk wherever possible—especially in areas that are well understood and historically managed. Force health protection is one of those areas.

When leaders step away from established preventive measures, it raises questions not just about policy, but about priorities. Are they accepting risk because it is unavoidable, or because it’s politically popular? If the latter, that isn’t leadership.

In the Army, we emphasize that leaders are responsible for everything their people and their unit do—or fail to do. That includes anticipating second- and third-order effects. Illness in close quarters is not a new problem. Armies throughout history have been weakened not just by enemy fire, but by disease spreading through their ranks. That lesson hasn’t changed.

What has changed is that for a long time we have had the means to reduce the risk of infectious disease and have institutionalized prevention measures because they work.

A professional sports team can bench a player, isolate him, and move on with the season. The military doesn’t operate that way. Units are not interchangeable rosters. Cohesion, timing, and collective performance matter in ways that don’t allow for easy substitution or separation. You can’t “bench” a platoon. You can only prepare it—or degrade it.

Eliminating mandatory flu vaccinations may appear to be a small policy change by a naïve civilian leader appealing to his boss’s base. But he’s removing a layer of protection from a force that needs collective health to function effectively. And unlike a sports team or a school, the consequences aren’t just missed games or sick days. The results affect readiness, mission execution, and ultimately, the well-being of the force.

That’s not a medical judgment. It’s a command responsibility.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Has Revealed MAGA’s Anti-Christian Nature… It’s time for sincere believers to pull the wool from their eyes and see the truth about the president and his followers, argues MONA CHAREN.

• George Washington’s Woke Vaccines… What the Founders would have thought about Pete Hegseth lifting the requirement that service members get the flu vaccine, writes THOMAS LECAQUE.

• Lawsuit: Blaze’s Crackpot Reporting Prompted a Wild, Unnecessary FBI Raid: Quickly debunked reporting based on “gait analysis” was enough to get the feds to descend with a helicopter on a falsely accused J6 pipe-bomber’s home, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.

Quick Hits

SCHRÖDINGER’S URANIUM HUNT: In yesterday’s Morning Shots LIVE video, your correspondents spent plenty of time breaking down Donald Trump’s long, rambling, newsy call into CNBC’s Squawk Box—from his insistence he would have won the Vietnam War very quickly had he been president, to his continued stubborn refusal to drop his pretextual criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, to his applauding companies like Apple for not (yet) seeking reimbursement of the revenues they paid under his illegal “Liberation Day” tariffs last year.

Still, there’s always lots more to chew on.1 Let’s just pluck out one more moment, shall we? Here was Trump discussing the problem of the uranium buried at the nuclear sites America bombed last year:

They can’t get the nuclear dust, because it was obliterated by the B-2 bombers that went in. . . . They’ve tried to get down there. You know, we have cameras from Space Force on it all the time. They’ve tried to get down. They can’t get down. That place was obliterated. . . . The left tries to demean all the time, like, ‘Oh, well, maybe it wasn’t totally obliterated.’ It was. And they can’t get it, or they would have tried to get it.

For the record, the question Trump was answering was about interest rates. As he often does, Trump spent much of this interview ignoring his interviewers’ questions to instead answer other critiques that have plainly been irritating him lately—in this case, the critique that it’s ludicrous for him to claim the United States has achieved a total military victory over Iran if its cache of enriched uranium remains unaccounted for.

Trump insists this is silly: that we don’t need to retrieve or account for the uranium, because it’s buried so deep that Iran can never get at it. But observe the two explanations Trump gives—back to back, one following immediately on the other—for how we know this is so. Iran has “tried to get down there,” he says, without success. (We know this, apparently, because of the “cameras from Space Force.”) But we also know “they can’t get at it” because otherwise “they would have tried to get it.”

So there you have it. Iran can’t get its uranium back, which we know for two reasons: because they have tried to get it back, and because they haven’t tried to get it back. Careful, kids: This is what becomes of a mind that has spent its entire career operating in the realm of spin rather than of fact.

BAD NATO! VERY BAD NATO!: The sanctimony of these people! The pure hectoring poutiness! Politico reports on the White House’s latest effort to break the bonds between ourselves and our NATO allies: the development of a “naughty and nice” list distributing head pats and finger wags based on how obediently other countries drop everything to throw themselves into American boondoggles like the Iran war:

The effort, which officials worked on ahead of NATO head Mark Rutte’s visit to Washington this month, includes an overview of members’ contributions to the alliance and places them into tiers, according to three European diplomats and a U.S. defense official familiar with the plan.

It’s the latest sign that President Donald Trump plans to make good on his threats against allies who don’t adhere to his wishes. And it’s another pressure point on the increasingly frayed alliance, which has been battered by Trump’s attacks—from his push to annex Greenland to his warning of a complete withdrawal from the pact.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth floated the broad idea in December. “Model allies that step up, like Israel, South Korea, Poland, increasingly Germany, the Baltics and others, will receive our special favor,” he said. “Allies that still fail to do their part for collective defense will face consequences.”

The funniest/bleakest quote in the piece comes from an anonymous European official: “They don’t seem to have very concrete ideas. . . when it comes to punishing bad allies. Moving troops is one option, but it mainly punishes the U.S. doesn’t it?” Sure, but that’s never stopped them before. Read the whole thing.

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Programming note: Join Bill and Andrew for Morning Shots Live at 10 a.m. EDT. Watch on Substack or YouTube. Happy Tuesday.

The Scandal Is the Men Trump Hasn’t Fired

by William Kristol

It wasn’t the biggest story of the news cycle, but you might have noticed that another cabinet secretary put in her notice yesterday. “Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung posted on social media, not even allowing Chavez-DeRemer the dignity of announcing her own departure.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet secretary to be forced out by Donald Trump in the last seven weeks. She follows in the footsteps of Kristi Noem, who departed the Department of Homeland Security on March 24,1 and Pam Bondi, who exited the Department of Justice on April 2.

Needless to say, none of these departures should be lamented by anyone who values competence, integrity, or honesty in government.

Still, does anyone see a . . . pattern here? As the eponymous villain of Ian Fleming’s 1959 James Bond novel, Goldfinger, says: “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’” I suppose it’s too strong to call this gender-inflected pattern “enemy action.” But when it comes to finding someone to fire, the Trump White House does seem to chercher la femme.

After all, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has surely done as much damage to his department and to the nation as Kristi Noem did. But Pete’s still on the job, strutting around and displaying his machismo at the Pentagon. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has profited on a larger scale from the Trump administration than Chavez-DeRemer did. But Lutnick is still there, grifting as men in the Trump orbit do. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is more of a crackpot than Pam Bondi was, but Kennedy remains in place, working out in his manly, denim-clad way as secretary of health and human services. And for that matter, Kash Patel still presides in all his male adolescent glory as director of the FBI (about which more below).

Maybe the president will soon rectify what might be an appearance of reverse DEI discrimination, and fire one of these men soon? Or some other male head could end up on the chopping block. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNN on Sunday that gas prices might not drop below $3 until next year. President Trump told the Hill Monday that Wright is “wrong on that. Totally wrong,” and that gas prices will drop as soon as the Iran war ends. One might think Trump would be annoyed at Wright for calling into question his happy talk. But for now Wright still has his job.

Gender bias in firing incompetent cabinet secretaries is not the most important indictment of the Trump administration. But it’s worth noting. And it’s also worth stressing that the problem isn’t that he’s fired the women. The problem is that he hasn’t fired the men.

Needless to say, Trump doesn’t want to be held accountable for his own appointments. But you know whose actions he wants to take credit for, and in whose embrace he wants to wrap himself? The military.

For example, yesterday Trump attacked Democrats as “TRAITORS” who “belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration.” Trump wants to conflate the U.S. military and his administration. But the military that is achieving those accomplishments is a military Trump inherited. Every one involved in the disciplined and well-executed military operations we’re seeing was trained and promoted under his predecessors. The servicemen and women who organized and executed the rescue of the pilots in Iran—while Trump was kept out of the room so military officers could get their work done free of his ranting—rose through the ranks under Bush and Obama and Biden. And yes, under Trump in his first term, when his secretaries of defense were James Mattis and Mark Esper, who refused to let Trump damage the military as Hegseth is now trying to do.

The contrast between how Trump treats the men and the women in his cabinet is notable. But even more striking is the contrast between the professionalism and expertise of a military that was shaped prior to this administration, and the buffoonery and incompetence of the cabinet members of this administration.

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Good for the Goose, Good for the Gerrymander?

by Andrew Egger

It’s decision day in your Morning Shots correspondents’ home state of Virginia, where Democrats have used their shiny new governing trifecta to go all-in on a controversial measure: a proposed constitutional amendment that would—let’s not get cute about it—temporarily gerrymander the hell out of the state. The current congressional maps in Virginia, a bluish-purple state that hadn’t previously given either party a trifecta since 2012, are admirably representative, thanks in part to years of good-government advocacy work that led to the establishment of a bipartisan redistricting commission in 2020. But Democrats want to throw out the current map, which favors Democrats 6–5, for a breathtakingly audacious one: a likely 10–1 gerrymander in their own favor.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum, of course. It’s one of the last punches in an all-out mid-cycle redistricting war that Republicans kicked off last year in Texas, redrawing their maps to move the Lone Star State House delegation from a 25–13 GOP advantage to a 30–8 split. Led by ferocious exhortations from President Donald Trump, Republicans nationwide went scrounging through the couch cushions to find gerrymanderable districts, producing maps designed to eke out new seats in Missouri, North Carolina, and Indiana.2

Democrats, who for years have been likelier than Republicans to support anti-gerrymandering reforms in their home states, ultimately decided to fight fire with fire. California voters approved a mid-cycle gerrymander to tip their own maps approximately five seats in Democrats’ favor. The second major battlefield has been Virginia, where Democrats are asking voters to suspend the normal redistricting rules temporarily to give them a massive advantage in this year’s midterms. The ballot language is, basically, ludicrous: Should the state Constitution be amended, it asks, to “restore fairness in the upcoming elections”?3

Is this just? On a national level, Democrats can still reasonably make the argument that all they’re trying to do is to neuter unfair advantages Republicans are trying to pick up elsewhere. If Virginia’s redistricting measure passes (and if it survives the courts), the GOP is still likely to come out ahead in the House of Representatives, thanks to a special redistricting session Gov. Ron DeSantis just convened in Florida. This is the basic argument: Republicans have dropped all pretense of fairness in redistricting, and for us to do anything less now amounts to unilateral disarmament. Against charges of anti-democratic hypocrisy, Democrats have argued that they are breaking no laws and that it would be grievously short-sighted to set aside their best chance of constraining Trump legislatively next year over good-government scruples.

All this is compelling on a certain level. Yesterday on the Bulwark podcast, Bill laid out his reasons for supporting the gerrymander; today I’m pretty sure4 I’m going to vote for it, too. For better or worse (worse), practically the entire role of our desiccated federal legislature today is to rubber-stamp stuff our imperial president wants, or else to refuse to do so. I want more people in there who will refuse to do so, and, well, here’s a legal way to get them.

But there’s a lot of fear and trembling involved—as there should be any time a movement deliberately sets aside a supposedly dear principle, like the importance of fair maps, in order to accrue for itself political power. The justification for this is ever and always the same: Just think of all the good we’ll be able to do with that power if we get it and all the harm THEY’LL do if we don’t! But I’m old enough to remember when, a decade ago, the Republican party made a bargain like that, embracing a ludicrous outsider candidate named Donald Trump on the Flight-93-election theory that a Hillary Clinton presidency would blow up the country and at least Trump would prevent that.

Obviously, a decade ago, that argument was not only stupid but wrong: Clinton wouldn’t have blown up the country, while Trump, who within a few short years had utterly remade the GOP in his image, seems well on his own way to doing so. But the fact that so many people talked themselves onto that path with the same rhetorical justifications as Democrats are making for their maps today should give us all pause. Momentary unscrupulous strategic decisions—just a little taste of the offerings of the devil, and then we’ll get back on the side of the angels—have an unfortunate tendency to turn into bad habits.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Return of Communism Chic… A new generation discovers the workers’ paradise, observes CATHY YOUNG.

• Will Wins Wars. We’re Forgetting That… MARK HERTLING reminds that Power = Will × Resources.

• The Tough Guy Really, Really Means It This Time… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to talk about Trump’s failures in Iran and his hollow attempts to save face.

• Is Mike Waltz Saying We Should Bomb Hospitals? On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SALETAN takes on Trump’s threats to destroy Iran’s infrastructure—and the chilling defense from top officials who say “all options” includes targets that blur into civilian life.

Quick Hits

KASH FILES LAWSUITS ALL AROUND ME: Kash Patel’s promised lawsuit against the Atlantic for reporting he’s been binge-drinking on the job is as silly as advertised. Its $250 million argument: If the FBI director is as bad as all that, why is crime down? CNN has more:

The defamation suit says statements in Fitzpatrick’s article “falsely assert” that Patel “is a habitual drunk, unable to perform the duties of his office, is a threat to public safety, is vulnerable to foreign coercion, has violated DOJ ethics rules, is unreachable in emergencies, has required the deployment of ‘breaching equipment’ to extract him from locked rooms, allows alcohol to influence his public statements about criminal investigations, and behaves erratically in a manner that compromises national security.” . . .

The lawsuit says The Atlantic sent the FBI a “request for comment” and asked for a response in less than two hours, then “refused to honor” a request for more time. The magazine published the article online later the same afternoon.

Patel’s goal, of course, isn’t actually to win in court. He’d face an extraordinarily high bar in doing so—needing not only to prove that the Atlantic’s allegations were false, but that the publication had known they were so when they published them, or at least didn’t care if they were true or not. Patel’s real goal appears to be to punish a publication that offended him with a nuisance suit—and to demonstrate to an audience of one that he’s fighting the lying lib media.

BROTHER, MAY I HAVE SOME LITHIUM?: For countries around the world, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the war in Iran is a wake-up call that fossil fuels shipped from afar can prove an unreliable source of energy in times of global instability. Many governments are working to accelerate their rollout of clean-energy infrastructure that can be generated at home as a result. This may be good for the climate, but there’s one obvious drawback: It risks tying more countries more tightly than ever to China. Politico reports:

Governments see clean, domestic energy sources, such as renewables and nuclear power, as the obvious long-term solution to protect their economies from the ups and downs of global fossil fuel markets.

But there’s also an obvious catch: The faster they move to decarbonize, the more they will have to rely on China to supply the necessary materials. After all, Beijing controls the overwhelming majority of the world’s clean technology and critical mineral supply.

Governments, uneasy about the idea of swapping one dependence for another, are keenly aware of that fact. The question now is whether they’ll put those reservations aside in favor of bolstering their energy security or continue taking measures to protect their economies from China’s dominance.

Read the whole thing.

A TOURNIQUET ON SCIENCE: DOGE didn’t kill American science, but it roughed it up pretty bad. A year out from Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s cockamamie campaign to balance the federal budget by going on a grant-purging bender, gross federal spending hasn’t ticked down in the slightest. But some small but crucial sectors, like scientific research, aren’t even close to recovery, as a Washington Post analysis finds:

Halfway through this fiscal year, the number of competitive grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health is down by more than half compared with the same period last year. Biomedical funding has also undergone a shift, the analysis found, cutting the U.S. research footprint across nearly every major disease area—including fewer grants focused on women’s health, cancer and mental health.

Overall, the NIH supported over 2,700 fewer scientific projects in fiscal 2025, about a 15 percent cut in the number of competitive grants compared with the previous fiscal year. In [endometriosis researcher Katherine] Burns’s field, women’s health, there was a 31 percent drop in the number of projects funded in 2025 that included the word “women,” after years of steady growth in competitive awards.

Read the whole thing.

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Programming note: After a week’s hiatus, MAGA Monday is back! Sam Stein and Will Sommer are going live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT. Happy Monday.

Donald Distracted

by Andrew Egger

Well, here we are again: The ceasefire in Iran is once again in a state of near-total collapse. The U.S. military hasn’t yet resumed its bombing campaign of the Iranian mainland, but the danger in the Strait of Hormuz is as bad as ever.

After claiming Friday that the strait was now open and letting a trickle of ships through, Iran abruptly reversed course Saturday, firing on at least two merchant vessels and insisting the strait would remain closed as long as America maintained its military blockade of Iran’s ports. Then, yesterday, U.S. forces fired on and seized an Iranian cargo ship that they said had tried to run their blockade—causing Iran to announce it was pulling out of the second round of Islamabad peace talks, which were scheduled to begin today. Oil prices, which on Friday had fallen by more than $10 a barrel on Iran’s claims of an open strait, rocketed back upward, now hovering back around $100.

In one sense, we’re right back where we were last month—the strait closed, Iran intransigent, Donald Trump threatening. But that undersells the damage. A cancer patient who goes under the knife and wakes to discover they couldn’t remove the tumor isn’t likely to be comforted that at least the doctors stitched him up properly. The ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz is becoming a global economic catastrophe, and it’s clear Trump is running out of options to compel Iran to stop throttling it.

The White House has suggested two ways this all might end, and neither seems particularly close to materializing. Trump still seems to think he can bully the Iranians into submission, even though his strategy of making theatrical threats and then backing down at the last second has already failed to accomplish this four or five times. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth keeps announcing confidently that Iran’s weapons stockpiles are all but depleted. But the Pentagon has quietly acknowledged the hollowness of this story: “Iran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs that can threaten U.S. and partner forces throughout the region,” Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. James Adams noted in a budget memo to the House Armed Services Committee last week. “In addition, Iran poses a persistent threat to freedom of navigation through the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Gulf of Oman, including retaliatory seizures of commercial ships and the threat of mining the Strait of Hormuz.”

But it isn’t just that Trump low on options: More and more, he barely seems to understand what’s going on in the conflict at even a basic layman’s level. His pronouncements—whether they be threats, triumphant announcements, or even just descriptions of what’s underway in the strait—resemble reality less with every passing day.

Sometimes this is a good thing: His genocidal threats that “a whole civilization will die tonight” never materialized. But other times it’s simply an alarming reminder of how fitfully and flightily the president is monitoring his own war. “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” Trump posted Friday morning. “It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!” He was so confident the end was in sight that he was already throwing the conflict in Iran and the proxy fight in Lebanon on his fanciful list of eight wars he’s “solved”: “It has been my Honor to solve 9 Wars across the World, and [Lebanon] will be my 10th, so let’s, GET IT DONE!” he posted. None of these statements had the slightest bearing on reality.

One other weekend example of Trump’s unaccountably gauzy grasp of the conflict bears pointing out. In announcing America’s blockade of Iran last week, Trump claimed that the United States would be “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” In the following days, U.S. leaders hastened to clarify that America was not blockading the entire strait—which would have violated international law—but was merely blockading Iran’s ports.

But somehow nobody managed to get this simple and crucial fact to lodge in the president’s tortuous mind. “Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait,” Trump posted Saturday, “which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it. They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day!”

The hour is growing very late. Already the political damage is irreversible for Trump and his party: Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged Sunday that domestic average gas prices would likely not return below $3 a gallon until 2027. (Today gas is north of $4.) And the simple fact causing it all—the same as it’s been all along—is that Trump, having chosen to kick the Iranian hornet’s nest, remains at a loss for what to do next. We’ve known he had no plan for months. But what’s becoming shockingly apparent now is how little he’s even paying attention to the problem.

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Donald Distrusted

by William Kristol

It was the afternoon of April 3. An American F-15E fighter jet had been shot down over Iran. The two airmen aboard were missing. The president of the United States was screaming at aides about Jimmy Carter’s hostage crisis and how this incident could cost him the next election.

Meanwhile, the military was devising and then executing a complex and challenging operation to rescue the airmen. And in order to help make this operation a success, “Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.”

“Aides kept the president out of the room.” It’s worth dwelling for a moment on this remarkable detail from a Wall Street Journal report this weekend on the state of Trump’s psyche. Aides—presumably senior military officials in particular—believed that they had to exclude the president from the decision-making if it were to succeed.

And Trump was excluded, and the operation succeeded.

On the one hand, it’s good news that some of Trump’s subordinates understand, at least somewhat—the truth about the man and the dangers he poses. And it’s good news that they are willing and able—at least in some circumstances, and to some degree—to act on it.

In the short term, we can only hope that other aides will similarly act to mitigate their boss’s furious irresponsibility.

On the other hand, it’s an untenable situation when the president can’t be trusted to be part of—or even present at—a crucial national security operation.

So as soon as is practically possible, which probably means early in 2027, Congress should take responsibility and remove him from office.

The fact is that Trump is far more reckless, unstable, and detached from reality than Richard Nixon was in 1974, when some of his senior aides also acted to protect the nation from his worst impulses. They did their job, but it was a short-term expedient. Two more years of Nixon in office would have been dangerous. Today, two more years of Trump in office would be unacceptably dangerous—not least because many more of Trump’s subordinates than Nixon’s are pandering to his whims rather than checking them.

As it happens, Trump has also committed acts of corruption and abuse of power even more deserving of impeachment and removal than Nixon’s. In other words, Trump’s removal from office would be in the national interest and would serve the cause of justice.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that we would be much better off if someone like Gerald Ford were vice president. But JD Vance isn’t deranged. And to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you have to go to impeachment with the vice president you have, not the vice president you might wish to have.

But it’s important to the country’s well-being to remove the unfit president we do have.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• What Would You Give Up to Make American Health Care Better? It’s a question everyone—from executives to practitioners to consumers—needs to ask. But few seem willing to think about it, observes EZEKIEL EMANUEL.

• Ukraine’s Second Miracle Year… The war isn’t won, but for the first time in years, outright victory seems possible, argues BRYNN TANNEHILL.

• How Trump Could Weaponize Surveillance… On The Bulwark on Sunday, RYAN GOODMAN joins BILL KRISTOL to discuss how surveillance powers could be used—and abused—by the Donald Trump administration.

• A Beautiful Victory in Hungary… On The Mona Charen Show, MONA CHAREN brings the Beg to Differ panel (BILL GALSTON, LINDA CHAVEZ, and DAMON LINKER) back for a reunion. They address Orban, Democrats, and Trump Jesus, among much else.

• Eliot’s Return & Schrodinger’s Strait… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN welcomes ELIOT COHEN back from his sojourn in Spain to break down the latest jackassery from the administration. They discuss the current state of the Iran war, including the somehow simultaneously open and closed Strait of Hormuz, the ongoing negotiations, and how China factors into the conflict.

Quick Hits

KASH IN JEOPARDY: If you’re a Trump mook in hot water, there’s one accepted best practice for making sure you don’t lose the boss’s favor: Immediately make a big show of the work you’re doing to punish his enemies.

Last week, we noted how Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been availing herself of this strategy. Now it’s FBI Director Kash Patel’s turn. Fresh off the Atlantic’s lacerating Friday report alleging an impulsive, binge-drinking, oversleeping FBI director who is “deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy” and has good reason to be, Patel took to Fox News on Sunday to do some damage control: He says the Atlantic’s report is all a pack of lies, and he says he’s suing. And he tried to change the subject by tossing out some red MAGA meat of his own.

Fox’s Maria Bartiromo teed him up: “Every time I see President Trump, he says this repeatedly, that the election was rigged in 2020. . . . You’ve been at the FBI now fourteen months. Have you done anything about that? Do you have anything to tell us about that?”

“I am never going to let this go,” Patel said. “They tried to thwart our elections and rig the entire system. And that is not something that I am going to allow on my watch. But you just have to remember. They built this disease temple over twenty and thirty years. We’ve got all the inference—I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. . . . We are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you it’s coming soon.”

The Department of Justice formally has a policy never to comment on ongoing investigations, which apparently has an out clause for those desperate enough for Trump’s praise.

TOO GOOD TO QUIT: Officially, the Defense Department considers the AI company Anthropic a klatch of radical-left psychos who are too dangerous and untrustworthy for their products to be allowed to touch the U.S. government in any way. But it turns out Uncle Sam is finding it tough to quit Claude. Axios reports that the National Security Agency—a component agency of the Department of Defense—is already using Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, despite the DoD’s ongoing claim in public and in court that the company is a “supply chain risk”:

The government’s cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon’s feud with Anthropic. . . . The military is now broadening its use of Anthropic’s tools while simultaneously arguing in court that using those tools threatens U.S. national security.

It’s unclear how the NSA is currently using Mythos, but other organizations with access to the model are using it predominantly to scan their own environments for exploitable security vulnerabilities.

Read the whole thing.

DUBAI TO ALL THAT: As the world grapples with the fallout from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Gulf states that have spent years cultivating close ties with Donald Trump are starting to call in favors. The Wall Street Journal reports that the United Arab Emirates has begun petitioning the White House about America backstopping a possible Persian Gulf financial crisis:

U.A.E. Central Bank Gov. Khaled Mohamed Balama raised the idea of a currency-swap line with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials in meetings in Washington last week, the officials said. The Emiratis emphasized that they had so far avoided the worst economic effects of the conflict but might still need a financial lifeline, the officials said.

The talks highlighted the U.A.E.’s concern that the war could inflict major damage on its economy and its position as a global financial hub, depleting its foreign reserves and scaring away investors who once saw it as a stable and secure place for their money. The conflict has damaged Emirati oil-and-gas infrastructure and shut off their ability to sell oil using tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, depriving it of a key source of dollar revenues.

Emirati officials haven’t made a formal request for a swap line, which would give the U.A.E. central bank inexpensive access to dollars to support its currency or shore up its foreign reserves in case of a liquidity crisis. In talks with the U.S. in recent days, they have portrayed the proposal as preliminary and precautionary, the U.S. officials said.

Read the whole thing.

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In line with the ceasefire in Lebanon, the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route as already announced by Ports and Maritime Organization of the Islamic Rep. of Iran.

It’s not clear yet whether this announcement heralds the real reopening of the strait—a massive breakthrough, if so—or whether this is just yet another change in language describing the same old status quo of Iran trying to route all strait traffic through its tollbooth. We’ll find out soon enough.

One housekeeping note: JVL and Catherine Rampell will be on YouTube and Substack at 12:30 p.m. ET today for Receipts Live. Hope we’ll see you there—Lord knows there’s plenty of economic news to chew through. Happy Friday.

Trump: Less Popular and More Dangerous

by William Kristol

This past week in politics began with a big bang: Péter Magyar’s stunning and momentous electoral victory in Hungary, overcoming all the obstacles Viktor Orbán had constructed over sixteen years of increasingly authoritarian rule. It ends1 with a pleasant coda, one that’s neither stunning nor momentous but that’s still noteworthy: a 20-point Democratic victory in a special election for the New Jersey House seat that opened up when Mikie Sherrill was elected governor last November. In 2024, Kamala Harris had carried the district by nine points, and even Sherrill, a popular incumbent, had won by only fifteen.

So Democratic margins continue to increase, despite the fact that in this case the Democratic nominee was Analilia Mejia, a progressive who had narrowly prevailed in a multi-candidate primary earlier this year, and who was not the most reassuring Democratic candidate for the affluent suburban district. The Republican candidate, Joe Hathaway, argued that Mejia was an unacceptable radical, while trying to present himself as more moderate than Donald Trump.

But it didn’t matter much. The race was about Trump.

As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump was never far from the lips of Ms. Mejia’s supporters. ‘At every turn, we have seen an out-of-control president,’ Ms. Sherrill said on Sunday at a rally for Ms. Mejia, who she said would be an effective ‘check’ on Mr. Trump.”

Indeed, as one New Jersey reporter noted, “Several voters who spoke with the New Jersey Globe outside an early voting location in Madison couldn’t name the Democrat they had just voted for.”

In other words, last night’s result was consistent with all the previous results and all the data suggesting a big blue wave this November, driven by disapproval of Trump.

A Quinnipiac poll published Wednesday had Trump’s national approval–disapproval at 38 percent to 55 percent. Quinnipiac broke out the numbers of those who who strongly approve or disapprove:

• approve strongly of Trump: 29 percent

• approve somewhat of Trump: 9 percent

• disapprove somewhat of Trump: 6 percent

• disapprove strongly of Trump: 49 percent

If you’re going into a midterm when your party has controlled both the White House and Congress, and that party is joined at the hip to a president who’s losing 29 percent to 49 percent among those who care the most and who are the most likely to vote, your prospects are . . . not good.

So April’s electoral good news from Hungary could well be followed by good news from the United States in November.

But! An increasingly desperate Trump will still be in charge of the executive branch. He’ll have all the levers of presidential power at his disposal, and he has subordinates seemingly as willing as ever to use them as he wishes.

And so, as Nick Catoggio put it last night, Trump administration apparatchiks seem ever “more fanatic about making the president happy, either by carrying out his vendettas more aggressively or by aping his worst impulses more doggedly.”

Catoggio explains that Trumpist fanaticism will have consequences:

To protect their hold on power, he and his menagerie will need to be considerably more ruthless about challenges to it than Viktor Orbán was. . . . As Trump and his aides become more convinced that a Democratic midterm wipeout is a fait accompli, they may surmise that there’s nothing left to lose by leaning all the way in on unpopular autocratic gambits.

With Trump’s unpopularity and his desperation both mounting, the next thirty-three months—especially the next eight months before the new Congress is seated—are likely to be ever more dangerous.

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Politics by Other Means and the English Language

by Mark Hertling

An important lesson our war colleges teach rising senior leaders is: Words are important, so be precise in your language.

That lesson was won by hard experience. It’s also borne out by research in the business world, where research on this subject is overwhelming. One of the most common causes of organizational failure is poor communication. When leaders are imprecise, when they rely on jargon or shorthand instead of clarity, when they use improper or fuzzy terms to describe desired outcomes, misunderstandings follow. In war, misunderstandings lead to bad decisions, unnecessary risk, and tragedy.

As George Orwell wrote, “the English language becomes ugly and inaccurate2 because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Turn on a news program or listen to a political speech, and you’ll hear a steady stream of phrases that sound tough, even authoritative—but convey very little real meaning. They’ve become ubiquitous, especially among civilians trying to describe a battlefield they’ve never seen. And in the process, they distort far more than they clarify. There are far too many to cite, but here are some of my least favorite.

Start with “locked and loaded.” It’s a rifle range term—a command indicating a weapon is prepared to fire under controlled conditions. But more often people who are nowhere near a rifle—and may never have been—use it to signal readiness or resolve. The term doesn’t explain who is ready, what they’re ready to do, where, or why. It may be a catchy phrase, but it’s not precise communication.

I’ve come to loathe the almost ubiquitous phrase “boots on the ground.” It’s often used by media to refer to troops who deploy to conduct land warfare—though I’ve seen it perplexingly used recently to describe naval and air warfare as well. This term reduces human beings to equipment. It distances the public from the reality that deploying a force means putting people—leaders, teammates, American sons and daughters—in harm’s way. It’s a phrase that sounds grounded and authoritative, but it abstracts the human cost of war. And it should be banned. If you want a more accurate image, don’t talk about “boots on the ground”—talk about soldiers prepared for combat or doing what civilian leaders ask them to do.

“Downrange” is another example lifted from the rifle range. Downrange is where the targets are, and it’s not a safe place to be when military personnel are training with their weapons. Yet, we now have people using it to describe where our forces are deployed. Think about what it means for a moment: Taken literally, it places our troops in the same conceptual space as targets. It’s sloppy at best, misleading at worst.

“Warrior” has similarly proliferated. Inside the profession, it can carry meaning tied to ethos, discipline, values, and identity. But in public usage, it’s often a catch-all label applied to anyone in uniform, regardless of role, training, or mission. It blurs distinctions that matter in a professional force and turns a complex institution into a caricature. “Troops” is widely accepted in all branches as a catch-all for all service members and better describes the range of occupations and skills of military personnel.

There are the euphemisms. “Take down the leader.” “Take out the commander.” Those are phrases more appropriate for describing a wrestling match or a bad date than assessing the results of a military operation. In combat, the objective may be to kill or capture an enemy, destroy a headquarters, or defeat a unit. That’s the reality. Softening it with casual, almost flippant language doesn’t make it more acceptable—it makes it easier to ignore what’s actually being done.

I’m not trying to be a doctrinal wet blanket or a grammar nazi. Jargon and shorthand among military professionals, as among any specialized community, saves time and is perfectly appropriate because everyone knows what the terms really mean. Shared experience creates shared understanding, and is often used as verbal shorthand. But used inaccurately, or out of context—even by members of the military—they create a vocabulary that is imprecise, theatrical, and detached from reality.

When leaders and commentators speak about military operations, they are talking to the American people, a high percentage of whom have never served in uniform. And the American people deserve clarity—especially when their nation is committing their sons and daughters to combat.

Imprecise language creates imprecise thinking. It masks risk and obscures costs. It allows policymakers to imply action without defining a purpose, and it encourages the public to accept military operations without fully understanding their implications. There’s a better way, and it’s not complicated.

Say what you mean. If the mission is to deter, defend, attack, or blockade, use those words and then describe what they mean. If the objective is to kill or capture an enemy, don’t hide behind a euphemism. If forces are being deployed, say where and why. Channel Gen. Colin Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs who succinctly described the goals for Operation Desert Storm with precision: “Our strategy in going after this army is very simple. First, we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it.” War is serious business, and the American people deserve real descriptions of what we are doing when we are engaged in those missions.

Too often, imprecise, militarized language is used to mask something even more significant: the absence of a coherent national strategy. Strategy is not a slogan or a strike. It is the alignment of ends, ways, and means—across all instruments of national power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. When those elements are not integrated, when there is no clear strategic framework, it becomes tempting to lean on military phrases and imagery to suggest control or progress. But tough talk is no substitute for accurately describing what our nation is trying to do.

Using the language of war to mask disorganized thinking confuses the public. It also risks committing the military to actions that are disconnected from achievable political outcomes. It places burdens on the one instrument of power that is most visible, most costly, and most dangerous, while allowing others to go underutilized.

We should expect more—from our leaders and from ourselves. War is not a soundbite, and shouldn’t be verbal theater. It demands discipline not just in execution, but in explanation. And that begins with using words that are clear, precise, and honest about what we are asking our military—and our citizens—to do.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• How Putin’s Propagandists Are Spinning Orbán’s Defeat… And what has the Russian opposition optimistic? CATHY YOUNG reports.

• On this bonus episode of The Focus Group, SAMI SAGE of Betches Media joins RACHEL JANFAZA to wonder whether millennials are truly still ‘cringe.’

• ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Review… A potentially repugnant film, warns SONNY BUNCH.

• The Worst President Ever… From Trump’s use of Jesus to corruption, pardons, and self-promotion, no president has sunk lower. Democrats need plans for oversight and stopping midterm cheating. AMANDA CARPENTER joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to discuss all that, plus Hegseth’s scripture problem, Trump’s ego-driven 250th birthday plans, and RFK Jr.’s obsession with dead animals.

Bulwark Live: California tickets go on sale for everyone at 9:00 a.m. PT today. For details and links, head to TheBulwark.com/Events.

Quick Hits

OUR EVAPORATING POWER: It seemed unavoidable on its face that Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran—a war that conjured up a global energy shock out of nowhere and involved Trump threatening genocide and other war crimes against an entire people—would hurt America’s diplomatic standing in the world. Now, reports coming in from U.S. embassies around the globe—a set of which were obtained by Politico—show that this is already happening:

U.S. diplomats at embassies in the countries’ capitals painted damning portraits of an America under siege in multiple media spheres by pro-Iranian actors that are exceptionally agile in the digital space.

In Azerbaijan, what had been a significantly improving relationship has hit a plateau at best, and appears to be faltering. Bahrain’s government is facing questions about whether the U.S. abandoned it to fend for itself against Iranian drones and missiles. And Indonesia’s leader could face growing calls to reduce security ties with the U.S.

Some of the cables describe anti-U.S. sentiment that is having an immediate impact, while others raise concerns that relationships could be in danger if the war continues much longer. Taken together, the cables paint a picture of countries where the U.S. is losing the population’s trust, and potentially that of their governments.

Among the grimmest facts of all, Politico notes, is that the cables would likely never have been sent if the situation weren’t truly dire: “Many U.S. diplomats have become afraid to speak up under the Trump administration after it largely sidelined them from key foreign policy decisions, fired numerous members of the Foreign Service and emphasized ‘fidelity’ for those left, two U.S. diplomats said.” Read the whole thing.

PEACE TALKS WITH CLAUDE: Anthropic’s legal war with the Defense Department (and the Trump administration at large) hasn’t progressed much since a federal judge temporarily barred the government from forbidding the AI company to do business with its contractors. But now a breakthrough suddenly seems imminent—not for diplomatic reasons, but for technological ones.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Axios reports, is heading to the White House today for a meeting with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—a meeting that comes as the administration wakes up to the fact that the company’s latest model, Mythos, is reportedly so capable both at engineering cyberattacks and at shoring up computer systems against them that it would be dangerous for the government not to use it. Here’s Axios:

The Trump administration recognizes the power of Anthropic’s new Claude model, Mythos, and its highly sophisticated—and potentially dangerous—ability to breach cybersecurity defenses.

“It would be grossly irresponsible for the U.S. government to deprive itself of the technological leaps that this new model presents,” a source close to negotiations told us. “It would be a gift to China.”

Making peace with Anthropic would be quite a pivot from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who for months have derided it as “A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” riddled with “leftwing nut jobs” who had “delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal” by placing “Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.” But as Emerson said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

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Trump’s Powell Paradox

by Andrew Egger

Well, would you look at that: Donald Trump is threatening Jerome Powell again. The president said yesterday that he plans to fire the Fed chair next month, should he not step down from his post “on time.”

“I’ll have to fire him, okay?” Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “I’ve held back firing him. I’ve wanted to fire him, but I hate to be controversial.”1

Such threats are nothing new: Trump has long seethed over what he sees as the Federal Reserve chair’s intolerable reluctance to lower interest rates, and has pursued many fruitless strategies to jawbone him into doing so. What is new is how apparent it’s become that here, far from holding all the cards, Trump is caught in yet another negotiating trap of his own making.

Powell’s term is up on May 15. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it: He would hand the role off to his successor without fuss. But right now Powell has no successor. Trump’s nominee for the position, financier Kevin Warsh, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. By law, Powell will stay in his current role unless and until the Senate confirms Warsh—or someone else.

But why hasn’t Warsh been confirmed? Because of the determined opposition of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Why won’t Tillis advance Warsh’s nomination? Because he has sworn not to allow any Fed nominees to move ahead in the Senate until the Trump administration calls off its ludicrous criminal investigation of Powell over supposed cost overruns during the renovation of the Fed headquarters in D.C.

And why is Powell under investigation in the first place? Because Powell, as head of an independent agency, has legal protection against being fired except for cause. All along, the Fed renovation “investigation” was a transparent attempt to get more leverage on Powell—either to twist his arm a little more on his interest-rates decisions, or to provide the legal predicate for Trump firing him after all. The president has barely tried to deny this: Last year, asked what Powell could do to assuage his concerns about the renovation-cost overruns, Trump replied that “well, I’d love to see him lower interest rates.”

But it didn’t work. Powell refused to be bullied. In January, he publicly accused Trump’s Justice Department of threatening him with criminal indictment over a pretext. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions,” Powell said in a direct-to-camera video, “or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”

Last month, a federal judge agreed, invalidating a pair of subpoenas sent by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office to the Federal Reserve. There was “abundant evidence,” Judge James Boasberg wrote, that the “dominant (if not sole) purpose” of the subpoenas was “to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.”

Their legal legs cut from under them, Trump and Pirro have been resorting to sillier, more thuggish tactics: Prosecutors from Pirro’s office made an unannounced visit to the Fed building yesterday, seeking to “check on progress” via a “tour” of the renovations.

The Fed, having declined to buckle under more dangerous pressures, practically laughed this one off. “As you know, Chief Judge Boasberg has concluded that your interest in the Federal Reserve’s renovation project was pretextual,” Robert Hur,2 the Fed’s outside legal counsel, wrote to Pirro’s office after the incident. “Should you wish to challenge that finding, the courts provide an avenue for you; it is not appropriate for you to try to circumvent it.”

Trump, then, is stuck. His investigation was supposed to give him the means either of bending Powell to his will or of getting the irritating Fed chair out of his hair. Instead, it has been completely thwarted—first by Powell’s courage, then by the courts. But the ongoing existence even of such a feeble and impotent investigation is enough to keep Sen. Tillis from giving his permission for the Senate to confirm Kevin Warsh. Far from accelerating Powell’s departure, then, the investigation now seems likely to prolong his stay.

Okay, so: Why not just end the investigation? Many of Trump’s allies, no longer seeing much merit in pretending the Powell investigation is some righteous, apolitical action by Pirro that Trump has nothing to do with, are asking exactly this. “You want Jay Powell out of the way,” Bartiromo said during her interview with Trump yesterday. “Isn’t the easiest way to get him out of the way to end the probe?”

And here we arrive at the most fascinating part of the whole business, at least when it comes to the president’s personal psychology: because Trump does not agree with this assessment. “Does that mean we stop a probe of a building that I would have done for $25 million that’s gonna cost maybe $4 billion?” he blustered. “Don’t you think we have to find out what happened there?”

Trump wants Powell gone. If he dropped his probe, Tillis would drop his objection to Warsh’s confirmation, and Powell would be out as Fed chair in thirty days. But Trump remains dispositionally incapable of such a tactical retreat. Either he has become so high on his own supply that he has genuinely convinced himself Powell has committed vile crimes as part of the Fed renovation, or Powell has simply become so irksome to him that he cannot bear to see him go unpunished, or he just isn’t willing to give Powell the win. For whatever reason, he finds himself unable to make the one move that everyone save him can see would solve his problem immediately.

Trump is a ratchet that turns only one way—toward further threats and more intimidation. Who cares if Powell won’t leave voluntarily or by law? Trump will just fire him, he insists—notwithstanding that his for-cause predicate has gone up in smoke. And who cares that Tillis will gum up the works? “That’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator,” Trump scoffed.

Either Tillis will have to blink, or Trump will. Until then, Powell’s not going anywhere.

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Why Trump Fears the Pope

by William Kristol

Does might make right?

It’s an age-old question, and there’s no great mystery about the Trump administration’s answer. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller articulated it clearly a few months ago, in the course of defending President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.

According to Miller, in the real world, it’s power—not justice—that matters. The “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” rule, and the essence of those iron laws is that might makes right.

This is the worldview of the Trump administration, and not just in foreign policy but in domestic policy. It’s also the worldview of the president, and not just for public but for private life (“when you’re a star . . . you can do anything”).

That Trumpist view—that power is to be worshiped, that might makes right—can be dressed up in religious garb, whether through the unctuous sophistry of JD Vance or the grotesque weaponization of faith by Pete Hegseth. But the costume clearly doesn’t fit. The claim that we have no choice but to follow “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” indeed that we should exult in doing so, is fundamentally at odds with a Judeo-Christian world view. After all, if Miller is right, if those iron laws from the beginning of time are unchangeable and unchallengeable, then there is no God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t matter.

Of course, if the Trumpist claim is right, if those iron laws since the beginning of time are all-powerful, then the Declaration of Independence doesn’t matter either. Whatever human rights we may think we should respect don’t matter. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

And that’s why the Trump administration and its surrogates have chosen to pick a fight with Pope Leo XIV. They’re attacking Pope Leo not simply because he’s the pope but because he’s the first American pope. He’s a threat to their ambition to change the meaning of America.

And he’s popular here in America.

A poll last month found that 42 percent of Americans had a positive feeling about the Pope, while only 8 percent had a negative view. Half said they were neutral or not sure. If you’re Trump, and you see a critic with those numbers, a critic who can command attention and who shows no signs of being afraid of you or of shrinking from a fight, you want to weaken him. You want to try to drive up his negatives and to drag him down into the polarized political mud in which all other American public figures exist. So you try to reduce him to just another political actor—to a radical leftist who’s “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

Trump claimed that Leo only got elected “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.” Trump may be wrong to ascribe his own kind of political thinking to the College of Cardinals. But he’s not wrong to sense that their choice of Robert Prevost as the first American pope posed a kind of threat to him. After all, the first Polish pope helped liberate his home country from authoritarian rule. Trump and the Trumpists are worried that the first American pope could contribute to such a development here.

And they should be. The view Pope Leo is upholding—that right matters, not just might—is an American one. It’s the view not just of Augustine but of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln attacked the heresy that might makes right. Lincoln in his great 1860 Cooper Union speech reversed the equation: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The Trumpists fear Pope Leo not simply because he’s defending the views, and speaking to the communicants, of his church. They fear him because he’s defending the principles, and speaking to the citizens, of his country. Of our country.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Said “Total Blockade”—That’s Not Happening… On the latest Command Post, MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER examine the growing gap between political messaging and military reality, focusing on how Trump’s public statements often differ from what the military actually executes.

• Dumped by Trump… The Riley Gaines side story from this week is just the latest reminder of how casually the president tosses aside allies, reminds PETER ROTHPLETZ.

• Trump Is a Wanker… The Irish are protesting in the streets over the price of fuel, Qatar’s GDP is plummeting, and heating bills are skyrocketing in France. All because of Trump’s war of choice in Iran. ALASTAIR CAMPBELL joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break it all down.

  Calling all West Coast Bulwark+ members: Today is the final day for the members-only presale for Bulwark Live in San Diego and LA in May. Tickets go on sale for everyone Friday at 9 a.m. PT. Click here to get the members-only presale code and links to the ticketing sites.

Quick Hits

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?: The New York Times brings a quick vibe check on the ongoing state of things in Iran:

In Mr. Trump’s telling, U.S. victory in Iran is already clear. In the Fox Business interview, reprising his frequent comments of the last two weeks, Mr. Trump asserted that Iran’s navy, air force and antiaircraft equipment had all been wiped out, along with many top officials. If Iran did not rule out nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump said, “we will be living with them for a little while, but I don’t know how much longer they can survive.”

In fact, analysts say, the 40 days of U.S.-Israeli bombardment that ended with last week’s cease-fire appear to have increased the power of the military and hard-liners in the Iranian system. Despite the widespread destruction and the killings of officials by the U.S. and Israeli militaries, the Iranian regime is acting emboldened, having demonstrated that it can wreak havoc in global trade and send U.S. gas prices soaring.

Nevertheless, markets seem to have determined the worst is behind us: The S&P is higher today than it was when the war began, and oil prices—while dramatically higher than before the war—are still well down from their peak-panic highs, despite maritime traffic remaining largely choked in the Strait of Hormuz. Hope springs eternal!

BACK IN THE GOOD BOOKS: She may be totally crosswise from him on the war in Iran, but Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard knows how to keep the bossman happy. Yesterday, Gabbard sent the Justice Department a criminal referral for two former government officials who played a major role in Trump’s first impeachment in 2019: a whistleblower who revealed the existence of Trump’s efforts to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for “dirt” on his future presidential rival Joe Biden, and the former intelligence-community watchdog who handled the whistleblower report. CBS News reports:

“I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote. “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.” . . .

Gabbard alleged in a post on X Monday that “deep state actors” in the intelligence community “concocted a false narrative that Congress used to usurp the will of the American people and impeach duly-elected President @realDonaldTrump in 2019.” She argued that the inspector general relied on “second-hand evidence” in looking into the whistleblower complaint.

The documents, however, do not provide any direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Read the whole thing.

DAILY BREAD: Okay, so it’s not exactly must-read news . . . but you could argue it’s a must-consume story. Caity Weaver’s megasized Atlantic odyssey to find the best free bread in America must be read to be believed:

Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.

Don’t betray her, or yourself: Read the whole thing.

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“The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this,” Trump wrote, “but I think it is quite nice!!!” Happy Wednesday.

Golden State Clown Car

by Andrew Egger

Last month, I wrote in this newsletter that billionaire Tom Steyer’s campaign to become California governor was “one of the funnier ongoing subplots of this young election season”—another vanity campaign like his 2020 presidential bid that would set unholy heaps of Steyer’s own money on fire en route to another doomed finish. I should have known I was tempting fate.

Now, the sudden collapse of Rep. Eric Swalwell due to sexual misconduct accusations has left California Democrats in a deeply unpleasant spot. Swalwell wasn’t running away with the contest, but he had started to seem a little inevitable, which Democrats, on the whole, were basically fine with. With him gone, the field is suddenly looking astonishingly weak—and Steyer simply buying his way to victory is actually a genuine possibility.

After all, who would stop him? The other known quantity in the Democratic contest, former Rep. Katie Porter, is a staunch progressive with fervent fans. But she’s also developed a reputation for—well—instability: She has had inexplicable meltdowns during respectful press interviews, gone viral for shouting at staffers during Zoom calls, and in 2022 barred a young short-term staffer from returning to her office after accusing her of giving her COVID.

Some Democrats are trying to cobble together alternative possibilities. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a more centrist candidate and one with actual California executive experience, had been considered an afterthought in the race. But the Washington Post reports that wealthy donors have begun looking to him as their way out of the jam: a super PAC supporting him received $12 million in pledged donations just this past weekend.

Meanwhile, somebody out there is running a poll testing a different proposition: How would Kamala Harris fare in this primary if she were to suddenly enter the race as a write-in candidate?

It’s a measure of how bad the vibes are that the only really good piece of news on the contest for California Democrats lately came from Donald Trump. Two different candidates, former Fox host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, had been polling above ten percent—raising the age-old anxiety about a Republican lockout.2 But then Trump endorsed Hilton, making the necessary near-even split between the two Republicans far less likely.

Still, doesn’t this all feel a little horrifyingly familiar? How can it possibly be that Democrats have yet again sleepwalked into yet another high-profile race for which they seem to have basically zero highly qualified and popular candidates? Is it too much to expect this party to figure out one primary field that looks inviting enough that nobody feels compelled to do write-in candidate hopium long after the filing deadlines have passed? Am I the only one for whom this nonsense is starting to get old?

Not to freak people out or anything, but the stakes are pretty high for the country right now. It’s not hard to imagine a world where the ongoing outrages of the Trump presidency galvanize Democrats to turf up more inspiring, more capable, more visionary candidates. Instead, Trump often has a flattening effect. As California Democratic strategist Brian Brokaw told the New York Times this week: “Trump himself occupies so much of the political conversation that the only way for anyone at the state or local level to break through that noise is to position themselves as an anti-Trump figure.”

But positioning yourself as an anti-Trump figure is so easy pretty much anybody can do it. Which means that it’s even more of an advantage than usual to be able to purchase a much bigger megaphone than your competitors. Which is why California may, remarkably, implausibly, find itself saddled with a Governor Steyer.

We can only hope Democrats will have these sorts of nominating kinks worked out by the time 2028 rolls around. That one’s going to be pretty important, too.

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The Lessons of Péter Magyar

by William Kristol

Yes, yes, I know. I can’t keep on writing about Hungary forever. I mean, this newsletter is called “Morning Shots,” not “Reggeli lövés.”3

And yes, I’m aware there are other things going on in the world: Trump’s ever-more unhinged behavior, the increased danger of his Justice Department now under leadership that’s still malevolent but probably more competent, the continued depredations of ICE, Trump’s desperate attempts to mask the fact that he’s heading for the exits in Iran with the mission not accomplished, and the still-unfolding Epstein scandal.

But I do want to dwell at least one more day on Hungary, and on lessons to be learned from Viktor Orbán’s stunning defeat and Péter Magyar’s inspiring victory. And I want to do this by bringing you a couple of key points made by David Pressman, our excellent ambassador to Hungary during the Biden administration, in a Bulwark Take we recorded yesterday. Here are some lightly edited excerpts:

The message: kleptocracy and corruption.

Péter Magyar took his campaign directly to the rural heartland of Hungary . . . to Viktor Orbán’s, and Fidesz’s, strongholds. And Magyar went to those strongholds, and he delivered a message and opened a conversation with conservative Hungarians that was about kleptocracy and corruption.

Magyar’s campaign framing was: Victor Orbán and Fidesz are a criminal organization, and we need to dismantle this criminal organization. And he connected the impact of the criminal organization to these Hungarians’ experiences.

So when you go to the countryside in Hungary, you realize they can’t go to a hospital that’s up to twentieth-century standards, they can’t find public schools that can properly educate their children, and they’re watching their grandchildren moving out of Hungary and leaving to try to find opportunity. What Magyar did is he explained to them that the reason your hospitals and your schools are crumbling is because these guys are stealing from you. I think that was hugely impactful. And he connected the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán as one vector of mass corruption in Hungary.

You asked, am I surprised? I’m surprised that Magyar was able to penetrate this pervasive media control that Viktor Orbán has over Hungary. But I’m not surprised at all that the Hungarian people were prepared to choose a different path. Hungarians galvanized behind a candidate who wasn’t proposing policy change, but was proposing system change.

One of the things that we have not transitioned to in the United States is we continue to see what’s happening as instances of corruption. I am concerned a little bit that as we look at the situation, we keep seeing some outrageous and unprecedented, in my view illegal, acts taking place. But we continue to view them as individual derogations from practice as opposed to a new system that has actually been put in place that needs to be challenged systemically. These are not aberrations. This is the new system of government. And in that respect, Péter Magyar wasn’t calling out individual abuses. He was calling out an entire platform that was designed to enrich a kleptocratic elite and the family of Viktor Orbán.

The messenger: bold and unafraid.

I’ve heard a lot of discussion in the Western press about the broad coalition that Péter Magyar brought together, which is absolutely true. But also, this is about leadership, right? It’s not just the ability to assemble a coalition. It was also not being afraid. And he was not afraid. It was his fearlessness—and the fearlessness manifested itself in the way he communicated.

I remember when he emerged onto the scene and the Fidesz party started going after him. But remember, the Fidesz party controlled all of the instruments of state. So when the party goes after you, it’s a government going after you. And at one point, this was early on, they started making fun of him because he was wearing what they called women’s sunglasses. Just a small example. And his response to that was not to deliver some sort of a lecture on gender norms, or to say, how dare you do this. He started broadcasting and projecting as many images as he could of him in these sunglasses, smiling, having fun, more sunglasses. Then he auctioned the sunglasses off, did a public auction, which created a whole story, raised all this money to deliver to women’s charities. And through it all, he appeared to be having a good time, And so, you know, there was a brashness to his communications that felt strong.

When we think about how you confront strongmen, it requires a kind of engagement that’s not something that we’re really accustomed to in politics.

Magyar at his press conference yesterday said something that I thought was right. I want to say something to the foreign correspondents in the room, he said. The propaganda apparatus in Hungary, he said, was like North Korea. I don’t think you understand how bad it was. And I think he’s right. I think that most Americans and most Westerners don’t appreciate just the sheer power that having just all of these platforms of communication badmouth you, smear you, spy on you, what that does to individuals. But Magyar, to his credit, he didn’t shirk and plowed through it in a really impressive way. Really, the most important part is that he wasn’t afraid, and he demonstrated to people how not to be afraid.

Watch or listen to the whole thing.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• A Bittersweet 20th Birthday for Romneycare… Mitt Romney’s legacy is a reminder of how governing used to work. JONATHAN COHN is in Massachusetts, where he talked to former senator and Governor MITT ROMNEY.

• Trump Keeps Trying to Pressure Ukraine. Zelensky Doesn’t Care… The American president is trying to use leverage he doesn’t have, argues STEVEN PIFER.

• A New Hungary Is a Huge Opportunity for Europe… Once the problem area, Central Europe could become the engine of reform the continent needs, writes DALIBOR ROHAC.

• The Nationalist Right Isn’t Taking Orbán’s Loss Well… CATHY YOUNG takes a look at America’s nationalists mourning one of their own.

Quick Hits

JD AMOK: Do the hits keep coming for JD Vance or what? Fresh off his humiliating Hungary trip stumping for a two-bit authoritarian who lost in an enormous landslide days later, the vice president headed last night to Georgia for a Turning Point USA event. But the event fell far short of expectations, with videos going viral of Vance speaking to a basketball arena barely a quarter full.

Nor were the vibes particularly good. Far from keeping fire focused on the left, Vance opened the event with a harangue against the right-wing conspiracy theorists who continue to harass TPUSA leader Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. Erika Kirk had been supposed to participate in the event, Vance said, but had pulled out over death threats. (Apparently, the risk to the vice president’s own life is not as substantial.)

“It’s one of the most disgusting things I have seen in public life,” Vance said. “To say Erika Kirk wasn’t grieving her husband—that she was somehow complicit in his death—is preposterous and disgusting. . . . If you’re going after Erika Kirk and not the people trying to destroy the United States of America, you’re part of the problem.”

Will Vance be successful in his attempts to scold the world’s biggest lunatics into focusing their lunacy on more politically useful targets? We’ll keep you posted.

MORE SHOES TO DROP: Congress’s ethics reckonings aren’t over yet. On the heels of the resignations of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), many in Congress are now raising the pressure on another pair of ethically challenged members: Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Republican Rep. Cory Mills, both of Florida.

Cherfilus-McCormick is under federal indictment for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars of FEMA disaster funds, conduct for which a House ethics investigation last month found her guilty of twenty-five ethics violations. Yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he believed Cherfilus-McCormick would be expelled from Congress: “I think the facts are indisputable at this point. . . That certainly rises to the level that’s needed.”

Mills isn’t there yet—his own ethics investigation, covering a host of accusations of campaign finance violations, sexual misconduct, misuse of federal funds, and more, remains ongoing. But many lawmakers, including some in his own party, seem to think it’s only a matter of time for him as well. “Two down,” Rep. Nancy Mace tweeted yesterday, “two to go.”

FRIEND OF A PREDATOR: The fallout from Swalwell’s implosion hasn’t been confined to the house. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) has been a longtime personal friend and political ally of Swalwell’s, and he came strongly to his defense when rumors about the congressman’s behavior started swirling last week.4

Now the senator, too, has been forced into damage-control mode. In a press conference in his office yesterday, a harried Gallego disclaimed all knowledge of the predations of his—he insisted—former friend. “I let this man into my family,” Gallego said. “Look, we socialized. We went out. But I never saw him engage in any of the predatory behavior, harassment, sexual assault, anything like that.”

“I definitely look at the world a different way now,” Gallego added, pledging to “take, you know, personal steps and office steps to make sure that we don’t even get close to a gray line.”

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Hungary Shows the Way

by William Kristol

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was, according to MAGA propagandist Steve Bannon, “Trump before Trump.” Or as the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts put it, Orbán’s Hungary was “not just a model . . . but the model.”

So it’s reasonable to wonder whether Orbán’s defeat on Sunday might not be a herald of failure for Trump, a harbinger of the defeat of Trumpism.

Orbán was in a stronger position in Hungary than Trump is here. Orbán had been in power for sixteen years, reelected with supermajorities in 2014, 2018, and 2022. He succeeded in establishing his dominance of the political system in his sixteen years in office, rewriting the constitution, changing electoral rules, and establishing a remarkable degree of control over the courts, the media, and the private sector. All this was in the service of institutionalizing the “illiberal democracy” he proclaimed as his goal in 2014.

Yet Orbán lost in a landslide. He was defeated by Péter Magyar, who’d been a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party until joining the Tisza Party two years ago. Magyar was able not only to bring together and unite disparate parts of the resistance to Orbán, but to turn that opposition into a kind of social movement that transcended normal partisanship and that offered the country a different vision of a Hungarian future.

David Baer, whose dispatch from Budapest was featured in yesterday’s newsletter, emphasized to me as were texting last night that Magyar was not merely a skilled political tactician; his campaign offered a vision that promised to “make people proud of their country again.” David noted that Magyar’s campaign often cited the great Hungarian national poet, Sándor Petőfi, a hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, who was “a great LIBERAL and PATRIOTIC poet.”

Here are the lines from Petőfi that the Magyar campaign liked to quote, in David’s translation:

Beautiful again shall be Hungary’s name
Worthy of its ancient fame
What centuries past have smeared with blight
We shall wash off and set aright.
We swear by God we shall be free
No longer sons of slavery.

And David remarks,

The extent to which Magyar’s campaign, and he himself, seem infused with the very classical liberal ideals of Hungary’s 1848 revolution is lost in the reporting that characterize him as conservative. We don’t fully know who he is yet, but you could make a good case that he’s a liberal in the way conservatism in America used to be liberal.

This of course raises the question and the possibility: Could liberal patriotism overcome authoritarian nationalism here as well? As Orbán showed the way for the authoritarian turn in American conservatism, could Magyar herald a revival of a vigorous and victorious patriotic liberalism?

This wouldn’t be the first time the small country of Hungary held aloft the torch of liberty.

The Hungarian revolutionaries in 1848, led by Lajos Kossuth, inspired liberals not just in Europe but in the United States (including Abraham Lincoln).

The example of the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, with their valiant uprising against the Soviet Union—“the first tear in the Iron Curtain”—was important to many both within and outside the Soviet bloc who resisted communism over the next decades.

And in 1989, Hungary led the way in breaking up the Warsaw Pact, opening its border to the West in September and dissolving its communist government in October, before the Berlin Wall came down.

Hungary is a small country. We’re a big one. And we’re used to indulging in the conceit that it’s our role to show others the way. So we often have. But it’s also been the case that others have shown us the way. One thinks especially of Churchill and the people of Great Britain who stood alone in 1940, as we remained mostly aloof from the fight against Nazism. One also thinks of Zelensky and the people of Ukraine who have so courageously fought alone against Putin’s Russia—though with support from the free world—over the past four years and longer.

Obviously what happens next in Hungary—to say nothing of what happens here—is up in the air. But for now we can at least express gratitude to the people of Hungary who have inflicted such a notable defeat not just on Viktor Orbán but on Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Let us see to it that it is not the last.

The Geopolitics of ‘Your Rules’

by Andrew Egger

Your rules, your rules, your rules! For much of today’s online right, these two words are a slogan, a rallying cry, a way of life. They’re a core part of the permission structure of a politics built around nothing but owning the libs. The good guys, it is suggested, have actual moral standards and codes that their godless dishonorable enemies lack, but they need not actually hold to these codes in their dealings with those enemies. In such instances, “we’re only playing by your rules.”

In theory, this is a condensed argument about double standards. In practice, it’s an all-purpose excuse for pretty much anything. That was obvious this week, when we saw the apotheosis of “your rules” thought from both the president and the vice president.

On Sunday morning, Donald Trump was asked on Fox News to defend his threat last week that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not capitulate to his demands—an obvious, explicit threat of genocide. “I’m fine with it,” Trump said, insisting that the threat had “brought [Iran] to the table.” Then he added: “They’re allowed to say ‘Death to America.’” Your rules.

Then, last night, JD Vance had this to say—again on Fox—about America’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which comes atop Iran’s blockade of the strait: “What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world—they’ve basically threatened any ship that’s moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Well, as the president of the United States showed, two can play at that game.” Your rules.

There are, of course, major differences between Iran’s blockade and America’s: Our military has promised to interdict ships transiting the strait under Iran’s permission, not to attack them with drones, menace them with mines, or ram them with speedboats. But Vance’s core argument, like Trump’s above, is predicated on a simple rhetorical point: How can anyone object to us treating Iran the way they treat us?

This argument is simply incompatible with the way America, until about fifteen seconds ago, conceptualized its position in the world. America was supposed to be a beacon of the good things that were possible for human civilizations to attain: freedom, prosperity, the rule of law. To borrow the hoary old phrase from John Winthrop via Ronald Reagan: the “shining city upon a hill.” This was both a noble aspiration and a great international brand that helped America become the linchpin of a global order that benefited it immensely.

But Trump, his lackeys, and his movement have nothing but contempt for both the old aspiration and the old order. All that ever did, they believe, is get us ripped off by people who were willing to be more devious and unscrupulous than us. But thanks to them, America is now wise to their tricks. We’re not going to let them get away with it anymore. Now, we’re playing by their rules.

We weren’t always perfect in following them, but our rules helped raise America to heights no other country had ever achieved. Now, the president and vice president suggest, no one can or should complain if we lower our standards to the level of the world’s most lawless regimes. We’re only playing by your rules.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• What a ‘Blockade’ in the Strait of Hormuz Really Means… It’s not as easy as it sounds, explains MARK HERTLING.

• RFK Jr.’s Lifelong Lapse of Judgment… A new book shines light, if any were needed, on the man’s manifest unfitness, writes BILL LUEDERS.

• Trump’s Weird DoorDash Stunt Backfires… On Bulwark+ Takes, ANDREW EGGER and CATHERINE RAMPELL break down Donald Trump’s bizarre McDonald’s DoorDash photo op at the White House, meant to highlight his “no tax on tips” policy.

• A 250-Foot Monument to Trump’s Ego… On the Mona Charen Show, Washington Post architecture critic PHILIP KENNICOTT joins MONA CHAREN to discuss Trump’s physical desecration of Washington, D.C.

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Quick Hits

THE MAN HIMSELF: Sometimes there just isn’t room in even as meaty and substantial a newsletter as Morning Shots to give adequate time to every ludicrous thing our president sets himself to in a given day. So we’ll just briefly mention here his “No Tax on Tips” stunt at the White House yesterday, in which a self-proclaimed “DoorDash Grandma” named Sharon Simmons delivered McDonald’s to the Oval Office to talk about how Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill has saved her money on her deliveries. Trump subjected her to an unexpectedly uncomfortable barrage of questions:

“I think you voted for me?”

“Uh . . . maybe.”

“Do you think that men should play in women’s sports?”

“I really don’t have an opinion about that. I’m here about no tax on tips.”

Simmons also stood by awkwardly as Trump offered a howler of an explanation for his Sunday Truth Social post of AI-generated artwork depicting him as Jesus, which had incensed many religious conservatives online: “I thought it was me as a doctor. And had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support.”

DOGGED PURSUIT OF JUSTICE: We’ve said it before, and this won’t be the last time: It is a grotesquery of our era that old outrages are so rapidly followed by new ones that the old ones are difficult to bear in mind. The horrors of ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis are barely past us—Renee Good was killed just 98 days ago, Alex Pretti just 80—and yet those horrors can already feel like a distant memory.

Some attempts at accountability persist, however. Yesterday, county officials in St. Paul, Minnesota announced the latest development in their investigation of ICE’s contemptible January treatment of ChongLy Thao, a U.S. citizen whom ICE agents inexplicably dragged half-naked from his home into the Minnesota winter.1

Ramsey County prosecutors have been investigating the incident as a possible kidnapping, but ICE—and we’re sure this will shock you—has proven remarkably uncooperative. At a press conference yesterday, county officials said the federal government has rebuffed all requests for basic records on the incident, and that they were preparing to sue if ICE’s stonewalling continues.2

“There are limits on ICE authority just like there are limits on ours,” Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher said at the press conference. “When someone breaches those limits of authority, there are consequences. . . . There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents.”

TWO CREEPS OUT: Well, that was fast. One week ago, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) was the odds-on favorite to become California’s next governor. Now, in the wake of a sudden blizzard of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, Swalwell’s career seems to have winked out of existence. On Friday, Swalwell insisted that “these allegations are flat false, and I will fight them.” On Sunday, he dropped out of the governor’s race. And on Monday, he announced his immediate resignation from Congress.3

This resignation had an unexpected effect: Shortly thereafter, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) announced he would be “retiring,” too. Gonzales, you may recall, is the congressman who last year allegedly pressured a staffer into an affair—then broke off contact when her husband found out. The staffer then killed herself by setting herself on fire. Gonzales, whose months of implausible denials of wrongdoing included accusing the woman’s widower of participating in a conspiracy to bring him down, finally announced last month that he would abandon his re-election campaign. But he had remained obstinately in his current office—until now.

The timing is notable. Both men were facing possible expulsion votes upon the return of the House this week—with a Democratic lawmaker announcing immediately after Swalwell’s resignation announcement that she would personally file the motion to expel Gonzales should he fail to resign. In our era of total-war partisanship, it seems that disgraced Republican lawmakers can stagger on for a while by calling all accusations against them witch hunts—at least until there’s a disgraced Democrat to trade their resignation for, like a swap of prisoners of war.

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“Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” Trump concluded. “It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!”

Given Leo XIV’s richly earned reputation as the Bulwark pope, we suppose this was only a matter of time.

Programming note: Tonight is the first Founders Town Hall of 2026. Thanks to all our Founders and Navigators for helping to fuel our growth! Want in on this exclusive livestream? Upgrade now and join us tonight. Sarah and JVL will kick things off at 8:30 p.m. EDT.

Happy Monday.

Victor Not Orbán

by H. David Baer

Budapest, Hungary
“Spring wind brings rising water . . . every bird must choose a partner”—so begins the popular Hungarian folk song that Péter Magyar’s opposition party adopted as the theme for its campaign. The image of rising water goes well with the party, which shares its name, Tisza, with a river in eastern Hungary. Yesterday, the Tisza flooded.

The flood began with record turnout, upwards of 77 percent, an early sign that looked favorable for the opposition. Soon after returns started coming in, Tisza took a commanding but not decisive lead. Then, unexpectedly, around 9:15 p.m. local time, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán phoned opposition leader Péter Magyar to congratulate him. Minutes later, Orbán delivered a concession speech that, if not exactly gracious, was nonetheless honorable and fully in line with democratic expectations. Fears that Orbán would not acknowledge defeat proved unfounded.

At 10:30 p.m., Magyar appeared, waving a Hungarian flag as he marched through the middle of the enormous crowd assembled for his victory party in Batthyány Square.

Like everything in Magyar’s history-making campaign, the choice of election-night venue was overlaid with symbolism. Batthyány Square takes its name from Lajos Batthyány, the first prime minister of Hungary and a hero of the 1848 Revolution, who was executed for his commitment to Hungarian freedom. The square sits on the banks of the Danube, directly across from the country’s neo-gothic Parliament, whose columns and spires glimmered as Magyar ascended the podium to deliver his victory speech—and to announce that Tisza had won a supermajority in Parliament. Now, with nearly all the votes counted, Tisza is expected to have 138 seats, five more than needed to reach the two-thirds threshold for enacting sweeping constitutional reforms.

Yesterday’s election was, in part, a referendum on Orbán’s leadership and his makeover of the Hungarian government. But it was also a battle for the soul of Hungary. To describe the election as a clash of two campaigns would be to miss a major part of the story: Yes, Orbán was running a campaign, but Magyar was leading a social movement. In every city he visited the last two weeks, crowds came out by the tens of thousands. The photos are astounding. Rallies this big aren’t really rallies; they feel more like marches or demonstrations, something more significant than a rally. Hungarians did not take to the streets in numbers like this even in 1989.

Orbán apologists are already trying to use this election as proof that his regime was always democratic—how else, after all, could Orbán have been defeated? But this shallow and self-serving argument ignores the improbability of Magyar’s rise, the scale of his achievement, and the change in Hungarian society set in motion by the movement he led. This country is different than it was when Orbán was returned to power sixteen years ago. Its people have drunk deeply from the bitter cup of divisive politics, of petty vindictiveness, of corruption and incompetence, of resentment and hatred. They have had more than a taste of kleptocratic authoritarianism, demagoguery, and unrestrained political power. They have gorged themselves on Christian nationalism—and they have spit it out. True to the Hungarian traditions of 1848 and 1956, they have chosen Europe; they have chosen democracy.

This must all be especially demoralizing for Orbán’s American apologists and the hangers-on at the Danube Institute and Mathias Corvinus Collegium1 in Budapest. But if they look closely enough at Hungary rather than its strongman leader, they might discover a few lessons in Orbán’s fall. Here’s one: In their narrowminded focus on the value of so-called national sovereignty and national traditions, they forget that nationalism in its early eighteenth-century stages was closely aligned with liberalism. Early liberals, seeking to establish a political foundation for their countries other than monarchy, appealed to sentiments of national unity built on language and culture. This early nationalism wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a political project built on aspirations for self-determination, a better life, and respect for other peoples.

Such liberal nationalism is connected to collective aspirations for better things and healthy pride in one’s national history, both of which are closely connected to the capacity to feel shame. A person feels shame when he recognizes that he has failed to live up to his high standards and ideals, when he has failed to demonstrate the quality of character of which he is capable. A nation feels shame when its people recognize they have failed to live up to their principles, to the image of themselves as a noble people pursuing a better future. In both cases, the feeling of shame motivates an individual or a nation to change, to improve. A true patriot has a capacity to feel both pride and shame in his country.

Although making people feel ashamed is not a normal campaign strategy, feelings of shame did float in the background of Magyar’s campaign when he talked about how Orbán had betrayed his country. This was one of Orbán’s most striking accomplishments: to make many Hungarians ashamed of their country. Although Orbán’s fearmongering about Ukraine worked for him four years ago, his willingness to betray Ukraine for the sake of personal gain revolts many Hungarians. Orbán’s alliance with Russia, which all Hungarians can see, evokes visceral disgust.

Observers around the world watching Orbán fall will likely comment on how the ‘illiberal international’ has lost its lodestar—but the significance of yesterday’s election runs much deeper. As early as 2011, the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller wondered if the rise of Orbán might be related to the way Hungary experienced the events of 1989. Poland had Solidarity, East Germany the Monday Demonstrations, Czechoslovakia its Velvet Revolution, and Romania its violent revolution. But in Hungary the change of regime was negotiated over the heads of the people by reform Communists and a small group of dissidents.2 Now, thirty-seven years after the fall of communism, Hungary has at last had its color revolution.

Next: The work begins. In his victory speech, Magyar promised to move swiftly to root out Orbánism, and he called on Orbán’s allies to resign. With his parliamentary supermajority, he will be able to do much more to fulfill his campaign promise that Hungarians will rebuild their country “step by step, brick by brick.”

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Jekyll Jekyll Hyde...

by Andrew Egger

Despite last week’s supposed ceasefire, the Strait of Hormuz never really reopened. Iran had been letting a trickle of vessels pay tolls to get through before the ceasefire, and they kept doing the same thing after. Now, however, it appears the strait is about to be—for the first time—totally shut. And this time, it’s Trump who’s shutting it.

This weekend, Pakistan-brokered talks between the U.S. and Iran broke down over the negotiation’s fundamental point: Iran remains unwilling to end nuclear enrichment, and the White House remains unwilling to sign a deal without this concession. Now, however, the United States has added its most aggressive economic pressure yet: It will forcibly close Iran’s Hormuz tollbooth.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday morning. Iran’s continued economic control of the Strait, Trump wrote, was “WORLD EXTORTION.” “I have also instructed our Navy,” Trump added, “to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.”

Between the United States and Iran, in other words, the strait will now be completely blockaded: If Trump is to be believed, no ship that fails to pay Iran will make it through the strait, and no ship that pays will make it through either.

Four points are worth making here. The first is simple: The United States has no more right than does Iran to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway in which unmolested freedom of passage is guaranteed by international law.

The second is that this announcement represents just the latest insane policy yo-yo from Trump in this conflict. Until now, the president—sweating under the skyrocketing global price of gas—has pursued a Jekyll-and-Hyde policy of making it easier for Iran to ship and sell its oil even while bombing the country to smithereens. Last month, the administration lifted decades-old sanctions on some Iranian oil in an attempt to control global costs. Now, they have swung without warning as far the opposite way as it’s possible to go: not merely sanctioning but blockading Iranian oil, and the oil of any vessel from any nation that pays Iran’s exit bribe to boot.

The third is that this is the latest Iran plan announced without, it seems, the slightest consideration of its effects. Set aside the blatant pirate illegality of Trump’s move. America’s military, the president suddenly announces, now stands ready to take hostile action toward any ship of any nation that tries to transit the strait under Iran’s conditions. And not only that: A plain reading of Trump’s threat would seem to indicate that any ship anywhere that paid the bribe even before Trump’s announcement—“every vessel in international waters that has paid a toll to Iran”—could be subject to U.S. interdiction. You don’t need MENSA certification to see some of the obvious immediate risks for spiraling conflict. Chinese ships have transited the strait through the tollbooth; is the U.S. military now under orders to seize these ships? This astonishingly open-ended threat has, unsurprisingly, driven yet another massive wedge between us and our allies; the UK has already announced it will not help Trump enforce his blockade.

Finally, the announcement is the clearest demonstration yet of the strange dual forces shaping Trump’s strategic decision-making. If the president is truly determined both to stop Iran’s nuclear enrichment and confiscate its fissile material and to reopen the strait, there is really only one strategy at his disposal that would fit both aims: an invasion with ground troops. But Trump, perceiving—probably correctly—that this would lead to yet another despised Middle East forever war, seems unwilling to give such an order.

In fact, putting boots on the ground is about the only thing Trump is apparently unwilling to do—or even to threaten. This has forced him into a series of bizarre contortions as he tries to find elaborate and disruptive ways to coerce the Iranians into submission from afar. He’s tried a shock-and-awe bombing campaign. He’s tried threats of genocide. Now, he’s trying a naval blockade. What are the odds he threatens to use nuclear weapons next?

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump’s Path of Destruction… On Shield of the Republic, MONA CHAREN joins ERIC EDELMAN to discuss the week’s developments—from NATO and Hungary to Vance’s Iran assignment—while unpacking MAGA’s internal splits, Netanyahu’s influence on Trump, and the broader political and cultural fallout at home.

• Hey, Democrats: Take Yes for an Answer… Welcome America Firsters into the tent—and steal their message, argues TIM MILLER.

• Zoning Laws Are Killing the Middle Class… On How to Fix It, JOHN AVLON talks with MECHELE DICKERSON about how housing rules, college costs, and the modern school system are stacked against working families—and how those same systems could be fixed.

Quick Hits

SWALWELL FALLING: California Rep. Eric Swalwell was a liberal star who was widely considered the Democratic frontrunner to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor next year. Then, in a single weekend, the wheels fell off. On Friday, CNN and the San Francisco Chronicle independently released stories detailing separate allegations of sexual misconduct by Swalwell—including a rape accusation from a former staffer and accusations of unsolicited nude photos and explicit messages from several other women. Swalwell denied the allegations, despite their being corroborated by significant circumstantial evidence. But it was clear almost at once that his campaign stood little chance of surviving them. His endorsers, including Nancy Pelosi, started backing out en masse.

On Sunday night, the congressman threw in the towel: “I am suspending my campaign for Governor,” he wrote in a statement. “To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment that I’ve made in the past. I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made—but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.”

The statement was odd—if he’s claiming the allegations are lies, what’s he apologizing for? Regardless, his departure leaves the California governor’s contest in a truly bizarre spot: No other candidate in the jungle primary had been polling above 15 percent. The latest Emerson College poll found Republicans Steve Hilton (13 percent) and Chad Bianco (11 percent) near level with Democrats Tom Steyer (11 percent) and Katie Porter (8 percent).

SAND RISING: In less sordid governor news: We’ve been paying quite a bit of attention lately to Rob Sand, the Iowa auditor who’s running a surprisingly competitive Democratic campaign for governor. On Friday, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved its rating of the contest from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up,” pointing to Sand’s favorable brand as an anti-corruption crusader, his strong fundraising numbers, his early polling position, and his go-everywhere media strategy.

In a post this weekend on her Substack, Iowa political reporter Laura Belin pointed to another element of Sand’s pitch: his regular attacks on the lack of state oversight of a school voucher program Iowa Republicans passed in 2023. School choice has become a major culture-war issue in red-state politics over the past few cycles, with more Republican governments passing policies to allow parents to take their public-school tuition dollars to pay tuition for private schools. The issue tends to be broadly popular on paper but can generate a backlash in practice, since it risks creating major budgetary problems for the public schools where most parents send their kids. And Sand, with his transparency- and accountability-focused brand, seems uniquely positioned to make hay on the topic. Here he was this weekend at a forum of the Iowa State Education Association, per Belin:

The only thing private schools can’t do with the voucher funds [Sand said] is pay a rebate to parents. “If you want to buy booze with public dollars as a private school in the state of Iowa, you can do that. If you want to run a for-profit school,” you can do that as well.

“And bless my heart, I thought they had made a mistake,” he said, drawing laughs from the crowd. “Pat me on the head, right? So trusting, so naive.” He went to find one of the bill’s supporters, thinking they would want to fix the problem. . . . Sand said that after he walked through the problems with the bill, [the supporter] replied, “We know. We don’t want public oversight of private schools.”

“Then don’t give them public money! How about public oversight of public money? That’s not complicated!” Sand said, drawing applause and another standing ovation.

Read the whole thing.

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Nevertheless, the polling shows Orbán’s Fidesz party trailing its main opposition, Tisza, 49 percent to 39 percent. Apparently America isn’t the only nation where MAGA-style right-wing authoritarianism is getting a little stale. Happy Friday.

Melania Flees the Sinking Ship

by William Kristol

In Act 1, scene 2, of The Tempest, Prospero, the once and future Duke of Milan, tells his daughter Miranda how years before traitors tried to do him in:

they hurried us aboard a bark,

Bore us some leagues to sea, where they prepared

A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigged,

Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats

Instinctively have quit it.

Shaespeare knew that rats instinctively leave a sinking ship. Yesterday, Melania Trump made her move to quit the rotten carcass of her husband’s presidency.

Standing behind a podium bearing the presidential seal, speaking at the White House Cross Hall where so many presidents have addressed weighty matters of state, and where her husband last week spoke to the nation about Iran, the first lady read a six-minute statement about her and Jeffrey Epstein.

Melania’s focus was on . . . Melania. She began, “The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” Her purpose, she said, was to defend “my reputation,” to clear “my good name.” (Emphasis mine.)

And so she asserted that “I have never been friends with Epstein” and that “I . . . was never on Epstein’s plane.” She also claimed that “My email reply to [Epstein’s imprisoned accomplice Gislaine] Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence. My polite reply to her email doesn’t amount to anything more than a trivial note.”

Left unsaid, but not unimplied, was that none of these claims could be made about her husband. He was a pal of Epstein’s. He was on Epstein’s plane. His relationship with Epstein, as exemplified for example in his contribution to Epstein’s birthday book, was more than “casual” or “trivial.”

Melania also chose to express concern for Epstein’s victims, something her husband has conspicuously not done.

And she went on to say that

Now is the time for Congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course, this doesn’t amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to uncover the truth.

So the Epstein investigation is not, as her husband has asserted, a “hoax.” Nor is it yet time, as her husband has said, to move on. The truth hasn’t yet been uncovered, and we need to uncover it. And if doing so leads more “prominent male executives” to resign, so be it. One wonders: Could Melania have one prominent male chief executive in mind?

Melania chose not to include in her statement any assertion of her husband’s innocence of complicity in the Epstein affair.

Melania is perhaps not a deep thinker, but she’s no fool. Since immigrating to the United States three decades ago, Melania Knauss has done well for herself. She’s shown that she has a shrewd sense of how to operate in her adopted country. She’s risen to the top, while mostly avoiding being directly engulfed in all the scandals that have raged around her.

And now she seems to think that the man to whom she hitched herself may be going down. She’s trying to arrange not to go down with him.

She presumably doesn’t think her husband can be induced to become one of those “prominent male executives” who resigns from his powerful position. But she knows that he can be removed from it. Isn’t Melania signaling others in the Trump administration and her husband’s supporters in Congress that it’s time to abandon ship, that it’s time to remove him from office?

It should not have taken Melania Trump, acting in her own self-interest, to spur this action. Others should have come to this conclusion based on a judgment of what’s necessary for the well-being of the nation. But one welcomes any helping hand in our current drama. After all, if

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

and if Donald Trump leaves the public stage sooner rather than later, then I stand ready to applaud Melania Trump for her role in ushering Donald Trump to the exit.

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The Iranian People Lost the Most

by Benjamin Parker

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked how her boss, the president, could claim the moral high ground against the Iranian regime while also threatening genocide and the end of an entire civilization. Her answer wasn’t convincing. It consisted of asserting that Trump did have the high ground (classic begging the question) and summarizing the evils and abuses of the Islamic Republic.

That last point is worth dwelling on. What has Trump done to mitigate those evils and abuses? Is the Iranian regime any closer to collapsing than it was before Trump’s war?

Let’s review the timeline. At the beginning of the year, the regime looked genuinely weak. Its economy was faltering, its nuclear program was in rubble, and its regional proxies were severely diminished. It was rocked by the largest protests in its history, in which more segments of society participated than ever before.

Then Trump promised that “help” was “on the way.” And within days, the regime had slaughtered some 30,000 protesters and the demonstrations stopped. No help had come.

Weeks later, Trump invited Iranians to rise up and take back their country. But his ill-conceived bombing campaign has only strengthened the regime. The United States has been exposed as an impotent and impatient power. The Strait of Hormuz has given Iran an immensely valuable strategic deterrent. The entire region will have to accept the fact that not even the combined power of the United States and Israel could dislodge the theocracy. The Islamic Republic’s governing structure has proved adaptable and durable even under extreme stress. The IRGC is charging tolls for the passage of oil through the strait. The Trump administration has given its tacit permission for the regime to resume enriching uranium. Trump may agree to Iranian demands to lift all sanctions.

Leavitt was asked another question on Wednesday—whether the regime change President Trump has insisted has actually taken place during the course of this war has “led to more freedoms for the Iranian people?”

Her answer was less than inspiring. “I think that’s a question that’s being asked a little bit too early,” she replied. “And we hope that is the case, but it’s something that has yet to be seen.”

In short, the Iranian people were as close as they’d come since 1979 to overthrowing their torturers and oppressors. Then Trump got involved.

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Programming note: Our next Bulwark Founders Town Hall will be April 13. Upgrade to a Founders Membership today to join JVL and Sarah for this exclusive virtual town hall. And don’t forget to tell us what’s on your mind or what you’d like to know more about in the comments.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• How Political Obsession Turned a Novelist Boring… Once a witty, perceptive writer, Lionel Shriver now produces books that are painful, predictable polemics, writes CATHY YOUNG.

• Melania Breaks from White House, Calls for Public Epstein Hearings… On Bulwark Takes, ANDREW EGGER and WILL SOMMER break down Melania Trump’s bizarre and unexpected White House statement on Jeffrey Epstein.

• Did the Pentagon Just Threaten the Vatican? ED CONDON joins JVL on Bulwark Takes to talk about the escalating clash between the Vatican and the Trump administration after Pope Leo’s comments on the Iran war.

• Hungary’s Surreal, Post-Reality Campaign… On the flagship pod, ANNE APPLEBAUM joins TIM MILLER to discuss the serious electoral challenge facing Putin Puppet Viktor Orbán in Sunday’s Hungarian elections, and America’s embarrassing attempts to bolster him with fake propaganda.

• Gen Z is Ready for Hope and Change… The youngest cohort of voters is ‘hopemaxxing’ politics, argues RACHEL JANFAZA.

Quick Hits

DISLOYAL ORDER OF PODCAST BROS: Yesterday, while Melania Trump was busy mysteriously resurrecting the Epstein affair, her husband was opening up a different unexpected battle: war on the MAGA podcasters who have grown hostile to him over his war in Iran. In a jumbo-sized 500 word Truth Social post yesterday, Trump denounced Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones1, fuming at their “Low IQs” for thinking “it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon.” The president uncorked grievance after grievance: None of these podcasters, he said, were “even invited on TV because nobody cares about them.” Tucker was “a broken man,” Candace was “crazy” for accusing the “Highly Respected First Lady of France” of being transgender2, and Alex Jones had rightfully lost “his entire fortune” over accusing the Sandy Hook shooting victims of perpetrating a hoax.3 After about 400 words of this, Trump claimed that “I no longer care about this stuff.”4

The MAGA base, at least early on, largely supported Trump’s war against Iran. But he’s bleeding more of his own media support than ever before, and it appears he’s starting to realize it.

OLD MAN YELLS AT STRAIT: How’s that ceasefire going in Iran? A string of three quick Truth Social posts from last evening tells the story. At 5:08 p.m., the president finally acknowledged that Iran has not actually reopened the Strait of Hormuz: “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait—They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!”

Twenty minutes later, however, Trump was back to fuming at the media for daring to suggest Iran hadn’t totally submitted yet. “The Wall Street Journal, one of the worst and most inaccurate ‘Editorial Boards’ in the World,5 stated that I ‘declared premature victory in Iran,’” Trump wrote. “Actually, it is a Victory, and there’s nothing ‘premature’ about it!” Trump insisted that “very quickly, you’ll see Oil start flowing, with or without the help of Iran.”

Then, one hour later: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” Keep it up, brother—we’re sure this empty threat is the one that’ll finally do the trick.

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Is this true? Who knows! But shippers will be unlikely to risk the main channel until they get more clarity. This is the shakedown America appears prepared to permit under our “ceasefire.” Happy Thursday.

The End of Madman Theory

by Andrew Egger

It’s a fundamental piece of MAGA mythology: None of the histrionic threats the president makes during his spasms of gangster negotiation should be taken seriously by Americans. If the president threatens a genocide against Iran, and that makes you worry that the president might order a genocide against Iran, you’re acting like an idiot or a rube. Somehow, Trump’s supporters insist, his threats are supposed to exist in some mythical space where we are permitted to discount them but they are expected to take them deadly seriously. This, in turn, is supposed to unlock for Trump devastating levels of negotiating pressure that only he can access.

But the last thirty-six hours have shown us the truth. Trump’s threats aren’t only a blot on America’s conscience and stain on our reputation, as the world now sees the United States as a country that might threaten the worst possible crimes to get what it wants. They’re also a total failure on their own terms. Far from maximizing America’s agency, Trump’s ultimatum and accompanying threats finally placed him in a negotiating straitjacket. He had to back down, and the Iranians knew it.

This backdown has landed America in a surreal place. For all intents and purposes, the ceasefire we announced with so much fanfare on Tuesday has already ceased to exist—indeed, never existed at all. All the belligerents, besides us, are still shooting. Yesterday, Israel conducted more extensive attacks against Lebanon, while the Gulf states reported that Iranian missile and drone attacks had not abated. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains, despite the president’s assurances to the contrary, functionally closed: Iran continues to warn ships to transit the strait only in coordination with the Iranian military, threatening to attack vessels that disobey.

According to the MAGA mythology of the Trump threat, none of this should be happening at all. Iran is supposed to be scared straight, too terrified that Trump might drop the gloves and bomb them back to the Stone Age to keep acting out.

But it isn’t just that we’re back to the pre-ceasefire status quo. The White House now has a strong interest in pretending that a ceasefire is in effect even if it isn’t—because otherwise Trump’s threats achieved nothing, and they would have to admit he just chickened out. And so the whole White House messaging apparatus spent yesterday twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why none of these obvious provocations were really, truly violations of the ceasefire.

That bloody fighting in Lebanon? Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance insisted it had never been subject to the ceasefire in the first place.1 The missiles and drones targeting the Gulf states? That, Leavitt suggested, was probably just because we’d bombed Iran’s military communications infrastructure too well: parts of Iran’s military maybe just hadn’t heard about the ceasefire yet. And Iran’s continued tolling of the Strait of Hormuz? Well, hey, that was a work in progress, and anyway the president was cooking up some ideas about how maybe America could get a kickback there, too, so why all the complaining?

Meanwhile, the White House was insisting—against all evidence—that the ten-point Iranian plan Trump had said Tuesday would serve as a basis for negotiation was not, in fact, the ten-point plan that had been publicly reported and which Iran was claiming Trump had agreed to consider. Leavitt insisted that that plan, which contained a host of ludicrous concessions that no American president would agree to, had been “literally thrown in the garbage” by Trump and his negotiating team. Leavitt further claimed that Iran had secretly communicated a different, far more acceptable ten-point plan, and that it was this plan that Trump had agreed to make the basis for further negotiations.2

“The president’s red lines, namely the end of uranium enrichment in Iran, have not changed,” Leavitt said (Trump contradicted this himself; more on that below), “and the idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd.”

This, apparently, was news to the Iranians. In an angry statement after Leavitt’s press conference, Iranian Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf accused America and Israel of already violating multiple clauses of the ceasefire, including by continuing to strike Lebanon and by denying Iran’s right to enrich uranium. “Now the very ‘workable basis on which to negotiate’ has been openly and clearly violated, even before the negotiations began,” Ghalibaf fumed. “In such a situation, a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable.”

I will repeat: Under the MAGA theory of Trump negotiation, all these roles should be reversed. It should be the Iranians who are desperate to maintain the ceasefire—because who knows what Trump would do?—and the Americans who are watching like hawks for any violation, warning Iran that the slightest deviation from the ceasefire terms would bring the wrath of Trump down on their heads.

Trump spent yesterday evening trying to reclaim that role: If a full agreement with Iran is not reached, he said, “then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.”

“In the meantime,” he added, “our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

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ICYMI: Andrew talks with Sal about shipping in the Strait.

Trump the Conquistador

by William Kristol

In his inaugural address fifteen months ago, President Trump proclaimed, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

We haven’t heard much talk recently from the president about wars we’re not getting into.

Will one consequence of his humiliating failure in Iran be a return to such a stance? Perhaps the difficulties of the last two weeks have diminished Trump’s interest in foreign excursions?

Appears not. A taste for foreign adventures seems to have lodged itself in Trump’s brain.

Just under two weeks ago, Trump said in Miami, “I built this great military. I said, ‘You’ll never have to use it.’ ​But sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba is ​next by the way.”

So Trump acknowledges a change of attitude from “You’ll never have to use” the military to “Sometimes you have to use it.” There’s no more boasting here about wars we’ll never get into. And “Cuba is next” seems to be a pretty straightforward promise that he’ll start yet another war.

Yesterday evening, in the context of attacking NATO, Trump reminded us of his interest in taking Greenland:

NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!! President DJT

So both Cuba and Greenland seem to be in Trump’s sights.

And later last night, Trump posted the threat Andrew mentioned above:

All U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with. If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the “Shootin’ Starts,” bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before. It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary - NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE. In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!

With respect to Iran, and despite the bluster about starting the shooting again, what’s noteworthy is Trump’s description of the goals of an agreement. “No nuclear weapons” is a far cry from no enriched uranium or no missiles or no nuclear program at all. In fact, the Iranian regime has always claimed they don’t seek nuclear weapons, so they can agree to that. As for the Strait of Hormuz being “open and safe,” that could be consistent with Iranian supervision of the strait, tolls for ships, and other elements of a new status quo the Iranian regime would be pleased with.

So the bulk of Trump’s post is consistent with retreat from Iran.

But the penultimate sentence is also striking. “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.”

It’s unusual for an American president to proclaim “Conquest” as his goal. In his June 6, 1944 D-Day prayer, President Roosevelt said that American soldiers “fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.”

Not so of American soldiers under the command of Trump. Like many wannabe authoritarians, he’s interested in “Conquest.” Indeed, the dream of foreign conquest seems to have become a more central part of Trump’s personal sense of grandiosity, not to say megalomania, than it was earlier in his career.

The prospect of more unauthorized and unjustified foreign adventures is evidently very much on Trump’s mind. He’s even adopted a name for it: the ‘Donroe Doctrine.’ It’s all the more reason for Congress to check him preemptively as much as possible, and to remove him from office as soon as possible.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Has a War Crimes Problem. It’s His Mouth… He can’t stop freestyling about plunder and atrocities, observes WILL SALETAN.

• Donald Trump’s Unfreedom of the Seas… GISELLE DONNELLY writes that Trump’s capitulation in the Strait of Hormuz could be the beginning of the end of America’s superpower era.

• Technology and Its Terrors… ‘Exit 8’ and ‘Undertone’ reviewed by SONNY BUNCH.

• Trump Went to War Without a Plan. Now He’s Scrambling to Get Out… TOM NICHOLS joins MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER on Command Post to discuss the bleak reality of Trump’s Iran war.

• The Superpower Folded in Front of the Whole World… DAVID FRENCH and REP. SUHAS SUBRAMANYAM join TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break down Trump’s erratic war leadership, rising global risks, and questions about his motives. Plus: Orbán, Virginia redistricting, and Dem oversight.

Programming note: Our next Bulwark Founders Town Hall will be April 13. Upgrade to a Founders Membership today to join JVL and Sarah for this exclusive virtual town hall. And don’t forget to tell us what’s on your mind or what you’d like to know more about in the comments.

Quick Hits

OIL OUTRAGE: It might be good enough for MAGA—for now—for Trump simply to slap an “OPEN” sign on the still-closed Strait of Hormuz. But the oil industry is a little more concerned about that “solution.” Politico reports:

Oil company executives are reaching out to the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance to protest allowing Iran to charge tolls through the strategic Strait of Hormuz as a condition of peace talks, said one industry consultant granted anonymity to discuss relations with the administration.

“Hell yes,” this person said when asked if executives were contacting the White House to protest a toll on Hormuz. ”We didn’t have to do that before—and I thought we won the war. Any place you have access to the administration, you ask, what are you guys thinking?”

The response [administration] officials were giving industry representatives “is not a cold shoulder,” this person added. “It’s more like, ‘Yeah, ok, we’ll take note.’”

Read the whole thing.

CLAUDE POWERS UP: Even in its current state, AI is already poised to become the defining technology and political issue of our time—and it just keeps getting stronger, faster. This week, Anthropic made an eye-popping announcement about its next forthcoming model, Mythos: The company would delay its public release over fears that it was too good at finding and exploiting cybersecurity flaws—both in the safeguards built by Anthropic to contain it and in unrelated software. Instead, the company would for now deploy Mythos only to a consortium of top tech companies, to enable them to use it to strengthen their own cybersecurity defenses, an initiative the company is calling “Project Glasswing.”

Anthropic’s claims here are startling:

Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.

Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe.

Oversold hype from a company talking up its own product? Maybe. But AI skeptics have been striking that pose toward AI companies’ claims for years, even as model after model keeps smashing through expectations of what large-language model technology can do. And a quick reminder: One major entity that has walled itself off from Anthropic—and thus from the ostensible benefits of participating in Project Glasswing—is the U.S. government.

BALLROOM BENEFITS: He’s the anti-mail-voting president who votes by mail! He’s the anti-foreign-steel president who builds his ballroom with foreign steel! The New York Times reports:

The White House has secured tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel for Mr. Trump’s $400 million ballroom project, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and private conversations.

ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based firm that is the world’s second-largest steel maker, is providing steel for the structure of the ballroom project, the people said. They said the steel was produced in Europe, where the bulk of ArcelorMittal’s production is concentrated.

The White House has not disclosed details of the donation, but Mr. Trump said last October that he had been offered a donation of steel for the ballroom valued at $37 million.

What a nice, patriotic donation from ArcelorMittal! See, the Europeans aren’t all bad. The Times notes that, two days after Trump first mentioned that a steel company had approached him offering to donate the steel, the White House relaxed tariffs on imports of Canadian automotive steel—a provision that just so happened to benefit ArcelorMittal. Read the whole thing.

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Trump Surrenders

by William Kristol

I’m old enough to remember when President Trump assured us, “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”

That was a month ago.

Since then, Trump has bombed and blustered and caused all manner of damage to Iran, to its neighbors, to the United States, and to the world. But Iran hasn’t unconditionally surrendered. It hasn’t even conditionally surrendered. It’s agreed to a ceasefire followed by negotiations. These negotiations will be based not on Iranian surrender but, as Trump said last night, on a ten-point proposal from Iran that Trump believes “is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”

So we’re off to negotiations. Trump and the Iranian regime are making wildly contrasting claims and promises about what has been or will be agreed to. For now, as Gregg Carlstrom, Middle East correspondent of the Economist, put it:

So if you’re keeping score at home, the ceasefire includes Lebanon but also doesn’t include Lebanon, America has agreed to all of Iran’s demands and Iran has agreed to all of America’s demands, America will recognize Iran’s right to enrichment and also insist on zero enrichment, Hormuz is completely open but also Hormuz is subject to unclear limitations.

Oil market researcher Rory Johnston wittily called this “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.”

But the fog of ceasefire doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything. In fact, we know quite a lot already.

We know that the Iranian regime remains in place. The mullahs and the IRGC remain in control of Iran.

We know that the Iranian regime still has its enriched uranium (even if they can’t get to a lot of it right now). And we know that while its military capabilities have been much degraded, it still has functional missile and drone capabilities. We know there’s no reason not to expect Russia and China to be willing to rearm Iran.

We know that primary and secondary sanctions on Iran seem likely to be relaxed or even lifted.

We know that at least for now the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened. But it’s unclear whether it will remain an international waterway, as it was before, or whether Iran will be able to charge fees or tolls for passage. And we know that the fact that the Iranian regime was able to close the waterway, cause significant damage to the global economy, and live to boast about it, can’t be unseen. Whatever promises are now made, Iran will retain leverage with respect to the strait.

We know more generally that Trump’s war has further shaken any confidence our allies might still have in us. It will be seen as confirmation that Trump’s United States of America has become just another rogue nation in the international arena, if a less disciplined and cunning one than Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. We know that the old international order with the United States as its anchor is gone.

What we know mocks Trump’s claim in an interview with AFP last night that the United States “won a total and complete victory. One hundred percent. No question about it.”

What we know tends to support the judgment by the distinguished military analyst, Phillips O’Brien, that “It’s a total fold by Trump. . . . What a waste all this was.”

And we know, as Jonathan V. Last put it on last night’s Bulwark livestream, that “This entire thing was avoidable and predictable. Donald Trump made America walk into the diner to eat the shit sandwich.”

The fact that this a shit sandwich doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t welcome this ceasefire. A ceasefire is better than war crimes. A deal to stop the fighting will be better than more death and destruction and economic damage. But the whole episode is a defeat for the United States, and for Donald Trump.

At 12:01 this morning, Trump tried to make the best of it all with a seven-exclamation-point post:

A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else! The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I suppose “big money” may be made from this war and its aftermath by the Trump family. But for the United States of America, Trump’s war has been a defeat and a warning.

Recovering from this defeat will be a long-term challenge. All we can do in the short term is prevent further acts of gratuitous damage to our country and the world. The public can punish Trump’s Republican party this fall. Democrats can try to check Trump through the legislative and appropriations processes.

But the warning is this: thirty-three more months of an increasingly reckless and unhinged Trump in control of the executive branch of the United States poses too great a risk. The Founders set up a mechanism to deal with such an unfortunate eventuality in the presidency: impeachment, conviction, and removal from office. So Congress should heed the words of the young prince Guiderius in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Come on then, and remove him.”

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A Tale Told by an Idiot

by Andrew Egger

God knows there’s plenty of competition. But for my money, the last twenty-four hours of Donald Trump’s utterances may take the prize as his most insane single-day run yet.

Yesterday morning, Trump was threatening genocide against Iran. This threat, we now know, was a bluff: He called it off despite Iran declining to give him the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING” of the Strait of Hormuz he was demanding. His threat, made in full view of the world, stands as a lasting stain on America, and it didn’t even get him a ceasefire on his own terms.

While Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Araghchi kept a poker face in his English-language statement about the deal—which Trump posted to Truth Social—the country’s National Security Council was more carefree in its statements to Iranian state media: “The enemy, in its unfair, unlawful, and criminal war against the Iranian nation,” the body exulted, “has suffered an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat.”

This probably overstates the case; in any event, Iran was always going to describe any ceasefire to its own people in these sorts of overwrought terms. But when CNN reported that this statement was going out on Iranian media, Trump lost his mind. “The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows,” he seethed. “The Official Statement by Iran was just released, and posted on TRUTH, below. Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’”

A few hours later, he posted again: “No one can believe that Fake News CNN put out a knowingly false and dangerous statement pretending it came from the upper levels of the Iranian Government. It didn’t! It was totally made up and posted, as a headline, for purpose of, perhaps, inflaming a very delicate situation.”

CNN, of course, denied all this: “The statement in question was obtained by CNN from Iranian officials and reported on multiple Iranian state media outlets. We received the statement from specific Iranian spokespeople who are known to us.” Iranian state media accounts had posted the statement themselves. But it didn’t matter. In the hours after his ultimatum had been exposed as a bluff, it was obvious where Trump’s head was: more focused on CNN daring to notice that not everyone thought he was the world’s best boy who had done the world’s best job than on the actual negotiations that were supposedly beginning.

Even then, Trump wasn’t done. This morning, on the phone with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, he uncorked one more lunatic banger: Maybe he wouldn’t insist that Iran stop tolling the Strait of Hormuz, as they’d begun to do since the war began. Maybe, instead, the United States would just get in on the action too.

“We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture,” Trump told Karl. “It’s a way of securing it—also securing it from lots of other people.” It would be, Trump added, a “beautiful thing.”

Why should companies halfway around the world have to pay the United States for the privilege of entering or leaving the Persian Gulf? In what universe would America benefit from locking arms with the terror regime in Tehran to extract these bribes from everybody else? Such questions appear not to occur to Trump, who is simply excited to have stumbled upon another possible place to wet his beak.

All in all, these statements present a remarkable survey of the various zones of necrotic flesh that appear to be consuming the president’s brain. There’s his ridiculous “negotiating” techniques: Threatening the biggest piece of pain he can imagine, then backing off and declaring victory despite none having materialized. There’s his ludicrous, myopic posture on the media, declaring war on CNN for passing along official statements from the government of Iran that Trump would rather not hear. And there’s his utterly senseless economic policy, which totally disdains the benefits of orderly and uninterrupted global trade in favor of a world order where everybody has to pay him a nickel on every transaction everywhere for no discernible reason.

The worst of the Iran conflict may be over. Unfortunately, we’re still stuck with the guy who kicked it off.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Sorry, The 25th Amendment Can’t Save Us From Trump… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to explain the legality of Trump’s unhinged Iran threats, the legal reality behind “war crimes” warnings, and the global fallout of a strategy with no clear objective.

• The Pentagon Purge and the Moral High Ground… Chief of Army Chaplains Maj. Gen. William Green is a good man, a good officer, and a good chaplain, writes MARK HERTLING.

• Right-Wing Figures Revolt Over Trump’s Genocide Threat… On Bulwark+ Takes, WILL SOMMER joins SAM STEIN to react to Donald Trump’s shocking post suggesting that an entire Iranian civilization could be wiped out and the rare backlash now emerging from inside MAGA.

Quick Hits

GIVING ORBÁN A HAND: JD Vance has been having a rough go of it lately, his supposed anti-war bona fides going up in so much smoke as the administration continues to pummel Iran in a war of its own choosing. So perhaps it made sense that Vance spent yesterday halfway around the world, indulging in his favorite security-blanket activity: boosting Europe’s reactionary right-wing political parties. There he was on stage in Budapest yesterday, offering a rousing speech that amounted to a re-election message for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán ahead of his parliamentary elections Saturday: “The bureaucrats in Brussels, those people should not be listened to,” Vance said. “Listen to your hearts, listen to your souls, and listen to the sovereignty of the Hungarian people.”

Vance also took a moment to call up Trump himself. “I am a big fan of Viktor,” the president said via speakerphone, as Vance held his phone to the podium mics. Orbán, he said, “did not allow people to storm your country and invade your country like the people have and ruined other countries.”

Hungary has extremely low levels of immigration, and its population has been shrinking steadily since 1980.

NICE PLANE YOU’VE GOT THERE: Kristi Noem may be gone, but her much-maligned luxury jet remains. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House intends to hang on to the $70 million plane, which the former Homeland Security secretary leased for high-style personal travel with top aide Corey Lewandowski:

The administration plans to use the plane, which is nicer than most other government jets, for travel by select cabinet secretaries, some of the officials said. First lady Melania Trump’s office would also have access to the jet, the officials said. . . .

Trump fired Noem last month, telling advisers that he was tired of the infighting and drama at her department and upset over her congressional testimony, in which she said Trump had signed off on other controversial spending at the department. Former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) was confirmed last month as her replacement.

Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was handling the jet’s purchase, thought plans to buy it would then be shelved, agency officials said.

But following Noem’s ouster, the White House wanted to move ahead, and has taken it away from DHS’s control, the officials said. The plane’s use is now approved by top White House officials instead of officials at DHS.

Noem should have known: There’s only one guy around here who gets to skim off the top with impunity, and it’s not the homeland security secretary.

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Cheap Shots

Actually, there may be one thing dumber than Trump declaring war on CNN over reporting on Iran’s official statements—Trump’s toady FCC chair doing the same thing:

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Bill and Andrew will be going live at 10 a.m. EDT for Morning Chaser today, with plenty to talk about. Tune in on Substack or YouTube. See you there. Happy Tuesday.

Trump’s Election Obsession

by Andrew Egger

If Iran caves or if it doesn’t, if Trump follows through on his threats or if he doesn’t, there will be lots to talk about tomorrow. For today, though, I wanted to turn briefly to another presidential obsession that’s gone under the radar lately: Trump’s ongoing attacks on American elections infrastructure.

So far this year, the president has failed to convince Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which among other things would require voters nationwide to show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote or vote by mail. But last week, he tried to scratch his election-meddling itch in another way: a one-weird-trick-style executive order trying to seize federal control of mail voting by creating new lists of whose ballots the Postal Service can and can’t mail.

“The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,” Trump, who himself cast a mail-in ballot to vote in Florida days before, said at the signing ceremony. “It’s horrible, what’s gone on . . . I think this will help a lot with elections.”

In all likelihood, what the order will actually do, at least as a legal matter, is nothing. Its strategy—which involves ordering the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of “approved” absentee voters, and ordering the USPS not to mail requested ballots to anybody else—is legally hilarious, a slapped-together usurpation of states’ election authorities without the slightest basis in federal law. The order has already drawn a plethora of major lawsuits, which are all but guaranteed swift success.

And yet pro-democracy advocates who are focused on the president’s election predations remain wary. Not because they think the order has a prayer in court, but because they see it as part of a larger, ongoing presidential strategy to sow doubt about future American elections, or even to attempt to meddle with their outcomes after the fact. It remains gospel in MAGA circles that Democrats fiendishly stole the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden. And Trump keeps testing the waters of how much bullying of election officials he can get away with, most notably with the FBI’s January raid on the elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.

In this context, even a legal win against the order isn’t a total win. Trump still muddies the waters, still intimidates anyone connected with elections who might need the courage to stand up to him, still confuses voters about what is and isn’t allowed, and still gets another point of “rogue judges” grievance to parade before his followers as the justification for his next move.

“He can’t lose with this,” Alexandra Chandler of Protect Democracy told The Bulwark. “Because basically, if there is the faintest vanishing chance the courts didn’t stop him, then he gets a win there. If he doesn’t, he gets a win in a narrative sense, and it just is the pretext for the next round, for the next action and the next, and then the eventual denial of the [election] results.”

There’s a perverse attention trap at play here. The more insane, ludicrous stuff Trump does around the country and around the world—the war in Iran being the most obvious example—the more he hemorrhages his domestic political support. But at the same time, these controversies threaten to take our attention away from his insidious work to meddle in elections right in plain sight—efforts which, if successful, would make such trivialities as “maintaining domestic political support” pointless. Why bother with holding an electoral coalition together if you think this time around you’ll just be able to steal the whole game?

We should take heed of all this. Trump really is losing support at a remarkable rate; all the old received wisdom about the impregnability of Teflon Don really does seem to have fallen apart. But Trump still has his hands around the neck of American democracy with a much surer grip than he had in 2020. And too much of the country seems strangely confident—just as in 2020, and with even less justification now than then—that he’ll simply choose not to squeeze.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• POTUS, the Macho Madman… BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to break down Trump’s Iran war—driven by grievance and bravado—its potential war crimes implications, impeachment talk, and new Supreme Court retirement rumors.

• The Pentagon Purge and the Moral High Ground… MARK HERTLING writes that one of the most troubling victims of the spate of dismissals at the Pentagon was Maj. Gen. William Green, the Army’s top chaplain.

SAVE THE DATE… Southern California, we’re coming to you next month—May 20–21! Tickets will be on sale soon for Bulwark Live with TIM MILLER, SARAH LONGWELL, and SAM STEIN starting in San Diego and winding up in Los Angeles. Watch your inbox and keep an eye on TheBulwark.com/events.

Quick Hits

PAIN AT THE PUMP: Think gas prices are bad now? You haven’t seen anything yet. Financial analysts at JP Morgan are warning that if Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues for another couple weeks, it may lead to nationwide gas prices above $5 a gallon. Prices have already risen nearly a dollar a gallon over the past month, sitting today at a national average of $4.14.

Trump has vacillated wildly in his public statements on the question of the strait, ping-ponging between shrugging statements that America doesn’t need it to reopen and ferocious demands that Iran reopen it immediately or face dire retribution. At his press conference yesterday, and in his post this morning, he threatened to destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran unless the Iranian government agrees by tonight to remove its choke on the strait.

MORE THREATS AGAINST THE PRESS: Donald Trump has long believed that journalists who protect their government sources should face jail time. Yesterday, he issued his latest threat in this department—pledging to unmask “that leaker” who had tipped the press off about the rescue of an American pilot in Iran Friday, while efforts to find and rescue the second American shot down were still ongoing.

“We’re going to go to the media company that released it,” Trump said during his long, rambling afternoon press conference, although many outlets reported on the rescue efforts. “And we’re going to say, ‘national security, give it up or go to jail.’ And we know who, and you know who we’re talking about.”

The evidence of the American search-and-rescue effort was also available on social media, where Iranians were posting videos of specialized aircraft and sharp-eyed observers were able to determine quickly what was going on.

DATA VIOLENCE: We’ve talked before about the growing populist backlash against AI in general and data center construction in particular, and yesterday we got a particularly alarming story in that vein out of Indianapolis. Last week, Councilman Ron Gibson voted in favor of a zoning measure he had championed to allow the construction of a data center in his district. The measure passed. Then, yesterday morning, someone shot up his home. Widely reported photos of the scene showed shattered glass and a front door riddled with holes; according to Gibson, thirteen shots were fired in all. And under his doormat, someone had placed a handwritten note: “NO DATA CENTERS.” The New York Times has more:

Gunfire at his home crosses a line, Mr. Gibson wrote in an emailed statement: “I understand that public service can bring strong opinions and disagreement, but violence is never the answer, especially when it puts families at risk.”

Mr. Gibson wrote that he and his 8-year-old son were awakened by the gunshots between 12:45 and 12:50 a.m. Monday, and he rushed to reassure his son that he was safe. He said 13 rounds were fired at his home, with bullets striking “just steps” from the dining room table where his son had played with Legos the day before.

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Sam Stein and Will Sommer are going live at 10 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube for MAGA Monday—don’t miss it!

Happy Monday.

Resistance and Impeachment

by William Kristol

“How are we going to make it through thirty-three more months of this?” a friend asked yesterday.

“This” is of course the presidency of Donald J. Trump. The query from my normally calm and composed friend was prompted by Trump’s Easter Sunday post:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

One might minimize the importance of this one post. Perhaps the president merely got carried away at his keyboard, as one does. But later in the morning, Trump told ABC News that if there were no deal immediately to open the Strait of Hormuz, “We’re blowing up the whole country.” He repeated to Axios that “if they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there.” And of course this post is merely one item in a long train of assaults on decency and sanity by the current president.

The simple fact is that we have a president who is irresponsible, reckless, and indeed unhinged. And he’s all the more dangerous because he is unconstrained by both his subordinates in the executive branch or by Congress.

What’s to be done? Let me offer two suggestions, one having to do with those subordinate officials in the executive branch, and one with Congress. I offer both of them in a spirit of tentativeness and as an invitation to further discussion. They may seem to be radical ideas—even desperate ones—but desperate times call for desperate measures.

The first proposal is that we think seriously about the case for internal resistance within the executive branch. When the head of the executive branch shows a repeated willingness to enrich himself, to lie to the public, to break the law, senior officials can appropriately recall that the oath they take is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. They can remind themselves that they are obliged to obey the law rather than the illegal wishes of their boss or their boss’s boss.

In current circumstances, this means that serious people within the executive branch have to think soberly about what they can do every day to minimize Trump’s damage to the rule of law. Senior officials do have discretion. They can move quickly or slowly. They can act privately or more publicly. They can make life more difficult for their political masters who are seeking to engage in misconduct or abuses of power.

Even if such resistance doesn’t stop but merely exposes illicit schemes, it would be doing a service. And if conscientious public servants find they cannot stay in their positions, they need not resign politely and then keep quiet. They could—and should—rather force their political bosses to fire them for standing up against impropriety, and then should speak up about what they have seen inside.

Now any kind of internal resistance within the executive branch is obviously a complicated and delicate matter. And I’m aware that resistance is difficult, especially when you know you’re facing a vindictive administration that will use the media and the justice department against you. But such resistance has always been an important tool in the battle against authoritarianism.

Still, resistance from within the executive branch is necessarily piecemeal and limited in its effects. The bolder and more straightforward measure that ought to be put on the table for debate now is impeachment.

After two impeachments in Trump’s first term failed to produce convictions, there’s considerable reluctance to talk about impeachment once again: Been there, done that. But perhaps the third time will be the charm. In any case, the fact is that Trump deserves to be impeached and convicted for his behavior in his second term.

Impeachment is, as Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, the remedy in our system for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” The misconduct of Trump, in terms of his corruption and that of his associates, is unparalleled in our history. His abuses of power leave Nixon in the dust. A trial of impeachment would allow all the evidence of his offenses to be presented coherently in one time and place. Even if conviction doesn’t follow, an unequivocal alarm would have been sounded.

Impeachment and conviction aren’t in the cards today. But it’s worth beginning to make the case now, because it may well be necessary for the public good to proceed along these lines in the next year. I’m the last person who would welcome JD Vance as president. But he would present less of a clear and present danger to the nation than Mad King Donald.

Raising the possibility of these two measures may seem alarmist. For some reason, even though the alarmists have been right all along in their analysis of Trump and Trumpism, it remains unfashionable to be one. But we shouldn’t be slaves of fashion. And in fact it’s not alarmism, it’s sober realism, to doubt that we can make it safely through the next thirty-three months without considering measures like these.

Resistance and impeachment. There may be convincing arguments against resorting to either or both these expedients. And there are of course many other important strategies for dealing with the situation we face. But the time to discuss all of them openly and candidly is now.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Why Democrats Should Shun Hasan Piker… They shouldn’t repeat the GOP’s mistake, argues MONA CHAREN, who also discusses Confronting Anti-Semitism, Left and Right with DAVID FRUM on her eponymous show.

• The Cost of Boots on the Ground… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN welcomes MIKE NELSON to discuss the president’s White House speech making the case for war with Iran—and the key questions it left unanswered.

• Remembering Shane DiGiovanna… In Overtime, JIM SWIFT remembers a friend of the Bulwark he profiled, who died last week at the age of 27.

• It’s “Messing With Me Mentally”... The Atlantic’s ASHLEY PARKER joins SARAH LONGWELL on The Focus Group to break down a month of the deeply unpopular Iran war—and hear what swing voters are saying about the Trump administration, including who they like (Marco Rubio) and who they really don’t.

• Dems Huffing the Hopium… In The Opposition, LAUREN EGAN writes of the Democrats’ growing optimism about the upcoming midterms. After that . . . it gets more complicated.

• This Was the Moment Trump Lost His Mojo... In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN has the slo-mo replay of the exact point where Trump forgot what got him elected in the first place.

Quick Hits

DOWN IN FLAMES: How catastrophic has Trump’s second term in general and his prosecution of the war in Iran in particular been for America’s reputation among our allies? European leaders are now openly comparing our strikes on Iranian infrastructure to Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine.

“Any targeting of civilian infrastructure, namely energy facilities, is illegal and unacceptable,” European Council President António Costa said this morning. “This applies to Russia’s war in Ukraine and it applies everywhere. The Iranian civilian population is the main victim of the Iranian regime. It would also be the main victim of a widening of the military campaign.”

THE STRAIT OF AFFAIRS: It was a weekend of confusing and contrary indicators for peace prospects in Iran, with official diplomatic contact inching forward even as the United States and Iran hurled increasingly wild threats at one another. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that oil prices, which careened upward after Trump’s Iran address last Wednesday, remained largely steady in weekend futures trading.

The number of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz continues to tick up slowly. Twenty ships transited the strait yesterday, the most in any 24-hour period since the war began—but still far below the historical average of nearly 140 ships a day. Iran continues to wield total control over which ships are able to transit, and continues to insist it has no intention of letting the strait fully reopen to America and its allies.

AND NOW, A WORD FROM THE POPE: As the first American pope,1 and one elected at a moment of such upheaval for the world, Leo XIV’s statements have seemed to carry an unusual political urgency for America. His Easter message, released yesterday, is worth a read:

In the light of Easter, let us allow ourselves to be amazed by Christ! Let us allow our hearts to be transformed by his immense love for us! Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!

We are growing accustomed to violence, resigning ourselves to it, and becoming indifferent. Indifferent to the deaths of thousands of people. Indifferent to the repercussions of hatred and division that conflicts sow. Indifferent to the economic and social consequences they produce, which we all feel. There is an ever-increasing “globalization of indifference,” to borrow an expression dear to Pope Francis, who one year ago from this loggia addressed his final words to the world, reminding us: “What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of the world!”

The cross of Christ always reminds us of the suffering and pain that surround death and the agony it entails. We are all afraid of death, and out of fear we turn away, preferring not to look. We cannot continue to be indifferent! And we cannot resign ourselves to evil! Saint Augustine teaches: “If you fear death, love the resurrection!” (Sermon 124, 4). Let us too love the resurrection, which reminds us that evil is not the last word, because it has been defeated by the Risen One.

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