Nostr notes by The New Republic

Nostr event nevent1qqsr5hucgs359h6wgrd7h7qusmcndwtx3ljcm92pa570xv55sf89w6qzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjapuctw

2026-04-22T15:34:25Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump is once again attacking members of the Supreme Court. Trump lamented that Democrats should be happy with their tight-knit minority on the Supreme Court in a post on Truth Social Wednesday morning. “The Democrat Justices stick together like glue, NEVER failing to wander from the warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases put before them,” he wrote. “They ALWAYS vote as a group, or BLOCK, even that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!),” the president wrote, referring to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.“The Republican Justices don’t stick together, they give the Democrats win after win,” he wrote, complaining about the recent decision on tariffs and the upcoming decision on birthright citizenship. Trump continued to claim that no other country in the world “is stupid enough” to offer birthright citizenship, which is not true. “No, certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad, completely violating what they ‘supposedly’ stood for,” Trump wrote. Clearly the president believes that justices should put their politics over their commitment to the law. Trump’s post came shortly before the Supreme Court released its latest rulings Wednesday, neither of which was the birthright citizenship ruling. But it’s clear Trump is stressed.He was first triggered Tuesday by James Carville, a fossilized political consultant who hasn’t managed a successful campaign since 1992. Speaking on his podcast last week, Carville said that if the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, they should grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, as well as expand the Supreme Court to 13 seats. Trump called Carville a “wacko.”“If they pull off adding these two States, these Country Destroying Sleazebags will dominate politics in America, if we even have a Nation left, for 100 years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday.Trump insisted in his Tuesday post that Democrats already had control over the Supreme Court, despite the obvious conservative majority. “They are an immovable force, and there is nothing that can be done to change that. Frankly, I respect that, a lot!”
https://newrepublic.com/post/209377/donald-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-birthright-citizenship

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2026-04-22T14:40:53Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump’s social media venture is sinking, and its MAGA CEO just bailed. Trump Media & Technology Group, which oversees Truth Social, announced Tuesday that cow enthusiast and former Representative Devin Nunes is stepping down after more than four years with the company. The news of his departure was authored by Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who sits on the company’s board and runs a trust managing the president’s 115 million shares in the venture. In a statement on Truth Social, Nunes said it was the “appropriate time” for new leadership with merger and media experience to “steer Trump Media through its current transition phase.” The company’s stock price has fallen from $58 per share on its first day of trading in March 2024 to $9.82 after closing Tuesday. Last year, the company had just $3.7 million in revenue against a staggering net loss of $712 million.While Trump has made Truth Social his main communications platform, it doesn’t seem to have helped his company in any way. A $6 billion merger with TAE Technologies, a fusion power company, in December to create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies gave Trump Media stock only a brief boost. As of February, the company was considering spinning off Truth Social in another merger with Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp., a shell company designed for mergers. The new interim CEO of Trump Media, Kevin McGurn, happens to be the CEO of Texas Ventures. While Trump Media’s news release didn’t mention the merger, it seems like Trump might dump his once promising cash cow pretty soon.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209372/trump-media-ceo-leaves-massive-stock-collapse

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2026-04-22T14:24:48Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

A federal judge has thrown out FBI Director Kash Patel’s defamation claim against former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi.Patel claimed that Figliuzzi slandered him during interviews on MS NOW, where the legal commentator said that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor” of the bureau’s Washington headquarters. That, according to Patel, was not technically true.Figliuzzi counterargued that the embellishment was sarcastic—a mode of protected speech—and the judge agreed.“The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement is rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation,” U.S. District Court Judge George Hanks Jr. wrote in his Tuesday decision. “Accordingly, Dir. Patel has failed to state a claim against Figliuzzi, and his lawsuit must be dismissed.”Figliuzzi further claimed that the lawsuit was intended to silence him and other criticism of the FBI director, an abusive litigation strategy known as SLAPP, or strategic lawsuit against public participation.But Figliuzzi’s tongue-in-cheek commentary wasn’t far from the truth: Patel has already sparked several scandals in his position due to his wild habits. Over the last year, Patel has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.Patel also ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)But the former conspiracy podcaster is trying to litigate his way out of the reports. On Monday, Patel sued The Atlantic, demanding $250 million after the magazine issued a damning report citing numerous internal sources familiar with the director’s drinking habits, which reportedly go “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.“FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk,” The Atlantic reported.Donald Trump, a famed teetotaller, has not been happy with the reports. The president reportedly called Patel after the Olympics stunt to express his unhappiness with the scene.The result could soon see Patel out of the Trump administration entirely.“We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel has been fired, one FBI official told The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209369/judge-toss-kash-patel-lawsuit-partying

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2026-04-22T14:19:20Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Department of Justice rescinded a number of subpoenas Monday, just days after they were issued as part of the agency’s nascent perjury case against former CIA Director John Brennan.Over the weekend, prosecutors issued subpoenas requiring witnesses to testify before a grand jury in Washington. This came as a surprise to some veteran prosecutors, as witnesses will typically be interviewed by the FBI before they are brought before a grand jury, according to The New York Times. The DOJ did not offer an explanation for the rescission Monday. Law enforcement indicated that they had opted to schedule voluntary interviews instead. Last week, Maria Medetis Long, chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, was removed from the investigation after she reportedly expressed doubts about the probe. The department then brought in Joseph diGenova, a Trump loyalist who has been outspoken about Brennan’s alleged guilt, to take over the case. He was sworn in on Monday, so it’s unclear whether he was involved in the decision to issue subpoenas. The prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida are looking into allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about his role in crafting an intelligence assessment about Russian efforts to interfere on Donald Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida has already issued 30 subpoenas as part of a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies. Those cases are set to land on the desk of the same judge who handed the president a get-out-of-jail free card: Aileen Cannon.This sudden rescission is part of a wider trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps by Trump’s Department of Justice, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209368/department-justice-blunder-donald-trump-john-brennan

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2026-04-22T12:59:21Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

House Judiciary Democrats want to force FBI Director Kash Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test after The Atlantic reported that his drinking was “a recurring source of concern across the government.” “There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Patel on Tuesday. “These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.” The Atlantic article is pretty damning. A litany of sources detailed Patel’s excessive drinking in private clubs across the country with White House staff, which often led him to push meetings for his hangovers and in one instance even forced the FBI to request SWAT-level “breaching equipment” because he was unresponsive behind a locked door. Patel of course has denied all of these allegations, stating that he’d never been drunk on the job and filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic. Patel has yet to respond to House Judiciary Democrats’ demand, which had a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209360/democrats-kash-patel-alcohol-disorder-test

Nostr event nevent1qqsww69nwm5xe2scw2deh6dn06vd934q82czu8kuk9l8s797vsh93vczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj0dxlrf

2026-04-22T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Lending Tree, an online lender, reported last week that nearly half of U.S. households that used “buy now, pay later”—loans offered at online store checkouts by companies like Affirm and Klarna—had been late on their monthly payment over the past year. That’s up from the 41 percent who paid late the year before, but more importantly it was the latest in a series of worrisome news about how many families are falling behind on all kinds of debt. And that’s not just a problem for those families but a collective warning sign for the entire U.S. economy.In March, the Century Foundation found that half of credit card holders weren’t able to pay their balances every month, and together carry $1 trillion in credit card debt. As of last October, which marked two years since the expiration of the Biden-era pause on federal student loan repayments, 11 percent of borrowers had fallen three or more months behind, according to a FICO Credit Score report released a month ago. And borrowers are also behind on auto loan and mortgage payments, after losing the breathing room they got from Covid-era payment programs.Are we on the verge of a debt crisis? What the data shows for certain is that families have been struggling for some time to keep up, and it’s going to get harder for them to do so, especially under President Donald Trump. “Finances are brittle,” said Mike Pierce, a co-author of the Century Foundation report and the executive director and co-founder of Protect Borrowers, a borrower advocacy organization. “[Families] feel like they’re operating without a net. And you actually do see that in the data, that people are leveraged in a way that they haven’t been in recent memory.”All of these problems share a core cause: Prices and interest rates are both high. “Stuff’s too expensive,” Pierce said. “People are turning to debt to be able to deal with routine expenses that they were paying for in cash as recently as half a decade ago, and then that’s having all of these spillover effects across other kinds of consumer credit.”The increases in home and mortgage prices have meant that fewer people are buying homes, but some purchases aren’t as easy to forgo. That’s especially true for cars, which many Americans need to get to work, school, day care, and so on. The average cost of a new car has hit $50,000, making monthly payments on a car loan about $775. More families are buying used cars to cope, but eventually families need to replace their older vehicles—and used car prices last month hit their highest level since the summer of 2023.Since families need their homes and their cars, they’re likely to keep paying their mortgages and auto loans first, but the monthly costs of trying to keep up are knocking their budgets out of whack. To cover price increases on regular goods like groceries, they’re using credit cards and buy now, pay later, or BNPL. In the Lending Tree survey, 29 percent of borrowers said they’ve used BNPL to buy groceries, compared to 14 percent two years ago, and 54 percent said they wouldn’t be able to make ends meet without these short-term loans.The Century Foundation report also found that more people are using their credit cards more often. Nearly a third are using at least 30 percent of their available credit. An increasing number of Americans are also getting new credit cards and maxing them out. Carrying a balance from one month to the next costs Americans trillions in interest and compounds their debt. Late payments also tend to raise borrowers’ interest rates, causing them to spiral further into debt.The lowest-income families are hit the hardest by these increasing costs, and they’re missing their payments at the highest rates. But those with higher incomes are also falling behind, and credit scores overall are falling. As the financial pressure builds, borrowers begin falling behind on more critical payments, like mortgages.But the first payments that people usually skip are for student loans. The FICO report found that this is the lowest-priority debt for borrowers, probably in part because Biden paused federal student loan repayment for three years and then followed it with a one-year grace period where borrowers’ delinquency wouldn’t be reported to credit agencies. That’s over now: The Trump administration has started a new collection program that will be run by the Treasury Department and plans to begin going after borrowers this summer. “I think that this just takes even more money off the table when people are trying to deal with rising costs and all these other financing costs going up,” Pierce said. “Having [to pay] an extra couple-hundred bucks a month for a student loan that’s been on pause since before the pandemic is more than many people can bear.”Some of these statistics are the worst they’ve been since the Great Recession. Pierce doesn’t think we’re headed for a catastrophe quite that bad, but he does think borrowers need a rescue. It would help if Trump fulfilled his campaign promise to cap credit rates at 10 percent, Pierce said. In the meantime, states can pass new laws to cap interest rates and protect borrowers.The problem is that the broader economy doesn’t suggest there’s any relief in sight. Trump’s war against Iran is driving up household costs, notably at the gas pump but also for all sorts of consumer goods (because transportation is now more expensive, owing to high oil prices). And this is on top of the “Trump Chaos Tax,” a term coined last year by Seth Frotman and Julie Margetta Morgan at Protect Borrowers to describe the knock-on effects of Trump and the Republicans’ “chaotic and reckless economic agenda over the past few months—tariffs, tax giveaways for the wealthy, and more.” This chaos has caused the Federal Reserve to pull back on interest rate cuts, which Frotman and Morgan estimate is costing families $210 per month.In deciding what to buy, when to buy it, when to take on and pay off debt, and other important financial matters, businesses and buyers need to have some sense of where the economy is headed and what it will mean for them. But that’s impossible under the Trump administration. The president seesaws between promises of a peace deal with Iran and eradicating a “whole civilization.” Trump claims the cost of gas will plummet once a deal is struck, while his energy secretary says gas prices won’t fall back below $3 until next year. And on top of that, we’re about to get a questionable new Fed chair handpicked by Trump.So it’s safe to say that many Americans are feeling uncertain, which means the state of the economy could become even more precarious as lenders mitigate risk by raising lending standards and interest rates, and families pull back on spending. If we’re not in a debt crisis yet, we could be hit with one very soon.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209322/trump-economy-debt-crisis-overdue-loans-repayments

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2026-04-22T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. The news media’s coverage after October 7, 2003, defended and legitimized Israel’s destruction of Gaza and killing of tens of thousands of civilians, says journalist Adam Johnson. In his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, Johnson details how outlets such as The New York Times and CNN often used terms like “massacre” and “barbaric” to describe the initial Hamas attack but would not use similar language to describe Israeli military offenses that killed hundreds of people in Gaza. The news media, Johnson argues, also wrongly portrayed President Biden as powerless to restrain Israel. Johnson argues that the mainstream news media played a powerful role in making liberal Americans who usually care deeply about human rights less concerned about the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209294/media-failed-palestinians

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2026-04-22T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a fairly explosive investigation into the birth of the Supreme Court’s modern shadow docket. Traditionally used for procedural decision-making, the shadow docket has, over the last several years, acted as a back door for SCOTUS to make key policy decisions more or less on the fly—or at least without spending months or years considering briefs and oral arguments and writing out signed and detailed opinions. The Times’ reporting focuses on what was, at the time, a shocking move: the unexplained decision, deliberated over for just a few days, to grant a stay of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have established a national system for controlling greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. If Obama’s rule had gone into effect, power plants would have had to reduce their emissions in line with state-specific targets, designed to meet federal goals. Thanks to SCOTUS, the plan was never implemented. The Court’s use of the shadow docket signaled both a bleak future for the Clean Power Plan, and a radical shift in how that body makes decisions. As my colleague Matt Ford wrote this week, the shadow docket has, in recent memory, “transformed from a simple administrative mechanism into a major roadblock for progressive governance.”At the core of the Times’ reporting are 16 pages of previously unpublished discussions among the justices. While these may not be the full extent of their debate on the matter, as Ford points out, they show Chief Justice John Roberts forcefully arguing to bypass precedent and grant petitioners’ request for a stay on the Clean Power Plan before the legal merits of the rule had been decided on by a lower court. The Trump administration came to power a few months later. Before the case could be formally decided, the White House got to work dismantling the Clean Power Plan from the inside. Eventually, in 2022, SCOTUS’s ruling in West Virginia vs. EPA limited that agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act—a prelude of sorts to its broader attack on the administrative state. The fact that the decision credited with giving birth to the modern shadow docket concerned a climate change regulation hardly seems incidental; corporate polluters have long funded the right’s remarkably successful crusade to control the judiciary branch. A closer look at the Times documents shows just how seriously SCOTUS took polluting industries’ arguments.In making the case to his colleagues for the urgency of granting the stay, Roberts wrote that it was important to do so because the Clean Power Plan would constitute “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector—net costs have been estimated to run as high as $480 billion from 2017-2031.” To support this assertion, he cited a 2014 report by NERA Economic Consulting. That study was prepared by NERA for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, and several other industry groups whose members would have been subject to the Clean Power Plan. The report’s authors qualified that it had “not been independently verified, unless otherwise expressly indicated,” and that they made “no representation as to the accuracy or completeness” of the information it was based on, only that such information was “from sources we deem to be reliable.” Such caveats are relatively standard fare for these kinds of reports. What is notable is that it’s one of the few sources Roberts cites as justification for a decision that would upend decades of Supreme Court precedent. Damningly, Roberts himself seemed aware of the limits of the report. He noted that “the sources of those analyses,” including another from Energy Ventures Analysis Inc., “lead me to believe that their figures are likely at the high end of a possible cost range.” “That is one view,” Justice Sotomayor replied. “A likely biased view, as the Chief’s memo recognizes.” A cursory look at the organizations that sponsored the NERA report lends some credence to Sotomayor’s assessment. Coal producers Murray Energy and Peabody Energy, for instance—two petitioners that sought a stay of the Clean Power Plan—were, in 2016, members of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, or the ACCCE. American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, whose members at the time included Koch Industries Inc., had given $135,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, by September 2016—up from $50,000 throughout all of 2015. Republican Attorneys General from West Virginia, Texas, and nearly all of the 22 other states that sued to stop the Clean Power Plan in 2015 were RAGA members. Among RAGA’s major donors at the time was the Judicial Crisis Network, a group closely associated with longtime executive vice president of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. As ProPublic has reported, Leo helped pick or confirm Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, and advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Sotomayor’s saying the NERA report was “likely biased,” in other words, might have been a serious understatement.Roberts’s phrase, “the most expensive regulation ever,” never appears in the NERA report, but it has been a favorite talking point for polluters challenging the Environmental Protection Agency. The National Association of Manufacturers, or NAM—which enthusiastically backed Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court—boasted in its 2014 annual report about its success in perpetuating the idea that a proposed EPA rule on ozone pollution would have been “the most expensive regulation of all time.” The group had good reason to be proud. “From the Speaker of the House of Representatives to almost every major news outlet in America, the NAM’s message opposing the EPA’s proposed ozone standard carried far and wide,” the business lobby bragged. “The NAM defined the message and set the tone about how much the unforgiving new ozone standard could raise energy prices, hobble economic growth and hurt job creation.” NAM commissioned the study it used to make that case from NERA Economic Consulting. After its release, the NAM annual report added that the group’s energy team “toured the country, forging partnerships with allies in key states to counter the standard.” Not long after SCOTUS granted its stay of the Clean Power Plan, in 2017, President Trump relied on yet another NERA report to justify pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement, which stated, somewhat fantastically, that the implementation of the agreement “could obliterate $3 trillion of GDP, 6.5 million industrial sector jobs and $7,000 in per capita household income from the American economy by 2040,” as Trump paraphrased. That report was prepared by NERA for the American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research, a non-profit research affiliate of the American Council for Capital Formation. The latter group has received generous funding from the Koch network, the John M. Olin Foundation, and other key fossil fuel–tied backers of the right-wing legal movement.The fact that Roberts references an industry-backed NERA report isn’t a smoking gun so much as confirmation of a well-documented fact: that the right’s corporate-backed war against climate and environmental regulations is central to its broader anti-democratic project. For decades, the profits that flow from the coal, oil, and gas industries have financed the right’s crusade against majority rule, including the Clean Air Act and the other vestiges of the New Deal state that spurred them into action nearly a century ago. The courts offer polluters an especially tantalizing end-run around democracy. Trying to change laws and regulations through lobbying and campaign donations is a lot harder than influencing a handful of judges who can simply invalidate them.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209318/chief-justice-john-roberts-shadow-docket-fossil-fuel-lobby

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2026-04-22T09:57:58Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 22 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.It’s getting harder for Donald Trump’s propagandists to defend his handling of the war. Trump has been saying that a deal with Iran is near, yet Trump officials are leaking that his public outbursts have only made it harder to reach an agreement to end the conflict. Amid those realities, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went full cult on Fox News. She viciously attacked the media for being insufficiently worshipful of Trump’s glory, and she unleashed an obsequious monologue that was plainly designed to lift Trump’s spirits. All this underscores that even if Trump gets a deal, it’ll be extremely hard to spin this adventure as a success. So how bad a catastrophe is this shaping up to be? We’re unraveling all this with former National Security Council and State Department veteran Emily Horne, one of our go-tos on these topics. Emily, nice to have you back on.Emily Horne: Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: So we’re getting close to the expiration of the two-week ceasefire. And as of this recording, JD Vance’s trip to negotiate a peace has been postponed after Iran failed to respond to the American position, though this could restart at any time. There’s a lot of confusion around the status of the Strait of Hormuz. Emily, can you explain where we are and bring us up to date on the current sticking points and everything else?Horne: Talks are off. There’s no plan for when or if they’ll restart. The Strait of Hormuz continues to be controlled by the IRGC—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—which is the real source of power in Iran. It continues to control the Strait of Hormuz. And it’s IRGC missiles and drones that killed 13 U.S. troops, attacked U.S. embassies and diplomatic facilities across the Middle East, attacked Gulf oil and data center installations across the region, and whose damage Trump political leaders at the Pentagon are really continuing to cover up even as they’re insisting that victory is at hand.So when you hear this administration talking about their conversations with the regime and how there may or may not be peace at hand, I think it’s really important to remember they often don’t know what the heck it is they’re talking about, because they confuse who really holds the power in Tehran these days. It’s really striking to me when I hear this administration talking about the regime change that U.S. strikes have brought about and the destruction that they have leaked on things like the Iranian Navy and the Iranian Air Force. Those were never power centers to begin with. So when they’re going out and bragging about them on Fox News, they don’t really know what they’re talking about. And it’s a real tell to negotiators in Iran that the people who are showing up at the table really have no idea what they’re doing—that this is total amateur hour. Sargent: Total Art of the Deal stuff. Well, CNN reports that the U.S. and Iran had appeared close to a deal, but then Trump started making all kinds of public statements to reporters and on Truth Social. He said Iran had agreed to a bunch of things that Iran hadn’t actually agreed to. Trump officials privately told CNN that this was detrimental to the talks. One official said this: “The Iranians didn’t appreciate POTUS negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home.” Emily, this seems really damning—not just on the substance, but also because officials are leaking this about Trump. What did you make of all of that?Horne: So the only thing that was surprising to me about this CNN story was that the headline suggested that the parties had at one point been close to a deal, which the story itself doesn’t even actually support. That was probably some editor who wanted to make it seem like there was higher drama and that Trump’s social media creative writing projects over the weekend and his random phone calls to random reporters had somehow interrupted something that was actually going well—when in fact it wasn’t. JD Vance doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Steve Witkoff, the president’s golf buddy—no diplomat. You know, the president’s son-in-law can’t negotiate anything except a deal with crypto leaders in the Middle East that’s going to enrich himself. These people don’t know what they’re doing and they barely even tried at the Islamabad talks. They were on the ground for less than 24 hours, where they washed their hands of the whole thing and said that it was a failure.So it’s not surprising that the whole thing fell apart. It’s not surprising that the president was tweeting about it in real time and calling up random reporters and bragging about it in real time when there was an effort to get things back on track after that first round failed. And it’s not at all surprising that the Iranians took one look at all of this amateur-hour nonsense and said, okay, well, even if they did agree to do something, even if we did manage to negotiate with these yahoos, who is to say that the Americans would keep their word—because Trump is not giving anybody a reason to think that he’s serious about any of this.Sargent: Trump’s red lines seem to be that Iran has to halt all uranium enrichment and turn over its stockpile of material entirely, whereas Iran doesn’t want to do those things and wants total control over the Strait of Hormuz. Is that about right? Is that about the size of who wants what?Horne: Yes, that’s basically correct. Now, one of the things that makes this complicated, though, is that there are lots of elements who have influence within the Trump administration who want these talks to go even further, who want even more maximalist demands from the U.S. side. And so it’s a constantly moving target, which—I want to be clear, I’m not advocating for the Iranians here—but from the Iranian perspective, which, a good diplomat and negotiator thinks about—what’s on the mind of the people on the other side of the table—it makes it really hard for them to know which end is up. It makes it really hard for them to know that the United States is going to actually keep its promises and that it’s not going to keep moving the goalposts. And Iran needs to retain some sort of leverage going forward, right? Because of the sort of legacy of mistrust with the United States, which means it would be hard for Iran to get anywhere close to the maximalist demands that the United States has.Sargent: Yes. And again, the demands and the leverage I think are different now than they were eight weeks ago. You know, the Tehran toll booth that is the Strait of Hormuz—some analysts estimate that it could generate over $200 billion a year for Iran when normal traffic resumes. And that’s a chokehold that Iran has now learned that it can control and use to strangle global shipping and global energy supplies. Arguably, that gives Iran far greater leverage over global affairs than it would even have had with nuclear weapons, at least until global energy flows fully adjust. And analysts expect that that could be years, if ever.Well, okay. So this is the situation that Karoline Leavitt is dealing with. Now listen to what she said on Fox News.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): He’s the negotiator in chief. And to all the critics in the media, the Democrats, the Panicans out there—you doubted he would win in 2016 and you were proven wrong. You doubted he would return to the Oval Office in 2024. You were proven wrong. I remember last year fighting with journalists from the podium about the president’s ability to strike a deal to end the war in Gaza and bring home all the hostages. And again, they were proven wrong. I suspect this time is going to be no different, Sean.Sargent: Emily, this is so absurd on so many levels. Trump very well may get a deal, maybe even soon. But the question is, will there be any scenario in which this is a good overall outcome for the United States, right? What did you make of all that?Horne: I hear an answer like that and I hear a spokesperson who knows that she has a really bad hand of cards to play. And so instead of trying to play that bad hand, she’s just attacking the person sitting on the other side of the table from her. She’s not engaging with any of the—I think the very reasonable and substantive questions that people on all sides of the aisle have about what does success look like in this conflict, when are gas prices going to go down, why does Iran have all this leverage now that it didn’t have eight weeks ago. She’s just refusing to engage with any of that and attacking anyone who asks her questions about it. But it’s really telling that she’s refusing to answer the questions and going on the offense.Sargent: That kind of opens up a window on how Fox propaganda works, I think, because if you watch Leavitt delivering these types of monologues and tirades, you’ll see footage in the background of the United States blowing stuff up, right? They always have that boom this, boom that, boom that—like the videos that they show to the president, apparently—but they’re showing them to Fox News viewers. And so you can kind of see where they’re going with the propaganda, which is to essentially say, okay, nevermind the fact that Iran has this leverage that they didn’t have eight weeks ago. Just look at how Trump is blowing things up and look how powerful he is. And then she just goes on this sycophantic rant, and you can kind of see exactly how they’re trying to manipulate the Trump base, right? Horne: I mean, sure, but that in five bucks will buy me a gallon of gas.Sargent: Well, right, exactly. Well, let’s listen to more of Leavitt. Here she runs through all the destruction Trump has rained down on the Iranian military. Then she says this.Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Yet the American media is still trying to say that the United States is in a worse-off position than we were at the start of this, that Iran still poses a threat. It’s all a bunch of nonsense. They are rooting against this president and therefore our country. And it’s really despicable to watch. The facts are the facts. President Trump has been the steady leader our country needs throughout this entire endeavor. And again, thanks to the success of the military operation and his hardline negotiating style, we’re on the brink of a deal. And if not, the president as commander-in-chief still has a number of options at his disposal that he’s unafraid to use. And President Trump has proven before—he does not bluff. When he makes a promise, he follows through on it. And I’m not sure why, after 10 years of covering this president, the American media still cannot understand: when President Trump says he’s going to do something, he’s going to do it.Sargent: My favorite thing about this is the description of Trump’s threat to destroy an entire civilization and commit major war crimes as a, quote-unquote, “hardline negotiating style.” But that aside, Emily, is it true that Trump is in total control of the situation or not? It seems like—yeah, the Iranian military has been badly degraded and yeah, Trump made a lot of things go boom, but like, he’s not actually in control of the situation, is he?Horne: I think that the IRGC is watching clips like this and gloating, because Karoline is revealing just how little this administration understands Iran and understands war and understands leverage and they could not be more thrilled that she is out there talking about the destruction of things like Iran’s Air Force and Navy, when it’s in fact the IRGC that is functionally in charge of the government and the military apparatus in not just Tehran, but increasingly controlling global affairs when it comes to things like the global energy market and regional security. All they can do is point at things that are blowing up and say, look, we did that. Like they’re asking for extra credit on a school assignment for particularly good drawing assignment. It’s just really disgusting.And to your point earlier—speaking of disgusting things—we can’t lose sight of what an utter game changer it is that the president of the United States has threatened to use the U.S. military to commit a genocide. And didn’t just do it once, by the way. This clip is Karoline, his spokesperson, going out there and saying that he’s perfectly willing to do it again. That means that the United States of America is functionally a rogue state on the global stage. And we’re going to be dealing with the repercussions of that, certainly for the rest of our lives, probably for our kids’ lives as well—that our country has threatened to exterminate a civilization, a country of 93 million people, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with the havoc that the IRGC is wreaking across the region. These are ordinary people who just want to raise their families and work and worship and live in peace and dignity. And every single person who was hearing that in Tehran is hearing a threat to extinguish their lives and kill everyone they know. I’m appalled as an American that that is something that my president is going out and talking about on the world stage in my name. We should all be appalled by that.Sargent: We should. And Trump keeps repeating this over and over. And I want to get into the repercussions of this, because if you follow Trump closely, you’ll note that he says things like he’s going to blow up every power plant and every bridge in Iran if Iran doesn’t do our bidding. And he keeps using that language. Now, that is an explicit threat to commit massive war crimes—it’s not right, it’s not even ambiguous. Like, even Pete Hegseth, who’s a bloodthirsty maniac, actually has a little bit of sense on this stuff, and he tries to keep it a little ambiguous. He says, we’ve got a whole list of legitimate targets we’re going to knock out, right, which seems to mean targets that have some sort of military function, which could be, you know, a bit of a borderline case on whether it’s war crimes or not. Donald Trump does not try to finesse it at all. He says, in essence, I will absolutely commit war crimes by blowing up every plant and every bridge. What are the repercussions of that?Horne: I mean, they’re horrific to think about. First of all, God help us all if he actually does it. And I pray that day will never ever come. But then let’s think about what happens if it does turn out that that is an empty threat. One, you’ve destroyed the moral credibility of the United States—not just as a moral force for good in the world, but as a source of stability, as a source of leadership. How are future generations going to look back at this moment? And how are we as people going to be dealing with the fact that the president is doing this in our name? That’s a pretty big question that we all should be asking ourselves right now. And it’s not too soon, by the way, to start asking ourselves what does accountability look like when this is all over? And I’m still enough of an optimist to believe that there will be a morning after for this administration. So I’m thinking a lot these days about what does accountability and what does reconciliation with accountability look like as we’re getting to that morning after.But there’s also the point that this is the position of a fundamentally weak president in this moment. To make a massive empty threat and not follow up on it—the world is watching that. The Iranians are watching that. The IRGC is watching that. And given the level with which Iranian propaganda has been able to mock this president for all of his many foibles and failings, I’m sure that they’ll find a way to mock him not being able to follow up on his threat to annihilate an entire civilization too.Sargent: Well, yes, there will be a morning after, and it may come a lot sooner than people think if Democrats can win the House and possibly the Senate. But just to sort of close this out—we’re in this strange situation where they keep telling us Trump has absolute mastery over the situation, as if he’s only agreeing to negotiate with Iran out of his own benevolence. If that were the case, though, then wouldn’t Trump be able to simply dictate the terms? There’s just an inherent absurdity to all this that I think is worth surfacing and looking at.Horne: Absolutely. And you know, going back to those clips of Karoline Leavitt—you know, honestly, sometimes I feel a little bit sorry for Karoline. She’s got this sick, crazy old man of a boss and he’s making these crazy rants on social media. He’s threatening genocide. He’s picking fights with the Pope. And it’s her job to go out there and publicly defend stuff that would make most people her age go, I don’t know, maybe we should talk about hiding grandpa’s car keys. And then I remember it’s not car keys at stake. It’s literally America’s nuclear launch codes. And then I no longer feel sorry for her or anyone else who is still choosing to defend this shit.Sargent: So, Emily, as we were recording this, it turns out that Trump just announced that the ceasefire will be extended indefinitely. And we don’t seem to know exactly what that means for the talks, but can you kind of play out where this all goes from here?Horne: So obviously this news just broke as we were recording. What this appears to be is an acknowledgement from President Trump that Iran holds all the cards here, and that he is extending a ceasefire with Iran until Iran submits a proposal to end the war permanently. The statement that he put up on Truth Social says, “Pakistan has asked us to hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.” So that, to me, says a couple of things. One, they’re acknowledging—and I think this is good for the world—that despite Karoline Leavitt’s threats today to destroy the entire civilization of Iran, that’s not going to happen. So let’s acknowledge that not doing genocide is a good thing. But apart from that one good thing, this seems to me to be a total caving to all of the leverage that Iran has been able to accumulate in the last eight weeks.I think it’s upsetting to see that we wound up in a place where—after 13 American soldiers were killed in IRGC attacks, where our diplomatic facilities were attacked, where a lot of the damage is still being hidden by the Pentagon, where we have all seen our gas and energy prices rising with no end in sight, where global trade has been disrupted, where our credibility has been shredded—this is the best that we’ve got: the maintenance of the status quo, and the timetable is now on Iran to put together a proposal while the U.S. is out of ideas for how to resolve this.Sargent: It sure looks that way. And we’ve got to think that at least he isn’t carrying out the threat of genocide, which is a weirdly positive thing.Horne: I don’t want to give him credit for it though, Greg, honestly. The damage of destroying America’s reputation on the global stage, of making us into a rogue state that threatens to annihilate our enemies—that damage has been done and can’t be undone. Even if in this particular moment it doesn’t look like the crisis that’s most at hand.Sargent: Well, who says Trump didn’t accomplish anything? He accomplished that. Emily Horne, awesome to talk to you, folks. Check out Emily’s Substack—it’s called Spin Class. Emily, always a pleasure to talk to you.Horne: Thanks, Greg.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209356/transcript-leavitt-goes-full-cult-fox-war-leaks-humiliate-trump

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2026-04-22T09:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump keeps boasting that a deal with Iran is at hand. But now officials leaked word to CNN that Trump’s public posturing has hurt the negotiations. One noted that by “negotiating through social media,” Trump implied Iran had agreed to things “they hadn’t yet agreed to,” complicating the talks. That’s humiliating, given Trump’s bragging of success. Meanwhile, in two cult-like tirades, Karoline Leavitt attacked the media for being insufficiently worshipful of Trump, and gushed over his greatness with extraordinary sycophancy. Can any good outcome be envisioned here? We talked to former National Security Council veteran Emily Horne. She explains why Leavitt’s spin is so absurd, why this fiasco is so hard for Trump to extricate from, why there may be no good options ahead, and what it means that Trump has indefinitely extended the ceasefire, which he announced while we were recording. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209353/trump-press-sec-goes-full-cult-damning-war-leaks-humiliate-anew

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2026-04-21T21:06:21Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Do Donald Trump’s legal prosecutors know what they’re doing? According to the chief of staff for the former top MAGA prosecutor in the country: No, they really don’t. As part of an article on Todd Blanche’s time as acting attorney general, CNN asked Chad Mizelle, Pam Bondi’s former chief of staff, why her “Weaponization Working Group”—which tried to investigate former government prosecutors Trump believed were politically motivated—never produced anything substantial.“Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent,” Mizelle said. “Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.” Presumably this was said without a whiff of irony. The quote is a perfect encapsulation of one of the few joys one can take from our present political situation: Trump’s staff is simply too dumb to carry out most of their assignments. Harmeet Dhillon, another Trump prosecutor who recently lost her fifth consecutive case trying to acquire a state’s voter rolls, gave CNN another doozy: “There are many prosecutors out there who are opposed to the president’s agenda and are not interested in doing the kinds of cases that are important to the White House.” Hmm, I wonder why.Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice like no president before, using it almost exclusively to attack political enemies. CNN reports that doing this kind of work “took a toll on Bondi, who sources said believed that she was at times being asked to do the impossible.”In fact, Bondi may have been unceremoniously fired because Trump believed she was going too soft on his enemies.Bondi’s biggest failure in the eyes of the public was her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, in which the rollout of information on the convicted sex trafficker was repeatedly delayed. She told Fox early last year that Epstein’s client list was “on her desk”—before her department backtracked and said the list never existed. After the files were released, some victims’ names were mistakenly left visible, while key information that might have actually led to some justice being done was redacted. No one has been arrested in the U.S. for involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, even with tons of publicly available documents for use as evidence. And of course, there are also 2.5 million files that have not been released yet.Blanche is continuing the Trump administration’s targeted legal agenda, releasing a report alleging that Biden’s DOJ was biased in persecuting anti-abortion protesters, and fighting to get a few Proud Boys off the hook for their January 6, 2021, actions. But like Bondi, he has not yet successfully prosecuted a high-profile Trump opponent. Long may the ineffectualness continue.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209345/pam-bondi-aide-maga-incompetent-donald-trump-revenge

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2026-04-21T20:37:59Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security are weeks away from losing their paychecks.Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News Tuesday that the agency’s funding has all but run dry, 66 days into the partial government shutdown.Donald Trump signed a memorandum earlier this month that authorized the release of $10 billion in emergency funds from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but that money will be gone by the first week of May. Mullin noted that between DHS’s 22 agencies, the department spends roughly $1.6 billion on wages every two weeks. “So, the money is going extremely fast, and once that happens, there is no emergency funds after that,” the DHS chief told Fox. “After we get through April … I’ve got one payroll left and there is no more emergency funds, so the president can’t do another executive order for us to use money because there’s no more money there.”The only solution, according to Mullin, is for Congress to pass another funding bill. Republicans and Democrats have been in a stalemate for months, unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on how to fund DHS without tackling the myriad recent abuses by two of the department’s subagencies: Immigrants and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Democrats demanded 10 reforms to the two agencies as a prerequisite for ongoing funding negotiations. Those demands included line items that required agents to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property. Republicans refused.The conservative caucus, however, is attempting to put forward a new funding package that would address DHS’s financial straits without diverting additional funds toward ICE and BPD. Last year, the two agencies independently received a total of $170 billion in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—more than five times their 2024 allotment.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209344/homeland-security-markwayne-mullin-pay-employees-shutdown

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2026-04-21T20:36:28Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

In September 2024, the Teamsters, whose strutting fool of a president, Sean O’Brien, had been gifted the month before with a prime time slot at the Republican National Convention, took a dive on endorsing a presidential candidate. It was the first time the Teamsters had not endorsed since 1992, and a thoroughly irrational choice, given that Donald Trump opposed labor rights during his first term and, unsurprisingly, has continued to do so in his second. After Trump was elected, O’Brien was rewarded with the selection of his favored candidate, former Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Republican of Oregon, for labor secretary. She turned out to be a total, scandal-plagued hack, and on Monday she joined the procession of departing Cabinet officials—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and now Chavez- DeRemer—judged too corrupt, or perhaps (in the case of Bondi) not corrupt enough, to serve the most corrupt president in American history.Chavez DeRemer is by far the least well-known in this (notably, all-female) cavalcade, probably because people seldom pay much attention to the labor secretary. Her initial reception among labor unions was mildly favorable, with AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler taking note that she’d been one of only three House Republicans to cosponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would expand labor rights for private-sector unions, and one of only eight to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would do the same for public-sector unions. It was encouraging to observe some opposition to Chavez-DeRemer in the business world and among conservative GOP legislators. “She’s one of them,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told Politico. “She’s pro-union.”But it turned out Tuberville (now running for Alabama governor) had little to fear. At her confirmation hearing, Chavez-DeRemer hedged obligingly on her support for the PRO Act, calling the bill “imperfect” and explicitly rejecting a crucially important section of it that would overturn state right-to-work laws. She also dodged questions about whether she’d support raising the minimum wage from the current hourly $7.25, in deference to Trump’s studied inscrutability on the matter. (In 2016 candidate Trump took so many contradictory positions on the minimum wage that The Washington Post published a guide to them; in-office Trump has effectively opposed any raise, most notably by canceling a Biden-era executive order requiring federal contractors to increase their hourly minimum to $15.) Chavez-DeRemer demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Trump’s agenda that in the end only three Republicans opposed her; Tuberville voted to confirm. As secretary, Chavez-DeRemer logged a mediocre enforcement record, reducing, for example, the number of concluded compliance actions against wage and hour violations from an average of 21,000 under Biden to 17,000, and reducing the number of compliance actions against the worst performers (“low wage, high violation industries”) from an average of 842 under Biden to 649. Republican Labor secretaries get rewarded for reducing enforcement and thereby reducing the government burden on private enterprise, so if Trump considered Chavez-DeRomer’s record at all before pushing her out (probably he didn’t), he would have regarded it favorably. Chavez-DeRemer also dutifully pressed forward with Trump’s deregulatory agenda, including a potentially disastrous proposed rule to open up 401(k) plans to risky investments that is effectively a bailout for private equity—and an especially high priority for Trump.What tripped up Chavez-DeRemer in the end was an impressive series of alleged personal ethical lapses. In January, The New York Post’s Josh Christenson reported that the Labor department’s inspector general (former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, Republican of New York, a former police detective) was investigating an “explosive complaint” alleging that Chavez-DeRemer was pursuing an “inappropriate” relationship with a department underling, and (per the Post) had “welcomed her alleged paramour at least three times to her DC apartment and twice into her hotel room while traveling.” The hotel room was at Las Vegas’s Red Rocks Casino Resort and Spa, reported the Post’s Christenson, and the Post possessed photos and videos showing them there. The complaint, per Christenson, said the hotel had additional footage of the illicit couple (not seen by the Post) engaging in “unprofessional behavior,” and that the alleged lovebirds visited Las Vegas not once but twice in 2025. The presumptive underling/boy-toy (subsequently reported to be a member of Chavez-DeRemer’s security detail; cherchez le bodyguard!) told Christenson: “I got lawyers, so I’m not gonna talk to you. I have nothing to say.”According to the report, the complaint further alleged that Chavez-DeRemer had committed “travel fraud” by directing her chief of staff, Jihun Han, along with her deputy chief of staff, Rebecca Wright, to “make up” justifications for official trips so that Chavez-DeRemer could visit family or friends. The Post further reported that Chavez-DeRemer was a “boss from hell” who made subordinates run personal errands for her. Oh, and the complaint said Chavez-DeRemer was observed drinking during the workday in her office, where she kept a stash of champagne, bourbon, and Kahlua Alcohol consumption is quite the emerging leitmotif in stories about Trump Cabinet members! Three days after Christenson’s bombshell story, Politico’s Nick Niedzwiadek reported that Han and Wright had been placed on administrative leave. Later, Chavez-DeRemer’s bodyguard and her advance person were placed on leave, too.If you think that’s tawdry, you ain’t heard nothing yet. The Post’s Christenson followed up with a report that Chavez-DeRemer took subordinates to an Oregon strip club while out of town on official business. Then The New York Times followed up with an even ickier story that “at least two female staff members” at the Labor department said that Chavez-DeRemer’s anesthesiologist husband, Shawn DeRemer, “had sexually assaulted them,” through inappropriate touching. In one instance, the Times’s sources said, Shawn was recorded on security cameras embracing one of the women for an extended period of time. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department were called in and filed a police report noting “sexual contact against her will.” Unsurprisingly, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro decided not to prosecute (too busy no doubt trying to bring Fed Chair Jerome Powell to justice), but Shawn was, at least, banned from the building.At some point, Dad allegedly got into the act as well, according to a March 4 report by Rebecca Davis O’Brien of The New York Times. Richard Chavez, per O’Brien, texted a young female Labor department employee (we’ll call her YFL): “Hearing u/r in town. Wishing you would let me know. I could have made some excuses to get out and show u around. Please keep this private.” YFL then replied, “Will do, no need to worry!” to which Richard replied, “When are u leaving an where u staying.” A few weeks later YFL texted not Richard but Shawn: “I’ve been having so much fun traveling with LCD and being in the moment for everything!! I promise from now on I’ll check in.” To which Shawn replied: “You better. I was feeling forgotten. I figured you were still in church repenting after your exposure to the demon state of Oregon.”Chavez-DeRemer was scheduled to meet Tuesday with the inspector general for an extended interview. She resigned instead. That sounds to me like an excellent call on her part.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209341/lori-chavez-deremer-resign-sleaze

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2026-04-21T19:52:23Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Florida became the first state to criminally investigate an AI model on Tuesday, and Attorney General James Uthmeier’s charges could lead to big changes in how the technology is regulated.Uthmeier, a Republican, launched a criminal probe into ChatGPT and its parent company OpenAI following a mass shooting at Florida State University, which took place in April 2025.Two people died and six others were injured in the shooting, including at least one student. All of those injured have since been released from hospital, and the suspect, 20-year-old FSU student Phoenix Ikner, is in custody.Prosecutors reviewed Ikner’s devices and claimed he spoke to the chatbot extensively. While Ikner does not appear to have been driven into “AI psychosis,” as some mentally unstable individuals have, he allegedly talked to the chatbot multiple times about the shooting.ChatGPT “offered significant advice to the shooter before he committed such heinous crimes,” Uthmeier said. One message involved the suspect quizzing ChatGPT about a gun’s power at close range, and which ammunition was needed to load it.On the day of the crime, Ikner allegedly asked the chatbot how America would react to a shooting at Florida State, and when the most crowded time was at the student union, the area of the campus where the shooting took place.“If this were a person on the other end of the screen, we would be charging them with murder,” Uthmeier said at a press conference.While Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, isn’t exactly a favorite of the left, he has been at the forefront of state AI regulation. DeSantis has asked the state legislature to come up with legal AI guardrails in a special session next week.But the country’s executive branch has taken the opposite stance. President Donald Trump has pushed to deregulate AI and force states to comply with federal policy. We’ll see which GOP sect ends up victorious, but Florida’s leadership on the issue is a welcome development.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209338/florida-investigation-openai-chatgpt-role-school-shooting

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2026-04-21T19:02:49Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The U.S. has significantly depleted its missile reserve during its war with Iran, sparking concerns that the military could be caught empty-handed if another conflict arises in the next few years.The Pentagon has used at least 45 percent of its Precision Strike Missile stockpile, at least half of its THAAD missiles, and nearly 50 percent of its Patriot air defense interceptor missiles, according to a report published Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.The number of missiles that remain are expected to be enough to continue the war in Iran, even if peace negotiations fall apart, but they are too diminished to thwart another major world power, such as China.“The high munitions expenditures have created a window of increased vulnerability in the western Pacific,” Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel and a CSIS report author, told CNN. “It will take one to four years to replenish these inventories and several years after that to expand them to where they need to be.”Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told CNN that the military “has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”“Since President Trump took office, we have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests,” Parnell said.The war with Iran is currently in its seventh week, but Defense Department officials first raised concerns about America’s missile supply more than a month ago. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted. One source told CNN in early March that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles in order to fend off the drones.Shortly afterward, European Union defense officials warned that the U.S. would no longer be capable of supplying missiles to its allies amid the war with Iran, stressing that the continent would need to develop its own missile manufacturing sector in order to adequately fill its supply without Washington’s help.But the reality has not aligned with the White House’s rhetoric. Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. has a “virtually unlimited” supply of missiles, capable of attacking Iran “forever.” Nonetheless, his administration has placed orders with private contractors in order to replenish America’s stockpiles, though some weapons reserves are expected to take years before they return to prewar levels.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209332/donald-trump-iran-war-military-run-out-ammunition-missiles

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2026-04-21T18:42:38Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego should be commended for some excellent fact-checking of Trump crony Kevin Warsh on Tuesday.Warsh is Trump’s pick to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve after Jerome Powell’s term expires in May. During Warsh’s Senate committee confirmation hearing, Gallego tried to suss out whether Warsh was going to put the president’s political interests ahead of the country’s economic health.“Earlier today, you said to Senator [John] Kennedy that President Trump never demanded you to cut interest rates in your job interview. Is that your sworn testimony?” Gallego asked.“That is, Senator,” Warsh said.“Well, someone here is lying, then,” Gallego replied. “It’s either you or President Trump. Because in an interview with The Wall Street Journal of December 12, President Trump confirmed he pressed you on your commitment to support interest rate cuts.”Gallego helpfully cited the Journal article for Warsh: “During a 45-minute meeting … the president pressed Warsh on whether he could trust him to support interest-rate cuts if he were chosen to lead the central bank, according to people familiar with the meeting. Trump, in the Journal interview, confirmed that reporting.”Warsh responded by claiming the reporters who wrote the story—Meridith McGraw, Nick Timiraos, and Brian Schwartz—were fibbing:“Senator, there’s, of course, a third alternative. You cite a couple of reporters for a leading financial newspaper.… I think those reporters either need better sources, or better journalistic standards.”GALLEGO: Earlier today, you told Sec. Kennedy that Trump never demanded you to cut interest rates. Is that your sworn testimony?WARSH: That is, senator.GALLEGO: Okay. Well someone here is lying then. Because Trump confirmed he pressed you on interest rate cuts. pic.twitter.com/AKoEK3uWrj— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026Of course, the cited “source” here is Trump himself, which Gallego pointed out, asking if that meant Warsh thought Trump was lying. Warsh began to reply before Gallego unfortunately cut him off and moved on. Gallego did ask Warsh what he would say if the Journal verified all of its reporting, to which Warsh repeated the same unsatisfying point about journalists needing better sources and standards.Warsh has previously worked on Wall Street, as an economic adviser in the George W. Bush administration, and as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011. With a net worth in the hundreds of millions, he would be the richest Fed chair ever, which feels fitting for a presidency that seems to be about the rich laughing in the face of working Americans as much as possible.Trump would love to see a Powell replacement as soon as possible. Trump appointed the mild-mannered, bespectacled Powell in 2017, but Powell has since drawn the president’s ire by being boringly responsible and refusing to cut interest rates. Trump has even weaponized the Department of Justice by subpoenaing Powell over a federal building renovation (a judge tossed the lawsuit out). In the face of mounting pressure, Powell has not wavered. His quiet resistance to the president has made him something of a cult hero among Democrats, who have crafted a few social media fancams in his honor.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209319/federal-reserve-chair-nominee-donald-trump-interest-rates

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2026-04-21T17:51:07Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump is still not happy that his tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court, and he said Tuesday that he would “remember” the companies that don’t seek refunds.The president spoke to CNBC’s Squawk Box over the phone in a morning interview, and anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him about large companies, such as Apple and Amazon, that haven’t sought tariff reimbursements because they were worried about “offending” the president.“Would you find it offensive for them to try to collect a refund?” Sorkin asked Trump.“I think it’s brilliant if they don’t do that. I actually think if they don’t do that, they got to know me very well. I’m very honored by what you just said. If they don’t do that, I’ll remember them,” Trump said, before going off on a tangent about the Supreme Court and birthright citizenship.SORKIN: There's a whole number of very large companies, including Apple and Amazon, that have not sought reimbursements yet for the tariffs. From what I understand, part of the reason is they're worried about offending you.TRUMP: I think it's brilliant. They got to know me very… pic.twitter.com/7AbxNAj518— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026Trump’s words could be considered as a threat to companies that do seek refunds for the tariffs they paid, as would be their right under the Supreme Court’s ruling. Trump has praised companies whose executives have cozied up to him or donated large amounts of money to one of his personal projects, and has attacked those that he sees as disloyal to him or his agenda.The president is explicitly saying that if businesses don’t ask for the money that they are legally owed for the tariffs, they will be in his good graces and can expect positive treatment from the White House. That is highly unethical and, from any other president, would be met with a huge backlash from Congress and media commentators. But since Trump has basically normalized corruption, he’s not likely to face any consequences.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209324/trump-companies-tariff-refunds

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2026-04-21T16:33:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Kevin Warsh, the man Donald Trump tapped to run the Federal Reserve, told Congress Tuesday that there’s only one detail that he and the president disagree on.In the midst of a heated exchange with Senator Elizabeth Warren over his previous pledges to “stand up to Trump,” Warsh failed to name a single line item from the MAGA agenda with which he disagreed.“Well, senator, the Federal Reserve in recent years has wandered outside of its remit, wandered into other areas,” said Warsh, dodging Warren’s question entirely.“Just one. Just one little place where you disagree with Donald Trump,” pressed Warren.“Well, I do have a disagreement, actually, senator, with the president. I think even this morning he said he thought that I was out of central casting. I think central casting—I’d look older, grayer, and maybe show up here with a cigar of sorts,” Warsh smirked.“Quite adorable, but you know we need a Fed chair who is independent. That’s the only way we preserve the independence of the Federal Reserve,” Warren bit back. “If you can’t answer these questions, you don’t have the courage and you don’t have the independence.”WARREN: Name one aspect of President Trump's economic agenda with which you disagreeKEVIN WARSH: He said he thought I'm out of central casting. I think I'd look older, grayer, and maybe show up with a cigarWARREN: Quite adorable pic.twitter.com/fm4UmMiwGB— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen similarly questioned Warsh’s chutzpah, citing his monetary policy record on the basis that Warsh’s positions on interest rates “seems to shift with what’s politically convenient, rather than based on sound economic judgment.”Warsh’s name was a surprise mention late last year when Trump first began floating his replacements for Jerome Powell. Despite railing against Powell’s inflation rates for the better part of his second term, Trump tapped Warsh, another well-known inflation hawk who cut his teeth during the George W. Bush administration and later during the fallout of the Great Recession. But the 56-year-old financier has since changed his tune on the matter and, in doing so, has caught the president’s attention. Trump has already made his expectations for Warsh crystal clear. Speaking with CNBC earlier Tuesday, Trump said that he would be disappointed if Warsh did not cut interest rates.Warsh, in turn, made his loyalty clear during his Senate hearing. He refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, in another apparent attempt to elevate himself to the Trump administration.Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed ripped Warsh for his transparent affinity for Trump, directly questioning him about Trump’s comments on the business network. Warsh responded that he would maintain independence despite Trump’s pressure campaign to cut rates. Later, in an exchange with Senator John Kennedy, Warsh said that Trump had never asked him to “predetermine, commit, fix, decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions.” “Nor would I ever agree to do so,” Warsh insisted.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209314/donald-trump-federal-reserve-chair-disagree-central-casting

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2026-04-21T15:51:42Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, tried to dodge questions Tuesday about his financial ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren asked Warsh about more than $100 million in investments that he has “refused to disclose to ethics officials and the public,” specifically assets held in vehicles called “THSDFS LLC” and the “Juggernaut Fund.” Warren directly asked the Fed chair nominee whether any of his assets had to do with President Trump or his family, the Chinese government, money laundering, or Jeffrey Epstein.Warsh refused to answer, saying only that he would sell those investments if he was confirmed. Warren pressed further, asking specifically if Warsh would tell the committee if he had financial ties to Epstein.“Are you refusing to tell us if you have investments, for example, in vehicles set up to advance Jeffrey Epstein? Is that what you’re telling us—you just won’t tell us?” Warren asked.Warsh again didn’t answer the question.“Senator, what I’m telling you is that those assets that you represent at Juggernaut will be sold if I’m confirmed before I take office and sign the oath of office,” Warsh said.WARREN: That's not my question. Are you refusing to tell us if you have investments in vehicles set up by Jeffrey Epstein?KEVIN WARSH: Those assets will be sold if I'm confirmed pic.twitter.com/aCzH5C0ACl— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026Warren then asked if he would “at least disclose how you would plan to disclose and divest these secret assets,” citing a scenario in which a billionaire looking for inside information from the Fed would cut him a check for $100 million. Warsh still would not answer the question, instead saying that he had come to an agreement with the Office of Government Ethics to divest his assets. Warsh’s name has popped up a couple of times in the government’s Epstein files. While that doesn’t implicate him in any of Epstein’s crimes, it does show that they traveled in the same circles. Warsh, who would become the wealthiest Fed chair in more than 100 years if confirmed, is married to billionaire heiress Jane Lauder, granddaughter of Estée Lauder and daughter of Republican donor Ronald Lauder. Is Warsh being evasive because he’s trying to dismiss those connections, or is it because he actually has assets connected to the notorious criminal?
https://newrepublic.com/post/209317/trump-fed-chair-kevin-warsh-epstein-investments

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2026-04-21T15:10:01Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t think soldiers living and fighting together in close quarters or aboard warships need to take the flu vaccine.“Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy, and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” Hegseth said in a video statement posted on Tuesday morning. “Under President Trump … we’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war fighting capabilities. In this case, this includes the universal flue vaccine, and the mandate behind it.” The War Department is once again restoring freedom to our Joint Force. We are discarding the mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately. pic.twitter.com/9K5W8g0NsD— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) April 21, 2026This is a developing story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209312/hegseth-ends-flu-vaccine-mandate-military

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2026-04-21T14:49:02Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump is not exactly known for his piousness, but one Bible verse seems to have struck his fancy—probably because it was used by evangelical Christians to sing his praises while they tried to overthrow the government on January 6.In the Old Testament, 2 Chronicles 7:11-22 consists of God responding to a prayer from Solomon, a king of ancient Israel. God promises Solomon he will bless his temple as long as he and his people are not idolaters. As is common in the Old Testament, God’s message rings with both love and fury. But verse 14, the most famous bit of the passage, is positive: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”As part of a week-long “America Reads The Bible” event organized by the White House and the election-denying evangelical group Christians Engaged, a prerecorded video of Trump reading 2 Chronicles 7:11-22 will air at 6 p.m. ET Tuesday evening. Remember the separation of church and state? That was nice.Trump reading the passage will thrill what’s left of the January 6-ers. During the Capitol riot, Couy Griffin—the founder of “Cowboys for Trump,” a fan club which rode on horseback to Trump’s political events—recited verse 14 over the crowd.According to the Christian Post, Trump’s association with the passage goes back even further, to 2016. After his unlikely election win, evangelist Anne Graham Lotz—Billy Graham’s daughter—used the same verse to claim that God had responded to America’s prayers.MS Now opinion writer Ja’han Jones called it “predictably Trumpian” that the president is reciting a passage that his supporters have used to heap praise on him. As the passage is over 400 words long, The New Republic would also like to note that it will be interesting to see whether Trump gets bored halfway though and starts talking about something else.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209303/trump-scripture-bible-reading-event

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2026-04-21T14:42:28Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Southern Poverty Law Center revealed Tuesday that it’s under criminal investigation by the Justice Department for previously using paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.The nonprofit public interest group announced that the Trump administration appears to be preparing a case against the organization or some of its employees.“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press.Fair said that the SPLC had used informants to monitor the threat of violence inside extremist organizations, and had frequently shared its findings with local and federal law enforcement.“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”The Montgomery-based SPLC was founded in 1971 in order to combat white supremacist groups after the civil rights movement. Yet the nonprofit’s purview has been nationally perceived (at least on the right) as less and less acceptable in the decades since. Conservative politicians and personalities have railed against the advocacy group, claiming that its work—which includes tracking extremist groups, promoting tolerance, and kneecapping bigotry through litigation—is inherently partisan and overly leftist.FBI Director Kash Patel announced last year that his agency would sever ties with the SPLC, ending a longstanding research arrangement between the nonprofit and the federal government.The investigation has reignited concerns that Donald Trump is trying to weaponize the Justice Department during his second term, morphing the agency into his personal law firm in order to harm or attack his dissidents and critics.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209304/donald-trump-department-justice-southern-poverty-law-center

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2026-04-21T14:42:17Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Department of Homeland Security is developing smart glasses that would allow federal agents to identify people using biometric data in real time. Journalist Ken Klippenstein, citing a budget request from DHS, reports that these devices, slated to be released by September 2027, build on existing smart glasses that include video cameras and heads-up data displays. They would be able to pull from the federal government’s archives of biometric data, including facial recognition, walking gait, and iris patterns. “The project will deliver innovative hardware, such as operational prototypes of smart glasses, to equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field,” the document states. The project is under the DHS’s Science & Technology Directorate, the agency’s research and development division.While the budget request says the glasses are necessary for immigration enforcement, a DHS attorney anonymously told Klippenstein that “It might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets, but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protestors,” adding that the technology behind the glasses has applications for general government surveillance in addition to immigration.These glasses would give federal agents the Orwellian ability to identify anyone within their line of sight, especially if people are on any of DHS’s many watchlists. The glasses would be only one more addition to the rapidly expanding surveillance state under the Trump administration, which is collecting mass amounts of data on people and organizations in the U.S. The federal government is gathering this data with the help of contractors like Palantir, a company with a disdainful view of democracy whose apps help ICE agents map out deportation targets and utilize AI to find them. ICE itself is also putting together a team focused on monitoring social media to find people to deport. Will Congress rein in this infringement on basic freedoms and liberties, or will they remain mostly silent?
https://newrepublic.com/post/209309/budget-leak-dhs-smart-glasses-ice

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2026-04-21T14:19:15Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump doesn’t sound particularly optimistic ahead of peace talks with Iran. Speaking on the phone to Joe Kernan of CNBC’s Squawk Box Tuesday morning, Trump signaled that the U.S. was ready to resume attacks if negotiations with Iran were unsuccessful.“Well, I expect to be bombing, because I think that’s a better attitude to go in with, but we’re ready to go. I mean the military is raring to go,” Trump said.Asked if he planned to extend the ceasefire if talks were unsuccessful, Trump replied: “I don’t want to do that. We don’t have that much time.”None of this sounds like what someone who is expecting a deal would say. And Trump’s vow for more violence comes after administration officials revealed that the president’s comments have hurt negotiations with Iran.The U.S. nearly upended peace talks Monday after it seized a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has demanded the immediate release of the cargo ship and vowed retaliation. Iran has reportedly told regional mediators that it still plans to send a team of negotiators to Islamabad Tuesday, but Tehran has refused to publicly confirm that the country will come to the table.Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned Monday night that Iran was also ready to resume fighting. “We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats, and in the past two weeks, we have prepared to reveal new cards on the battlefield,” he wrote on X.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209300/donald-trump-threatens-bomb-iran-peace-talks

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2026-04-21T14:10:32Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump appears to have finally lost one of his most influential supporters.Ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson disavowed the president Monday night during an interview with his brother, Republican operative and speechwriter Buckley Carlson, telling his audience that he was “sorry for misleading people” and that he regretted supporting the MAGA leader over the last decade.“You wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. I mean, we’re implicated in this, for sure,” Carlson said to his brother on The Tucker Carlson Show. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well I changed my mind,’ or like, ‘Oh this is bad, I’m out.’ It’s like in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now.”“So I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people, and it was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say.”Carlson was once the largest figure in conservative media, ranking head and shoulders above his competitors during his primetime evening slot at Fox. But his sympathies for Trump after the 2020 election—and his penchant for demeaning women and minorities—cost him his throne. Carlson was fired by the network in 2023, shortly after Fox settled a historic $787.5 million lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for spreading baseless conspiracies that the company had rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden.Trump has broken up with several major MAGA acolytes in recent weeks over their unfavorable responses to the Iran war, including Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and another famous former Fox News host, Megyn Kelly. The president boosted a video on his Truth Social account over the weekend that urged viewers to stop questioning his decisions. His disavowed media supporters—Carlson included—were plastered all over the clip, framed as individuals that need to “shut the fuck up.” It was the second time that Trump had shared the video; he previously posted it to his account in January. Nonetheless, it has taken months of repeat public abuse for his supporters to question their loyalties.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209298/tucker-carlson-apologizes-endorsement-donald-trump-fallout-iran

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2026-04-21T13:07:02Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump’s addiction to social media posting is hurting negotiations with Iran. Talks last weekend seemed to be going well, with a deal close to being reached. But then, Trump went online and claimed that Iran had agreed to specific provisions such as handing over all of its enriched uranium, making similar comments to reporters over the phone. Iranian negotiators then publicly denied those claims and announced they weren’t preparing for more talks, saying that the U.S. was unserious.Unnamed Trump administration officials told CNN that Trump’s posts and statements to the media have had a negative effect on efforts to end the war with Iran, fueling mistrust from the Iranian negotiators. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate POTUS negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” one person who was familiar with the negotiations told the news outlet. Trump’s remarks in the press didn’t help either. To Bloomberg, he claimed that Iran had agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program, and he told CBS News that Iran had “agreed to everything” and would remove its enriched uranium with help from the U.S. In an interview with Axios, he said “I think we will get a deal in the next day or two,” with another meeting “probably” coming on the weekend.Whether any of these details were true or not, airing them out in public before an agreement was reached was not wise, and probably gave the Iranian government less of a reason to take the U.S. in good faith. But don’t expect the president to change anytime soon. On Tuesday, he threatened to resume bombing Iran, just as Vice President JD Vance was expected to leave for peace talks in Pakistan.“I expect to be bombing. The military is raring to go,” Trump said on CNBC, setting a deadline for a peace deal to be reached in the next 24 hours.KERNEN: You're saying you need at least the prospect for a signed deal today or tomorrow or else you would resume bombing Iran?TRUMP: Well, I expect to be bombing. The military is raring to go. pic.twitter.com/yRRZzOZhzV— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/post/209293/trump-iran-comments-derail-peace-talks

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2026-04-21T12:19:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist at Columbia University who studies U.S foreign policy, says that President Trump’s only choices to resolve the war in Iran are “humiliation or escalation.” Escalation is the kind of total destruction of Iran that the president has hinted at if negotiations fail. Humiliation is cutting a deal that provides sanctions relief to Iran and/or allows it to continue its nuclear weapons program in some form while also leaving in place a regime hostile to the United States. Saunders, in the latest edition of Right Now, says Iran is in a strong negotiating position because of how its control of the Strait of Hormuz has caused a surge in oil prices. And she says that the leaders now in control in Iran are even more radical than the ones they replaced after the U.S. and Israel killed them.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209289/trump-choices-iran-humiliation-escalation

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2026-04-21T11:13:08Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 21 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here. Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is losing control of events to a degree that appears new, and he’s furious about it. He unleashed a series of wild Truth Social tirades over the war, at the news media, and at Democrats. He’s reportedly been very angry over gas prices, and he’s even imagining himself in the role of a Jimmy Carter-like figure. Meanwhile, Republicans are starting to sound alarm bells over prices and fear they could get killed in the midterms, according to another report.If you listen to Trump’s language, you can see that he actually did think he could rule as an autocrat who single-handedly decrees how all events will go. There’s a reason he thought this. Trump and the people around him intended his second term as the culmination of efforts to concentrate quasi-unlimited powers in the presidency. So it’s urgent that this be seen to fail. Journalist David Sirota of The Lever narrates a podcast called “Master Plan,” and its second season is all about that vision of the presidency. So we’re talking to him about all this now. David, nice to have you on.David Sirota: Thanks so much for having me.Sargent: So Donald Trump just exploded on Truth Social over media coverage of the war. He said this:“I’m winning the war by a lot. Things are going very well. Our military has been amazing. And if you read the fake news, you would actually think we are losing the war. The anti-America fake news media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen because I’m in charge.”David, note that line—I’m in charge. I think Trump’s been asserting he has quasi-absolute control really a lot lately. Have you been noticing that?Sirota: I have, I have. And I think he’s sort of shocked that he doesn’t have control, certainly of world events. But I do think he’s gotten used to the idea that he gets to call the shots—he and he alone—not in a co-equal branch of government. I think he genuinely sees himself as an elected king. And I think that’s underneath all of this, a big part of what we’re experiencing right now. The culmination really of this idea that the president is the only branch of government—and not just the executive branch, but he individually is the executive branch—who gets to determine everything that goes on in the country in the way that he wants. And I think it’s an incredibly dangerous idea, but I think we have to understand it again as a culmination of a trend and not just something Donald Trump created. Donald Trump is wielding powers that were given to him—and to the presidency—over many years.Sargent: Yeah, and I think you really got at a critical point there by saying that he really genuinely thinks of himself and himself alone as being the kind of only arm of government that actually exists—not just that matters, that actually exists. He shows up at the Supreme Court to try and lord it over the justices. When it comes to birthright citizenship, it looks like he’s going to lose there. But him sitting there glaring at the justices as if they are showing impudence by exercising their role in the constitutional scheme is really the thing to pay attention to here. He simply does not think that Congress or the judiciary should have any say in anything.Sirota: I think that’s exactly right. But I would say that that is an idea that has been sold to the country for a very long time—both, by the way, through our media and through sort of political and policy decisions. I think we have come to this idea that the only thing that matters is the presidential election. The only thing that matters is who’s the president. The only thing that matters is the executive branch. And I should say, I think Congress has in many ways receded from using its power because for a lot of members of Congress, it’s just easier not to use their power. Let’s use the war as a great example here. Donald Trump wakes up one day and essentially starts World War Three. There is no authorization. There’s no public sales pitch about why this war should happen. Congress—the Democrats have had to fight to try to get a couple of votes on this war. But people might be asking, well, why doesn’t Congress want to be more assertive here? And I think underneath this particular fight is the idea that members of Congress aren’t really looking to go on record as to whether they support a war or not.I think the crazy thing, if you chart the trajectory of this, is it seems like the lesson from the Iraq War debacle is not that Congress should stop wars—it’s that members of Congress should simply not have to vote on these wars to create political problems for them back home. And it’s a really scary deferral of power to the executive branch.Sargent: Yes, and the Republican Party has supported him in his waging of this war without congressional assent or congressional debate of any kind. And for that reason—because Republicans don’t want to have to go on record—Democrats have been trying here and there to force votes on the war. And this unsurprisingly infuriates Trump. He erupted at Democrats on Truth Social, calling them “Weak and Pathetic,” and saying: “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran.” Trump added this: “I read the fake news saying that I am under pressure to make a deal. Not true! I’m under no pressure whatsoever, although it will all happen relatively quickly.”Note again this effort to maintain the illusion of absolute mastery. Just to focus on the politics a little bit for a second, David—it seems like he knows that once the perception seeps in that he’s not the master of events, something will crack in his political mystique, because he’s very much sold himself as the sole controller of everything to a certain fairly large chunk of the country, right?Sirota: A hundred percent. And I certainly think that we’re seeing a lot of things get out of Donald Trump’s control. The economy, the inflation, job loss—you’ve got obviously the war situation. You have a situation where consumer confidence is extremely low right now. And Donald Trump has done everything from tariffs, to allowing mergers, to trying to force artificial intelligence down the economy and the country’s throat. So I think what Donald Trump rightly fears is that the perception that things are out of his control could end up fracturing his political coalition.Now, I want to be clear—I’m not putting a lot of faith in the Republican Party here, but I do have at least some basic level of—maybe it’s hope—that the worse things get here, the more pressure there will be on members of Congress, including in Trump’s own party, to break with him. Like, ultimately at some point you have to believe that the average House member, the average senator, even in the Republican Party, who wants to get reelected is going to go home and realize: I am not going to get reelected unless I make some kind of break with the White House right now on various sets of policies.Sargent: Well, I want to get to that in a bit. But first let’s just do the big picture. Let’s step back. You’ve been narrating this series, “Master Plan,” on the decades-long project to concentrate power in the presidency. In a nutshell, how does Trump represent the culmination of that project?Sirota: So after Watergate there was an attempt by Congress to grab back power from the so-called imperial president. It was seen as an out-of-control executive branch. Congress passes stuff like the War Powers Act, Congress passes stuff like the Budget Impoundment Act—essentially saying the president doesn’t get to make all the decisions. Then there is a backlash to the post-Watergate backlash, where the Reagan administration comes into power and sees the backlash to Watergate as too constraining of the executive branch. It starts fighting back on things like the Budget Impoundment Act. It starts ignoring, in a lot of ways, the War Powers Resolution from the Vietnam era.Ultimately, inside Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese’s Justice Department, they cook up something called the unitary executive theory. So they basically realize—instead of fighting with Congress over what powers have you delegated to the White House or to the executive branch, let’s start saying any laws that try to constrain the executive’s control over the federal government are unconstitutional, on the grounds that Article 2 of the Constitution says the executive power is vested in a president. It’s a radical theory, but Reagan’s administration starts bringing it into court. And this is the doctrine that Donald Trump’s officials have been bringing into court. This is the doctrine that a lot of conservative Supreme Court justices have endorsed as well.Sargent: I want to just jump in and point out that two of those post-Watergate reforms—on the war powers and on budgeting—those are two of the very biggest things that Trump is violating right now.Sirota: Yes, exactly. So that’s a direct through line to Trump. This idea that was started in the Reagan administration—that the Reagan administration and conservatives started saying we do not have to pay attention to the War Powers Resolution, we do not have to pay attention to the Budget Impoundment Act.Ultimately, you get to Trump saying, I can hold back on spending money that Congress has already appropriated, the whole DOGE situation. You have Trump saying, I can wake up and start a war and don’t even have to get any authorization for it.Sargent: I want to dwell a little bit on Reagan for a second, because for the American right, Jimmy Carter represents everything the president should not be. The Reagan revolution emerges from the aftermath of that presidency. And now The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump has been looking at high gas prices due to his war and privately having nightmares about becoming another Jimmy Carter. As the Journal put it: “Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times, has been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.”David, that’s kind of funny since to the master thinkers behind the Trump presidency, high gas prices and Jimmy Carter represent everything they think of as weakness and failure, right? Everything they constructed this theory to get away from is now kind of coming back at them, and Trump is slipping into sort of the same pitfalls that the dreaded Jimmy Carter did.Sirota: I think it underscores the idea that simply wielding executive authority in a unilateral way isn’t necessarily a sign of strength. I mean, this is actually sort of the weird dichotomy here—it’s that Trump is doing a lot of things unilaterally, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are strong policies strengthening the United States or projecting strength. I think it projects a guy frankly out on a limb.Sargent: Politico reports that the Energy Secretary’s admission that gas prices might not fall sufficiently until next year “sent alarm bells ringing for Republicans in battleground districts.” One person close to the White House tells Politico: “The rhetoric around this stuff matters way less than the reality. If we don’t see the $3 gallon of gas, we’re going to get killed.”David, I think that’s interesting because they’re admitting essentially that this is slipping out of Trump’s grasp and that they’re the ones who are going to bear the brunt of it, which is really sort of a weird but welcome bit of poetic justice if it happens. Sirota: And I think what’s compounding their problem is that there’s a direct line between the actions that Trump has taken, the inaction of the Republican Congress to stop him, and the economic problem you just identified—high gas prices.This is arguably politically a worse situation for the Republicans than it was for Jimmy Carter, in the sense that Carter could argue, Listen, there are a lot of things going on here. Gas prices are high because of an oil embargo, etc., etc. I didn’t wake up one day and start World War Three. So Carter could at least try to make an argument like, This is a convergence of different factors. Trump can’t really make that argument. I mean, he started a war. The Strait of Hormuz closed. The Republicans didn’t do anything to stop the war. Gas prices—it’s a very simple story for people to understand. Look, I won’t put it past the Republicans to come up with some argument to blame something else, but I have to believe it’s such a straight, simple story that most people already implicitly understand what happened.Sargent: Right. Voters are going to say: Why didn’t you stop this guy? We’re going to put someone there who will stop him. And so this whole Republican project of essentially turning everything over to the ultimate imperial president, Donald Trump, screws them—which is great to see, really.Sirota: My hope is that if the Democrats win back Congress, they will start making an effort to assert congressional authority in a real way. There are ways for the party in Congress to certainly stop some really terrible things from happening, but also assert real power when it comes to the budget, when it comes to war powers. I don’t know how long this war is going to last. I hope it ends as soon as possible. But I think if it’s continuing to go on, the Democrats will have—if they win the Congress—budget authority, they will have the War Powers Resolution. I mean, I think we are headed into—if that happens—a real confrontation over what the executive can do and what it can’t do. Sargent: Democrats are going to have to start defunding some stuff, whether it’s Trump’s maniacal use of the military abroad or the use of heavily armed militias in cities. Don’t you think the power of the purse is going to have to really be reclaimed by Democrats in Congress and exercised hard?Sirota: So one thing that our series Master Plan, the second season, goes into is that ultimately Congress’s power of the purse has been pivotal in so many of these fights through history. The Vietnam War did not end in a real way—Nixon was not brought to the negotiating table—until Congress finally passed legislation saying no more money can be spent in Southeast Asia. During Iran-Contra, the Reagan administration tried to ignore a law like that, the Boland Amendment, which said that money cannot be spent on proxy wars effectively in Central America. Reagan’s administration tried to ignore that and they got burned badly. But they tried to test the outer limits of whether the executive could ignore a law like that, and they were brushed back. I think it remains sacrosanct, Congress’s power of the purse, which is the ultimate power that it has, I think, in these battles, as you allude to.So I think ultimately, if you want to see a stop to ICE invasions of cities, if you want to see a stop to Trump’s military adventurism across the world, it is going to require Democrats using that power of the purse. And I might add, Democrats [must not be] intimidated by the old argument that we saw, of course, during the Iraq War, and we’ve seen in every war, where the president will say, you’re undermining the troops, you’re hurting the troops by not funding the war, not funding the military. Maybe I’m an optimist—you can call me crazy—I don’t think those arguments land as much anymore. I don’t think that the average person buys the idea that if Congress says we’re not going to fund a war, that means Congress is harming the troops. I would like to believe we’ve advanced beyond that jingoistic sort of misinformation. And I think Democrats are going to have to, if they want to stop this stuff, stand up to those arguments.Sargent: Well, there are two really big things that show that you’re right. One is that Democrats actually opposed this war right at the outset in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before. And point two, public opinion was opposed to this war at the outset in a way we haven’t seen before. So there’s an opening. And that brings me to the final question. To pull all this together, the backlash that the Trump administration is facing right now is aimed at the very areas where Trump is trying to exercise the most imperial power—tariffs, the pissing all over our allies, the mass deportations with heavily armed militias, the bombing of Iran and other war-making such as the blowing up of people in the Caribbean without congressional approval, etc. So is there an opening here to start saying, We’re seeing the imperial presidency fail before our very eyes? This experiment is a disaster—say that, right? We need a president who operates more within the system. Is there some way for Democrats to kind of do what you’re saying—exert power, but also say that stuff, like engage in real public communications around this idea?Sirota: That’s my hope. And I think one thing you can take heart in is I do think the so-called No Kings rallies, at their heart, is a message of we don’t want a king. Now, I would admit, I wonder whether what’s really being said there is we don’t like their king, we want our own king. I mean, I do wonder if we’re really taking seriously the idea that we don’t want a king. I think the midterms are important because it will be after the midterms—if the Democrats win—they will have a chance to test-run using legislative power, congressional power, more assertively, not executive power.I think the big question—and we should come back and talk about this if there is another Democratic president—is that the next Democratic president is going to face a big question. Use the power that has been rightly or wrongly concentrated in the White House to pursue aggressively an agenda, or use the presidency to try to relinquish some executive power to restore a balance. And I’m of two minds on this. I don’t think it’s tenable to have every time Republicans get into office they push the limits of executive authority, and then Democrats get into office and just give back or there’s like a stasis—they try to give back executive authority or don’t use it as aggressively. That’s not great. But I also understand the idea that we’re destabilizing the country by concentrating so much power in the executive branch and saying policies are going to shift wildly every four years based on this or that president governing purely by executive authority.And what I’m really getting at here, Greg, is the idea that, look, I don’t think the Constitution got everything right, right? I think there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s wrong. I think one thing they did kind of get right was, let’s make the power a little bit diffuse. Let’s separate it so that when a president does something, the president has to effectively go to the public to build some kind of consensus around it, some kind of stability. So you’ve got to go to Congress, pass laws, you’ve got to get them validated by the courts—in other words, the genius of that is we want there to be public consent to what is happening. And what destabilizes the country is any president not seeking that consent at all. It makes it hard to do business, right? Like, think about being a business trying to make decisions when Donald Trump can wake up any day and impose tariffs. I mean, there are so many different ways that the way of governing that Donald Trump is pursuing destabilizes the country. And so for a Democrat who is a president, how to govern aggressively in a way that doesn’t destabilize the country the way Donald Trump is destabilizing it—that is going to be the big challenge.Sargent: Yeah, it’s going to be a really complicated set of calculations for Democrats. I can see them kind of using their power over the White House and Congress—if they get it back soon—to put a bunch of checks in place against the next imperial president. But of course they’re going to want to get stuff done too. It’s tricky.Sirota: Exactly.Sargent: Well, that’s going to be the topic for our next discussion. David Sirota. Folks, check out David Sirota’s podcast—it’s Master Plan, Season 2, “The Kingmakers.” That’s what we’re talking about here. David, great to talk to you. Thanks so much.Sirota: Thanks for having me.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209291/transcript-trump-secret-war-fears-leak-gop-panics-alarm-bells

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2026-04-21T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu share a lot of traits. They are both solipsistic, mendacious, narcissistic, and paranoid megalomaniacs who perceive themselves as victims of a cabal of elites. Now they share something else: They have lost a war together. Driven by vanity and hubris, the U.S. president and Israeli prime minister miscalculated Iran’s mettle, and now their mutually inflicted failure is causing them considerable political harm at home. What started as a Smith & Wesson partnership has degenerated into a Thelma & Louise ending.In the U.S., there has been no rally-around-the-president effect from this war. Every day, another poll shows Trump’s approval rating hitting a new low and support for the war below 40 percent. As The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, his public “bravado” is a mere mask for his private fears about the damage the war is doing to him as he stares down the November midterm elections that appear certain to cost him unified control of Washington. Meanwhile, in Israel, Netanyahu is getting clobbered on all sides. The New York Times reported Friday that “the prime minister’s critics, and even some of his allies on the right, have seized on ... his inability to resist Mr. Trump’s pressure” to end the war. Netanyahu’s coalition, like Trump’s, is also lagging in polls in an election year. “A core element of Mr. Netanyahu’s appeal to voters—the argument that his close bond and strategic mind meld with Mr. Trump make him uniquely equipped to ensure Israel’s security—now appears far less convincing,” the Times noted. As reporting from the aforementioned outlets has shown, Netanyahu prodded and, some might say, dragged Trump into a war America had no interest in. In that sense, Netanyahu is responsible for Trump’s political damage. But with all due respect to Netanyahu’s swindling qualities, you can’t really “drag” the president of the United States into a war he does not want to participate in. A willing, even enthusiastic Trump joined Netanyahu in what he thought was a cool video game in which the other side would surrender quickly. Because the war failed to achieve anything close to Netanyahu’s fantasy scenarios of Iranian capitulation and regime change, Trump in fact inflicted major political damage on Netanyahu. Trump entered this war without clear and attainable objectives, without public support, without coherently defined deliverables, and with no overriding American interests at stake. A war that he justified as “preventing Iran from becoming nuclear” is now mainly an effort to reopen a shipping corridor that was wide open before he launched the war. History will judge him harshly on this adventure, but Trump may not be defined solely by the failed Iran war. However ill-conceived and impulsive it was, it’s one among many of his destructive, incomprehensible, self-inflicted political debacles. Netanyahu is an entirely different opera. For him, the Iran war is an epic calamity. This was his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it has amounted to very little. Iran was the defining issue of his career. It was his political raison d’etre, the epitome and culmination of how he interprets history and his self-ordained image as the protector of Israel. For him, every year is 1938 all over again, Tehran is Berlin, and he is Winston Churchill. In this respect, this war was his Normandy D-Day, and the invasion failed. Here was a near-perfect strategic alignment and confluence of elements: a jittery, impressionable American president willing to collude; overwhelming American-Israeli military and technological superiority; a weakened Iran under severe economic strain and diminished geopolitical stature. But, and not for the first time in his strategic assessments, Netanyahu got it wrong. His assumptions about how the war would transpire were fundamentally flawed. His rosy scenarios of regime collapse have not come to fruition, and he wrongly dismissed the possibility of Iran upending the military asymmetry and shutting the Strait of Hormuz. And it is unlikely Netanyahu will ever get another opportunity like this. But who is most to blame? A peculiar phenomenon has emerged among both Trump’s and Netanyahu’s supporters: It’s the other guy’s fault.MAGA voters need to reconcile how Trump, who promised to never engage in “forever wars,” decided to attack Iran—so they conclude he was duped by an external actor. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s hardcore supporters accuse Trump of not going the distance and eventually dumping Israel. In the one of the few countries in the world where Trump is popular, he is now a disappointment.In the last 15 months, Netanyahu has developed total dependency and reliance on Trump, lubricated by deep fealty. Some of it was politically motivated: from his ardent neoconservative tendencies, his affinity to anti-Clinton Republicans (Newt Gingrich and the Evangelicals), his anti-Obama association with the Tea Party movement, his speech to Congress in 2015 against the Iran nuclear deal, and his intrinsic and cultural disdain for anything “liberal.” Some of it comes from the grievances and sense of victimhood he shared with Trump: persecuted by a left-wing cabal, hated by the media, resented by the judiciary, and detested by elites. But a lot of it was genuinely about Iran. Netanyahu accurately identified Trump’s megalomania as a vulnerability he could exploit. Trump is amenable to extreme sycophancy and all you need to do is massage his ego, fan his anger at his predecessors, and promise him a huge win.How many times has Netanyahu tried to dupe Trump? For most of 2017 and into 2018, Netanyahu prodded Trump to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal that Barack Obama struck in 2015. He believed that if Trump ripped it up and imposed crippling sanctions, Iran would come crawling and beg for a better deal. In May 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew. Over the next seven years, Iran increased its uranium enrichment centrifuges from 200 to 19,000 and accumulated approximately 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. In March 2025, Israel violated the ceasefire in Gaza and Netanyahu reassured Trump that it was a temporary resumption of war to destroy Hamas. In June 2025, Netanyahu convinced Trump to attack Iran’s military nuclear facilities. “We obliterated their nuclear capabilities,” Trump ceremoniously announced, with Netanyahu declaring that we “set them back decades.” The stage was set for the biggest manipulation of them all: the all-out war against Iran that began in February.As a general rule of political and international relations writing, wars cannot and should not be determined to have been a “success” or a “failure” while they’re ongoing or in their very immediate aftermath. But there are immediate takeaways from the Iran war when comparing the stated goals and the actual results. The Middle East is less safe, and the global economy is less stable. Iran has discovered something—its power to control the Strait of Hormuz—that’s much more effective than nuclear capability or a network of terror proxies. It has also exhausted the U.S. military’s resources and bruised its ego; shattered the business model of the Arab Gulf States; and merely by surviving the onslaught of bombs, caused Israel to become even more of a pariah state.Trump and Netanyahu, in their infinite delusions of grandeur, expected this to be a quick win that would buoy their respective political fortunes. They probably envisioned being showered with praise by their countrymen and the media, and relished the thought of rubbing the victory in their opponents’ faces. The exact opposite has happened instead, and they have no one to blame but themselves—and each other.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209271/trump-netanyahu-iran-war-political-damage

Nostr event nevent1qqstz2tgc7m9um9eh83azgqrsdc7m5ws0arfaefnaau2p5889vwhljszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjjj03tv

2026-04-21T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The New York Times on Saturday published a series of Supreme Court internal memos that amount, in hindsight, to a major milestone in the decline of American democracy. The closely held memos show how the justices’ shadow docket—particularly their use of brief, unsigned decisions on cases before they’ve even reached the court—transformed from a simple administrative mechanism into a major roadblock for progressive governance.There are caveats, of course: It is impossible to know whether these memos, from a 2016 climate-change case, represent the entire conversation between the justices. No memos were published from Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And while it is tempting to think they are a complete snapshot of the court’s deliberations, there are signs that they may not be. One memo omits a page with the signature line of the justice who wrote it; we can only infer that it is from Justice Sonia Sotomayor because Justice Samuel Alito later references her by name when describing its contents.Even if this is not the entire discussion from the justices, it is nonetheless damning for them and for the shadow docket itself. The memos show how Chief Justice John Roberts pressured the other justices to lean heavily in favor of the oil and gas industry so they could kneecap a major EPA climate-change regulation, even as the court’s liberal justices warned that it was an unprecedented and unjustified expansion of the court’s powers.The shadow docket’s origins are not as mysterious as its workings. The Supreme Court has used its motions docket for the last decade to shape the outcome of major policies through selective stays and injunctions. Legal scholars and court watchers have known all along that the first real step towards this dynamic came in West Virginia v. EPA in 2016.In February 2016, the state of West Virginia, a coalition of other Republican-led states, and major energy companies were mounting a legal challenge to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, or CPP. The Environmental Protection Agency had enacted the CPP through its regulatory progress under its Clean Air Act authority to regulate carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. If it had gone into effect, it could have significantly reduced U.S. carbon emissions and boosted the nation’s efforts to curb climate change.At the time, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals was already considering whether the EPA had exceeded its powers under the Clean Air Act when promulgating the CPP. The plaintiffs had asked the D.C. Circuit to stay the CPP from taking effect during litigation, but it declined to do so in January 2016. In response, the plaintiffs then asked Roberts to grant a stay instead.Americans are most familiar with the court’s merits docket—the big-name cases where the justices review briefs from litigants and interested third parties, hold oral arguments where they can publicly ask questions of each side, and then write formal opinions that are binding on the parties and the lower courts. Virtually every case name that comes to mind, from Brown v. Board of Education to Trump v. United States, followed this pattern.Beyond the merits docket, however, the Supreme Court is also constantly at work on a variety of administrative and procedural motions for each case. William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor, first described this workload in 2015 as the “shadow docket,” which he used to refer to “a range of orders and summary decisions that defy its normal procedural regularity.” As originally used by Baude, “shadow” did not mean “sinister,” but rather “partially hidden”: Court watchers could see the outcomes of these decisions through the court’s orders, but not the rationale behind them because the justices did not write opinions to explain them. “People criticize the Court’s merits cases for being political, unprincipled, or opaque,” Baude explained in the 2015 law-review article. “But those criticisms may be targeted at the wrong part of the Court’s docket. It is the non-merits work that should most raise questions of consistency and transparency.”To understand how the shadow docket works, it is worth explaining how the court distributes its massive administrative workload. Most of this work is performed by the nine members of the court in their roles as circuit justices. Each member is assigned to one of the geographic circuit courts of appeal. Since there are twelve circuits—eleven for the states plus one for the District of Columbia—some justices get multiple circuits. The chief justice, for example, traditionally gets the D.C. Circuit, as we’ll see later.In this role, a circuit justice typically gets the first look at each motion filed in a case. Their job is to dispense with the easiest ones—when one side requests additional time to file a reply brief, for example—and refer more substantial motions to the rest of their colleagues. When the Justice Department requests a spot in oral arguments in a merits case that they aren’t already involved in, for example, all nine justices will consider that request. As a result, the circuit justices act like a filter to ensure that all nine members need not constantly meet to decide trivial administrative matters.Some of these motions could also be quite consequential. The most prominent examples were death-penalty cases where the entire litigation was defined by a ticking clock. A death-row inmate in Virginia, for example, could file a last-minute petition on the eve of their execution. Election cases, which are also driven by immutable deadlines, occasionally received some attention through the shadow docket as well. When the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case, it can also grant a stay to preserve the status quo until it delivers a ruling.None of those factors were at play in the West Virginia case. Roberts instead argued that the court should intervene because an EPA rule on mercury in a previous case had led to structural changes by polluters, even though it was later partially struck down by the Supreme Court. In that 2014 case, Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, the court began to sketch out what would later become the major-questions doctrine.“Past experience makes the case for irreparable harm,” Roberts claimed. “On June 29, 2015, we ruled that the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards violated the Clean Air Act. One day later, the EPA announced that it was ‘confident [it was] still on track to reduce’ the targeted pollutants in part because ‘the majority of power plants are already in compliance or well on their way to compliance.’ In other words, the absence of a stay allowed the agency to effectively implement an important program that we held contrary to law.”This is less persuasive than it sounds. First, as one of the other justices noted in a later memo, most of the CPP’s requirements wouldn’t kick in for years, giving plenty of time for courts to resolve legal questions. Second, Roberts had been pretty flexible on this subject before. In a shadow-docket order in a 2012 case involving a warrantless DNA-swabbing program for Maryland arrestees, Roberts declined in his circuit-justice capacity to block the state law from taking effect while the justices considered the case. (They eventually upheld it.)Roberts appeared to favor the law’s constitutionality in his in-chambers opinion and wrote that blocking it would represent “an ongoing and concrete harm to Maryland’s law enforcement and public safety interests.” He then delivered a line that he and the court’s conservatives would rely on frequently in Trump-era cases: “Any time a State is enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes enacted by representatives of its people, it suffers a form of irreparable injury.”That reasoning was absent in West Virginia, and unsurprisingly so: The Roberts court rules against the EPA so frequently and so energetically that one almost wonders if they wish they could abolish it altogether. The court’s liberals at the time tried to mollify Roberts’s sweeping demands but were unsuccessful. Justice Stephen Breyer noted, with no small amount of understatement, it was “unusual for this court to issue a stay of an agency’s order during the time that the court of appeals is considering its lawfulness.” Now it is so routine, at least when Democrats hold the White House, that the absence of a stay is a notable exception.The timing of history can be remarkably cruel. On February 9, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a three-sentence memo that appeared to be the final step to confirm the five-justice majority for the stay of the CPP; the court issued its order later that day. Scalia died four days later, on February 13, leaving the court with a 4-4 ideological split until the Senate confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace him in March 2017.Kennedy explained that he saw no harm in imposing a stay because the court would likely issue one when it likely took up the case later that year. “The memoranda from the conference have been very helpful,” he wrote. “In my view, a stay would be granted in four to six months in any event, and fairness to the parties counsels that we should grant it now.”But the Supreme Court didn’t get that opportunity: The D.C. Circuit didn’t issue a ruling before Trump won the 2016 presidential election and took office in 2017, at which point his administration began working to repeal the CPP. Along the way, it asked the D.C. Circuit to hold its ruling in “abeyance,” meaning that it would take no further action one way or the other. The court ultimately dismissed the case in August 2018 after the Trump EPA enacted a new rule to repeal the CPP.Had the Supreme Court followed its normal practices, the CPP would have stayed on the books for at least two years before the Trump administration could have repealed it—and perhaps longer, depending on how litigation over the repeal went. The United States could have made significant progress in reducing carbon emissions from one of their most pernicious sources. The Obama administration would have been able to carry out their governing mandate from the electorate.Finally, I do not think we should underestimate the impact of the Times’s report on the Supreme Court itself. Memorandums like these are typically not made public until a deceased Supreme Court justice opens their papers to researchers. Many justices (though not all of them) often donate their archives to universities on the condition that their papers won’t be released until all serving members of the court at the time have left it. Under normal circumstances, the American public may not have seen these memos until the 2060s.This leak arguably represents an even greater breach of the court’s secrecy than when Politico obtained a copy of Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022. That draft represented the end of the court’s internal deliberations; these memos represent the beginning of it. Prominent law firms offer hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses to former Supreme Court clerks to get the insights into each justice’s thinking that these memos offer.These memos provide little insight into the justices’ current thinking, of course. Four justices who took part in the 2016 case have since left the court. But the leak of them may prompt members of the court to be even more secretive and guarded with one another in the future, fearing another Dobbs-like leak on the horizon from an errant clerk or renegade justice in a high-stakes case. The quality of the court’s reasoning might decline even further if the court’s members have fewer opportunities to challenge and critique one another. Then again, perhaps it might show the justices why such consequential decisions do not belong in the shadows.For now, we can only regret the court’s failures that have already taken place. Future generations will lament the Supreme Court’s departure from its own practices, both in practical terms and in democratic ones. The court these days is remarkably willing to let the Trump administration govern the country however it wishes nowadays, so long as it does not impose billions of dollars in illegal tariffs or try to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I look forward to seeing if it maintains this expansive approach during the next Democratic administration.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209283/supreme-court-shadow-docket-memos-west-virginia-epa

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2026-04-21T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers will go out of their way to avoid this moment of clunky announcement. You never hear, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis snarl, “Welp, there will be blood,” or Leonardo DiCaprio mutter, “You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.”HBO’s new limited series DTF St. Louis observes no such prohibition. In the world of the show, “DTF St. Louis” is a hook-up app for married people looking for discrete adulterous encounters. It’s the catalyst for the entire sweet and sordid affair that takes up this show’s seven episodes. We hear Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman) and Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) discussing it, and their joint interest in exploring it, in one of the show’s numerous timelines. Both men, suburban husbands and fathers, are unfulfilled in their sexual lives. So they make a pact to revitalize their lives together through online love. And we hear police investigators explaining and interrogating it after Floyd’s mysterious death in another of those timelines. The app’s logs are a key archive of evidence for Detective Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Detective Plumb (Joy Sunday) as they try to figure out what exactly happened to Floyd.DTF? DTF. They met on DTF. I got a hit on DTF.The mantra-like repetition of this title is, thus, perfectly explicable in plot terms, but it also leads the viewer to notice how many other different notable terms or phrases characters repeat over and over again to each other onscreen. Cornhole. Outback Steakhouse. Quality Garden Suites. Nicer plates and bowls for the household. Finish First. B out the B. Watermelon Breeze. No way, José. Jamba Juice. DTF St. Louis. There is a touch of smugness in the portrayal of these Midwestern suburbanites who pay such linguistic reverence to the names of the strip mall chains that litter their commercial thoroughfares, but there’s also something more. Characters repeat these loaded phrases—each tied to a meaningful event in the story of love, friendship, and infidelity that we watch unfold—until they are more sound than word. It’s the stylistic signature of DTF St. Louis—language that becomes gesture that becomes feeling.A prose poem? I hesitate to use too literary an analogy, as there are aspects of DTF St. Louis that are pretty willfully goofy, and I’m not entirely sure every tonal movement it makes is either effective or well chosen, but there’s really no other experience on TV quite like it right now. Words and phrases repeat, but so do images, sometimes achingly gorgeous ones, stitched through the series like embroidery.I have an allergy to media about suburban ennui and adultery. But I will also admit that DTF St. Louis hypnotized me. The show begins, and it seems like a murder mystery or a suburban infidelity melodrama or a male friendship cringe comedy. It is indeed all of those things, and several more besides that reveal themselves over time. But the rhythm and pace of the show does not belong to or emerge from any of those genres. Its repetitions, its quick vignettes, its narrative haltingness and teasing, its many gemlike moments of visual beauty—the show builds out of these disparate and interconnected blocks of text, gesture, feeling. I will admit that I was resistant to this show at first. I have an allergy to media about suburban ennui and adultery—it’s hard to come up with new things to say about a topic so well trodden over many decades. But I will also admit that DTF St. Louis hypnotized me. Does it have anything new to say about the stir-crazy horniness of middle-aged middle-class white people? Maybe. But the way DTF St. Louis says what it has to say is utterly original and irresistible. That’s enough for me. DTF St. Louis is one in an increasingly long list of recent prestige TV series about the crisis of contemporary masculinity. In fact, it airs on a cable channel—HBO—that, over the past two years, has essentially become a one-stop-shopping narrowcast boutique of narratives of male loneliness and anxiety. The Rehearsal, The Chair Company, Rooster, Task, The Pitt, the forthcoming Richard Gadd series Half Man—these series are all variations on a theme, and DTF St. Louis, for all of its formal eccentricity, slots right in among them. Like many of these series, it’s an alternately critical and credulous examination of what exactly the hell is the matter with men these days.DTF’s take on this discourse is, as its characters like to repeatedly say, “complex.” At its heart are Clark and Floyd. Clark is a successful local meteorologist for a news station in St. Louis. He lives in the imaginary West County suburb of Twyla, MO, with his wife and two children in a large and lovely, if sterile, new construction home. He is a measly kind of man, soft and sensitive, acquiescent to his family, but also blocked up. He greets everyone with ingratiating good cheer, but he’s also possessed by a kind of twitchy nervousness. He rarely finishes a sentence, hanging, instead, on his conversation partner to fill in the rest. Bateman does an unnerving but effective job of transmuting his characteristic smarm into something a little more fragile.To Floyd and his wife Carol (Linda Cardellini), though, Clark is a glowing image of stability. Floyd is a bit of a lovable loser. He is an American Sign Language interpreter who works onscreen with Clark. He describes himself as overweight, out of fighting trim, and that’s only the beginning of his manifold problems. He is a doting stepfather to Richard, a sad young boy with devastating behavioral issues. He wants to regain his lost intimacy with Carol, but there are two problems that we find out about right away. The first is that Carol has taken on a job as a little league umpire to make some extra money, which they need because they are deep in debt. It’s not that Floyd objects to this as a threat to his masculine status as a breadwinner but that Carol’s umpire uniform turns him off. The second reason for their cold snap in the bedroom, though, is that Floyd, for reasons that it will take the entire season to unfold, has a debilitatingly crooked penis. I’ve already listed a number of storytelling genres—mystery, erotic thriller, buddy comedy—that DTF St. Louis incorporates. One of them, maybe the most structurally important, is the dick joke. So, these lost boys turn to DTF St. Louis, and the promise of midlife sexual awakening it brings. It’s hard to summarize what actually happens after that, largely because “what happens” is revealed piece by piece, with events thoroughly shuffled out of chronological order. DTF St. Louis creator Steven Conrad—who is the sole writing and directing credit on every episode—borrows and blows out a contrivance that I most closely associate with Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad: Each episode, from the very first, features scenes from every other episode. That means that the convoluted, devastating final moments of the series—as well as dozens of other moments—are stealthily interspersed as elliptical cutscenes all the way through. When we first encounter those images—Clark riding his recumbent bike on the dark streets, for instance, or Clark and Floyd embracing in the nude—it’s unclear where and when they’re from. The show’s quick-cutting and lyrical editorial style makes this pattern seem perfectly natural in the pilot. But it means that, every time we see a set of images, we learn more about them. Every time we watch a scene with a little extra time at the front or back, or from a slightly different perspective, we understand something different about them. The story moves forward, but through recycled images and moments that gain meaning and feeling over time. Jamba Juice. Quality Garden Suites. No way, José.This is a portrait of radical male vulnerability, of the kind of soul-entwining friendship we are told is hard for men to strike up at this age. The basic outline is that, soon, Clark and Carol embark upon an affair of their own, while Floyd begins—first accidentally and then on purpose—to explore the possibility of “intimacy play” with other men. Those paths crisscross and converge in expected and unexpected ways, forming a kind of homespun love triangle that it takes every minute of all seven episodes to fully appreciate and understand. Then, in the end—as we’re shown in the pilot—there’s Floyd’s dead body, an empty can of poisoned Bloody Mary, and a Playgirl magazine centerfold with the model’s face scratched out.What’s never unclear on this show is that the real love story here is between Clark and Floyd. These men share everything, they support each other 24 hours a day, they are kind to each other in ways that will eventually baffle the investigating detectives. This is a portrait of radical male vulnerability, of the kind of soul-entwining friendship we are told is hard for men to strike up at this age. “I’m just fucking lonely, man,” Clark tells Floyd. “I’m lonely as shit.” DTF St. Louis is a show about the side effects of Clark and Floyd’s deceptively simple and incredibly complex cure for male loneliness. Then there’s Carol. Since Freaks and Geeks, Linda Cardellini has become one of the greatest and most dependable TV actresses of her generation. She is, in this show, sultry and silly, cold and furious, whimsical on occasion, and righteously cutting. Her performance in her umpire gear is a massive comic achievement, her diminutive head rolling around atop the bulky chest pad, her arms slicing out to call strikes—she’s like a silent film comedian. And while Carol’s woundedness and frustration and awakening desire are as important to DTF’s narrative as anything else, so too is her ultimate marginality. She is the wife of a mixed-up, depressed man and the mother of a mixed-up, depressed son. When she and Clark meet up for sex, Clark calls the assignations “dream sessions,” because the room becomes a space for them to realize their (sexual) dreams. But Carol doesn’t really have any hot dreams of her own. The only ones she can come up with are about ways she can rescue her lost husband and lost son. Even still, Carol’s screen time fully dwarves that of Clark’s wife and children. They barely factor in the story at all, not even into the many conversations Clark has with Floyd about his guilt. He feels guilt about cuckolding Floyd and about hurting Floyd’s feelings, but little guilt about his betrayal of his own family. Late in the series, Clark tells the investigators that his affair with Carol was, “a reaction against my own life.” He goes on to recall the gentle #GirlDad scene of braiding his daughters’ hair as they share their lives with him. Despite the sweetness of these moments, he feels removed from them, asleep. “You cannot be there with your daughters in these precious moments, thinking about yourself and your things,” he said. “Come on, you gotta be present.” And yet, Clark is not present. Or rather, he’s present elsewhere. Clark only has eyes, and a heart, for Floyd. And part of this show’s tragedy and romance is in witnessing Clark devote, and then sacrifice, his life (daughters included) for him.There is a heart-flaying generosity to the way Clark and Floyd melt into each other, a deep selfishness to their self-love. A criticism many commenters brought up about Martin Scorsese’s funereal gangster epic The Irishman was that the film’s few women were radically marginalized onscreen. In particular, Scorsese cast the outstanding Anna Paquin to play the daughter of the aging hitman protagonist played by Robert DeNiro. But Paquin has only a single line in the film. Why have her there, why put her in those scenes, looming in a corner, if you’re going to ignore her? The answer—for many, an insufficient one—is that this is a film about the sustaining and suffocating embrace of male friendship. That the titular Irishman’s enmeshment in the “family” of the Italian mob gave him a sense of belonging and acknowledgment he’d never had, but that it came at the expense of any kind of relationship at all with his actual family. At the end of that film, as those men that filled his life are killed in their turn or die of old age, he is left alone, lonely, without the daughter he kept at the margins of his life. The cure for male loneliness is fatal if taken in too high a dose.DTF St. Louis tells a similarly dire story in a form that is deceptively enlivening. Its quick disorienting cuts, its uplifting seventies pop soundtrack, the electricity of its leads—we don’t feel, here, the dread and horror of mortality that suffused every second of The Irishman. But it’s all a feint. It’s possible, it turns out, to give too much of yourself, to escape an airless co-dependency only to reproduce that same airlessness elsewhere. It’s possible to be so kind that it’s cruel. Carol keeps saying that Floyd is “the sweetest man,” but he is as dismissive of her struggle and pain as he is attentive to Clark’s. There is a heart-flaying generosity to the way Clark and Floyd melt into each other, a deep selfishness to their self-love. They find something in each other only to lose everything. You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209187/dtf-st-louis-utterly-original-drama-male-loneliness

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2026-04-21T09:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

On Monday, Donald Trump exploded in telling tirades. In one, he raged that he (just he) is winning the war “BY A LOT” and bizarrely stressed that “I’m in charge!” In another, he emphasized that he feels “under no pressure whatsoever” to reach a deal with Iran. Why is Trump so fearful of appearing to lose control? Well, The Wall Street Journal has a striking new report relating that gas prices and the war recently had the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis “looming large in his mind. He’s “grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.” In short: He fears looking like Jimmy Carter as the midterms approach. Indeed, Politico reports that prices have some Republicans sounding “alarm bells” about this fall. We talked to The Lever’s David Sirota, narrator of the “Master Plan” podcast, whose new season focuses on the hyper-powerful presidency. We discuss Trump’s growing fears that events are slipping from his grasp, how this is rooted paradoxically in his assertion of an imperial presidency, how decades of failure led to this moment, and how Democrats can run against his imperial rule. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209287/trump-secret-war-fears-leak-gop-grows-unnerved-alarm-bells

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2026-04-20T21:27:04Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump’s scandal-plagued labor secretary resigned Monday, the White House announced.“Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector. She has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung said on X. Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure was brief but tumultuous. The secretary was accused of having an affair with a member of her security detail, asking staffers to buy her alcohol at all hours of the day, and misusing government funds—including to throw herself a birthday party.Her husband was also banned from Labor Department grounds after he allegedly assaulted two female staffers.This is a developing story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209285/trump-labor-secretary-resigns-lori-chavez-deremer

Nostr event nevent1qqs959w2x2rhtyvxc0g95znz8pux6u0lqsyh7h5uj6c7ryzpsx35ndgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj3efw4s

2026-04-20T21:12:05Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles summoned dozens of Republican political consultants from across the country for a meeting Monday at the Waldorf Astoria, a person familiar with the plan told Politico’s Playbook.The gathering of Republican operatives comes as the White House is developing its strategy and aligning the broader party apparatus to face November’s midterm elections amid Donald Trump’s rather unpopular “excursion” to the Middle East. Former deputy chief of staff James Blair, who departed the White House earlier this month in order to run the president’s political operation, was also involved in organizing the meeting at the Waldorf.“Taken together, the sessions underscore growing urgency inside the White House about the midterms and concerns around energy prices and cost of living exacerbated by the Iran war,” Politico reported. Trump’s overall approval rating has hit a new low of just 37 percent, according to an NBC News poll Monday. Two-thirds of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of inflation and the Iran conflict, which has upended global trade and sent energy prices skyrocketing. Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted Sunday that gas prices may not come back down until next year, leaving Republicans in a tough spot when it comes to seeking reelection in November. It seems that strategists in the White House are aware that there’s only so much spin they can do. “The rhetoric around this stuff matters way less than the reality,” one person close to the White House told Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday. “It either will be or it won’t be. If we don’t see the $3 gallon of gas, we’re gonna get killed.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/209282/white-house-panic-donald-trump-iran-midterms

Nostr event nevent1qqsd27ev3scw6ue7dvmzqt3vkqen5dv255l34l78fnue7akaq30xmgqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjsyhc37

2026-04-20T20:49:24Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Republicans are fighting over expelling some of their own members of Congress. Representative Cory Mills, under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of assaulting women, soliciting sex workers, lying about his military service, and profiting from federal contracts as a member of Congress, has drafted a resolution to expel his colleague, Representative Nancy Mace, from Congress after she tried to expel him and three other members of Congress last week. A source told NOTUS, which first reported the news, that the resolution would highlight an incident at Charleston International Airport in South Carolina, last year, in which Mace yelled at TSA agents and security officers, calling them “fucking incompetent.” The resolution could bring up any other number of Mace’s scandals. The South Carolina representative is also facing her own House Ethics Committee investigation over allegations that she collected $12,000 in congressional reimbursement funds that she wasn’t eligible for, and ordered her staff to buy her alcohol late at night, clean her house, and promote her on forums as one of the “hottest women in Congress.”The congresswoman took to X after news of Mills’s resolution broke, posting that he “lied about his military service, has been accused of beating women, has a restraining order against him, and has allegedly been stuffing his own pockets with federal contracts while sitting in Congress. As a survivor, I will always stand up and right the wrongs of others. He is only coming after me because he knows he’s next.”Mace last week also targeted Democrat Eric Swalwell and Republican Tony Gonzalez, who ended up resigning rather than face expulsion resolutions from Congress. Swalwell faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, while Gonzalez sent sexually explicit messages to two aides and had an affair with one who later committed suicide. The fourth representative in Mace’s crosshairs is Democratic Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who faces an expulsion vote this week over allegedly misusing Federal Emergency Management Agency funds. For now, the infighting in the Republican caucus undermines their already razor-thin control of the House and makes it appear that petty squabbling is taking precedence over serious ethical issues.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209280/house-republicans-target-each-other-expulsion

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2026-04-20T19:24:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The man who just committed the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. in the past two years had a previous weapons conviction—so how did he get his hands on another gun? Shamar Elkins, a 31-year-old father, shot and killed his seven children and their cousin Sunday in Shreveport, Louisiana. The victims’ ages ranged from three to 11, CNN reported. He also critically injured two women: his wife and the mother of the eighth child. But in March 2019, three years after he finished a seven-year stint in the Louisiana Army National Guard, Elkins was arrested for firing a 9-millimeter handgun 300 feet away from the fence line of a school where children were playing outside, KTBS reported. Elkins was charged with illegal use of weapons and carrying a firearm on school property. He pleaded guilty to the illegal weapons charge, and the second, more serious charge was dismissed. Elkins was placed on probation for 18 months but walked away without a permanent firearms ban.Elkins was also charged with driving while intoxicated in 2016, CNN reported. The state of Louisiana has a 10-year ban on firearm possession after certain felonies—crimes of violence, sex crimes, drug crimes, burglaries, for example—but not all felonies. The crime to which Elkins pleaded guilty sat beneath this legal threshold. Because Elkins’s 2019 conviction for illegal weapons use only resulted in probation, his record fell short of the legal threshold for a permanent firearms ban under U.S. federal law, according to the International Business Times. Elkins was able to legally own a firearm again after his probation ended.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209277/louisiana-shooter-able-get-gun-prior-convictions

Nostr event nevent1qqsqfkj7dv0um9jukz84yplcgtc5vnyven07a9tkr44696r25edhv6szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjq0q7fa

2026-04-20T14:33:33Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump’s erratic behavior has gotten him exiled from critical peace negotiations with Iran.The president was removed from such talks by his own aides last month, who feared that his unpredictable style could hamper the discussions, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.The decision was informed by the president’s behavior during the search and rescue operation for the aircrew of the downed F-35 fighter jet late last month, when the president reportedly screamed at his aides for hours. As a result, his 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 told the Journal.Shortly after the second airman was recovered, the president was back to beating his chest. In a rapid-fire series of hair-raising Truth Social posts on Easter morning, Trump pledged he would completely annihilate Iranian civilization within a couple of days. He was reportedly under the impression that appearing unstable would spur Tehran to negotiate, according to the Journal.But it wasn’t the first time during the sustained military offensive that Trump’s entourage decided the president would be best kept out of the action.Around the same time, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles forced a meeting of Trump’s most trusted advisers. The problem: No one was being honest with the president about the domestic impact of the war.Privately, Wiles had expressed fears that the inner circle’s rose-tinted retelling of the conflict would leave Trump oblivious to the political reality of the war, just months ahead of a contentious midterm season, reported Time magazine earlier this month.Up until that point, Trump had been spoon-fed daily video compilations of various battlefield successes, a senior administration official told the publication. Trump was under the impression that stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran could be one of his greatest legacies as America’s 47th president. The current conflict has gone on for more than seven weeks, surpassing the administration’s six-week deadline. In that timespan, the U.S. has lost access to a critical oil tradeway in the Middle East, tanked global oil markets, spiked the cost of living for people around the world, and agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the Western hemisphere. It has also cost American taxpayers over $50 billion, and sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. The war has killed more than 3,375 people in Iran, state media reported Monday, and more than 2,290 people in Lebanon. It has also claimed the lives of 13 U.S. service members throughout the region.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209262/donald-trump-iran-war-plans-screaming-aides

Nostr event nevent1qqsr5hdh32zwhckp8jfwuf0dcyreve5qnpmhwrmme4ceadfp5tg7wuqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjzhq89y

2026-04-20T13:28:25Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Last month, I considered whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used what he knew about the imminence of the Iran war to expand his stock portfolio with a little blood money (“Is Pete Hegseth Killing Iranians To Get Rich?”). That was the thrust of a shocking Financial Times report, based on three anonymous sources, that said Hegseth’s Morgan Stanley broker approached Black Rock in February about making a “multimillion-dollar investment in the asset manager’s Defense Industrials Active ETF.” An ETF, or Exchange-Traded Fund, is a financial instrument comprised of multiple stocks and/or bonds that are bundled together and sold as a single stock. According to the FT, Hegseth’s broker’s request was flagged internally at Black Rock, presumably because it so obviously threatened to trigger an insider-trading investigation. (I’m guessing the FT’s three sources all worked at Black Rock.) Ultimately, Black Rock denied the request on the technicality that its Defense Industrials Active ETF was not yet available to Morgan Stanley clients. Whether Hegseth found some other way to profit from the Iran war remains an open question. (A Pentagon spokesperson called the FT report “entirely false and fabricated” and denied that Hegseth or any Hegseth representative approached Black Rock.)This is a matter that demands immediate investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and this morning Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, sent SEC chair Paul Atkins a letter requesting him to do just that.It says a lot about our current scandal-rich environment that the FT story hasn’t dominated the news these past three weeks. But congressional Democrats certainly didn’t forget it. The day after the story broke, the House Committee on Government and Oversight Reform’s ranking member, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, and the ranking member of its Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, sent Hegseth a letter instructing him to preserve “all documents, records, and communications” on his financial transactions back to November 1, 2024. Regrettably, no investigation by their committee is likely, because its chair, James Comer of Kentucky, is perhaps the most shamelessly partisan hack in the entire Republican House majority. As I write, Comer is trying to justify Pam Bondi’s evading a committee subpoena in its Jeffrey Epstein investigation despite the fact he previously voted to hold the Clintons in contempt for defying committee subpoenas in the same investigation. Two days after the FT story broke, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and three other Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee pointed out, in a letter to Hegseth, that even in peacetime Hegseth would be prohibited by federal law “from owning any stock in Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls, Boeing, RTX Corporation, and L3Harris Technologies.” Stakes in all of these companies were bundled into the ETF his broker reportedly tried to buy. It would be illegal for Hegseth to buy a Defense Industrials Active ETF because—duh—these are defense companies, and Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense.In her new letter, Warren observes that failure on the SEC’s part to investigate the FT allegations would undermine “the confidence investors around the world place on the integrity of our markets.” Granted, Hegseth’s broker was not able, the FT reported, to complete the offending insider trade. But securities law, Warren points out, doesn’t just ban securities fraud; it also bans attempted securities fraud. The relevant language is “Whoever knowingly executes, or attempts to execute” [italics mine] the fraud in question. If the FT story is true (and I think probably it is), why would Hegseth do anything so very stupid? If I’m right that the FT’s three sources were all at Black Rock, it shouldn’t be hard for a determined investigator to locate them. Also, if Hegseth’s request was flagged internally at Black Rock, that probably means there’s a paper trail just waiting for some government official to subpoena. Even if Hegseth defied Garcia and tossed all communications with his broker into a bonfire, he’d still be screwed. This is not a difficult investigation. So, I ask again: How could Hegseth be so stupid? One answer is that Hegseth has already given us plenty of reason to believe he’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic. The most hilarious recent example (there are many) was Hegseth’s recitation last week of Scripture that turned out to be a fictional embellishment memorably recited by Samuel L. Jackson before he blows a few yuppie deadbeats’ brains out in the great Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction. Thank goodness Hegseth skipped the part where Jackson asks the yuppies whether they think his employer, the terrifying mob boss Marcellus Wallace, looks like some sort of bitch. But another, less obvious factor, is that Hegseth’s personal finances look a bit shaky. Hegseth’s salary as defense secretary is about $250,000, or $21,000 per month. Out of that $21,000, according to Forbes, Hegseth and his wife must pay a mortgage of $19,000 per month for a house in Tennessee—actually a 77-acre estate—that they bought in 2022 for $3.4 million. That leaves—can this be right?—$2,000 per month to cover all other expenses, and that’s not counting paycheck deductions for taxes and benefits. But it’s a really great house! According to Forbes’s Kyle Khan-Mullins, it’s situated 25 miles north of Nashville, has 6,900 square feet, and includes “a 5-car garage, a pool, a theater room, and a 960-square-foot, two-bedroom guest unit.”Now you’re going to tell me none of this matters, because Hegseth entered the Trump administration a rich man. A $3.4 million house should be no stretch for a guy whom Fox paid, during the three years before he entered Trump’s Cabinet, $4.6 million. Hegseth also raked in more than a million per year through book advances, royalties, and speaking fees. But in spite of all that, Hegseth doesn’t seem to have much of a cushion. The giveaway is that $19,000 per month mortgage. A payment that big means the size of your loan exceeds the $750,000 cap on mortgage interest deductibility, driving up your tax bill, and you know how much Republicans hate to pay taxes. If Hegseth is paying $19,000 per month, that means that when he bought his house four years ago he was unable to make an appropriately large down payment. And indeed, according to Forbes, Hegseth’s net worth turns out to be only about $3 million, of which $2 million appears to come from his wife, Jennifer Rauchet. If, after being a TV personality for more than a decade, you end up with an individual net worth of only $1 million, then something must have gone wrong. What went wrong?Alimony appears to be at least part of the answer. Hegseth is twice-divorced, and (again, according to Forbes) just one of these divorces, from Samantha Deering, has cost him $1.3 million in alimony, child support, and private school tuition. Hegseth also paid $50,000 to settle allegations (that he denied) that he committed sexual assault in 2017. A major theme of Hegseth’s life before entering the Pentagon was chaos. He left two organizations he ran—Concerned Veterans for America and Vets for Freedom—amid accusations of financial mismanagement, much of it said to be fueled by boozing and partying. CBS News reported in December 2024 that tax filings for Concerned Veterans of America showed that in fiscal year 2013 the nonprofit brought in $3.8 million but spent $3.9 million. “There’s a long pattern,” one Hegseth associate told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in December 2024, “over more than a decade, of malfeasance, financial mismanagement, and sexual impropriety. There’s a fair dose of bullying and misinformation, too.” Don’t forget that in 2019 Hegseth’s mother emailed him that he was “an abuser of women … We are broken by your behavior and lack of character.” It would be a surprise if none of this mayhem showed up in his personal finances. Logically, a person whose individual net worth is $1 million would be in no position to invest “millions” in anything—even an ethical financial venture. But he might consider doing so if he were feeling desperate and wanted to make a Hail Mary pass. What little we know of Hegseth’s finances suggests that’s possible. Hegseth might especially consider this sort of reckless move after a few drinks. That may sound like a cheap shot, but the New York Post reported earlier this month that Hegseth’s top aide, former Marine Lt. Col. Ricky Buria, told Pentagon colleagues that he went with Hegseth, in disguise, on a secret bender last year at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. Multiple sources told the Post that this was Buria’s clumsy attempt to ensnare leakers. But that would be a really clumsy attempt, because Buria set the trap on at least two colleagues. If one of them leaked, how would Buria know which it was?One of the Post’s two sources on Buria mouthing off said he (or she) thought maybe Buria made the story up to advertise his closeness to Hegseth. That would be pathetic, but not unprecedented. In Washington, aides have been known to show off what big shots they are by boasting about catching a president’s cold. A Pentagon spokeswoman told the Post: “This is false, and the Department is not going to entertain Washington gossip while we are focused on major military operations abroad.” Which is also what this regime would say if you asked whether the sky is blue. Still, that doesn’t mean Buria tied one on with Hegseth.And yet. I note with interest that Buria—who previously embarrassed Hegseth by telling Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll never to stand President Donald Trump alongside a Black female at a military event (this according to a March report in The New York Times that Buria denied)—did not, after the Post bombshell appeared on April 3, get his sorry ass fired. Might that tell us Buria and Hegseth share what Trump, circa 2003, called a “wonderful secret,” in this instance about knocking back a few? I don’t pretend to know the answer. The outrageous financial adventure Hegseth seems to have contemplated is nothing I’d expect a person of even average intelligence to consider. Being stupid would change that calculus, and being desperate would change it more. Being stupid, desperate, and drunk would make an insider trade look maximally plausible. But does plausibility demand the entire trifecta? Recall that the one vice Trump never indulges is consumption of alcohol. He is also nowhere near so stupid as Hegseth, nor as desperate—but look at all the crazy stuff he does!In any event, it shouldn’t be hard to prove the FT story true, if only someone with subpoena power will take an interest.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209247/warren-hegseth-iran-insider-trading

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2026-04-20T13:05:44Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Iran says it won’t be participating in negotiations with the U.S. after it seized an Iranian cargo ship near the Strait of Hormuz. “While claiming diplomacy and readiness for negotiations, the U.S. is carrying out behaviours that do not in any way indicate seriousness in pursuing a diplomatic process,” said Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, on Monday, saying that the U.S. “violated the ceasefire from the beginning of its implementation.” President Trump bragged on Truth Social Sunday that the Navy destroyer USS Spruance intercepted the Iranian cargo ship Touska in the Gulf of Oman, claiming that the U.S. “stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engine room.” The ship has been captured by the Marines, which Trump said is under Treasury sanctions for “illegal activity.” The two-week ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. is set to expire on Wednesday, and a senior Iranian source told Reuters that the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports was undermining the prospect of negotiations, and that Iran’s “defensive capabilities,” including missiles, were not open for discussion. Meanwhile, the U.S. is sending a delegation to Islamabad, Pakistan, including Vice President JD Vance, envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Pakistan is deploying 20,000 police, paramilitary, and army personnel to secure the talks, but it could all be for nought if the ceasefire collapses and Iran refuses to take part in talks.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209257/trump-derails-iran-ceasefire-seized-ship-strait-hormuz

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2026-04-20T10:38:33Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 20 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Is MAGA shrinking before our very eyes? In recent days, Donald Trump unleashed more tirades about ex-allies in the MAGA movement who’ve criticized him over the war and other things. Trump’s own pollster added more in a new interview, with both saying Trump’s critics don’t count as MAGA anymore. In a sense, they’re both saying that you will get excommunicated if your devotion to Trump is not absolute. The real message here seems to be quite clearly that MAGA really is a cult. This captures so much about this moment—Trump’s deepening unpopularity, the fracturing of his coalition, and the tenuousness of MAGA’s future as it keeps throwing out big voices. We’re talking about all of it with New Republic staff writer Perry Bacon, who has a great new piece on the global right turning on Trump. Perry, good to have you on.Perry Bacon: Good to see you, Greg. Thanks for having me.Sargent: So Donald Trump exploded in self-pity and megalomania on Truth Social, and this one had something special. He said this: “I have among the best poll numbers I have ever had, and why shouldn’t I? ALL THE COUNTRY DOES IS WIN.” Then Trump attacked MAGA critics this way: “I hear Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens are fading fast. Their numbers are terrible. They were FAKE MAGA, and now they’ve been exposed!” Perry, we used to joke that MAGA is whatever Trump says it is, but here he’s making that really clear. Anyone who dares to criticize him is fake MAGA. What do you make of that?Bacon: I mean, very explicit. As you said, we’ve been talking about a movement or whether MAGA is a movement or an ideology or something else, or just Donald Trump. And, you know, I’ve written and used that phrase to mean other things, but like Donald Trump is saying what I’ve always thought, which is that MAGA is Donald Trump and will be gone the moment he’s off the scene, whenever that is.Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. By the way, on Trump’s claim that his polls are as good as ever—guess what? That’s not true. One set of polling averages that you noted in your piece has his approval at 38 percent to 58 percent, some 20 points underwater. He’s worse on the economy in many polls: CNN had it at 31 percent and his approval on inflation at 27 percent, which is just extraordinary. That’s the issue voters care most about. Perry, what’s your general sense of where public opinion is on Trump right now? As we record, he seems to be announcing some sort of deal with Iran, I guess. I think maybe he gets a couple of points out of that, or maybe not. What do you think?Bacon: I think the question for him is there’s a core of Republicans who are at probably 35 to 40 percent of the electorate—people who are hardcore Republicans, always vote Republican. Can you get below that floor number in this era? If you remember, there are two times this happened where a president got below that. George W. Bush got to the high 20s, low 30s at the end of his administration—after Hurricane Katrina, after the Iraq War, and after the economic meltdown. Those were the big events that happened. And Trump got to the low 30s right after the January 6th insurrection, when pretty much everybody in the world, including Mitch McConnell and lots of Republicans, were criticizing him.So can he get below 35? I don’t know. And I would have said a war that goes poorly and lasts a long time, but this war maybe is not that long and is maybe going to end soon. But I think the one thing is that he’s probably getting near his lowest possible number, which is probably in the 36 to 38 percent range.Sargent: Well, I want to highlight some quotes from Trump’s pollster, Jim McLaughlin. He talked to Politico. I’m going to quote one of them. He said this: “The base doesn’t consider a Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, or a Candace Owens a conservative anymore.” Perry, that’s so revealing. And these are people—I want to stress this—who criticized Trump for going to war, which absolutely does betray his promise to voters. That’s what Trump was supposed to represent to Trump voters: no more wars. Whereas Kamala Harris was supposed to be the Liz Cheney shill or whatever, the candidate of the globalists and the warmongering establishment in D.C. But for pointing that out, they’ve been declared non-MAGA. I think that’s a window into what Trump and his pollster actually think of his voters. They really believe that those voters will think whatever thought Trump tells them to, right?Bacon: Yes. To be fair to them, they have some evidence of that. Remember, there were polls in 2016 that showed Republicans used to pretty much be opposed to Russia. And then a lot of them started approving of Russia once Trump—they used to say, we don’t want an adulterer as president. And then they changed their mind about that. So the idea that the base is Trump supporters and the base believes whatever Trump said that day is pretty much what’s happened the last 10 years. Most days, Republicans rewire their opinions about policy—not the sort of moderate Republican part of it, that sort of 10 percent of people who vote Republican but are not MAGA, but that core base has moved wherever he’s gone. When he endorses someone in a primary, they immediately go up in the polls. Like, this has been a bit of a cult-like support for him. So his pollster is saying something that I think is maybe—I’m sure the average Trump voter would not say, I do whatever Trump says—but they have behaved that way for the last 10 years.Sargent: Yeah, and of course, as we all know, people who cover this stuff as relentlessly as you and I do—unfortunately for us, I guess—this is not exclusive to Republican voters by any means. Voters tend to develop their allegiances on identity grounds. Policy isn’t that important to them. They say that they support this or that policy sometimes as a statement of identity and allegiance. You’re aware of this, but this does look like something a little different to me. I think it’s fair to say that it’s as bad as it’s ever been with this group, don’t you think?Bacon: Yeah, I mean, to give an example—people often follow the guidance of their political leaders. A good example was in 2012, I think the majority of African Americans opposed gay marriage. Then Barack Obama—a respected person who’s president, but also very respected among African Americans—says I’m for gay marriage and immediately the majority shifted their views. They rethought the issue because of a leader in his case. I’m making this point only because you’ve talked about the political science of this. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever said, whatever Democratic beliefs are, whatever I think, our Democratic base is whatever I think. And he would never have said Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Joy Reid are not part of the Democratic base, which is essentially what you’re saying if you’re saying Tucker and so on don’t count. So again, Democratic voters—a lot of my friends will follow what a Biden or AOC or a Bernie or a Warren says. I won’t deny that. But that said, those people also tend to speak in terms of accuracy and normalcy and so on. So if you’re a Democrat, you might be modeling yourself after people, but those people believe in democratic norms and election results and so on.Sargent: That’s such a good point. I hadn’t even thought of it. But obviously, Barack Obama feuded with his progressive critics a lot during his two terms. I mean, we remember all that. They would rip him apart over all kinds of things. Bacon: And he would defend himself, but he would never usually go on—he would never go on Twitter and trash them and say they’re not real liberals, which is what we’re just seeing now. Sargent: He would never say, I am the movement, whatever the equivalent of MAGA is on the Obama side.And, you know, there’s an irony here that’s probably worth highlighting, which is that Obama’s Republican critics absolutely portrayed him as a cult leader to his followers, fairly relentlessly. It was a really big refrain during the Obama years. And in fairness, there was a lot of adoration for Obama, no question. But it’s just sort of weirdly ironic that they lobbed that criticism, and Trump is explicitly saying that I tell my voters what to think—period, end of story. Bacon: He’s invoking the idea that he should be compared to Jesus Christ. This is something I never would have thought Republican voters would have been for before. So yes.Sargent: I would love to see some polling on that. How do you anticipate that shapes up? I think probably what we’ll see is that evangelicals overwhelmingly support him trashing the Pope, maybe. Catholic voters, I’m not so sure. What do you think?Bacon: I mean, the fact that JD Vance—who is not usually conciliatory—has been giving some comments that, I respect the Pope, but we disagree. His comments have not been as sharp as usual. These people are very conservative and attack everyone, but I think they’re aware that attacking the Pope is probably not smart, in part because that doesn’t just offend Catholics in the United States. It also offends Catholics in Europe, many of whom are Trump’s allies—leaders in places like Italy and Germany. The far right and the conservatives in Europe that Trump wants to be aligned with also do not want to see him bash the Pope because the Pope is fairly popular in many European countries.Sargent: Right. And we should probably add that among those constituencies that these far-right leaders in Europe rely on, Trump himself is very unpopular.Bacon: Yes. This is a key thing we’re seeing more. You know, there was a piece in the Financial Times in which Boris Johnson was criticizing Trump and in which Nigel Farage was. I think we’re seeing for the first time that the far-right leaders who agree with Trump on immigration—they’re politicians first and they want to win elections, that’s their job. And they’re seeing that Trump is very unpopular in my country, I have to distance myself from him. So I think that’s happening more and more abroad.Sargent: Yeah, and your piece made that point really well. I want to get to that in a second. First, I want to highlight one more quote from Trump’s pollster, Jim McLaughlin. He says: “There are no real divisions among the GOP MAGA base. They overwhelmingly support President Trump and his policies.” Perry, I just don’t understand this spin. His people keep saying that the MAGA core is with Trump. So what? Like, what about the young voters and non-white working-class voters—the voters that Trump won in 2024? What about independents? He’s losing these groups in huge numbers over the war and other things. How does MAGA elect people without those voters? They’re not exactly MAGA, but MAGA needs them, right? I guess the question is this: can MAGA survive if it keeps getting whittled down to a more and more fanatical core?Bacon: Right, because part of this is a lot of pollsters will ask, first of all, are you part of MAGA? And then they will second ask, do you approve of Trump? And so in some ways, the people who say they’re part of MAGA—that means they’re a Trump voter. So it’s not really telling us more than that. What we’re seeing is that if you’re in the core 30 percent of people who say I’m MAGA, Trump’s approval was 90 percent among them. But remember, Trump got 50 percent of the vote—the MAGA group is 30, 35 percent. There’s that big 15 percent, as you’re referring to—some Latinos, some African Americans who moved from the Democrats to Republicans, some people who were independents. Right now, if you look at the polls in North Carolina, look at the polls in Ohio, look at the polls in Alaska—that’s the problem. You have these people who were Republican voters, or were in 2024 at least, who are not MAGA and who do not like where the prices are going, do not like inflation, do not like this Iran war and do not like all the madness of Trump being himself. And I think that’s the core of it that they’ve got to be worried about. And the pollster, I think, is only saying the base is with us, but neither party’s base alone can win elections. You have to have those other people in it.Sargent: Well, that’s a really good point about the Senate map. And I want to ask you a little more about it. Obviously the Senate map is tough for Democrats. They need to flip four seats basically that are in really tough territory. But as you point out, for Republicans to hold onto those seats in some of these states, they need a large chunk of non-MAGA. And in these states, it looks like there’s really a fairly strong desire for a check on Trump. It doesn’t take much for a non-MAGA voter who voted for Trump because of inflation to say, this guy isn’t delivering on my stuff and he’s out of control. And okay, this Democrat who’s running here has a strong personality and has distinguished him or herself from the national party and has deep ties to the state and so forth—it’s not that hard for that group of voters to get over to supporting that Democrat, right? Can you talk about this dynamic? Bacon: I’m never going to say Democrats are going to win Texas because people say that all the time and it never happens. But even a place like Texas—Trump is net unpopular—and so therefore if you’re James Talarico, you probably aren’t going to win, but there’s room to go there because if 55 percent of Texans disapprove of Trump, that’s your potential electorate.A lot of them are Republican voters. Like if you look at Alaska, Ohio, Texas, the Democratic candidates are going to have to win some actual Republicans. In Maine and North Carolina, you can probably just win the election on Democrats alone. North Carolina is very narrowly between the parties. But I think in those three places, Democrats have to win something like Ohio, Alaska, Texas—probably two of those. And those are going to be tough. Every year, like if the election were today, I think it would be really close because this Iran story—most Republicans, you know, a lot of Republicans don’t support this either. If we had the election today, I think the Republicans would be in danger because they have not only messed up the economy, but they’ve gone into foreign policy in a way voters don’t agree with. But I’m assuming Trump is going to get out of this war in part because he sees the same poll numbers.Sargent: Yeah, and there are strong Democratic candidates in a number of these states. And North Carolina, I think, is a really interesting tell. The fact that it really does look like Democrats are on track to win there—it’s going to be super tight, it’s North Carolina—but that is a key tell, don’t you think?Bacon: Yeah. And I think one thing to keep in mind is we really are talking about is there a Democratic majority in 2029? That’s the really key win. My hope at least would be there’s a Democratic president, a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate in 2029. If it happens in 2027, that’s not big for policy. If the Democrats get two or three seats in 2026 and then one or two more, that ends up getting you to 50, 51. And that’s the key thing here. So that’s kind of what I’m looking for. I’m curious about Maine—I agree with Platner on issues, I’m a little nervous about his bio, if he’s ready for primetime, but people like him up there so far.Sargent: So this is why it’s so baffling to me that Trump and his people keep spinning, MAGA is with him because like, so what? That’s not going to matter for the battle for the House and the battle for the Senate. Anyway, onto your piece—you looked at how some of the leaders of the global right are now distancing themselves from Trump. And I guess the main factors are the unpopularity of the war pretty much everywhere, the rise in energy prices, the feud with the Pope and so forth. You made this great point, which is that this will impact domestic politics here, lending a boost to the opposition to Trump in the U.S. As you put it, Trump is now isolated and diminished. Can you talk about that?Bacon: Well, I think the key thing is we’re 10 years into this. So if you’re a liberal—if you’re Perry Bacon or Greg Sargent, Nancy Pelosi, of course you criticize Trump. They have a phrase for it: Trump Derangement Syndrome. I think that’s all silly, but that said, those of us who’ve been correctly criticizing Trump for 10 years, we’re not saying anything new. And so in a certain way, we’re repeating ourselves. But when the Pope, or when a leader of the Reform Party in the UK, or when a leader of the AfD party in Germany—when these people who are conservatives who unfortunately oppose immigration and who like a lot of Trump’s policy ideas—when these people are criticizing him, it’s a different story entirely. Because those are not predictable liberals, those are conservatives. We have a Republican Party in the United States now where you never hear any criticism of Trump because being a Republican functionally means liking Trump. But conservatives abroad do not have to behave that way, and they’re not. And I think that matters. And look, there’s no way to say this—whatever the Pope says is news. And so in a certain sense, the Pope criticizing you is a big story. And the fact that the Pope is repeatedly criticizing Trump is a very important dynamic of politics.Sargent: Well, let’s tie this all together. If Trump is already losing huge swaths of the coalition that elected him in 2024, and he and his top allies are going to expel everyone who disagrees with him or doesn’t grant him unquestioned loyalty, where do they go from here?Bacon: I mean, I guess you can probably win the governorships and Senate races in 25 states just as the Republican base. So I think part of what it is, is that they don’t seem to really—I mean, part of it is like we’ve credited them a lot, but it’s not clear to me that Donald Trump’s staff actually exactly knows why they won those Latino, younger, and Black voters in 2024. I think that was kind of an accident and kind of like an anti-incumbent wave. And so I don’t think those voters were ever in their coalition really in the first place. And so I think that they don’t know how to keep those people because that’s not really what they were doing. They sort of accidentally won some new people. And then Trump for most of these last 10 years has governed as if the base is the country. And so he’s just doing what he does. He’s not actually a great politician. We saw in 2018—anytime he’s in office and people are paying attention to him, the Republicans lose.Sargent: Absolutely right. And by the way, the war is really, really the type of issue that’s driving those groups away from Trump really, really fast and really, really hard. Folks, make sure to check out Perry’s show over at NewRepublic.com. It’s called Right Now with Perry Bacon. Perry, great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.Bacon: Thanks for having me, Greg.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209255/transcript-trump-accidentally-reveals-contempt-maga-voters

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2026-04-20T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

I had always read James Baldwin’s declaration “I want to be an honest man and a good writer” as a statement of artistic ambition—the kind of thing a young person, defining themselves for the world, says in order to be taken seriously. It comes at the end of “Autobiographical Notes,” the introduction to his first essay collection Notes of a Native Son, where he declares that he has no hobbies, no interest in anything else that is not his work. Total dedication, at the expense of everything else that makes a life.Perhaps I’ve grown more jaded over the years, but I read it differently now. I see it as a confession, an acknowledgment of his, our, limitations: One can aspire to be a good writer because there is no such thing as a good man. A cynical outlook, but it’s difficult to turn away from the evidence of the past decade: Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, Pete Hegseth, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, R. Kelly, 4chan, the “manosphere,” the eager correspondents of the Epstein files, on and on and on. Call it toxic masculinity, male supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, whatever you like, at the end of it is a picture of manhood that appears incompatible with the idea of “goodness.” Even the men who have appeared good, who haven’t done what Trump or Cosby or Weinstein have done to earn our disdain, have failed at goodness in other ways—they, we, have failed at being honest.Tom Junod is a good writer. Great, even. He is the only writer to win back-to-back National Magazine Awards for feature writing (one a profile of an abortion doctor, the other a profile of a rapist, both written for GQ). He won a James Beard Award for his essay “My Mom Couldn’t Cook,” published in Esquire, where Junod wrote for more than a decade; his story “The Falling Man” makes the rounds every anniversary of 9/11, taken out from behind the Esquire paywall, a classic of magazine writing. A recent profile of Junod, in that very magazine, says: “A list of Esquire’s ten most important writers in the magazine’s nearly 100-year history would probably look like this: [Norman] Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, Richard Ben Cramer, and, well, Tom Junod.”For a long time, what had separated Junod from the rest of that list was that he had written no book. He has changed that now with a memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. It’s a book, he says, he has been researching for the past 10 years, but it’s probably best to understand its origin in the essay “My Father’s Fashion Tips,” which Junod wrote for GQ in 1996. The essay finds Junod talking to his father, Lou Junod, about—no surprise—his fashion advice, though of course it’s really about his advice on how to be a man. “In my father’s view a man is not allowed irony in the wearing of clothes. Irony is for women, because for them clothes are all about play, all about tease and preamble—because for them dressing is all about undressing,” Junod wrote. “For a man, though, clothes both determine and mark his place in the world; they are about coming from nakedness, rather than going to it—and so irony spells diminution, because irony says that you don’t mean it … and you have to mean it. You have to mean what you wear.”It’s a profile written by a son in awe of his father—in love with the man and all he represents. It’s not honest. Not about who Lou Junod was, not about how Tom Junod truly felt about him. In In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Tom recalls what his mother, Frances, said to him after that essay was published: “Don’t forget who raised you, kid.”This memoir is Junod’s mea culpa, a 30-year-late revision toward honesty. “There were always secrets,” he wrote in 1996. “You could not walk into my father’s bathroom and not know there were secrets. Secrets of grooming, secrets of hygiene, secrets of preparation, secrets of the body itself—secrets and knowledge.” But his father’s secrets were not secret to Tom; he learned them early, his father barely kept them from him. Lou didn’t conceal his infidelities—he took young Tom along to some of them. He bragged about the starlets who admired him on his trips to Manhattan (Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner). He hid his dildos and hardcore fetish pornography only to the extent that Tom had to open his father’s briefcase and find them. It was Tom who kept the secrets. Kept them from his mother, his two siblings, from the world. It was Tom who wrote his father’s legend, the mythology of himself as a self-made man and paragon of masculine and patriarchal virtue. He wrote it because he loved his father, loved him too much to be honest about the man he actually was.“But I loved you,” Junod writes in a letter to his father at the end of In the Days of My Youth, “in order to survive you.”Lou Junod, a World War II veteran from Brooklyn who made his living as a traveling handbag salesman, was not violent toward his family. That was a point of pride for him. Violence was not the way he imposed his will and instilled fear. He simply sucked up all the air in the room. He carried himself like a celebrity, and in his mind he was one. Lou and Tom, during a night on the town, have a chance run-in with Muhammad Ali in a hotel elevator, and all Lou has to say to the greatest boxer of all time is “Good night, champ,” as he and his son exit. He tells Tom he should never ask a celebrity for an autograph; they should be asking him.There was little to interrupt Lou’s conception of himself. He bought two homes on Long Island, sent all three of his children to college, kept his wife in fine jewelry and furs, and attracted the attention of nearly every woman he walked by (“You’re just going to have to accept that your father was a Casanova, Tommy,” a woman with whom Lou carried on an 11-year affair tells Tom years after his father has passed). His wife may have considered him a pill, and his sister may have had a fresh insult for him every time the family gathered, but Lou Junod, in his cuff links and suntan and black bikini underwear, could not be brought down to size. He had a Purple Heart and a fat money clip. He had a wife and any other woman he so desired. He was a man.It was a manhood built on half-truths, which Tom would later print in GQ. Lou was, in fact, a veteran and had been injured in Normandy, but after that he spent most of his war service in liberated Paris, singing in a revue with a name tailor-made for the subject of this book: For Men Only. The first home he purchased for himself and his family was at the dawn of Levittown, where “For $100 down, veterans—white veterans—could buy one of Bill Levitt’s houses and move in before the lawn was even seeded,” Junod writes. The version of manhood Lou was able to step into had been constructed specifically for men like him and was gatekept in such a way to allow those men to tell grand stories of themselves and their heroism, while the rest gawk with a mix of admiration and envy, wondering what the cost might be to gain entry into this exclusive club.It’s something Tom intuits at a very young age, that there is a threshold he must cross in order to be seen as a man in his father’s eyes. During a family trip to Jones Beach, Tom, afraid of the water just as his mother was, finally wades out into the ocean, and Lou, surprised at his presence, admonishes him to swim to his father. “And I do,” Junod writes, “in a furious, hopeful, gasping dog paddle, suspended between escape and capture, swimming toward him even as he moves away, somehow understanding that manhood is a matter of admission, and that in order to gain admission I have to brave the deep water.”He tried. He became a childhood bully to a boy weaker than him; he picked the teams his father would gamble on; he played high school football, even when it meant riding the bench as the fourth-string quarterback. Tom tried to convince his father, and himself, that he could be a man, as accomplished and resplendent as Lou Junod, but it was never quite enough. Not because of some inadequacy on Tom’s part, but because manhood itself is bankrupt, a performance with little to offer the audience or performer except a superficial interaction with the rest of the world—it believes the most flattering thing a man can wear is a turtleneck because it draws attention to the face, because the face is all it has. It’s soulless.On the eve of Tom leaving for college, Lou entered his son’s room, ready to dispense some fatherly advice. Tom, like all of us, sat ready for there to finally be something, some meaning, previously inscrutable, finally revealed that would make his father, men, make sense. “My heart thumps involuntarily,” he writes, “like the tail of a dog whose master keeps speaking his name. After all these years and all those tears, here it is—the moment that will make it all worthwhile. He glances at the door to make sure my mother isn’t standing in it. He lowers his voice and speaks to me man to man.”The advice? “Do yourself a favor and date a Jewish girl. They’re all … nymphos.”That’s all there is, all there has ever been. Manhood is a club where the cost of admission is the degradation of others. Junod could have ended the book there and had an elegantly written, damning portrait of Lou Junod and the men like him, and subsequently the men who admire men like Lou, who claim we are living in a crisis of masculinity and want a return to the days of men being men because they are also too afraid to look beyond the shine of their cuff links. But in researching and telling the story of his father’s secrets, Junod found a web of even bigger secrets spread across his family history: siblings his father either didn’t know about or refused to acknowledge; the truth of his father’s paternity; a child his father may or may not have known about born to woman he had an affair with in Florida (whom Lou described as “the One”); and much, much more about his grandmother, his aunts, and all the rest. It turns In the Days of My Youth into an epic, sometimes difficult to follow—like a modern 10-hour docuseries that probably only needed three, stuffed full of details that can be fascinating but at times superfluous and distracting. Even the minor characters here get the full Tom Junod treatment, their own human-interest profile, but they’re only relevant when serving this larger question: Who might Lou Junod have been if he’d brought himself to wrangle with the truth?Though this is a memoir of Lou Junod, the book is for Frances Junod. This is Tom’s apology to his mother, which began when he published “My Mom Couldn’t Cook” in Esquire back in 2010. By finally telling the truth about his father, he gives his mother the tenderness she was not afforded in life. Frances Junod suffered the effects of Lou’s “talent of making betrayal look classy, instead of cheap,” was there through it all, dimming her light to make room for Lou’s, which Tom only realized when she helped him through understanding an E.E. Cummings poem for his high school homework. “We’re happier alone than we are with him, happy together with Mom free to be herself,” he writes. “I know she is smart.… But when she tries to sound smart when Dad’s around she sounds strained and snobbish, all her intelligence draining into her worried hands, her watchful eyes. She is smartest when she feels what she’s thinking, and that’s what she doesn’t allow herself to do in front of him.” The real tragedy of manhood is what it does to everyone else in its orbit. We may wonder who Lou Junod might have been if he had confronted the truth, but the more pertinent question is who Frances Junod might have been if she had had a husband with the courage to love her.Tom Junod has always been a good writer—great, even. With In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, he has written an honest book. And it arrives honestly at a time when manhood needs no redemption: no redefinition, no rescuing, no return. “I have to figure out a way to be a man,” Junod writes, “by becoming a human being.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/208851/tom-junod-memoir-review-father-midcentury-man-secrets

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2026-04-17T18:34:17Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump is in “discussions” to settle a $10 billion lawsuit with the Internal Revenue Service over the release of his tax returns.The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to “avoid protracted litigation.” “Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”Any payment from Trump’s lawsuit against the government would be doled out to him via taxpayer funds.The suit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department during Trump’s first term did not do enough to thwart Charles Littlejohn, a former contractor for the IRS, from leaking the tax returns to the press. Littlejohn leaked 15 years of Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times in 2019. The documents were published by the paper of record the following year, in September 2020, two months before the presidential election.Trump’s attorneys have argued that, despite the fact that Littlejohn was classed as a contractor, he acted as a “joint employee” of the two agencies. They further asserted that the government was liable for Littlejohn’s actions due to the IRS’s “extensive, detailed, day-to-day supervision” of his behavior.The legal challenge has raised numerous ethical quandaries, chief among them the apparent conflict of interest in the case. Legal experts have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.A group of former government officials filed an amicus brief in February that challenged the suit’s core claims. Those officials included former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and former National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson. Together, the cohort argued that Trump’s lawsuit contains “significant legal flaws” and risks becoming “collusive litigation.” This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209230/donald-trump-settle-irs-10-billion-lawsuit-tax-records

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2026-04-17T15:59:13Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, marking the end of a multi-week trade embargo that massively exacerbated oil and gas costs around the globe.Donald Trump, however, was not happy.The president went on a social media bender as the news came in, complaining that he felt he had not received enough credit for his handling of the war (that he started) while optimistically suggesting that the war was already over, despite lacking a concrete peace deal.“The Failing New York Times, FAKE NEWS CNN, and others, just don’t know what to do,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They are desperately looking for a reason to criticize President Donald J. Trump on the Iran situation, but just can’t find it. Why don’t they just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT, and start to gain back their credibility???”In a series of posts, Trump incorrectly referred to the vital waterway as the “STRAIT OF IRAN,” and declared that the U.S. blockade on the strait would “REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN, ONLY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE.”“Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” Trump declared in a separate post. “It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!”Trump thanked Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar for their involvement in the peace negotiations, and stated that while any potential peace deal will not pertain to Lebanon, he would eventually “MAKE LEBANON GREAT AGAIN.” At the same time, the president slammed America’s NATO allies, claiming in a separate post that the coalition had called to offer help in the region in the wake of the strait’s reopening.“I TOLD THEM TO STAY AWAY, UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL. They were useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!” Trump said.Earlier this week, France and the U.K. agreed to cohost a summit with more than 40 nations to “restore freedom of navigation” along the waterway. Its results, however, were dependent on a peace deal, according to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.The war in Iran has thrust the entire world into an energy crisis, spiking oil and gas prices, stalling movement, and tanking economies. At the time of publication, Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—had finally dropped, hovering around $89 per barrel. Last month, the cost reached a high of $108 per barrel—a dramatic increase from before the war started in late February, when Brent crude cost around $65 a barrel.It is not clear exactly what the war in Iran has accomplished. Together, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, 13 U.S. soldiers have died. The war also spiked the cost of living for people around the world, agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the Western hemisphere—cost American taxpayers over $50 billion, and sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. Trump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to erase Iran’s nuclear capabilities—but his administration’s battle assessments have stood in contrast to other attacks they boasted about as recently as last year.Prior to the war—which never obtained congressional approval—Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22. At the time, the Trump administration claimed that the one-off air raid had set Iran’s program back by “years.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/209214/donald-trump-begs-praise-social-media-iran

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2026-04-17T14:07:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

GOP leadership tried and failed to force President Trump’s long-term Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) extension through the House in the dead of night on Friday, as 20 Republicans joined Democrats to derail both the five-year and 18-month renewal plans for the contentious spying program. Instead, after back to back failed votes, they agreed to a mere 10-day extension shortly after 2 a.m.“We just defeated [Speaker Mike] Johnson’s efforts to sneak through a 5-year FISA authorization tonight,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna said. “Now, they will have to fight in daylight.” Four Democrats, including Jim Hines, broke with the party to try and help Johnson force the original FISA plans through. Not only did they fail, they drew even more attention to the surveillance bill that has been criticized by both the left and right for years. “Speaker Johnson (R-LA) and Rep. Jim Himes (‘D’-CT), in EXTREMELY poor form and bad faith, tried to sneak through a FISA reauthorization missing key privacy protections at 2am last night,” Drop Site News’s Julian Andreone wrote on X. “This was a deliberate and bipartisan attempt to subvert the democratic will of the American people, turning over mass surveillance powers to Trump, including the ability to monitor your emails, search history, online dating matches, and even buy your commercial data.” The vote now heads to the Senate, even as the program expires on Monday.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209202/republican-revolt-vote-trump-fisa-surveillance-plan

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2026-04-17T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Pope Leo XIV may be the most prominent and respected figure abroad who is increasingly critical of President Trump. But he’s far from alone. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva this week mocked Trump for his unpopularity with voters abroad, telling reporters it would help Lula electorally if Trump interjected himself into Brazilian politics as the American president has in Hungary and other nations. There’s more. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni blasted Trump for his repeated criticism of the pope. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “fed up” with Trump. Even Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, once an admirer of Trump and a Mar-a-Lago habitué, distanced himself from the American president, telling the Financial Times, “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by.” From the left (Lula), center (Starmer, Leo), and right (Farage, Meloni), Trump is taking it on the chin. World leaders, particularly Europeans, disliking Trump is nothing new. Some have been complaining about him for a decade. But the disdain for the U.S. president is now more open and blunt than earlier in his second term, the dismissal of his ideas more direct and unequivocal. This shift matters for two reasons. American presidents are much less constrained by courts and Congress on foreign affairs compared to domestic policy. But other countries can blunt a president’s international goals—and that’s happening now to Trump. Secondly, Trump’s domestic opponents are helped if they’re joined by a chorus of international critics. The mainstream media may downplay congressional Democrats’ latest rebuke of the president. It’s harder to ignore those same comments from the pontiff or the right-wing leader of another country like Meloni. The war in Iran is the immediate cause of this rising anti-Trump sentiment abroad. While we don’t have many surveys measuring support for the war in various countries, all indications are that it’s very unpopular almost everywhere. So their presidents and prime ministers aren’t eager to align with Trump on this issue. The surge in energy prices because of the war has created a huge economic and political problem for these leaders. And Trump blasting Leo over the pontiff’s criticism of the war inevitably resulted in backlash from Lula and Meloni, whose countries have huge Catholic populations. Put this all together, and Trump is insisting that other world leaders enthusiastically support a war that they in fact have little incentive to support at all. Of course they are frustrated with him. But it’s not just the war in Iran. Center and center-left European leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron have long felt that the U.S. president is trying to bully them on trade and other issues. Lula and other Central and South American leaders on the left are both furious and threatened by Trump’s overthrow of the Maduro regime in Venezuela earlier this year. And for right and far-right leaders who might be more ideologically in tune with Trump, his unpopularity with voters in their countries makes breaking with the American president a political necessity. For Meloni, who once touted her close relationship with the president, Trump bashing the pope provided a perfect opportunity for her to criticize the American. In Germany, officials of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, or AfD, have sharply criticized the war in Iran, and perhaps more tellingly have reportedly discouraged party members from publicly touting their visits to the United States to meet with Trump-aligned Republican politicians. In Britain, Trump is now being dissed not only by Farage, who a few months ago was using the slogan “Make Britain Great Again,” but by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, once one of Trump’s strongest allies abroad. This open disavowal of the American president could reshape politics both at home and abroad. Trump rejects most international cooperation, particularly with European democracies. But as the war with Iran is showing, America can’t unliterally conduct foreign policy. Starmer’s wariness about the United States using British bases abroad has complicated the war effort. It’s harder for the U.S. and Israel to make forceful demands in negotiations with Iran when it’s clear that so many other countries aren’t on board with America’s strategy. And the spread of far-right politics across the globe could be stemmed if Trump is considered not a political genius but a pariah, reviled by voters everywhere and seen as an enemy of one of the world’s most respected leaders in Leo. The disavowals of Trump abroad are also important here at home because of the unique dynamics of American politics in 2026. Right now, Democratic Party officials are wary of being cast as reflexively anti-Trump. Nonpartisan figures in the United States, such as journalists and academics, don’t want to be seen as biased against the twice-elected president. And Republican Party officials and GOP voters largely back whatever Trump does. So as a result, no matter how crazy Trump behaves, criticism of him is often either muted (journalists) or ignored (Democrats). But bringing in the views of the Pope, Starmer, Farage, Macron, Meloni, and others abroad changes the conversation. These people can’t be accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for a decade. Many of them weren’t in power in his first term. Others have either at times praised the president (Farage, Meloni) or at least tried to downplay differences with him (Starmer). Some of these new critics are ideologically centrist or even conservative. So Representative Hakeem Jeffries can now quote the pope casting Trump as divisive, instead of using his own words. The movement against the Iran war can describe itself as not just American liberals who hate Trump but a transnational coalition that includes far-right parties and politicians abroad. The New York Times can quote leaders abroad who agree with the president on immigration and other issues but still find his behavior erratic. That Trump is authoritarian with bad judgment is obvious. But having more people from different backgrounds, ideologies, and geographies saying that is extremely useful and powerful. Ultimately, of course, Trump is likely to ignore all of these critics. Because the U.S. has massive military and economic power, these foreign leaders still have to placate Trump to some extent. And Trump still has three years in office in the most powerful job in the world. But Trump is becoming more isolated and diminished. A year ago, he was not only the twice-elected American president but a leader of what seemed like a growing global far-right movement. Now Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson won’t praise him and Lula is practically begging Trump to come campaign against him in Brazil. Trump’s approval rating has plunged to 38 percent among American voters—and probably 3.8 percent among the foreign leaders that he has to deal with. That is worth celebrating.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209182/trump-orban-farage-global-friends-disappearing

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2026-04-17T09:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

In today’s episode, George Conway argues that as improbable as it might seem right now, congressional Republicans will ultimately decide they have no choice but to remove Donald Trump from office before his term ends. Conway, the former GOP lawyer turned Trump critic, is running for Congress as a Democrat. One of his ads is a montage of all the horrors that Trump has unleashed, followed by Conway’s promise to be a different kind of congressman in response. In our conversation, Conway explains why he thinks Republicans will eventually decide Trump has to go and talks about how he’ll push for impeachment immediately if elected. Conway also lays out an accountability agenda that includes impeaching many Cabinet officials, criminal referrals for high-level Trump administration officials, and extensive other reforms designed to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209194/trump-will-removed-office-sooner-think

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2026-04-16T18:19:52Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The first Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has been charged in relation to President Trump’s brutal Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., 35, was charged with assault in Minneapolis on Thursday for pointing his gun at two people in a car while trying to pass them in an unmarked vehicle on the highway. Morgan told investigators that he “feared for his safety and the safety of others” after the civilian vehicle “cut him off,” according to the state’s complaint.Morgan faces two felony counts of second-degree assault for the apparent road rage incident. There is an active warrant out for his arrest.This is the first time ever that a federal agent has faced local prosecution for their actions while on duty, according to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.While this is a welcome development, it’s an absolute disgrace that Morgan is the first and only ICE agent to be charged with some form of excessive force or brutality in Trump’s 10-week operation in Minneapolis, given that federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good for no reason at all.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209175/minnesota-charges-first-ice-agent-felony-assault

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2026-04-16T17:51:20Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Franklin Graham, one of the most prominent evangelical leaders in the country, is siding with Donald Trump amid his recent Christian controversies.The president has received nationwide backlash since Sunday for sharing an AI-generated image that depicted him as Jesus Christ. Graham brushed off the blowback in a statement on X Thursday, arguing that he didn’t believe Trump would “knowingly depict himself as Jesus,” and that he accepted the White House’s explanation: that Trump thought the heavenly portrayal suggested that he was a doctor rather than the messiah.“When I looked at the illustration, I didn’t jump to the same conclusion as some,” Graham wrote. “There were no spiritual references—no halo, there were no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles, the Statue of Liberty, and I think this is a lot to do about nothing.”But many of Trump’s Christian supporters saw something else: the president, dressed in white and red robes, encircled in light, holding light, and sharing it with the fallen.“I’m not a Catholic, I’m an Evangelical, but I appreciate how President Trump has defended religious freedom for people of all faiths, including millions of Evangelicals and Catholics in the U.S. and around the world,” Graham continued. “He is the most pro-Christian, pro-life president in my lifetime, and he doesn’t shy away from it.”Graham then chimed in on Trump’s ongoing feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has upset the administration by advocating for peace instead of war. Graham wrote that he hoped the pope “would have the opportunity to thank the President for his efforts to protect religious liberty for Catholics and people of all faiths.”Trump has expressed no interest in connecting with the pope. Speaking with reporters outside the White House Thursday afternoon, Trump remarked that he doesn’t think it’s necessary to meet with the leader of the Catholic Church—a decision that could seriously injure his Republican allies in the midterms.The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second most popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.But there’s another possibilityL that Trump is merely playing coy with his disinterest in meeting the pope. The president was evidently irked by news that David Axelrod, former Obama strategist, visited the Vatican last week and had reportedly discussed efforts to get the 44th president and the Chicago-born pontiff in a room together.Failing to meet the pope would make Trump the first modern president to break from the longstanding American tradition, which has remained intact since President Woodrow Wilson started it in 1919.Meanwhile, even fervent MAGA politicians were not impressed by Graham’s defense.Former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the evangelical missionary’s thin excuse was “one of the worst things [she’d] seen,” and included a warning from Matthew 7:15-20 about false prophets.“Franklin Graham of all people, who is frequently at the [White House] and with Trump, should be leading Trump to be a Christian, NOT telling other Christians that Trump did nothing wrong when he committed blasphemy,” Greene wrote on X. “Trump knows what he is doing. He knows what he posted. He knows how to manipulate his followers. And he’s not sorry, he never apologized. Instead he lied, and said he was a doctor, which is also absurd.”A Franciscan friar that spoke with CBS News earlier this week said that “no one” should try to “put themselves in the person of Christ.” “I think that’s a little bit of a problem,” the robed friar said. This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209169/far-right-christian-franklin-graham-pope-thank-donald-trump

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2026-04-16T15:55:59Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump is claiming that he has negotiated a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, posting on Truth Social Thursday that the two have agreed to suspend hostilities for 10 days beginning at 5 p.m. EST. “On Tuesday, the two Countries met for the first time in 34 years here in Washington, D.C., with our Great Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. I have directed Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Rubio, together with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Razin’ Caine, to work with Israel and Lebanon to achieve a Lasting PEACE. It has been my Honor to solve 9 Wars across the World, and this will be my 10th, so let’s, GET IT DONE! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump wrote. Israel has said that it was targeting Hezbollah in its bombing campaign, which has killed an estimated 2,167 people in Lebanon since the beginning of March. Trump’s post didn’t mention if Hezbollah, which has opposed the talks between Israel and Lebanon, is on board with the deal. He also made no mention of Lebanon being a sticking point in the U.S.-Iran talks, as Iran and mediator Pakistan maintained it was. Whether this ceasefire will hold is anyone’s guess, especially considering that Israel’s sweeping evacuation orders in southern Lebanon suggest ethnic cleansing against Shia Muslims—but Trump will surely declare victory nonetheless. This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209158/trump-ceasefire-israel-lebanon

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2026-04-16T15:38:47Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump has canceled $11 million in funding to Catholic Charities in Miami for taking care of immigrant children as he continues to feud with Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized Trump’s mass deportations and the war in Iran.The federal government has worked with the organization since the first Cuban exiles arrived in south Florida. The government, through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has paid the nonprofit for years to house immigrant kids who arrive in the U.S. without any adult guardians. The operation runs in a similar way to foster care, independent from state agencies, and the government notified the charity in March of its decision.“The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski of the Miami Archdiocese said in a statement to the Miami Herald’s editorial board. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.”Wenski added: “Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months.… It is baffling that the U.S. government would shut down a program that it would be hard-pressed to replicate at the level of competence” shown by the organization.The Department of Health and Human Services told the newspaper that the refugee office is handling about 1,900 unaccompanied minors daily, compared to a peak of 22,000 during the Biden administration.“ORR is closing and consolidating unused facilities as the Trump Administration continues efforts to stop illegal entry and the smuggling and trafficking of unaccompanied alien children,” said HHS spokesperson Emily G. Hillard. It’s unclear how many children are in the Catholic organization’s care, and what will happen to the children if their full-service child welfare program in Miami-Dade County is forced to close.Trump has blasted the pope for being “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” but the administration’s criticism of the church’s immigration stances goes back even further. In January 2025, Vice President JD Vance suggested that Catholic bishops were more worried about their federal funding than administration policies. It would seem that Vance’s words back then have now become the administration’s policy.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209153/trump-defunds-catholic-charity

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2026-04-16T15:33:19Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Trump administration is lying to the public—and it doesn’t care.In a heated exchange before the House Ways and Means Committee Thursday morning, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted that his department has “done better” at preventing measles amid a global epidemic than “any country in the world.”Measles is an incredibly contagious disease, meaning that an outbreak anywhere is dangerous for people everywhere. Several countries across the globe, including India, Angola, and Mexico, are currently combating thousands of cases. But even America’s relatively small caseload—which currently sits at more than 1,800 for 2026—does not suggest that the Trump administration has excelled at combating the virus. Instead, that number has put the U.S. at risk of losing its measles elimination status, which it has maintained since the year 2000.“There is no country that has seen a bigger percentage increase” than the U.S. under the second-term Trump administration, argued California Representative Linda Sanchez.Measles does not have a cure. The disease can cause a blotchy rash, pinkeye, a high fever, white spots inside the mouth, full body aches, pneumonia, and severe dehydration, and it can result in hospitalization or even death.Fortunately, however, it is highly preventable thanks to a vaccine that was developed by a couple of American scientists in 1963. Less than a decade later, in 1971, researchers created yet another vaccine capable of preventing measles as well as two other contagious illnesses—mumps and rubella—thanks to miraculous developments in modern medicine. The joint shot was named the MMR vaccine, an acronym for “measles, mumps, and rubella.” Kennedy has railed against the three-in-one shot, baselessly claiming that it was not “safely tested.”America’s diminishing herd immunity is due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents—whom Kennedy champions at the federal level—who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab. During the deadly measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy advised that state residents take extra vitamins rather than receive the vaccine, and justified a local religious community’s decision not to receive it by claiming that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles.” Fact check: It does not.But the 72-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: The more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his anti-vaccine lawsuits. He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled anti-vax messaging in Samoa so badly that it started a 2019 measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of 5.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209156/robert-f-kennedy-jr-measles-outbreaks

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2026-04-16T14:09:35Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Pope Leo XIV continued preaching a message of peace Thursday, telling an audience in Bamenda, Cameroon, that “the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”The pope is touring Africa, and delivered his speech in a country in the midst of a civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people and displaced over 500,000. But the comments also come just days after President Trump, upset that the pope vocally opposes the war in Iran, called him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”Though the pontiff didn’t mention Trump by name, he condemned leaders who “manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”For those that haven't seen the video of the pope telling trump indirectly 😂 pic.twitter.com/4mP7tdsQlt— Necessary-Cliff (@theos_mafia) April 16, 2026It’s a continuation of the pope’s response to Trump on Monday, when he told reporters that “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do.”“We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker,” the pope said on Monday. “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing.”One would think that a man who claims he ended multiple wars wouldn’t get offended if the pope calls for peace, but Trump has not engaged in any religious introspection this week, instead inciting a backlash from his Christian supporters by posting an AI image of himself as Jesus, which he later deleted, and then reposting a picture of Jesus hugging him. He probably knows deep down that he is actually a major source of conflict in the world right now.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209151/pope-leo-tyrants-manipulating-religion-feud-trump

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2026-04-16T11:28:10Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 16 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump’s war with Pope Leo has taken an uglier turn. His vice president, JD Vance, warned that the Pope should be careful when discussing theology. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to the whole battle, committed a howler by bringing up just war doctrine, which Trump and Pete Hegseth are serially violating. It’s notable that this comes as The New York Times just weighed in with an epic piece detailing Trump’s mental decline. In some obvious and not so obvious ways, Trump’s battle with the Pope neatly captures that decline and then some.Olivia Troye, a former national security official during the first Trump administration, got an unusually close-up look at Trump’s mental unfitness for office. She just announced a run for Congress [as a Democrat]. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Olivia, thanks for coming on.Olivia Troye: Hi Greg. Thanks for having me.Sargent: Let’s start with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Recently the Pope criticized Hegseth for praying for maximal violence and killing of the enemy. The Pope said that God does not hear the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them. Now listen to Johnson.Mike Johnson (voiceover): You know, I was taken a little bit aback, just honestly, frankly, something that was said—I think he said several days back—that something about those who engage in war, you know, that Jesus doesn’t hear their prayers or something. You know, it is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There’s something called the Just War Doctrine. There’s a time to every purpose under heaven. I think what the president’s comments, what the vice president’s comments reflect is their understanding deep in the, you know, the SCIF and the classified briefings of the stakes that are so high and the situation that we’re facing, and the fact that you had the nation that was the largest sponsor of terrorism now having had that ability taken away from them.Sargent: Let’s break this up into two pieces. Johnson said there that Trump has access to all this classified info that somehow makes our attack on Iran acceptable, seemingly meaning that the threat posed by Iran justified the attack. That’s not at all true. Is it, Olivia?Troye: From everything that we’ve seen in the intelligence community and the reporting that we’ve seen, there was no justification for this war. During the first Trump administration, there were many of us in national security—there were career people who were assigned to the White House—and I lived that firsthand. And Trump was specifically talked out of engaging with Iran. This is something that he has wanted to do for a very long time, but there were prevailing minds in the room that were able to navigate the situation and show him what the ramifications would mean. And so one of those being the Strait of Hormuz, which we are seeing play out right now in very, very plain view—the complications of what happens when you do that. And it ultimately impacts us here domestically.Sargent: Well, that’s really interesting because Donald Trump was told again this time by senior members of his administration that if he went into this, it would be much harder than he anticipated. And he just brushed them off. Sounds like you’re telling us that he was actually talked out of it by those same voices, or by similar voices, during the first term.Troye: I think the issue right now is that you have an ongoing escalation that is happening in this conflict, where now I don’t think that they even know where to go from here. I mean, I don’t think they know how to de-escalate this. I don’t know how they’re going to navigate this internationally. And this has become more of a regional thing as we’re seeing. And I think that in many ways, the United States—this leadership that we have unfortunately at the helm—has been outplayed.Sargent: It really looks that way. The second piece of what Johnson said is really something—he invoked just war doctrine. But Trump and Hegseth are violating that doctrine’s most basic tenets very seriously. Those tenets generally involve prohibitions on needless wars without imminent threats, and they involve proportionality toward the enemy. Yet Hegseth has talked about killing people who surrender, and our war has killed well over a thousand civilians. Can you talk about the perversity of this, of Johnson invoking just war doctrine?I mean, it is absolutely clear that Trump and Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth are violating those tenets regularly, right? Troye: Yes, absolutely. Look, I think the bigger concern with Pete Hegseth is just their invocation of this being like almost their holy war to fight. That’s the irony to me about this entire situation—of Trump having the audacity to take on the head of the Catholic Church and attack him just for wanting a de-escalation of this conflict, for wanting less loss of life, for innocent lives not to be lost in this situation. While then you have Pete Hegseth at the helm, who is waving his very, very strong, almost Christian nationalism flag, I would say, in the way he is approaching this war. We’ve seen the rhetoric come out of him in terms of that. And so I think when you combine all of these things, that hypocrisy is pretty astounding, I would say, across the board.Sargent: It really is. Hegseth is just absolutely saturated in bloodlust and sadism. Let’s listen to JD Vance now. Here’s what he said about the Pope’s criticism of the Trump administration.JD Vance (voiceover): I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. I think one of the issues here is that if you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.Sargent: That’s just amazing stuff. The Pope needs to be careful about these debates, but Vance would never say that Trump needs to be careful when he viciously attacks a spiritual leader for a billion people. I’ve got to say, Olivia, it’s just so dark that they put Trump above the Pope and treat Trump as a quasi-deity. It’s clear that these religious conservatives see their highest allegiance as being to Trump. I find this a mask-off moment. What do you think?Troye: Well, I think it’s pretty ridiculous for JD Vance to sort of be the bastion of theology, I would say, with the way he is approaching the Pope. I also honestly think it’s shameful and it’s disgraceful. And I also think it’s a complete insult to anybody of faith, any religious community of faith who is watching what is happening here by JD Vance and Trump and what they’re doing in terms of the Catholic community and the church—by their behavior and to claim, like, you know, attacking the Pope on theology. I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from these two individuals, certainly pretty rich from Donald Trump, who to me is like the antithesis of anything having to do with religion, considering how he conducts himself and all of the history of everything that he’s done in his life.So, I mean, this is really just another level. But I will say this, Greg—I hope that this is an educational and enlightening moment for some of these individuals and communities who are watching this and are really seeing Trump for what he really is, the hypocrisy of this man in all manners, right? When it comes to religion, the way he uses religion as a cloak on himself. I mean, that meme of Jesus was disgusting. It was atrocious. And also the hypocrisy of the no-wars campaign, right? I mean, we’re engaged in conflicts, we’re sending military service members, people are being killed. I mean, this is just so, so heinous that I just don’t see how it ends. And I also think it’s only going to get worse—the more unfit, I would say, that he has shown himself to be, and his instability going forward.Sargent: Yeah. Well, speaking of Trump’s instability, I think it’s very clear that Trump himself wants this war with the Pope to continue. Otherwise JD Vance and Mike Johnson wouldn’t be doing this. Now you’ve seen up close how the people around him operate. They are taking their cues directly from him, right? Can you describe that dynamic—how that works?Troye: Yeah, absolutely. And with this circle, especially unlike what I witnessed in the first Trump administration—back then there was some pushback, there was definitely recovery afterwards of like, how are we going to navigate whatever the madman in the Oval Office just said?—this is a totally different dynamic where you have a circle of complete, all-in loyalist enablers who are there for their own power quest and enabling. And so they are not going to take this on. They are not going to be willing to put their own power on the line to push back on this, which is why I think this is so dangerous overall in terms of the kind of demeanor. They’re just going to sit there. They’re going to watch what Donald Trump says and they’re going to parrot what he says. And I’ve seen this, you know, where they parrot the talking points. At this point, I don’t even think that they’re coordinating. They’re just like, okay, whatever he said, now we’ve got to cover for him. Let’s say something more ridiculous so that way we can just pile on it and continue to perpetuate this narrative.Sargent: The New York Times had this extraordinary piece with the following headline: “Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate.” The piece ran through Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization—his attack on the Pope for being weak on crime—that was the first attack. Trump’s tendency to wander off on weird tangents, his confusion about basic facts such as mixing up Greenland and Iceland. The piece very well documented that his former allies are talking about the need for the 25th Amendment now. This includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, former White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who called him “clearly insane,” former chief of staff John Kelly, who concluded Trump is mentally ill, and so forth. Olivia, as someone who ran with those people a little bit, I just wanted to get your thoughts on that piece.Troye: No, I think it’s absolutely accurate to say that he is mentally unstable, mentally unfit to be serving in the Oval Office right now. I mean, we have the leader of essentially the free world who is off his rocker. Look—Ty Cobb absolutely is accurate. He knows Trump well, right? If anyone knows Trump, Ty Cobb certainly does. And he is calling it how it is. Okay. Trump aside, what it is doing to the global dynamic and the disruption here is going to be the aftermath of this. It’s going to last for years, Greg. The dynamics here, the rest of the world and the dynamics and how they have completely disrupted the world order—our allies don’t trust us. Why would they? Why would they? They have no idea what’s coming next and they’re left to deal with the fallout. Right? I mean, Europe is watching this conflict and they’re trying to figure out within themselves how they’re going to navigate this because it’s obviously impacting them as well.Sargent: Well, when you were in the administration, what was your direct impression of his sanity or lack thereof? And what did the people around him say privately when he wasn’t around? I’ve got to assume that it was already very, very pronounced. I mean, it was all sorts of craziness in the first term, but it got much worse in the second one. What was your direct experience of this man and the people around him?Troye: I would say that when I observed him, he was certainly unpredictable. Obviously, the last person in his ear manipulates him. So easily manipulated with [that]. And I think also just short attention span, inability to really take in information unless you really are drawing it like a cartoon artist on pencil and paper—like, drawing it out to make sure that you can take it in, because you certainly can’t take in intelligence briefings. So that is a kind of persona. I do think that there was some, like, obviously he’s got the narcissistic qualities, the neurosis and the manipulation factor there. He’s very power hungry, always self-centered, always seeking the attention.But what I’ll say that is different from what I observed then and what we’re seeing now is I do think that his health in terms of mental stability and the way he is conducting himself has gotten significantly worse this time around and throughout the past couple of years, which worries me, by the way, because we are one year, one year and change, into this presidency. We have several years to go. And my concern is that he is going to continue to get worse. He’s going to continue to decline. And I think this insanity and this recklessness is only going to get worse over time. And we are going to see someone that is going to continue to lash out, especially as he becomes sort of a lame duck and his power is coming to an end. I just foresee him slash-and-burn in a way that we’ve probably never seen before, especially if he’s not all there.Sargent: Yeah, and especially if he senses his power slipping away from him, which it absolutely is. You’re running for Congress in Virginia. You’re in a crowded primary. There’s been some debate among Democrats—and this is sort of an obsession of pundits—but the take has sometimes been, anybody who talks about Trump’s mental illness or his unfitness for the presidency or his erratic nature and derangement and so forth is missing what voters actually care about, that voters only care about the kitchen table, they only care about their wallets, they only care about what’s absolutely immediate to their material lives. I’ve never bought this line before. It seems to me that a lot of Americans don’t want to have a madman as president. And I want to ask you, as you sort of embark on this candidacy, are you going to talk about this kind of elephant in the room, so to speak, that the president is a nut?Troye: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can’t discount what we have at the helm right now of the United States and the free world. But here is what I will say, Greg. The issues of affordability, the issues of rising gas prices, rising grocery prices, rising fertilizer [prices] for farmers, by the way—I mean, like, think about the Strait of Hormuz and what is happening there, right? And also healthcare, the ACA, things that actually everyday working-class Americans like the family that I grew up in—I’m the daughter of a truck driver, I’m the daughter of a Mexican immigrant—like, these are things that are tangible. Yes, kitchen table issues. Nevermind the fact that my mom, who’s 82 years old, is actually fearful right now because of ICE and what ICE is doing to torment our communities because they’re targeting people like her. I mean, so like when I look at the combination of this, yes, we care about affordability. We care about these issues, economic issues. But the thing is, a lot of these things are driven from the very top. They’re driven by Donald Trump’s actions and his recklessness. And so that is what I plan to do. I plan to tie it back to people and explain to people as much as I can, to educate people that, yeah, I want to work on that.I plan to focus on healthcare because I have an aging mom and I know that there are a lot of people like me in my situation who are trying to figure out how we afford this. Or there are a lot of people who, like my husband, didn’t have healthcare for a long time—and he has an autoimmune disease and couldn’t get affordable medication, so it took over his body and he got worse. Like, these are things that are very real. But the issue is that Trump at the helm, and MAGA Republicans and what they’re doing, are actually making our lives worse by the legislation and the things that they are focused on and passing, that feed back into that loop of these issues. And that’s why it doesn’t help to have a madman and unstable individual in the office who’s getting us into global conflicts that actually impact the kitchen table issues on a daily basis—and govern in this type of way, right? I mean, that is where my concern is as someone who witnessed this firsthand. I was there as a career person serving. Plenty of people are there in a career capacity right now that are having to live this daily nightmare firsthand and trying to navigate inside the government.Sargent: Well, it’s interesting the way you position all this, because it’s really an important factor that the Iran war is almost like a double whammy for Trump in the following sense. First, it shows how unhinged and how unfit to govern he is. But at the same time, it also is having this very palpable impact on prices and on people’s everyday lives. So in a certain sense, the war with Iran is like the perfect issue to capture all the profound pathologies—the whole bundle of madness and destructiveness that this presidency has ushered in, right?Troye: Yes, 100 percent, because it all impacts, it all boomerangs here domestically. So instability, conflict—he’s making our world less safe, right? He’s making our communities less safe, but he’s also creating the increases in the things, by the way, that he ran complaining about. Let’s not forget during the campaign, he blamed Kamala Harris and they said, oh, if you elect Kamala Harris, there would be war with Iran. The price of eggs, all of these things were the Republican narrative in 2024 that I was out there countering every day on the campaign trail when I was traveling to swing states. That is what you would hear. Well, guess what? We’re in those situations right now that Donald Trump has gotten us into.Sargent: Yeah. And I just want to close on this thought. When Donald Trump threatens to obliterate Iranian civilization, which would kill tens of millions of people, I don’t think that should be treated as just Trump being crazy Trump, right? It actually matters to a lot of Americans to hear their president do something that deranged and so sadistic. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, we don’t want the president to be saying that we’re going to use the American military to commit mass atrocities and extraordinarily serious and grave war crimes. We want our president to not do that kind of thing, correct?Troye: Well, we would want the United States presidency to exhibit diplomacy. We would want him to be a leader in foreign policy, to bring people to the table, to be a negotiator, not be threatening exactly what you said—war crimes, destroying an entire civilization. I mean, to me, when I saw that, my concern was the after-effects and the implication of watching the president of the United States use such language globally and how the international community and how everyone perceives that, right? Because what that does is it antagonizes people against the United States. It radicalizes people against the United States. It makes people angry and overall it makes everyone much less safe.Sargent: Well, you’re a very good voice to explain this to voters. So we’re glad that you’re running, if only for that purpose, to explain to people from a national security perspective just how unhinged and dangerous this guy really is. Olivia Troye, best of luck with your congressional run. Thanks so much for coming on.Troye: Thank you. I appreciate the support. And if you want to learn more about me, visit OliviaTroye.com.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209137/transcript-trump-pope-war-ex-aides-panicking-mental-decline

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2026-04-16T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

In March, The Wall Street Journal’s Meghan Bobrowsky broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg was “building a CEO agent to help him do his job.” The purpose of AI Zuck was to help flesh-and-blood Zuck “get information faster—for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get.” To me, that sounded an awful lot like Zuckerberg was desperate to avoid talking to his employees. But earlier this week, The Financial Times’s Hannah Murphy set me straight. Sparing flesh-and-blood Zuck from talking to his employees, Murphy explained, is not the job of AI Zuck, but rather the job of an entirely different digital proxy, a “photorealistic, AI-powered 3D character” that we’ll call AI Zuck II. AI Zuck II’s avowed purpose, Murphy reports, is “to engage with his employees in his stead.” Fobbing Meta employees off on AI Zuck II is necessary, per FT’s Murphy, because “Zuckerberg has become increasingly hands-on.” “Hands-on” used to mean doing what Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., in their best-selling 1982 business manual In Search of Excellence, called “management by walking around,” or MAWA. But that isn’t what Zuckerberg is doing. Instead, according to Murphy, he’s spending five to 10 hours per week coding AI products and attending product reviews. Applying a Peters-Waterman-style analysis, I would call this “management by sitting splendidly on your arse,” or MASSA. I envision a spiral-eyed Zuck twiddling dials ad infinitum to create a secret army of Zuck cyberslaves that resemble the clone troopers in Star Wars Episode II. For chief executives, digital spirit animals are all the rage. I know this because on Monday my onetime Politico boss Jim VandeHei, subsequently co-founder and chief executive of Axios, posted an “Axios C-Suite” self-help column headlined “Building and exercising an AI-powered version of you.” VandeHei “loaded every speech, internal memo, column and TV appearance of [his] into both ChatGPT and Claude to create JimGPT.” Flesh-and-blood Jim “got JimGTP rocking in an hour or so.” Only an hour? Isn’t that kind of ... insulting? Let me assure you that, if it ever comes to market, TimGPT will have taken at least two decades to build, with white-coated technicians working in shifts round the clock. Not that VandeHei lacks self-esteem. Unlike Zuckerberg, VandeHei created his AI familiar not to avoid talking to his employees (Jim loves to talk), but rather to supply another Jim VandeHei whose wisdom he can imbibe, like Narcissus contemplating his own reflection in a pool. Flesh-and-blood Jim advises, for example, the following prompt:I have a hunch that [trend/shift] is taking place. Knowing I am the CEO of [company] in [industry], give me the five data points or signals I should look for to confirm or kill this theory, and suggest the cheapest way to test it this quarter. End by telling me an adjacent idea I am missing or underappreciating.I don’t dispute this might be good question to pose to AI, (or, better yet, to another human being you hired to advise you). But why pose it to a digital version of yourself? Won’t JimGTP just tell VandeHei the sort of thing that would occur to him if he had a little more time? Where’s the added value in that? Another drawback is that JimGTP is programmed to write “in Axios style.” For my views on that subject, I direct you to my September 2022 post, “Hell Is A World In Which Everybody Writes Like Axios.”When Mark Zuckerberg can use AI to avoid talking to the people on his payroll, and Jim VandeHei can use AI to talk into a digital mirror, the suspicion arises that chief executives are the most disposable actors in the AI-reengineered economy. I am not the first person to notice this. A September 2023 survey by the research firm edEx found that 49 percent of chief executives believed “most” or “all” of their jobs “should be completely automated or replaced by AI.” Anant Agarwal, the founder of edEx, told David Streitfeld of The New York Times that he thinks “80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.” Streitfeld further cited a 2017 survey in which 42 percent of 1000 British workers polled said they’d feel “comfortable” working for a computer rather than a person (which doesn’t speak well of British bosses). In September 2024, an article in Harvard Business Review stated flatly: “AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs.” Sam Altman, godfather of ChatGPT and co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, told Axios earlier this month: “Our job is maybe one of the more automatable jobs.” Then why the hell do we pay you so goddamned much money? The economic logic of AI is that humans are expensive to employ, and no human is more expensive to employ than the human who runs the company. In 2024, the last year for which data are available, chief executives were paid, on average, 281 times what the typical worker earns, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. Why do we pay them anything at all?Altman shrewdly takes himself off the hook by accepting only a nominal salary ($65,000 two years ago) and no equity in OpenAI. (He’s not a saint, only a billionaire, worth $3.4 billion from other investments, including many linked in one way or another to OpenAI.) But Zuckerberg pulled down a reported $27 million in compensation in 2024. With $230 billion in the bank, Zuckerberg would seem to need that paycheck a hell of a lot less than Altman does. When the day arrives that two or more bots take over so much of Zuckerberg’s former duties, exactly what value will he provide the company?Well, like the FT said, he’s coding. Can you code? I cannot. So that’s worth something. Zuckerberg is probably very good at it! But at this late date Meta must surely employ scores of people who do it much better. So it’s really not worth Zuckerberg’s (very expensive) time to do this work.OK, maybe Zuckerberg needs more time to think Big Thoughts. Zuck built a gigantic company digitizing Harvard’s red-bindered Freshman Register, informally known as The Facebook; removing the The; then peddling its snob appeal to other colleges and eventually to all humanity. If you’d asked me the one time I met him (way back in 2005) whether this venture would yield a vast fortune I’d have told you no. So obviously Zuckerberg possessed a few insights I lacked.But more recently Zuckerberg’s Biggest Thought was the Metaverse, a creepy virtual-reality realm in which we would all use avatars to shop, argue, bank, date, get scammed, etc. The Metaverse was a flop that cost the company a reported $80 billion over five years before flesh-and-blood Zuck finally threw in the towel last month. Even Meta employees reportedly disliked using the company’s VR headsets.What exactly is it CEOs do, anyway? Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria spent more than a decade examining this question, reporting their findings in 2018. One surprising data point was that during the week, chief executives don’t work very many more hours than the rest of us: 48.5 hours, versus 44 hours for schmucks like you and me. They work through the weekend, though (79 percent of weekend days, averaging about 4 hours per day) and also on vacation (70 percent of vacation days, averaging about 2.4 hours per day). This suggests chief executives need to develop a digital doppelganger to interact with their wives and children (and yes, sometimes with their husbands, though only about 10 percent of Fortune 400 CEOs are women, and less than one percent are gay men). Porter’s and Nohria’s least surprising data point was that chief executives spent 72 percent of their time in meetings. Sixty-one percent of their interactions were face-to-face and only 24 percent were electronic (typically email). Probably today, post-Covid, those numbers have flipped. In any event, the bulk of a chief executive’s job appears to be those very duties Zuckerberg is looking to offload.My findings here are tentative, but I’ll venture to estimate at least half of all Fortune 500 executives today should be replaced by AI bots tomorrow, their stock options and salaries to be distributed among all those close-talking, lapel-grabbing employees Zuck is moving heaven and earth to avoid. These mass layoffs will prompt many howls of outrage among the top 0.1 percent. But as those same corporate leaders have told us so many times in the past: We’re running a business here, bub, not a charity.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209132/mark-zuckerberg-ai-replacement-ceo

Nostr event nevent1qqsqckzhvvpjacttfy424me80mu6st4cppekzxdjcvutf5anynfcy3czyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjuyaj2y

2026-04-16T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

On February 4, 2026, The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson, announced on X that she had been laid off, via email, “in the middle of a warzone”—left behind in Kyiv by a ruthless wave of layoffs at the Jeff Bezos–owned paper. Johnson’s stranding at the imperiled fringes of America’s once sturdy network of European allies seemed to perfectly embody the pending collapse of another empire, America’s formerly sprawling newspaper industry. Where once an array of informants, stringers, correspondents, editors, newsrooms, and foreign bureaus had splayed across the country and the world, now all that remained was a handful of big city papers, cannibalizing themselves and each other in order to survive, while on occasion leaving former staffers behind like weapons cast off from an army in retreat.The Post’s self-immolation was, of course, hardly the first wave of devastating cuts to America’s newsrooms—nor was Johnson’s stranding the first time that foreign correspondents who deserved better found themselves unemployed. As Elisa Tamarkin tells us in her mesmerizing Done in a Day: Telex From the Fall of Saigon, her father was one such causality, left jobless decades earlier, after the Chicago Daily News closed in 1978. This was despite Bob Tamarkin having been, in his editor’s words, “promoted to trench coat”—industry slang for a dedicated, in-country foreign correspondent—full time, three years earlier. On April 30, 1975, he had managed to be the last American reporter to flee the fall of Saigon and one of the first to “telex” his story home, one of the triumphs of the Daily News’s 70-year-old foreign bureau, and among its last. Yet though Done in a Day is in part an elegy for the newspaper business, Elisa Tamarkin resists turning the book into a straightforward hagiography. What results instead is a startlingly original meditation on the last day of the U.S. War in Vietnam and the end of the newspaper business—one that makes clear that, as much as newspapers were one of the great triumphs of modern civilization, they were also intimate partners in the violence that civilization seems to so endlessly produce.The Chicago Daily News was part of the U.S. War in Vietnam from the start, or indeed, from before the start, with veteran war reporter Keyes Beech arriving in the early 1950s, when the war against Vietnamese independence still technically belonged to France. The truth, of course, was that the Daily News was there because the French war was also an American war, with U.S. money and political support backing Paris’s efforts to keep Vietnam from unifying under the popular Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. The News was one of the first U.S. papers to open a Saigon bureau, just as it had been among the first U.S. dailies to establish its own comprehensive foreign news service a half-century earlier. This was the idea of turn-of-the-century publisher Victor Lawson, who saw an opportunity to permanently embed his own reporters in foreign locales, a “man on the spot” rather than the in-and-out “spot reporting” of the wire services. Newsmen (and they were almost all men to start) could then become like locals, covering the world, as the pioneering Chicago reporter Ben Hecht wrote, “with the enthusiasm … brought in Chicago to four-eleven fires, basement stabbings, love-nest suicides and all the other hi-de-ho doings outside the norm of living.” This was reporting where, as Tamarkin writes, “if you listened you could hear the language of Dickens, Twain, Carlyle, and Rabelais, only breezier, like they were drunk.” As much as newspapers were one of the great triumphs of modern civilization, they were also intimate partners in the violence that civilization seems to so endlessly produce.It’s hard to escape the romance of all this—a world of Graham Greenes and Martha Gellhorns, trench coats (or in warmer climes like Vietnam, as Tamarkin notes, cotton or linen twill jackets with extra pockets for pens and notebooks), cocktails on the veranda of the hotel where “everyone” was staying, and meetings in humid back alleys with informants whose faces are covered in shadow. All to be tapped out on a typewriter and sent home to a newsroom that prided itself on producing the “writer’s newspaper,” providing the story of the day—the “literature” of the day even—“done in a day,” as the paper’s unofficial motto put it. The daily paper, as Hecht suggested, was “a kind of shrine” that had “to be constructed and worshipped, then forgotten, then built again the next day,” all with a flair for “the whiplash phrase … sonorous syntax and bull’s-eye epithet.”Bob Tamarkin, as his daughter tells us, was there at the end. Arriving in Vietnam in January 1975, Tamarkin began reporting from Saigon amid what Henry Kissinger allegedly called the “decent interval”: the period after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 1973 and the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in April 1975. Saigon was thus already, from a reporter’s perspective, something of a ghost town, emptied of the hundreds of journalists of earlier years, the war now largely fought by Vietnamese, not Americans. Antiwar activists like Rolling Stone editor David Harris—who flew in in January to protest continued U.S. support for the Saigon regime—couldn’t even get themselves arrested anymore, while reporters like Tamarkin demurred in covering their daylong protest in front of the U.S. Embassy. The “story was dead,” said one of the remaining reporters, and no one at home seemed to care. This changed as winter turned to spring and a new offensive of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, gathered steam, crushing U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces in the Central Highlands and moving south toward Saigon. Reporters and writers started to pour back in—“tout le monde was there.… Le Monde was there,” noted one—only to have to immediately start flooding back out as the offensive became a rout and the “final” end grew near. Hunter S. Thompson made it a couple of weeks, arriving on April 8 and leaving on one of the last commercial flights on April 24, right before PAVN began shelling the airfield. Tamarkin meanwhile saw his colleague Keyes Beech through the crowd surrounding the U.S. Embassy and over the wall to the waiting Marines on the final day, remaining for a few hours more himself to witness the absurd scene: looters breaking into the embassy grounds as half-burned classified documents were caught up by the rotors of the escape helicopters and then drifted down from the sky to the sound of “White Christmas” (the song signaling to Americans and their allies that it was time to go). Tamarkin made it out on the last helicopter that carried civilians and, upon arriving on the USS Blue Ridge, banged out his “Diary of S. Viet’s Last Hours,” one of the first in-depth accounts of the fall of Saigon to reach American readers. Within a few years, the decline of the newspaper too turned into a rout. The Daily News closed all its foreign offices in 1976 and then its own doors two years later—meanwhile other papers were cutting their foreign reporting “to the bone,” with international news having “almost reached the vanishing point” (as famed correspondent Peter Arnett put it) in most dailies, and the foreign correspondent “a vanishing species,” according to mid-’70s media scholars. The papers themselves would shutter in alarming numbers as the decades progressed, victims of corporate consolidation and hedge-fund machinations, a process grimly documented in a “morgue of final editions” (images of final font pages running from 1978 to 2025) that Elisa Tamarkin includes at the end of the volume—a visual testament to the crumbling cornerstones of popular literate culture.It’s a simple enough story—one that, again, would be easy to romanticize—but as Tamarkin notes, that would be to mistake the perspective of the reporters, of the “West,” for the only one. Writing of her father, she describes how “his dispatches,” while honest and critical of U.S. officials, “never rose to an acknowledgment of the cause—of revolution and liberation—of the other side of the fall” of South Vietnam. They were usually just “Reds,” engaged in the various actions of warmaking, right up to and including smashing into Saigon and ejecting the remaining Americans, down to U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin’s little dog, Nit Noy (among the passengers on the final helicopters). Violence and oppression had, in fact, been behind the news business from the start—this was true of city journalism and its regular beat of murders, sexual assaults, break-ins, and crooked politicians, but part of foreign reporting especially. Lawson’s idea for overseas bureaus, for example, first emerged in 1897 as he contemplated the brutal Cuban war for independence from Spain—a conflict of interest for Americans because the United States would soon join it to deny Cubans full independence—and came into its own thanks to Hecht’s 1918–1920 tour in Berlin, where he covered the aftermath of World War I, another conflict decided by late American arrival. World War II was its heyday: Pyle, Shirer, Gellhorn, and Hemingway on the typewriters, with Capa and Miller clapping home the shutters. The foreign bureau and international reporting for American newspapers and magazines thus emerged and reached their height in direct correlation with the emergence and expansion of U.S. imperial power in the twentieth century, two trend lines tracking up on the graph together, before tumbling back down the chart in 1970s Southeast Asia. Tamarkin consequently avoids telling the story in a straightforward way, one that might overly valorize the correspondents and their trade, using her father’s time in Vietnam instead as a frame for an impressionistic and nonlinear consideration of one day and the way it was understood—moving in and out of the main story for extended digressions on small details. Central is the image of the telex. She considers Hans Haacke’s News, a contemporary art exhibit featuring an actual telex machine that began churning out page after page of news in 1970, the paper collecting in piles on the floor of the Jewish Museum in New York. This seemingly endless and transient accumulation of information was not unlike, Tamarkin suggests, the endless waves of information and news from Vietnam—news that had made clear to the government by the mid-’60s, and the American public by the early 1970s, that the war was unwinnable. The press may have raised questions, Tamarkin argues, but these often focused more on the process of the war than on whether or the why. “Historians” she writes, sometimes “suggest the war was a transformative moment of accountability journalism,” where the press began to truly speak truth to government power—a narrative belied by the billowing piles of telex paper, reporting on a failed war effort that nevertheless kept failing for decades. The press may have raised questions, Tamarkin argues, but these often focused more on the process of the war than on whether or the why. “Journalists,” then as now, “rely on officials to share their perspectives and … leak information, so when there finally was dissent in the press,” it was because that view was shared by many in Washington, the State Department, and the intelligence community too. Those officials were often leaking because their bosses, like the American public, also seemed impermeable to the waves and waves of news and information that swept over them. Ambassador Martin refused to begin the official evacuation, even as Communist forces closed in on Saigon in early April, and his CIA officers leaked like sieves in the hope press reports would change his mind. He made no plan for getting Nit Noy out—though he did pack his beloved stuffed ocelot and a suitcase full of top-secret documents (meant to help him justify his inaction before Congress). The dog, the ocelot, and the documents ultimately made it to safety, but thousands of the South Vietnamese who had supported the U.S. war effort did not. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, learning in Washington that the final evacuations were underway, chose not to attend a play at the Kennedy Center as planned—though, according to one photograph of that night, at least, he continued to wear his tux. The remaining Marine guards were the last Americans to leave (nearly left behind, actually, until one last helicopter was sent to their rescue). Among “the last things my father reported seeing in the Saigon embassy lobby,” Tamarkin writes, was one of them: “a young Marine … stuffing a paperback book,” The Fall of Rome, “into his knapsack.” Evidently a copy of a 1971 volume by R.A. Lafferty, the topic seemed well fitted to events from an American perspective. But the view of the PAVN was strikingly different: Official watercolorists depicted in vibrant colors not a “fall” but a glorious rising, a long-delayed but inevitable triumph of the “people” over the machinations of empire.Those machinations, alas, have outlasted the age of newsprint. While today American power seems too to be in decline—withdrawing, not unlike the Post, from old allies in Europe—it retains enough strength to further an orgy of purposeless and horrific violence in the Middle East. At the same time, the last remaining newspapers have not transcended the flaws of their ancestors, relying on a set of well-practiced euphemisms to cover destruction in Gaza. Still, the successors to the PAVN watercolorists are also present today, bravely posting videos of the war crimes committed against them. These scroll across the screens of viewers and—in most American news and living rooms—accumulate like spools of unread telex paper on the floor.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208901/elegy-foreign-correspondent

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2026-04-16T09:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump’s war on Pope Leo is worsening. JD Vance warned that the Pope, who condemned Trump’s war on religious grounds, should “be careful” in his theology. Mike Johnson dismissed the Pope’s criticisms by bizarrely invoking just war doctrine, which Trump and Pete Hegseth are serially violating. All this reveals Trump to be demanding that his leading sycophants (even devoutly religious ones) place him above the Pope—and indeed that they recognize no higher allegiance than to the president. Meanwhile, The New York Times has an epic piece on his mental decline, which reports that many ex-allies are sounding the alarm, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to numerous top first-term advisers. We talked to former national security official Olivia Troye, who just announced a run for Congress. She recounts what she witnessed first-hand about Trump’s unfitness, why his enablers are much worse this time around, and how his madness is now impacting Americans’ everyday lives. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209135/trump-war-pope-takes-darker-turn-mental-decline-alarms-ex-allies

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2026-04-15T21:22:56Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

A Black former federal employee is suing the Trump administration, claiming he was fired because of his race. Alvin Brown, a Democrat member of the National Transportation Safety Board nominated by President Biden, was fired from his post in May 2025. In his lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Tuesday, Brown said that political differences couldn’t have been the main reason for his firing from the NTSB. Brown’s lawyers, who work for the Democracy Forward Foundation, also claim that 75 percent of Black officials at independent agencies have been fired under Trump.“Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB cannot be explained by the fact that Mr. Brown is a Democrat and President Trump might have wanted to exert Republican control over the Board,” the lawsuit states. “At the time of Mr. Brown’s removal from the NTSB, there were two other Democrats serving on the Board.” Since Brown’s firing was racially motivated, the lawsuit alleges, it “therefore violated Mr. Brown’s constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment,” the lawsuit states. The lawsuit also points to people of color being dismissed at agencies including the National Labor Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Federal Reserve, and Library of Congress.The lawsuit cited Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the fact that Brown’s replacement, John DeLeeuw, is white. “President Trump has removed Black Senate-confirmed appointees; he has either nominated a non-Black individual for their replacement or has not formally replaced them at all,” the lawsuit states. “This trend fits with President Trump’s consistent messaging criticizing diversity and inclusion and his clear and demonstrable emphasis.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/209131/trump-sued-firing-black-officials-government

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2026-04-15T18:23:49Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Democrats are mounting a formal opposition to oust Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Arizona Representative Yassamin Ansari filed six articles of impeachment against the Pentagon chief Wednesday, accusing Hegseth of repeatedly violating his constitutional oath.“Pete Hegseth broke his oath to the Constitution, put U.S. troops at grave risk through the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, engaged in abuse of office and conduct beneath the dignity of his office, and carried out unlawful military actions despite his obligation to refuse—including strikes on civilians and a girls’ school in Minab, Iran,” Ansari said in a statement.The text of the articles claims that Hegseth engaged in “high crimes and misdemeanors” when he obeyed Donald Trump’s orders, initiating a war against Iran without congressional approval.“Only Congress can declare war; his actions demand immediate removal,” Ansari wrote on X.Ansari also accused Hegseth of demonstrating a “willful disregard” for the Constitution, a willingness to abuse the powers of his office, and reckless endangerment of American servicemembers deployed in the Middle East. She further argued that Hegseth’s relative incompetence fronting the war effort caused thousands of civilian casualties.But his actions in the Iran war were not the only topic of concern. Ansari also said that Hegseth had inappropriately politicized America’s military, and that he had broken the established rules of engagement by approving illegal “double tap” strikes on noncombatant boats in the Caribbean. She even alluded to the March 2025 Signalgate scandal, claiming that Hegseth had “demonstrated gross negligence” in his handling of classified military information.A dozen other liberal representatives cosponsored Ansari’s bill: Sarah McBride (Delaware), Lauren Underwood (Illinois), Al Green (Texas), Steve Cohen (Tennessee), Jasmine Crockett (Texas), Nikema Williams (Georgia), Dina Titus (Nevada), Dave Min (California), Shri Thanedar (Michigan), Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico), Mike Quigley (Illinois), and Brittany Pettersen (Colorado).This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209115/democrat-articles-impeachment-pete-hegseth-iran

Nostr event nevent1qqsg6zu3vqspz6gklc4mp6x8a7ewwlynzxkm5603ajqls4f28gj5yeszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjj6vl6y

2026-04-15T11:09:02Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is raging in all directions. After exploding at Pope Leo over his criticism of the war, he’s now lashing out at an ally, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Why? Because she sided with the Pope on the war and because she won’t help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This comes as a new polling analysis shows him cratering with non-college white voters, who are of course a critical voting bloc. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has a high floor of support due to his base. But what if he hasn’t bottomed out yet? We’re talking about all this with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who’s been writing well about the catastrophic politics of Iran for Trump world. Alex, always good to have you on, man.Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.Sargent: Let’s start with some polling because it’s amazing. CNN’s Harry Enten looked at an average of polls to calculate Trump’s approval with white voters who didn’t go to college. Listen.Harry Enten (voiceover): We are talking about non-college white voters and he is sliding right into the water. This is a ruh-roh moment, to quote the great Scooby-Doo. Trump’s net approving with non-college whites. Look at this. In February of 2025, it was plus 32 points and now it is minus two points. That is a 34-point shift. And I will note this is an average of polls.Sargent: So that was overall approval. Now listen to what these voters are thinking on the Iran war. Harry Enten (voiceover): What about the war? Well, the war ain’t helping him because just take a look here. Non-college whites, net approval rating of U.S. military action against Iran, minus five points. You think that’s low? Come over to this side of the screen. How about Trump on Iran? Minus 13 points, a very unlucky 13 indeed for the president of the United States with a key core group of his.Sargent: Just to recap, Trump’s general approval with non-college whites has slid by 34 points and he’s now underwater with them. On the war, support for it is five points underwater with those voters and support for his handling of Iran is 13 points underwater with them. Alex, that is something. Your thoughts?Shephard: It’s just terrible. I mean, I think there’s always been this misguided idea that Trump’s support among the white non-college, white working-class vote is ironclad no matter what. And that’s just not true. We saw this during the pandemic as well. But even during the pandemic, which basically did create a global recession, we did not see the president do this sort of this level of economic self-sabotage. And I think that the extent to which many people—myself, I think, included here—overstated some of the causes of Trump’s victory back in 2024, it’s really coming into the foreground right here. The big thing that rode him to victory was inflation, right? And Trump is taking a number of actions right now to cause prices to rise. And if you look back, the sort of cratering support started at the beginning of this year, so all the way back in January—it predates Iran and it’s post-tariff inflation. That was the sort of start of the erosion of white working-class or white non-college support. And now Trump has basically quadrupled down on that by starting a stupid war for no reason that he’s now stuck in. And you’re seeing things like, for instance, gas going up by 30, 40 percent in some cases—that is forcing people to reckon with what the president is actually doing here, and understandably they are recoiling.Sargent: Well, Alex, I followed up and asked Harry Enten if Trump has ever fared this badly with non-college whites in polling, and Enten told me that this rivals where he was with that demographic just after January 6th. That suggests he’s at a low point with them, as you also said. What’s critical to me here, though, is it isn’t just the economy. His base is cracking over the war too. And as you say, maybe the perceptions of the war are colored very strongly by the impact it’s having on prices. But I also think the war is just filling the headlines with awful news and stuff that makes him just look like a preposterously ridiculous moron. And so I think this demographic is really souring on him over that as well.Shephard: I think one of the reasons why a lot of Trump’s voters stuck with him, even amidst all the kind of erratic fire and fury, garbage and nonsense of the first term, was that Trump’s outbursts—they were relatively low stakes—were about people that Trump personally cared about. And in general, he was doing things that didn’t tend to affect people’s day-to-day existence. And I think for some voters, that erratic behavior only communicated the fact that Trump was a different sort of politician. And again, the stakes were relatively low in the first term. If you look back then, as bad as things were, for the most part it largely amounted to a big tax cut—pre-pandemic, a big tax cut bill that any Republican president would have passed anyway. And I think now what you’re seeing are those voters having to reckon with what those policies look like in the real world, right? In a way that they haven’t had to before.And they are having to actually see that, like, this guy, Donald Trump, who claims to be breaking the system on our behalf, is actually engaging in just another stupid Middle East war. He’s not explaining why he’s doing it. And every action that he’s taken since that war began has only made it worse. It’s only made costs go up. And I think in general, people are looking at this with understandable wariness, right? Where you look at a situation like the Strait of Hormuz and it’s impossible, I think, regardless of your political beliefs, to not to be incredibly cynical about it and say, this is a situation in which the U.S. has managed to lose in the Middle East faster than at any time in our history—maybe even going back to when we were fighting the Barbary pirates or whatever. And I think that also matters here.And again, I think for all of the talk about the president’s ability to communicate with these kind of low-propensity voters, there has not been any of that about this war. You look back—the things that have cut through to the mainstream are Trump tweeting that he’s Jesus or whatever. It’s not a rationale for going to do regime change in Iran. And that’s because there’s no one in this administration that can actually tell you what they’re doing here. But if you are a voter, what you will see is, for instance, I went on vacation two weeks ago and when I came back gas was a dollar and 40 cents more expensive than when I left.Sargent: I think you got to the critical point there, Alex, which is that the Strait of Hormuz situation is just really legible to a lot of voters. It’s a choke point. A lot of important stuff passes through it. Trump has said that he will obliterate Iranian civilization to compel Iran to open the strait—and they didn’t open the strait. So people are kind of wondering, like, what is this half-cocked lunatic doing? He’s threatening to incinerate tens and tens of millions of people and it’s not actually forcing Iran to do his bidding. And I really think the entire mystique is just cracking up over that. What do you think?Shephard: Yeah. I mean, I think that they’re totally high on their own supply and they have been for a really long time. And, if you look back, for instance, at the Iraq War—to which that is a much more significant use of American manpower—but that war at least had a sort of fake rationale of providing democracy to the Middle East, and it existed as a kind of post-9/11 catharsis for people. Both of those things were legible. And this war is just not legible, right?It is legible when you explain to people that this is a longstanding Israeli preoccupation and that the Gulf States had their own reasons for wanting the U.S. to do it. But none of these parties could understandably take out the Iran regime themselves because they don’t have the military power to do it. So they convinced Trump to do it. Which is what happened. And I think when you look at it more broadly, I think people understand that that’s what happened here. But I think inside the administration, my general sense is that Trump believed that he had kind of gotten in and out of Venezuela in this way, that he could just keep kind of doing this, and that he is the sort of sole master of reality and he can declare victory whenever he wants. We’re in a situation now where Iran—our stated adversaries—are in a much stronger negotiating position than they were before, right? Because they can hold the United States economy hostage, and they know that Trump is terrified of that as well. But he also can’t get out of a situation in which he’s not the sole winner, which is already impossible here. And that’s the bind that you and I and the millions of non-college white voters that we were talking about earlier find ourselves in right now.Sargent: Trump’s frustration over Iran right now is just white hot. After the Pope criticized the war and Trump unloaded on the Pope, the prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called Trump’s attack on the Pope unacceptable. This really angered Trump. He said this to an Italian newspaper: “It’s her who’s unacceptable because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance.” Alex, this isn’t just any pointy-headed European leader. Meloni is a member of the MAGA International. What’s funny about this, though, I think is that Meloni didn’t understand that she’s not even allowed to defend the Pope if it makes the ailing American despot look bad in the least. Trump has to be above the Pope, even for the prime minister of Italy.Shephard: Well, yeah, and of course, we all know about the Iranian nuclear threat to Italy right now, too. I do think that this tells us something that is really interesting to me, though, which is that basically from the moment that Trump really emerged—especially since him and Steve Bannon linked up—there was this idea that they were the kind of spearhead of this global far-right movement. And this was like back in June of 2016, after the Brexit vote happened, Trump was going around calling himself Mr. Brexit. And there was this larger sense—and this is like where a lot of the Viktor Orbán links come from, the Hungarian president who went down after 16 years basically of power over the weekend—there was this idea that they were sort of part of this groundswell of the global far right, that populists were fed up with open borders, that they were fed up with bureaucrats, that they were fed up with people in faraway places like Brussels, which is ridiculous to me, dictating how they live, and that they were going to rise up. And I think what we’re seeing is the crackup of that everywhere.You look at Canada, for instance—Canada was probably on the verge of electing a kind of Trump-esque figure last year. Trump comes into power, puts in these tariffs. Now you have a technocrat, Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of England, running there. And I think Meloni is fascinating because she is the furthest-right Italian prime minister since Mussolini, right? That’s not debatable. That’s crazy in its own way. But she has really had to dial back on her populism and conservatism because of the association with Trump and how toxic that is. And I think that what you’re seeing is that even among far-right figures, tying yourself too close to him is a problem. Of course, I mean, again, if the president attacks the Pope and you’re the prime minister of Italy, you do sort of have to step in. But that again is the absurdity of this moment.And again, once you speak out against Trump, you have this ridiculous situation where Trump is watching television on Sunday and sees these three American cardinals speak out against the war and then literally—kind of literally—starts a holy war right after that. And the reverberations, I think, from that are huge. But I think that the Orbán defeat there is not immaterial to this—that global far-right leaders are looking around and saying, this is a pretty bad moment for us. People are turning against this kind of far-right populism that has been ascendant since Trump essentially walked down the escalator in 2015.Sargent: Yeah. I mean, in fact, I want to underscore what you’re saying by pointing out that when Meloni ascended, that was seen as a real sign that this global far right, this MAGA International, was really on the march. And so for her to have to really start distancing herself from the, you know, unquestioned supreme leader of the MAGA International is a real sign that it’s just starting to crack. That, plus Orbán going down to defeat, really suggests that the global right is on much shakier ground than it looked as if they would be. And boy, it happened fast. Shephard: This was already baked in before Iran, right? And Iran is the most catastrophic thing an American president has done since Iraq. I mean, it’s maybe worse in some ways, which is crazy to say. But I think what we’re seeing here is a huge global trend that is manifesting itself everywhere and seems to be manifesting itself here as well, though we won’t be able to see its results in full view until the midterm elections in November.Sargent: Trump’s anger at Meloni is also over the fact that she’s apparently not willing to send military help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said this to the paper, speaking about Italians: “Do they like the fact that your prime minister isn’t giving us any help to get oil? I’m shocked at her. I thought she had courage, but I was wrong.” Alex, I don’t know if Trump understands the situation at a basic level. The problem doesn’t appear to be that we don’t have enough military firepower. It’s that military firepower can’t force Iran to open the strait. Isn’t that the essence of this?Shephard: Yeah. And I think the other thing too is what Trump is doing is psychological more than it’s strategic, right? That he wants other people to take the blame here. That he is trying to bring in NATO and the European Union, which have wisely kept their distance from this entire farce. The United States does not need help militarily to bomb Tehran, but it does need the help of other nations to end this conflict, right? It needs the help of countries specifically that are not Israel to end this conflict. And it needs those countries, I think, to help find an off ramp, or to build one that is acceptable to the United States, Iran, the Gulf States, and the Iranian regime, to the extent that such a thing exists right now. And instead of trying to bring those sort of partners in to find a way out of this, Trump is alienating them and demanding that they share in the blame for something that is just colossally stupid.Sargent: Well, to return to some stuff you said earlier in this discussion, I think there’s an interesting through line to all this. Trump’s MAGA allies in Europe are turning against him over the war—that means MAGA International is splitting over it. Meanwhile, Trump’s base is splitting over the war at home. That means MAGA in America is fracturing over it. The scale of betrayal—in a way—of what Trump is ostensibly supposed to represent and what MAGA is ostensibly supposed to represent, nevermind that it was always bullshit that they were anti-war, but they’re supposed to be that. The scale of this betrayal is actually at the point where it’s really seriously endangering a massive movement. And I find that really striking. And I’ve got to say, man, if this is what brings MAGA crashing down, then boy, is that a certain kind of satisfying, poetic justice—aside from the fact that thousands and thousands of innocent people are getting killed.Shephard: Yeah. And I think that you’ve been seeing this sort of crackup—I’ve been writing about it for the last couple of months, especially since Iran started—which is it started, I think, with people that are all opportunists. They are almost all, or maybe all, antisemites. They are people like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly. But these are also people that I think were genuinely trying to intellectually backfill the notion of Trumpism with something. And that’s not just the president. And what you’ve seen, I think, is a real—the first schism was between people that were trying to kind of come up with a meaning outside of Trump for this stuff. They left. And I think that you now have this sort of true believers that just say, well, MAGA is Trump, it’s whatever Trump says, it’s just a straight-up cult of personality.But one of the things that you saw this week was, after the Jesus picture, people like Riley Gaines or these kind of Catholic influencers—they were out too. And I think that was notable to me, not because I think it will necessarily last, but you see how quick these people will leave now, right? That anyone is basically—if there’s a sort of exit door that cracks open, they will speak out about it. And that’s a notable difference from the first term, where for the most part the kind of Trump opposition on the right was from a sort of more establishment or moderate wing. And what we’re seeing now—in some ways it resembles the aftermath of January 6th—is that there’s a sense that he’s done, right? He’s a loser, he’s cooked. And so the people that understand that they are going to have to be fighting over what power in the Republican Party looks like post-Trump are starting to position themselves and sharpen the knives. And I think that is something that I assumed was going to happen closer to the end of this term. But it’s happening right now. And it’s, I think, causing this sort of accelerated breakdown of this coalition.Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up, here’s the best part of all. JD Vance can’t do that. He can’t distance himself from Trump. He’s tied to Trump very, very tightly. All he can do is get dutiful reporters to write things in newspapers saying that really, really, he totally opposed the war. And at the same time, he of course is really loyal to Trump. So he’s going to stick by Trump because he’s a loyal guy, even if he has misgivings. And he’s the guy who’s supposed to be inheriting this movement and this coalition. And it’s cracking up under him, yet he can’t distance himself from the dark force, the kind of vortex that’s causing the cracks to really radiate out in all directions. I mean, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy. You wrote about this. Can you sort of take us through how JD Vance kind of manages this at this point?Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been fascinated with Vance more or less since I first came into contact with him via Hillbilly Elegy. He is one of our great opportunists and cynics and is a shape-shifter par excellence. And I think what he’s been doing this term has been really interesting to me because he’s trying to sort of build connections with these various sort of independent movements within MAGA, right—whether they’re kind of this sort of podcast crowd or the sort of more intellectual wing. Certainly he has his Catholic conversion story and his upcoming memoir about that. So he has a kind of religious conversion take as well. But one thing that Vance does not have, which Trump does, is an independent base of support within the party.And I think where Vance is fascinating is that you’re seeing somebody who’s trying to figure out what a Vance coalition post-Trump could look like. And he, in the lead-up to Iran, basically said, okay, well, if I can keep my hands clean here—while Marco Rubio, his main rival probably for the nomination, has his fingerprints all over that—then he can go out and say, look, you know, Trumpism, you know, it still works, right? We moved too far with it. This Iran thing is a mistake, but you can follow me and I will take care of all of that. And that’s just not going to work at all. As we’ve been discussing, he is tied to all of this. So I think what we’re seeing is that there isn’t like a successor who can come in and just say, I am MAGA now, right? And we’re going to do MAGA without Trump and it’s going to be even better—because Trump has never allowed somebody like this to flourish or prosper in any way. And so I think that also points to a kind of failed-state situation, right? That Trump will be term-limited—he’s not going to hold on to power, I don’t think—but he’s not going to. And you’re going to have these people that are fighting over the sort of scorched earth that we’re left in, which is $6 gas, a strengthened Iranian regime, no strong ties to Europe or even to the Gulf States, maybe, in the Middle East. And a country that is more isolated, weaker, and poorer than it was 10 years ago, solely because we elected this moron twice.Sargent: Well, there is one other thing that Trump has that JD Vance definitely lacks, and that’s charisma. Which is also a problem because he’s going to need that to try to hold together all these different competing factions who, as you say, will have their knives out for each other. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Shephard: Thanks for having me.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209073/transcript-trump-fumes-bad-iran-news-polls-hit-shocking-new-low

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2026-04-14T18:35:22Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Fifty House Democrats have officially filed legislation that would create a commission to jump-start the process to remove President Trump using the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The bill, introduced Tuesday by House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, would establish a “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office,” a move that would allow Congress to complete its part in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process. It also calls for the commission to hold “a medical examination of the President to determine whether the President is mentally or physically unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.” The bill essentially bypasses JD Vance, as Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment requires either the vice president and the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to determine the president is no longer fit for office.“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings on-line likening himself to Jesus Christ,” Raskin said in a statement. “We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation.” It remains highly unlikely that this attempt will be successful, even as some of Trump’s staunchest former supporters call on Congress to “25th Amendment his ass.” If the bill does somehow pass the Republican-controlled House and Trump vetoes it, which he likely would, then at least two-thirds of both the House and Senate would have to agree to overturn his veto.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209055/democrats-file-25th-amendment-bill-get-rid-trump

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2026-04-14T17:14:18Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Trump administration won’t face contempt of court charges for deporting immigrants to El Salvador last year in defiance of a court order.In a 2–1 ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a writ of mandamus Tuesday rebuking U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, saying that he overstepped his authority by pursuing the charges against former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials. In March 2025, DHS quickly deported over 100 Venezuelans that the administration claimed were gang members, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to justify their removal without due process. The immigrants were put on planes to El Salvador as part of an agreement with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, to house them in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, where human rights abuses are alleged to take place. These flights took place in spite of Boasberg ordering them to stop.Boasberg subsequently ruled that “probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt” for the government’s defiance of his order, but over the next year, the administration dodged the contempt charges with multiple appeals to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which deliberated on whether Boasberg had the authority to hold the federal government in contempt.The two judges who ruled against Boasberg, Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, were both appointed by Trump, and they claimed the lower court judge abused his power with the contempt probe.“The district court proposes to probe high-level Executive Branch deliberations about matters of national security and diplomacy,” wrote Rao in the majority opinion. “These proceedings are a clear abuse of discretion.”Incensed over Boasberg, Trump called for his impeachment last year, earning a rare and light rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who warned about attacks on the judicial branch of government. While Boasberg isn’t being penalized with this ruling, the White House will be happy that none of its officials, for now, will face penalties for breaking the law.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209048/trump-judges-block-criminal-contempt-inquiry-officials-court-orders-deportations

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2026-04-14T13:08:29Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Vice President JD Vance thinks economic terrorism is OK—as long as President Donald Trump’s the one doing it. Speaking to Fox News Monday night, the vice president made a startling admission about how Donald Trump intended to end the war in Iran. “When it comes to weapons of war, 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,” Vance said. VANCE: What they have done is engage in this act of economic terrorism against the entire world. As the President showed, two can play at that game. pic.twitter.com/pd9HIdamV7— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2026“And if the Iranians are going to try and engage in economic terrorism, we’re going to abide by a simple principle, that no Iranian ships are going to get out either,” Vance said. Still, the vice president insisted that Trump only wanted to see Iranians “thrive and succeed,” as if the president had not threatened to end their entire civilization a little more than a week ago. Trump’s naval blockade on Iranian ports began Monday. A sustained military blockade would be incredibly expensive and require a large number of warships, and U.S. allies have made it very clear they have no intention of helping out. While it may seem like a quick fix, taking Iranian oil off the market will only squeeze the market, causing energy prices to surge higher. Gas prices in the U.S. have surged beyond $4 a gallon, as crude oil has climbed to over $100 per barrel.
https://newrepublic.com/post/209027/jd-vance-donald-trump-economic-terrorism-iran

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2026-04-14T10:46:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.When Donald Trump viciously attacked the Pope and then posted a picture depicting himself as a divine figure, it provoked a massive backlash from many in his own base. That was bad enough, but then Trump offered some rambling spin on it all that was so preposterous in its dishonesty, so insulting, that it quickly made things worse. We think this mess hints at deeper truths about how Trump approaches religious voters, particularly the right-wing evangelicals who are critical to his support. It also helps explain why the Trump coalition and the Trump project are so fragile right now. So we invited on Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of several books about religion and the American right, to make sense of all this for us. Robert, good to have you on.Robert Jones: Thanks. Glad to be here.Sargent: So Trump is angry because Pope Leo has repeatedly criticized the Iran war and especially Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization. In response, Trump unleashed this crazed rant describing the Pope as “weak on crime,” adding this: “I don’t want a pope who thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also said, “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the president of the United States” because I’m doing what I was elected for. Robert, I just wanted to get your general thoughts on that first.Jones: Well, I guess I’ll start with the last one. “I was doing what I was elected for”—I mean, Trump, of course, thinks that now that he’s been elected, he can be constrained by nothing but his own whim. And so I think that’s really what he’s reacting to here. But, in this case, he’s got the leader of a worldwide church who is also operating out of a 2,000-year-old theological tradition. So Leo is not firing from the hip here. He really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism, again, is not just about the war. It really is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching. Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever. I mean, this is the authoritarian playbook, right? That you should have no dissenters. And certainly no dissenters with influence or power.Sargent: Exactly. And it doesn’t matter whether they speak for a 2,000-year-old religion or not. So Trump also posted this deranged image that portrayed him as a divine figure in a white robe, healing a sick man by placing his hand on the man’s forehead. This got MAGA figures angry. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an anti-Christ spirit.” A Daily Wire reporter called it “outrageous blasphemy,” adding “he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness.” Christian MAGA activist Sean Fucht said: “This should be deleted immediately.” And former Republican spinner Ari Fleischer said “it’s inappropriate and embarrassing—it’s offensive.” There was much more like that. Robert, can you just explain at the core why this image is seen as blasphemous?Jones: Well, Trump is clearly displaying himself as Jesus. So, in the image he’s got on a white robe with a kind of red robe over it. And you could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus, dressed this way—this white robe, this red sash over the top. And he’s got this glowing hand, right, as he’s kind of leaning over this person in their sickbed. So this is also this depiction of supernatural divine healing power that he’s claiming for himself. One other thing I would say is that this is not the first time Trump has done this. You know, it was actually just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the Pope, dressed up in papal vestments. So, you know, this is not the first time he’s posted things like this, assuming either the chair of the Pope himself or the image of Jesus.Sargent: Well, Trump actually deleted the image of himself as a divine figure. Now let’s listen to how he tried to spin his way out of this.Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, it wasn’t a picture. It was me. I did post it and I thought it was me as the doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. So I had—I just heard about it. And I said, how did they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor.Sargent: So, Robert, apparently Trump thinks doctors have celestial light pouring forth from their palms and can heal people by touching them. As the picture showed, what did you make of his excuse?Jones: Well, he’s reaching deep for this one, I’ve got to say. I mean, the problem is that the image really didn’t allow much wiggle room. So the best he could say is, yeah, OK, I’m a doctor, I’m at a bedside. But there’s angels in the air behind him. And as we said, these kind of glowing palms. So it’s very clearly—he’s just trying to clearly just obfuscate and kind of trying to back away from it. And again, if he thought this was just an image of him as a doctor and did this innocently, why remove it? Just leave it up if he really believed in it.Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s obvious and very clear that a big motivator here, a big core of this whole thing, is that for Donald Trump, he doesn’t really understand why something like this would actually bother a lot of people, don’t you think?Jones: I think that’s a really good insight. I mean things that are sacred, things that are holy, things that deserve kind of awe and respect and deference, right? These are all religious emotions that actual people who have some sense of piety take very seriously. And so I think that’s why we’re seeing some of this kind of reaction, even from some of his strongest supporters, is because they also have a religious sensibility. And I think that’s the thing that makes so much of what—whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off very tin ear, because he just has no sense of piety, I think. It becomes very clear, whether it’s his misnaming a book of the Bible, walking across the street, clearing it with kind of some violence and then holding up a Bible awkwardly in front of a church. These are all things that actual religious people wouldn’t do that way. But I think he just has no innate sense of that.Sargent: So Robert, I wonder if part of what we’re seeing here is that in Trump’s genuine understanding of the situation, evangelicals really do matter a lot more within his base than Catholics do. What does the data show on that? It confirms that, right? And how would these different groups perceive this controversy generally?Jones: That’s right. His strongest supporters have always been white evangelical Protestants. They have voted more than eight in 10 for him every time he has been on the ballot. And Catholics are a much more complex story. His support among Catholics has actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines. So he’s always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six in 10 for him, not 85 percent for him. And the real difference though is that inside the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democratic, typically. So in the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics that supported him, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. So there’s this kind of racial tension inside the Catholic Church, and it’s just not a monolith in the way that it is among white evangelicals.His statement that he could walk down the middle of the street and shoot somebody in the middle of the day and people would still vote for him—I think that’s actually largely true among white evangelicals today. In fact, he made that comment at an evangelical college in the first place. It’s not so true among Catholics.Sargent: Yeah, I want to ask you about that because it seems like there may be a fundamental difference between how devout evangelicals and how devout Catholics perceive Trump. Evangelicals are much more prone to understand Trump as kind of a flawed vessel sent to them by God to carry out his and their plans in the world. Whereas Catholics, I think, aren’t really at that place. Is that distinction correct?Jones: I think that’s fair. I think that Catholics have much more complex reasons for supporting Trump than white evangelicals do. His messianic appearances actually resonate, I think, much stronger with evangelicals than they do among Catholics. You can see that in the favorability numbers too—that Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals, even today, is 70 percent. It just hardly ever wavers, no matter what happens. But his favorability among even white Catholics who voted for him is only about 53 percent. So it’s just barely in majority territory today.Sargent: And what is his favorability rating with Catholics overall right now?Jones: Yeah, with Catholics overall, it’s actually a little bit underwater—just below majority. But that’s because his favorability rating among Hispanic Catholics is 25 percent, right? It’s half as high as among white Catholics.Sargent: So let’s listen to some more of Trump here. He’s asked if he’ll apologize to Pope Leo. Then he says this.Reporter (voiceover): You don’t apologize?Donald Trump (voiceover): No, I don’t, because Pope Leo said things that are wrong. He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran. And you cannot have a nuclear Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You have hundreds of millions of people dead, and it’s not going to happen. So I can’t. I think he’s very weak on crime and other things. So I’m not. I mean, he went public. I’m just responding to Pope Leo. And you know, his brother is a big MAGA person, and he’s a great guy, Luis. And I said, I like Luis better than I like the Pope.Sargent: So, Robert, what do you make of that? I think all this makes it a lot worse, doesn’t it?Jones: Well, look, I mean, the never-apologize mantra, right? Straight from Roger Stone all the way through. I mean, this is his M.O. It’s also—just while we’re talking about religion—it was striking to me when he was running for president the first time around, where he just outright admitted he’s never even asked God for forgiveness. Like he outright said that, I’ve never asked forgiveness for my sins, which for most Christians is a pretty threshold moment, right, to kind of joining the religion or becoming part of the religion. So I think this is really part of his MO. Don’t ask forgiveness even of God. Certainly don’t apologize to any human being. It is just kind of stand by it. But I think you’re right that in this case, it again is so far over the line. I think he’s going to—it may actually do some damage.Sargent: Well, I think another way to put this is that he thinks of himself as answering to a higher authority than the Pope, and that higher authority is Roy Cohn.Jones: Yeah, that’s right. Sargent: He’s basically applying his longtime policy of never backing down—which was taught to him by Roy Cohn—to his relations with the Pope, a spiritual leader of many, many millions who is operating from a 2,000-year-old theology. If you think about it, the Pope is saying some fairly unsurprising things. He’s saying that violent conquest and domination are contrary to the spirit of the Lord, that we have to take care to welcome the stranger. These are things that he probably shouldn’t be surprised by coming from the Pope. But Trump is only capable of understanding this as an affront to him personally. And I really wonder whether that makes things worse in the minds of at least some religious people. Can you talk about that?Jones: Well, being surprised by something depends on having some knowledge of where the benchmark is in order to even know whether you should be surprised by something. I think Trump is so out of his depth here that he doesn’t really even realize what he’s walked into. Catholic just war tradition goes back to St. Augustine, right? It is more than 1,500 years old of serious Catholic theology. And so it’s very developed, and it’s over the very serious question of, if there’s a state that has a monopoly on violence and can wield it at such high levels, what are the moral restraints that should be placed even on a state—or even on a king, in its original formulations? And it turns out there are moral constraints according to Catholic moral tradition. And one of the key ones is that there’s no such thing as a preemptive just war. In other words, preemption is never a moral reason to go to war. War always has to be a last resort, after all modes of diplomacy have failed, and there has to be an imminent threat before—and none of those things has—you could imagine a different world in which Trump knew this tradition and tried to frame a justification for going to war with Iran that might meet some of those criteria, even if it were kind of spun very heavily. But he just hasn’t even attempted to do this. I think he just doesn’t really realize the kind of bandsaw he’s run into here with Catholic moral theology.Sargent: I want to clarify for listeners what you’re saying here, which is that the just war doctrine and the laws of armed conflict are in a sense nourished by Catholic theology going back to St. Augustine.Jones: I think it’s really telling in that clip you’ve played about Trump that he’s simply appealing to ends. So if you kind of think about ends and means in your kind of philosophy classes. he’s just appealing to an end and saying, well, we should want this kind of end with Iran. And if we want that kind of end, then we could just go to war. But that’s not the way moral philosophy works, right? There are principles that one must meet. You can’t just declare an end and then willy-nilly deploy any means to getting there. That’s entirely the whole point of moral theology—to limit what can be done. Particularly when we’re talking about wielding violence. And I think the thing that is so revealing here is that Trump can’t even recognize the functioning of a principle that might limit power. That’s just not even in his lexicon.Sargent: Right. And I think it’s probably worth bringing in here Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s been holding these monthly sermons at the Pentagon, which is itself probably a violation of the church-state separation. Pete Hegseth is a Christian Reconstructionist, and that’s really a radical theology. And Pete Hegseth has also, not coincidentally, been essentially saying that maximal force and violence and brutality is a good thing. He’s been kind of saturated with bloodlust and sadism as he’s talked about how our precision weaponry will kill people on a mass scale. And he even recited one prayer which essentially said, in some form or other, that the Iranian enemy doesn’t hear God when he cries to God. By contrast, Pete Hegseth believes he does hear God when he speaks to God—God speaks back to Pete Hegseth, but not to the enemy. And it seems like that itself is something that, if I understand this correctly, Pope Leo is rebutting. Is he not? Can you explain that?Jones: Well, Pope Leo rebutted it directly by saying that God does not hear the prayers of those who pray for violence. So he came straight at those in response to that. And so I think we do have these diametrically opposed things where one is saying we are declaring ourselves the instruments of God’s violent justice in the world and God is on our side. And what Pope Leo is saying is actually something quite different. He’s saying that, no, no, we actually have to go through this process to figure out whether what we’re doing can actually put us on God’s side, which is a very different way of thinking about it.Sargent: So do you think that a lot of religious Catholics out there will understand this kind of dimension of the debate, and will they see Trump essentially—not just blaspheming himself, but also being so diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine on principle—will that trouble them?Jones: I think it will. I think it may be cumulative thing. I think what will happen is they’ll see the tension between Pope Leo and Trump. They’ll definitely see it because, again, he’s an American Pope, right? So that’ll make it much more resonant than perhaps other popes. So they’ll see that. But I think what will happen is, because of the way that Pope Leo is carving out this very careful moral theological stance, that then trickles down to the bishops and to parish priests. And it creates a kind of space for very different conversations to happen. Because the most powerful thing is what happens at the local community level, right? Not what happens on high. But I think Pope Leo’s leadership here is creating more space for bishops and parish priests to have a different kind of conversation—one where maybe they just have a whole Bible study or a whole kind of theology study on the Catholic just war tradition. And if you do that, I mean, you’re very quickly going to discover there’s no way to shoehorn this Iran War into anything to be approved by that tradition.Sargent: Can I ask, do you think that Pope Leo, by saying this stuff, is actually in some subtle way trying to invite these conversations on the local level?Jones: Well, I think so. I mean, I think that that’s the church’s job, right, is to kind of provide moral teaching, and that’s part of what the hierarchy does. It organizes the worldwide church and can influence certain kinds of conversations and bring them to the fore. I think by spotlighting this as something very important, addressing it on Easter—these are very strong signals, I think, to local parishes that this is actually something important to talk about.Sargent: And I guess what that would ultimately mean is that Pope Leo is, in some sense, subtly undermining Trump with a constituency among whom he’s already vulnerable.Jones: Yeah, I don’t think Pope Leo would think about it directly like that, but I think that may be the end result. I did take a little bit of a look, and what’s important to remember is that Trump’s super support among evangelicals largely occurs among states that are very safe Republican states, right? So even if he dropped 10 points among evangelicals, he’d probably still be okay. But his support among Catholics, particularly white Catholics, is very heavily concentrated in places that are all swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—these are places where elections are won or lost. And so, if you’re thinking about very close elections in those states, if he loses—again, 60 percent of white Catholics voted for him, his favorability is now 53 percent among white Catholics, only 46 percent of white Catholics support the war in Iran—if he loses 10 points among white Catholics, it’s game over in those swing states.Sargent: Just to wrap this up, can you explain how that plays out for JD Vance in 2028? He’s, after all, someone who converted to Catholicism and he’s making that a major part of his political identity.Jones: He did, and very early on. And he’s also earned his own direct rebuke from the Vatican when he tried to kind of really bastardize a Catholic teaching about immigrants—he was trying to invoke the Ordo Amoris, right, the Order of Loves. He was trying to say, first we love our family, then we love our friends, then we love our community, and then we love the rest of the world. And he got a straight rebuke from the Vatican saying, no, actually, that’s not the way this theology works. So he may run into the same kind of problems, even though he himself is Catholic. And because he’s Catholic, that may actually create more problems for him than it does for Trump.Sargent: Why? Because he’ll have to explain himself in more detail.Jones: I think so. And you have to explain—like, if you consider yourself to be a Catholic in good standing, how then can you be being rebuked by the head of the Catholic Church at the same time?Sargent: Well, best of luck to JD Vance sorting that one out. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Robert Jones’s new book, which will be out soon. It’s called Backslide. It’s about Christian nationalism and democracy. Robert, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much.Jones: Thanks so much.
https://newrepublic.com/article/209024/transcript-trump-rages-pope-harsh-new-rebuke-lands-surprise-blow

Nostr event nevent1qqs8zjgkpqh5em9lqpadef2758ewh0z3sw4l349vz27u72qsrd0kjuszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjpaxylf

2026-04-14T00:41:10Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: Good afternoon, everybody. This is Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined today by Ibram Kendi. He’s a professor at Howard University. He’s also the author of a few books now—How to Be an Antiracist, The History of Racist Ideas—and he has a new book out that we’re going to talk about today. Professor, welcome.Ibram Kendi: Thank you for having me.Bacon: So let me talk about the book itself. The book is about this idea of the global replacement theory. So talk about replacement theory and what that means. The title of the book is Chain of Ideas, I should say. We’re going to talk about about the chain of ideas ... but the book is about replacement theory, so talk about what that means for people who don’t know.Kendi: Sure. In Chain of Ideas, I’m chronicling the reemergence of what’s known as “great replacement theory” over the last two decades, but also showing its much longer history. After chronicling that history, I ended up defining great replacement theory as a political theory that suggests that there are these powerful elites who are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives and even livelihoods of white people, who apparently need authoritarian protection. When we hear things like “immigrants are invading the nation,” we’re hearing great replacement theory. When we hear ideas like “the enemy is inside the gates,” or “they’re poisoning the blood of the nation,” or “diversity programs are discriminatory,” or “we need to engage in mass deportation,” or “anti-DEI” programs in order to save the nation—we’re hearing great replacement theory.Bacon: Is there a place it originated, or is it a more recent phenomenon, or has it been existing a long time but proliferated in the last decade or so?Kendi: So a French novelist named Renaud Camus named the theory with a book he entitled The Great Replacement in 2011. And ideas are different than people, and ideas can live for quite some time before anyone names them. This is an idea that really emerged in its totality in the late nineteenth century, when you had some colonial officials thinking that if decolonization ever came—if African people who were colonized, or Latin Americans, or even Asian folks were to free themselves—these colonial officials imagined that they wouldn’t stop there, that they would then try to come and colonize Europe and engage in displacement and genocides, and essentially do to Europeans what had been done to them.What’s ironic about that origin story is even Camus, writing in 2011, and again in 2018 when he wrote a book, You Will Not Replace Us—he described the so-called great replacement as counter-colonization.Bacon: So in the U.S., I think the obvious example is the tiki torch–holding students at the University of Virginia in 2017. That’s when I thought about this, because they actually said, “You will not replace us.” But give other examples of where you’re seeing this play out.Kendi: We can go all the way back to 2011. That is the year in which ... the sixth link in the chain of ideas is this notion that white Christians are indigenous to the nation. And when I say the sixth link—the chain of ideas is organized around these 10 ideas that are the building blocks for great replacement theory.This idea that white Christians are indigenous to the nation and everyone else, no matter how long they’ve been here, are eternally immigrants, and certainly not American, is one of the ideas that undergirded birtherism, [which] of course Donald Trump expressed first in 2011. That was also the year when a group of scholars and scientists in New England found that white people had recognized Black progress, but the majority of white people that they surveyed believed that Black progress had come at white expense. They empirically found the existence of what’s known as zero-sum theory, which is also a foundational idea within great replacement theory—an idea that has been relentlessly debunked.Bacon: How does it play out in other countries? Because ... it’s not white versus Black, or white versus people of color, [like] in the U.S.Kendi: So what I found is that even as Renaud Camus and even maybe a Donald Trump positioned and conceived of these as a racist theory in which Black people were replacing white people—it’s mutated. And it’s mutated to not just a racist theory. It’s mutated to be an ethnocentric theory, whereby in a country like India, Modi, the prime minister, is positioning the Muslim minorities as replacing the Hindu majority.Or similarly in nearby China, in which it’s imagined that Chinese Muslims are replacing and displacing the Han majority, so they’re being actually rounded up in concentration camps. In other countries, it may be the minoritized ethnic group that’s positioned as a replacer.Or in a country like Russia, whereby Putin has described queer people as replacing the traditional values of Russian Christians. Or gender. In the U.S. context, like in other countries, it’s imagined that “gender ideology,” as they call it—another term for feminist ideas, or ideas that express equality between queer people and cisgender and heterosexual people—that those are destroying the nation. Or white women who decide not to have three or four children are contributing to declining birth rates, which is leading to the replacement of white people.Bacon: Does this depend on demographic change, or is it almost distinct from that? Because in the U.S. we’ve had a growing population of people of color, so there is a numerical case for changes—not necessarily that you’re being replaced, but ... does this theory depend on change, or is it more a feeling of change that people are expressing, that they’re really opposing?Kendi: Again, going back to Renaud Camus—in writing and conceiving of great replacement theory, he acknowledged that data and science were not necessarily on his side. He more or less told his readers to not really look to science or data to describe what is happening—that instead you should look to how you feel.Bacon: OK.Kendi: I’m literally sort of quoting him. This is not a theory that makes logical sense. Even if you take the United States, which has the largest foreign-born population in the entire world—86 percent of people in the United States were born in the United States. And in the European Union, 91 percent of residents in the European Union were born in the European Union, even as it’s being described as being taken over and invaded by “African migrants” who are mostly Muslims.Bacon: The book is called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. So connect the ideas with authoritarianism.... Why does replacement theory lead to authoritarianism?Kendi: When you can make a group of people—or even a person—believe that their lives are under attack, that they’re indeed facing a genocide, that their jobs are being stolen, that their electoral power is being taken away, that apparently their elections are being stolen, that their culture is being eroded, that their nation is being lost—it allows you to then turn around and claim that you are going to be their savior and their protector.What’s happened around the world is the way in which these politicians have gone about being people’s protectors and saviors has been creating these militarized, heavily policed states with some of the largest forms of kidnapping and incarceration in the world, while simultaneously taking away the rights and freedoms of the very people they’re claiming they want to protect. The authoritarian states become justified on the notion that in order to protect you from these losses, I have to apparently do away with democracy.Bacon: Does Donald Trump—just to give an example—think there’s a replacement happening, or is he just weaponizing that? Does he know there’s not? Does he think there is? Is he weaponizing it? What’s the agency of people who are used in milking this idea? Do they know they’re lying, or is it more unconscious? I know you think it doesn’t really matter—we’ll come back to that. But do they know they’re lying, or is it more unconscious?Kendi: As a historian of ideas, this is always a tricky subject, because I can only truly, as a scholar, convey that this is what the person said, as opposed to ... it’s always tricky when I say, This is what the person truly believes. We really don’t know what a person believes. So I actually don’t know.What I do know is that many of these authoritarians, like Donald Trump, claim that they are against mass migration when they engage in or support policies—or even attack countries—that destabilize them, which then leads to migration. Many of these politicians are heavily funded by some of the wealthiest people in the world who are also heavily investing in AI and other new technologies that are leading to jobs being taken from the very people who they’re trying to get to believe that their jobs are being taken by immigrants, Black people, and Muslims. I certainly know it’s an effective strategy to hoodwink and distract people, but whether people are true believers is not something I necessarily know.Bacon: So I asked about leaders, and you said that’s not certain, but there’s some polling suggesting actual, white working-class voters—to be very reductive—in the U.S. do believe this, even if it’s not true. What about the people who are being influenced? Are they being hoodwinked? Do they actually know the demographics of America? You go to Ohio ... you can go to a Trump rally, you’ll find people who say, Black people get all these jobs and so on, but they work at companies; they know who’s in charge of the company, I think. So is this playing into latent biases? Do they really think they’re being replaced, in terms of the average person?Kendi: This is one of the reasons why I not only wanted to write about the history of great replacement theory, but I wanted to break it down into its component parts. If we think of zero-sum theory—that if Black people are making progress, then I’m losing out as a white person—what that means is if you have a huge minority of Black people in your particular company, people could still perceive that two percent as taking from them, or that single Black person in a position of power in their space as somehow an indication that opportunities are being lost to you.There’s also an emphasis, as I write about in Chain of Ideas, on defining racism as essentially interpersonal discrimination. What happens is it compels a white working-class person to say, if they didn’t get access to housing or that job, it’s because they’re white, even if there’s no evidence to support it.Bacon: I remember in The History of Racist Ideas, in the conclusion, you had this part in which ... you argued basically that you have a society where there’s all this inequality based on race, so racist ideas are in some ways invoked to justify this. In some ways the racist policies lead to racist ideas. Is there a similar interplay here?Kendi: I think so. I think the authoritarianism and the erosion of democracy is being justified via great replacement theory. I also think the policies that are allowing for growing amounts of economic inequality are being covered up via great replacement theory. What it’s allowing is an economic and political class to continue their, frankly, hoarding of power, and then getting the very people who they’re taking power and rights from—like they are the rest of us—to believe that they’re actually protecting and saving them.It’s also operating among cultural workers. These are people who are writing or philosophizing or covering—there have been many people who are white and male, who feel that their opportunities are being lost at the hands of those Black thinkers and writers and intellectuals who they imagine are receiving preferential treatment, or they’re talking about an issue like racism that isn’t that important. So there’s also an anxiety and a resentment there. That’s why in Chain of Ideas I talked about how even as great replacement theory is primarily identified as a far-right theory, it has also infiltrated centrist and even leftist spaces.Bacon: This idea of zero-sum—you’ve mentioned it a couple of times now—sort of rings true. What makes people think that way, and is there a way to get them to stop thinking that way?Kendi: It is such an old idea. I even wrote about how Thomas Jefferson articulated this idea in his Notes on the State of Virginia. He argued for gradual emancipation, but then argued for colonization of Black people back to Africa, and argued that if Black people remained and were given their rights, there would be a perpetual race war. I want to emphasize: This is an idea as old as the United States, in the U.S. context.But I talked about in Chain of Ideas what’s known as positive-sum theory, which is the notion that as that other group gains, my group gains. When you look at the history of the United States and the times in which we have instituted equitable and just policies, the majority even of white people benefited more than they benefited from the privileges that came along with racist policies and practices.Bacon: The 1960s ... Social Security, most Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, all at the same time, essentially. You mentioned the symbolism—how much in the U.S. is this like, we have a Black president, so therefore that creates the idea? If Hillary Clinton had been president—well, she’s a woman—if Joe Biden had been president in 2008 forward, would this have taken off in the U.S. the way it did?Kendi: Probably not. As I write about in Chain of Ideas, in 2008 there were two major historical events that allowed these theorists and politicians to really capitalize on these situations and spread great replacement theory. One was the Great Recession, in which they were able to tie people’s economic struggles to immigrants, Black people, and Muslims. But also the election of Barack Obama—these theorists at that time positioned this one Black man being elected to the presidency as an indication that Black people in general had taken over the entire United States. Frankly, they argued that Black people had taken over the world. That became a trigger for the spread of great replacement theory.Bacon: If you don’t mind, connect the three books ... I haven’t read this book yet—but connect the Racist Ideas book, How to Be an Antiracist, Chain of Ideas. What are you trying to do as an intellectual project, if you don’t mind me asking?Kendi: The way that they’re connected is: Stamped from the Beginning chronicles the history of anti-Black racist ideas—from their origins in 15th-century Portugal to 2008. So the narrative ends in 2008. The narrative of Chain of Ideas largely begins in 2008 and comes to 2025, and chronicles that the most dominant anti-Black racist idea in the world today is great replacement theory. So it extends that history. Instead of taking a holistic look at a number of different types of anti-Black racist ideas, it looks at one specific one, in terms of great replacement theory, which also happens to be the most dominant bigoted idea and political theory in the world today.What’s striking [with] great replacement theorists: You take somebody like Camus writing in 2011—even in You Will Not Replace Us in 2018—he argued as early as 2011 that the force that was bringing on the great replacement was anti-racism. He has relentlessly argued that it was anti-racism, apparently, that he imagined was genocidal, was harmful to white people, was harmful to the world. I didn’t know, when I was writing How to Be an Antiracist, that I was walking into this building storm that was coming to really engulf any of us who were actually showing what anti-racism has the capacity to do—which is ensure democracy, ensure equality, ensure equity for everyone.Bacon: I am glad you moved to that, because the backlash—I don’t love the term “backlash,” I think the term “countermobilization” is better, because it actually describes what happened—but we’re almost six years from when a lot of people I know bought your book How to Be an Antiracist. I’m not sure if they all read it, but they were suddenly walking around with it, and they were purchasing it, and that was a useful thing, I thought. But by the end of the next three years, the book was banned by all these legislators, banned from classrooms, criticized by every Republican politician I can think of, and so on. What have you made of what’s happened—with your writing, but also Nikole Hannah-Jones’s writing, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing? I hate the term “racial reckoning,” but we had something that happened in 2020, and then these last five years we’ve seen the ideas be suppressed and banned. What have you made of that, as someone who’s experienced it personally?Kendi: It’s been interesting. The level of political force that has come down to discredit us as authors—and even to ban or restrict our books—what that says to me is that these individuals who did that did not feel comfortable having a robust conversation on the merits of the actual books, or even on the merits of our integrity as writers and journalists and scholars. Instead they had to figure out ways to get people to not take ... me or Nikole or Ta-Nehisi or others seriously, or to not read our books.One of the ways in which they went about doing that was positioning our work as harmful to the nation, as harmful to white people, even in certain cases harmful to Black people. I talk about in Chain of Ideas what I call the inversion of anti-racism—the ways in which these great replacement theorists inverted our work as somehow anti-white. This was happening at the same time they inverted feminism, they went about inverting LGBTQ activism as somehow anti-Christian. Really any thinker who is seeking to defend or advocate for a particular group has been positioned—I should say repositioned—as seeking to harm another group, which has been one of the driving forces of great replacement theory.But I should add this: Countermobilization, to use your term, didn’t just come at the hands of Republicans. It came at the hands of Democrats. It came at the hands of people who imagined themselves as progressive and radical, who had issues with people who weren’t themselves receiving spotlight or attention. I think we received it and were attacked really from all sides.Bacon: What does that mean for you now? You’re six years from that, you’re releasing a new book. Can you do anything about that? I see you’re being reviewed everywhere, so it’s not like you’ve disappeared. But has it affected how you present your ideas and how you go about promoting them and talking about what you’re seeing and what you’re researching?Kendi: One thing I will say is when you are a writer or a scholar who is under scrutiny, it becomes that much more important to ensure that you’re fact-checking, to give an example. The intensity of the fact-checking that we did for Chain of Ideas was unlike any book that I had done. We wanted to ensure that it may not have been perfect in terms of facts, but we damn near tried to make it such. Even as a scholar, knowing that I’m writing on, frankly, propaganda, I didn’t want to—I also know the ways in which my work has been misinterpreted and misrepresented—I didn’t want to continue that age of misrepresentation. By doing that, I was very careful in trying to ensure I was representing the words of people accurately and citing those speeches and articles, and putting the entire note section for Chain of Ideas online so that people can click through the speech for themselves.Bacon: I’ll finish here: We’re about to start a Democratic presidential primary—a lot of people are running for president. What I observe is a lot of the candidates now feel like they can’t discuss race or gender or identity or LGBT issues. There’s something called “wokeness,” something called “identity politics,” and these things are bad. Even the people I like—the AOCs, the Ro Khanna’s—are being advised: Don’t touch any issue that doesn’t affect white men the same as anybody else. Those of us who think there is racism, there is sexism, there is homophobia, there is Islamophobia—what should the rest of us be doing? Because I get the sense the politicians we vote for are no longer going to speak about these issues honestly.Kendi: Certainly we should, as everyday people, never look to our politicians to eradicate racism. We should always be organizing among ourselves and simultaneously organizing and mobilizing and pushing them to represent our interests.But if there is a candidate for the Democratic Party that does not talk about racism and sexism and Islamophobia and xenophobia, it’s highly likely that candidate is going to lose.We have seen all over the world, and I document this in Chain of Ideas, that when candidates who are opposing these great replacement politicians—when they either adopt some of their ideas, in the way the Democratic Party did in 2024 by saying that it was more equipped to engage in border security, or they just don’t demonstrate how the racism and sexism that party is engaged in is harming everyone—when they don’t do that, they lose. That’s why these great replacement politicians are surging all over the world.Can you imagine in any other field or posture of competition where someone has a very specific strategy that is winning, and you’re being advised: You can’t counter that? It’s very difficult for you to win in any capacity. There’s a way to counter it while also not saying to white men: You are the oppressors. There’s a way to counter it by saying: White men, you’re being manipulated and hoodwinked too. They’re distracting you from those super-wealthy white men who are actually taking your jobs, through racist ideas, to convince you that those women and people of color are taking your jobs.Bacon: I’m glad you said that, because I’ve read your books, I’ve read TNC and Nicole; I’ve read a lot of authors who write about racism and so on. This idea that they’re all portraying white men as oppressors—I don’t think that’s a line I read in How to Be an Antiracist. Is this because white people have more numbers and power than we do? I’ve read these books. People who didn’t read these books have created this narrative about them that we can’t debunk. Is that just purely a numbers game? What do you think happened here? Kendi: I think it’s a number of different factors. One, it’s an assumption that people have. They assume that if someone is attacking racism, then they must be attacking white people. And maybe because they themselves know how responsible white people are—Bacon: They think we will oppress. This is what the subtext is.Kendi: Exactly. But I also think that there are some writers who are saying those things, and so what’s happening is they conflate the people who are saying them with the people who are not saying that. To give an example—my book How to Be an Antiracist was oftentimes conflated with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, in which she did say that pretty much all white people are racist. There were things on which we had obvious disagreements on.But what oftentimes happens—particularly when you have a popular book by a white author and a popular book by a Black author—is the ideas that are expressed by the white author become the norm that’s applied to the Black author, and then people end up critiquing the Black author as if he or she said those things. I think that those ideas do exist and they have been misapplied. I also think it really is a projection—you have people who are deeply racist and who are white who believe that if we’re challenging racism, we must be challenging them. And actually, we are—because they’re racist, not because they’re white.Bacon: We’ve had a discussion about ideas that are not positive, and a theory of the world that we wish was eradicated. I hate to ask the question, but do you see anything—I’ve been encouraged by the Palestinian protests, the protest movement that has emerged, which is not necessarily about a racial idea but is a call for equality. A lot of the people involved in that have been reading your books. A lot of people who were involved in the 2020 protests supported Mayor Mamdani and are also involved in the Palestinian protests. Are there any things like that you see positively happening—where people are hearing the right ideas and acting on them—that you see in your work or your travels?Kendi: I do. I see, for instance, people in the United States not falling for the propaganda of this administration about the war in Iran that, of course, the U.S. and Israel are waging. To me that’s a positive development. That antiwar impulse—and, frankly, anti-genocide impulse—that galvanized many people when Israel was bombing Gaza, is now, to a certain extent, extending to this U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which is to me a good development, because people are recognizing the nuance. You can simultaneously see the ways in which this regime in Iran is an authoritarian regime, while at the same time recognizing the authoritarianism regimes in the United States and Israel, and be like: All of y’all have issues, and we’re opposing, in certain ways, all of you—but we’re also opposing the aggressors in this particular situation. People are recognizing that nuance. That to me is positive, because this is a very complicated situation and people are learning and expressing those complications.Bacon: Ibram, thanks for joining me—congrats on another great book, and on all your work. I’m so honored to talk to you. You’ve done some very important work these last few years, so thanks for the time. Good to see you.Kendi: Of course. Thank you for having me.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208939/transcript-racist-theory-poisoning-politics-across-world

Nostr event nevent1qqsynmvmv2frseamctsnqqnrwjlgfx20y837dgtxdwjsg35kf4f2ynszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqju3xlvg

2026-04-13T20:38:01Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Trump administration is continuing to punish immigration judges who impede its deportation agenda.Judge Roopal Patel ruled in January that the administration did not have sufficient evidence to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student studying at Tufts University on an F-1 student visa. On Friday, Patel received a pink slip, formally pushing her out of the federal judiciary. Patel told The Boston Globe that she was not sure if her ruling in Öztürk’s case had affected her tenure. The White House has made it all too clear that immigration is a top priority for Donald Trump’s second term legacy. Under ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department massively reshifted its resources towards arresting and prosecuting non-criminal immigrants, dropping tens of thousands of criminal probes in the process.Immigration court is the final step of that process before the Trump administration can legally thrust the people out of the country, though the admin has not seemed to understand the limitations of the law. Instead, the DOJ has attempted to ram cases through the system in an attempt to meet the White House’s demands, placing an enormous and unusual burden on America’s judges.“It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” Patel told The New York Times. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”But Patel was not the only judge suddenly ousted from their job on Friday. Six federal judges were fired at the end of last week, a U.S. official confirmed to the Times. Four of those were probationary discharges, according to the official. One of the other immigration judges dismissed on Friday was Nina Froes, a Massachusetts judge who oversaw the government’s case against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student leader at Columbia University and green card holder that protested against Israel’s war on Gaza.Froes ultimately ruled against Mahdawi’s deportation last April, despite an aggressive pressure campaign fronted by State Secretary Marco Rubio to push the West Bank refugee out of the country. Rubio at one point argued that Mahdawi’s presence in the U.S. could “potentially undermine” U.S. foreign policy.Froes was similarly unsure if her ruling in the Mahdawi case had affected her job stability.“I don’t know what’s in the minds of other people,” she told the Times. “But I can’t imagine it was helpful.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/209009/donald-trump-fires-judges-blocked-deportations-pro-palestine-students

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2026-04-13T16:39:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump has deleted a post containing an AI image of himself as Jesus after backlash from his supporters and religious leaders. The Truth Social post showed an illustration of the president, in the style of art usually found in Bibles, dressed in white in a red shawl with light emanating from him while he healed a sick man in a bed wearing a hospital gown. In the picture, Trump is surrounded by men and women, all white, while the background is full of soldiers, fighter jets, a bald eagle, a waving American flag, and the Statue of Liberty.Shortly after deleting the image, he made a lame attempt to play dumb, saying that while he did initially post it, “I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker there which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.”Reporter: Did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?Trump: It wasn't a depiction. I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor. And had to do with red cross as a red cross worker, which we support and only the fake news could come up with that one. pic.twitter.com/7Y1u86GjkP— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2026Various figures on the right, including evangelical Christians and right-wing media personalities, decried the picture as blasphemous. Sean Feucht, who has performed worship music at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and the White House, called on the photo to be “deleted immediately.” Christian influencer Mandy Arthur posted on X that “we have made a mistake and accidently elected the Antichrist. Send help.”Anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines also chimed in, saying that “a little humility would serve [Trump] well” and “God shall not be mocked.” Conservative Christian commentator Megan Basham called the post “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy” and called on Trump “to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.” Trump has not endeared himself to his Christian supporters in recent days, drawing ire from Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals alike. After a report emerged last week that his administration apparently threatened Pope Leo XIV in January, Trump doubled down on Sunday and attacked the pontiff further, calling him “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”The pope deflected Trump’s comments on Monday, saying that he wasn’t afraid of the president and that he “will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, ⁠promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions to problems.”“Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way to do this,” the pope added. This post alienated Christians of all denominations, even the right-wing conservatives in his base. But Trump doesn’t seem to care, and has enjoyed being compared to Jesus before, most recently at an Easter lunch at the White House by his spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain. The president has never rushed to correct anyone praising him, no matter how excessive. This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208999/trump-deletes-ai-jesus-photo-maga-uproar

Nostr event nevent1qqsfr4mwgm0gtvdpn7g88sjmahdkjy4teeps39veuvhfwsrt8m7tv3szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjtdw9ej

2026-04-13T12:29:39Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance treated Hungary’s election like it was a U.S. Senate race in the United States. Vance flew to Budapest to campaign alongside Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He even called Trump at one of Orbán’s rallies, and while on speakerphone the American president told a crowd that Orbán had done “a fantastic job.” The president repeatedly urged Hungarians to back Orbán in his social posts. But on Sunday, Orban’s Fidesz Party lost resoundingly in the Hungarian elections, ending Orban’s 16-year reign as prime minister. Opposition party Tisza is projected to win more than two thirds of the 199 seats in Hungary’s parliament. This is a huge victory for liberal and pro-democracy voices not only in Hungary, but across the world. Orban is an intellectual leader of the global far-right movement that has reshaped politics around the world over the last decade. He and his allies have come up with strategies to weaken the judiciary, the media, academia, and other independent sources of power in Hungary that Trump and other leaders around the world have then implemented in their countries. It’s also another huge defeat for Trump. Candidates that Trump supports have been losing elections across the United States over the last year, Now, his losing streak has crossed the Atlantic. It’s important to emphasize that Hungary’s voters probably didn’t go to the polls thinking about Trump or the global fight for democracy. Fidesz lost for the normal reasons that political parties do. A corruption scandal, centered around a pardon issued by some of Orban’s allies in 2023, created deep public frustration with the party. Hungary’s economy is struggling. Tisza and its leader Péter Magyar—no one’s idea of a liberal crusader—ran a smart campaign that unified people who were tired of Orban and Fidesz.And while parties and leaders in other countries, particularly Canada, have successfully leaned into anti-Trump sentiment, that wasn’t the case in Hungary. Vance and Trump interjected themselves into the race because there was some chance it would help. After all, 53 percent of adults in Hungary said they had confidence in Trump doing the “right thing” regarding foreign affairs in a Pew Research Center poll conducted last year. That number was significantly higher than other European nation. But even if this election wasn’t a referendum on democracy, far-right politics, or Trump, it’s still cause for celebration. Orban wasn’t just an autocrat—he was inventing new methods of autocracy. He was a huge proponent of the anti-immigrant, anti-multiculturalism, anti-European Union, anti-liberal politics that has taken hold among conservatives in the United States and Europe. He was beloved by Trump and Vladimir Putin, perhaps the two most destructive world leaders of this century. It’s great this man is out of power. And while Trump’s candidate in Hungary losing an election doesn’t do much for those of us in the United States, it’s another indication that neither the United States nor the rest of the world are destined to adopt right-wing authoritarianism. We are far from the dark days of 2024, when far-right parties made huge gains in the European Parliament elections, and Trump was elected in the United States a few months later. Now Trump is deeply unpopular. Republican candidates are losing or underperforming everywhere. Far-right politicians in Italy, France, and Germany are increasingly keeping their distance from the American president, aware that their publics hate him. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is getting international acclaim for bashing Trump. Let me not overstate my case. It is not clear how committed Tisza and Magyar are to reestablishing democratic norms in Hungary. Orbán (or Fidez with a new leader), could regain power, as Trump did after his 2020 defeat. Far-right parties could still win elections in Britain and France in the next few years, giving Trump-style politics an even bigger beachhead in Europe than controlling Hungary. And Trump’s growing unpopularity at home and abroad didn’t stop him from going to war in Iran and further destabilizing the Middle East. The American presidency is a hugely powerful job, and Trump still has almost three years to wreak havoc from the Oval Office. All that said, we can still appreciate this moment. The vice president of the United States made the virtually unprecedented move of flying to another country on the eve of their election to explicitly campaign for a particular candidate. That candidate lost, badly. Embarrassing. Humiliating. Couldn’t have happened to someone (Vance) more deserving of shame and ridicule. From California to Wisconsin to Canada to Hungary, being Donald Trump’s candidate these days is a path to defeat. Scholars describe Hungary and increasingly the United States as “electoral autocracies.” That second word matters. But so does the first. Elections are proving to be a critical check on aspiring autocrats around the world. Good riddance Viktor Orbán—and may his friend JD get the same treatment in 2028.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208975/orban-lost-hungary-election-trump-vance

Nostr event nevent1qqsvvuuwwyrx6zdenqzr0yfjsvcpyzmzh5n7j39csmh8easzf8pakfqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjga5lpr

2026-04-13T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

In a small corridor near the governor’s office at the Idaho State Capitol last week, state and local police officers stood in formation, blocking the public from approaching a public restroom. Inside, two state police officers had taken up a position beside two white pedestal sinks, their uniforms a strange contrast to the white marble tiled walls. One announced that those people remaining in the toilet stalls were “trespassing.” Not long after, officers walked each person out of the bathroom and into the corridor, cuffed their wrists behind their backs, and took them away, some still chanting, “Trans rights are human rights.”Two days earlier, Governor Brad Little had signed into law the most punitive anti-trans bathroom bill in the United States, banning “knowingly and willfully” entering a bathroom or changing room “that is designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person”—with penalties including up to one year in jail for a first offense, “essentially making it a misdemeanor for trans people to use the bathroom that aligns with their identity,” said Scar Rulien, a board member at Trans Affirm, a statewide trans rights group. Subsequent offenses could result in felony charges and up to five years in prison. “The bill doesn’t ban illegal activity in a bathroom,” Rulien told me. “It makes a new crime out of something.” The ban is not yet in effect. The arrests last week were the culmination of a protest against the law—resulting in six charges of misdemeanor trespass and two charges of resisting arrest—but they were a preview of what trans Idahoans may soon face.Laws endangering transgender and nonbinary communities are now so common. Dozens are introduced every legislative session in many states: banning bathroom use, prohibiting gender-affirming care for young people, forcing schools to out trans students, denying changes to government-issued identity documents. The onslaught from anti-trans lawmakers is now so constant that it may be hard to remember that just ten years ago, it was not like this. Human Rights Campaign identified 55 anti-trans laws introduced across the United States, with three passing, in 2015. The next year, when North Carolina passed an anti-trans bathroom ban, there was national resistance from civil rights groups to professional sports organizations and corporations. A narrative began to take hold: Republicans had gone too far, and such bans were costly, extreme, and politically reckless. As North Carolina news outlet The Assembly marked the anniversary of the bathroom ban, it reminded readers that the state’s attorney general called the bill “a national embarrassment” and that Trump, during his 2016 campaign, said North Carolina was “paying a big price” for the law.Now, in 2026, when Idaho’s legislature has passed the country’s most comprehensive and most punitive bathroom ban, the national response feels comparatively muted. There were no calls for boycotts from major organizations, as the NAACP had in North Carolina. Bruce Springsteen did not cancel shows. PayPal—a company co-founded by the gay neoreactionary Peter Thiel—did not threaten to take its business out of state, as the company had done when it withdrew a planned expansion to Charlotte. Bathroom bans have since proliferated, but very few threaten trans people with arrest as Idaho has. While Florida, Kansas, and Utah have bathroom bans with some criminal penalties in some public bathrooms, Idaho has the only ban extending such penalties to any “place of public accommodation.” The bill was opposed by a range of groups and interests, from Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates–Idaho to the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police. It was not even the state’s first bathroom ban; the first was in 2023, targeting students, then was expanded to colleges and universities in 2025, and now has been expanded to all bathrooms, and for the first time criminalizes trans people themselves. Legal challenges to both those bans have already been brought by trans students in Idaho, represented by Lambda Legal. “We are tremendously concerned about the new law that criminalizes transgender people for ordinary restroom use,” said Kell Olson, counsel and strategist at Lambda Legal in a statement this week. “We are talking to people across the state whose daily lives are being affected.” Given all this, it is unnerving to witness something like public acquiescence despite Idahoans’ loud and persistent resistance to the bathroom ban, just one among a host of other anti-trans laws passed this year in the state. As if to make the point for the public, Governor Little signed the bathroom ban into law on Transgender Day of Visibility, as trans Idahoans rallied outside the Capitol. “We were in our own world,” said Rulien of Trans Affirm, who had co-organized the rally. “We were in the moment.”“The law doesn’t go into effect until July 1, but the trans community is already feeling the anxiety,” said Preston Pace, an activist and co-founder of the group Trans Joy Boise. The message had been sent: The state’s government was officially excluding trans people from civic life. “We’re already starting to see the public try to enforce these things, and getting aggressive with people in public restrooms,” Pace told me by phone this week. In hearings on the ban, state Senator Brandon Shippy claimed the bill doesn’t target trans people because trans people are not mentioned in the bill. “There is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here,” said Shippy. “Because there is only male and female.” He called the trans community a “myth.” When the opposition claims they have none, why would they entertain testimony at all? Shippy said in 2025 that he had voted against that year’s bathroom ban because to do so would affirm that trans people existed.The hearings, such as they were, were rushed affairs, with limited public comment. In one Senate committee, testimony was cut off after only five people spoke (two in support, three against). “We see this tactic happening a lot,” said Rulien. “Push them to the end of the session so that they can justify not giving them an adequate hearing.” Rulien testified against the bill, and as they told me (and told the panel considering the bathroom ban bill), “This is the second time I’ve testified against this exact same thing.” Both Pace and Rulien were clear about what little they can expect from the legislature. “When we go to the hearings, we go into them knowing they are going to pass anyway,” said Pace. When they prepare what they’ll say about a bill, Rulien told me, what advocates are asking themselves is, “how are we going to frame our testimony so that when this goes to court, it can potentially be overturned? Because that’s the only real reality for us to win in these deep red states.”This is not at all uncommon. In 2021, I met a Texas middle schooler who had already testified against three sessions worth of anti-trans bills that targeted her education and her medical care. Any anti-trans strategy that Republicans introduce in one state predictably spreads to another, and another. Idaho has been dealing with this for a long time, too: In 2020, they were the first state to adopt a blanket ban on trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports. With the Republicans’ supermajority in the legislature nearly guaranteeing passage of anti-trans laws, the fight isn’t even really about those lawmakers. It isn’t really about the law at all. “We go to show that there are people that are fighting against this,” Pace explained, “and to also show other people in the trans community that we are fighting for you.”In addition to local organizations such as Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise, new media outlets in Idaho are now regularly reporting on anti-trans legislative developments and community resistance at the Capitol. Idaho activist and independent journalist Jaewon Lee livestreamed the bathroom protest on their Boise Blackbirds Instagram. When we spoke this week, Lee told me that he only really got into activism after Trump’s re-election. “I’m noticing kind of a pecking order here,” he told me, “where you have immigrants being targeted, trans people being targeted.” Lee is a naturalized citizen, and at least for now, they told me, being involved in activism feels safer than it might be for immigrants without that status. “I felt an obligation to get out there, and say, I’m somebody who is on that pecking order.” Lee realized they weren’t alone in that, that they were seeing people who said, as he put it, “we’re gonna show up wherever we can and do what whatever we can, not only for the queer community but for immigrant community.” By now, they’ve been seeing “a lot of familiar faces coming together.” Lee is one of the very few people who is keeping that record in real-time.The same week as the bathroom arrests at the Capitol, a group of activists held a sit-in in Governor Little’s office, requesting a meeting and demanding he veto the bathroom ban, along with a bill that would force teachers to out trans students to their parents. Lee noticed that the people there were really active in the community, and were coming from different causes, “we understand there’s a lot of overlap, and the things we are standing up for in Idaho against white Christian nationalism right now.” At the governor’s office sit-in, he saw many of the people involved were faith leaders, who wanted to confront Christian nationalism, as well. Preston Pace was there, too, but wasn’t one of those arrested. “Being in that setting, surrounded mostly by allies, which consisted of a lot of older, cis white church women,” they told me. “Having these people so willing to not only stand up for our rights and protect us, and put themselves between us and danger was incredibly moving.”One of those arrested, Nikson Mathews, spoke at a Trans Day of Visibility rally at the Capitol, telling supporters how important it was to show up, “in front of this building when year after year they continue to bring bills that try to remove us from public space and remove us from our public lives.” When Mathews offered testimony opposing the bathroom ban in the House, like Rulien, it was far from the first time he testified against a bathroom ban in the state. “In the past five years this body has passed 17 laws targeting trans rights,” he said, noting that five were introduced this session. “When is it enough? When do we reach the point when it’s been enough?”Republican lawmakers were not content merely to file and pass as many of these bills as they have. They also tried to keep opposition off the record, voting to suppress a report by Democrats on the likely harms of a the forced outing bill—“a dangerous bill,” the ACLU of Idaho said in a statement, “that would require trusted adults, such as teachers and counselors, to monitor children for signs that they are not conforming to gender stereotypes.” The Democrats’ report attempted to get on the record objections that will be important when the law is enforced or challenged, such as it lacking any “safety exception for children at knowable risk of abuse, homelessness, or parental violence” and creating “compelled speech obligations that conflict with professional ethical and legal duties,” among other concerns. House Republicans “do not want Idahoans to see the serious legal, constitutional, and practical problems this bill creates,” said House Democratic leader Ilana Rubel.In his testimony, Nikson Mathews pressed the lawmakers to think through what the bathroom ban meant for trans people, “what this law forces me to do,” he said. “It forces me to use the women’s bathroom,” where people would see a bearded young man enter, in apparent violation of the law. What if someone took enforcement into their own hands, attacking a “man” in a “woman’s bathroom”?“It’s worth noting that based on existing Idaho code”—Mathews offered a sheaf of printed pages—”if I were assaulted, that person would face a lighter punishment than I would for using the men’s bathroom.” The law becomes an instrument for creating public spaces where violence against trans people is more likely, and where such violence was deemed less worthy of punishment than a trans person’s mere presence. Mathews would thus be left to choose, as he put it: “Do I feel like going to jail today? Or do I feel like being attacked?” Given the experiences of trans people in jails and prisons, the likelihood that someone arrested under this law would also be attacked while in custody is also high, notwithstanding the violence of the arrest itself.Hours before Little signed the bathroom ban on March 31, he signed a petty and mean-spirited law banning Pride flags on government buildings. That day, Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise were also recognized with a proclamation by Boise’s Democratic mayor, Lauren McLean. The contrast is too obvious to dwell on for long, but that night Boise City Hall was lit magenta, blue, and violet to mark Trans Day of Visibility, even as its Pride flag had been removed by state decree. Since then, “the mayor has kind of maliciously complied,” Scar Rulien told me, “and they have put a giant rainbow up,” inside and visible in the window. The City Hall flagpoles are also now wrapped in Pride colors.Idaho Republicans are not stopping any time soon, but the session is done for the year, offering some time to regroup and ready for the next one. “I know the reality of how red it is in Idaho, and at times, it is a losing battle,” Pace told me. Pace is headed out of state soon—but not for good, as many trans Idahoans have had to do. Pace is going to attend law school, so they can return “and help continue the fight.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/208968/idaho-trans-bathroom-ban-republican-anti-lgbtq-laws

Nostr event nevent1qqsfpx38a6tf0jqvrpkphp6va3rjqnefg2u4y98sc45fes25m4sd34szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjza7cey

2026-04-10T19:00:08Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump’s administration admitted that it spread faulty claims of health care fraud in New York state, raising questions about the federal government’s crusade to cut waste in Democratic states across the country, according to an exclusive report from the Associated Press Friday. Last month, Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host Trump picked to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), claimed that last year, New York’s Medicaid program had provided five million people—nearly three-fourths of the state’s 6.8 million enrollees—with personal care services, meaning housekeeping, grooming, and meal preparation.Oz announced on March 3 that CMS would launch a federal investigation into the apparent fraud. “Heart surgeons are trained to look at the numbers. When something doesn’t add up, you don’t ignore it, you investigate,” he said. “And right now, the numbers coming out of New York’s Medicaid program don’t add up.” Apparently, they don’t add up because the ones Oz cited are just plain wrong. CMS spokesman Chris Krepich told the AP that the number of New Yorkers who used personal care services last year was closer to 450,000, or between 6 and 7 percent of the state’s Medicaid enrollees.He told the outlet that the agency had misidentified New York’s approach to applying billing codes. “CMS is committed to ensuring its analyses fully reflect state-specific billing practices and will continue to work closely with New York to validate data and strengthen program integrity oversight,” he said in an emailed statement.Despite this revelation, Krepich said that the federal investigation of New York state’s high health care spending is still ongoing. Health analysts have argued that the state’s spending reflects higher costs for service and policies committed to providing New Yorkers with at-home care. Not everyone is buying that this was an innocent mistake. Cadence Acquaviva, senior public information officer for the New York Department of Health, told the AP that Oz’s initial false claims about the program were “a targeted attempt to obscure the facts.” Fiscal Policy Institute senior health policy adviser Michael Kinnucan said the discrepancy “could have been cleared up in a phone call.” “It’s really slapdash,” he said.The CMS administrator appeared to make other false and misleading statements in his video on X. He claimed that New York had lowered the bar for receiving personal care services to include providing aid to people who are “easily distracted”—a phrase that does not appear among the program requirements that have only become more rigorous in the past year. New York is just one target of the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on supposed fraud in slue states. The Trump administration enjoys singling out Minnesota and California when discussing nationwide fraud, frequently equating the alleged fraud with its Democratic leadership, personified by Governors Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208961/donald-trump-dr-oz-new-york-fraud-investigation-medicaid

Nostr event nevent1qqs8ehq5grezd5xq8gfevpvaskc9nwweldm7hkcwtusrzcg3fxg8sdgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj0q3zvc

2026-04-10T17:04:30Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Kristi Noem might be fired soon from her latest position within the Trump administration.The former Homeland Security chief has barely put in a lick of work at her new government job, sparking questions about Noem’s ongoing tenure within the Trump administration, State Department officials told the Daily Mail.Noem was ousted from her position atop Homeland Security last month for playing a starring role in several major scandals, including a sprawling $220 million DHS advertising campaign that prominently featured her on horseback and reportedly funneled money into the pockets of her friends and allies. Her reputation—and consequently, Donald Trump’s immigration agenda—were also marred by the actions of ICE agents in Minnesota, where Noem’s subordinates killed two U.S. citizens in January.But despite the drama, Trump was not willing to let Noem exit his administration entirely. Instead, the president demoted her to the position of special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a multinational security coalition within the folds of the State Department formed two days after she was fired.So far, the bloc has not achieved much under Noem’s stewardship. At least four officials who followed Noem from DHS to the brand-new security coalition have been placed on administrative leave, unnamed sources told the Mail Thursday. The outbound officials include former deputy chief of staff Troup Hemenway, ex-deputy general counsel Giovanna Cinelli, and junior staffers Josh King and Octavian Miller.Noem, meanwhile, took just one meeting last week via teleconference, senior State Department officials told the British gossip tabloid.“This post was intended as a soft landing so it didn’t look like Noem was immediately being fired,” one State Department insider told the Mail. “But no one really thinks she should have this job. The State Department was not happy to have her here and the understanding is that she’s not going to be here for much longer.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208949/kristi-noem-not-showing-up-new-job

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2026-04-10T16:10:03Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump took time out of his day to specifically praise defense company Palantir, causing its stock to spike on Friday. “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” the president wrote on Truth Social, even going so far as to put Palantir’s market ticker symbol in the post. “Just ask our enemies!!! President DJT.” This blatant positive press for a private weapons manufacturer with multiple government contracts and extensive ties to the president profiting off the war he started once again raises questions of market manipulation. Last month, Trump postponed strikes on Iran just two hours before markets opened, causing skyrocketing oil prices to temporarily dip. At the time, Iran’s Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf referred to Trump’s Truth Social announcements as “a setup for profit-taking.” This move by Trump appears to be no different, and the market shows that.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208946/trump-praise-palantir-truth-social-stock-boost

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2026-04-10T14:40:40Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Trump administration is warning staffers not to bet on world events in futures markets. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House Management Office sent out a staff-wide email on March 24 telling administration employees not to engage in the practice following President Donald Trump’s announcement the previous day that he was pausing strikes against Iran. The email was likely prompted by the rise in suspicious wagers and investments being made just before Trump announces major policy decisions. Only 15 minutes before Trump announced the pause in bombing Iran, $760 million in oil futures contracts was traded in under two minutes. Three accounts in the prediction market Polymarket correctly bet on the timing of the Iran war ceasefire earlier this week, netting over $600,000. One of those accounts, with a 93 percent accuracy rate, was able to profit by betting on when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes would occur in 2024, 2025, and 2026. The timing of those bets raises the question of whether one of Trump’s staffers or associates is using insider information for profit. Online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket allow their customers to bet on everything from political events to sports, and suspicious bets have been going on for months. In January, one trader, who had only created their account in December, made $400,000 by betting that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power less than five hours before it actually happened. Israel arrested and charged two people, including a military reservist, in February for allegedly using classified information to make bets on Polymarket.Insider trading in the White House is a disturbing phenomenon, made worse by Trump’s embrace of corruption as president and because it’s an even more perverse form of war profiteering. It extends further than Polymarket or Kalshi, which are problematic in their own right, and could go all the way to the presidential Cabinet, as a broker for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth allegedly tried to invest millions of dollars in defense companies just before the U.S. began bombing Iran. One wonders if Trump himself is also engaged in insider trading, or if his corrupt Department of Justice even takes the issue seriously.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208929/white-house-stop-placing-bets-prediction-markets

Nostr event nevent1qqs2cp403j34dr4sh2y6ryf3cfsxxr06edx8842j2vhypyeyvmf2gtqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjt5vn5n

2026-04-10T14:32:17Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump just drove a wedge into the MAGA movement.The president reamed out several of his longtime acolytes Thursday, smearing ex-Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as far-right influencers Candace Owens and Alex Jones. The quartet had each issued their own condemnation of Trump’s warmongering rhetoric, slamming the president’s various promises to completely annihilate Iran as vile and unpresidential.And for once, Trump’s base was not willing to back him up in this fight. Instead, droves of MAGA supporters seemed shocked by the president’s sudden turn on his own political disciples, writing their own critiques of the president’s behavior under one of his Truth Social rants.“Trump just going against everyone that fought for him to win, just because of the Epstein files and being at war with Iran for Israel,” wrote a Truth Social user called Deportation News. “You had so much potential, Trump. Voted for you all three times, and I feel so betrayed.”“LOST MY SUPPORT,” responded user Mark Winslow.“As of last week, they’ve done nothing but make excuses for your behavior and you think they’re the enemy??? They are why I am a triple Trumper!” posted Misty. “Whoever is telling you this is very wrong!!!! They have been trying to tell you how a large percentage of Americans see things... I was confident that you knew what you were doing but this is truly SCARY.”The president posted 482 words to his Truth Social account Thursday afternoon, complaining that the four conservative commentators had been “fighting” him “for years” because of their “low IQs.” Trump further claimed that the MAGA-aligned media personalities were “stupid people” and that they “don’t have what it takes.” He also mentioned that he believed Owens was less attractive than the first lady of France, Brigitte Macron, who has sued the far-right podcaster over her repeated claims that Macron is transgender.But the mouthy tirade only seemed to inspire Trump’s voters to lose respect for him. In his Truth Social replies, supporters referred to Trump’s missive as “childish,” “rambling,” and “pathetic.”“What am I am hearing is your ego is so fragile you think anyone who questions any of your decisions is a low IQ person,” wrote Truth Social user shannstine. “Sir, statements like this say far more about you than them.”“You’re the terrorist that kills people for politics,” wrote user RealTedFrancis.“They’re fighting you because you sold us out,” posted another user on the platform, PapaSteve72. “We aren’t getting anything we voted for. No DOGE cuts, no mass deportations, no fraud and abuse getting cut, no arrests of pedofiles and traitors, and a brand new war nobody wanted and in fact voted explicitly against. You are an absolute failure and pathetic loser and I am so sorry I voted for you 3 times. I will never be tricked like this again. I’ve learned my lesson. Fuck you asshole!”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208922/donald-trump-fans-attack-far-right-influencers

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2026-04-10T14:28:13Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly convinced President Donald Trump not to include Lebanon in the United States’s ceasefire deal with Iran—even though the U.S. agreed to stop the bombing there. Trump was initially told that the ceasefire would apply to the entire Middle East region, including Lebanon, multiple diplomatic sources told CBS News Thursday. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, who helped mediate the plan, announced on X Tuesday that the U.S. and Iran had “agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere.” Lebanon was even included in the version of the deal originally circulated by the Trump administration. Trump then abruptly changed his position on Lebanon—following a phone call with Netanyahu, CBS News reported. Israel has waged an escalating military campaign in Lebanon using heavy munitions on densely populated areas, killing hundreds of civilians in its pursuit of Hezbollah. On Thursday, Netanyahu insisted that there was no ceasefire in Lebanon, as Israel launched a fresh round of strikes. The Trump administration has resorted to a sort of collective amnesia about the whole thing. Vice President JD Vance told reporters Wednesday that he believed there’d been a “legitimate misunderstanding” about the terms of the ceasefire. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted earlier that day that all parties were aware that a ceasefire in Lebanon was not included in the deal. A State Department official told CBS News that the U.S. will lead diplomatic talks between Israel and Lebanon. It’s not hard to guess how that could go. When the U.S. supposedly mediated the end of Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza, the Trump administration turned it into a lucrative real estate deal, while letting Israel continue its deadly strikes, oppression, and violent land grabs in the West Bank. Trump caving to Netanyahu threatens to upend the fragile ceasefire deal that Iran now claims the U.S. is violating by allowing Israel to continue strikes in Lebanon. Iranian media said that Tehran would continue to suspend traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and was considering pulling out of the deal with Washington altogether.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208925/donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu-ceasefire-lebanon

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2026-04-10T13:55:44Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Inflation has hit record highs in the U.S. thanks primarily to the war President Trump and Israel started on Iran. The most recent Consumer Price Index report reveals inflation rose by 3.3 percent in March from one year ago, with energy prices being hit particularly hard. Gas prices went up a record 21.2 percent in just one month, and energy prices rose 10.9 percent. Prices overall are up 0.9 percent through March, the biggest monthly spike since 2022. Meanwhile, the American Automobile Association reports that gas costs nearly 40 percent more than it did since the war began in February, and Americans are paying an average of $4.15 per gallon. All because Trump listened to war hawks telling him to bomb Iran, leading Iran to close one of the most vital trading routes in the world, and causing you personally to spend more of your income to fill up your tank.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208927/inflation-highest-level-years-trump-iran-war-gas

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2026-04-10T13:18:18Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse are angry with Melania Trump.Several of his victims released a statement blasting the first lady after her remarks in the White House Thursday attempting to distance herself from Epstein and calling for survivors to publicly testify before Congress. “Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony,” 15 of Epstein’s victims said in a statement in response. “Asking more of them is a deflection of responsibility, not justice.”The statement called out Trump for “shifting the burden onto survivors under politicized conditions that protect those with power: the Department of Justice, law enforcement, prosecutors, and the Trump administration, which has still not fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”“It also diverts attention from Pam Bondi, who must answer for withheld files and the exposure of survivors’ identities. Those failures continue to put lives at risk while shielding enablers,” the statement added. “Survivors have done their part. Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.” The first lady’s statement Thursday raised a number of questions, chief among them why she chose this moment to address her proximity to Epstein. Several of the files released from the government’s Epstein archive show her corresponding frequently with Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Her speech is only drawing more attention to an issue her husband, President Trump, has desperately tried to sweep under the rug. Survivors of Epstein’s crimes are correctly pointing out that the first lady’s goal in speaking out now is clearly self-serving.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208918/epstein-survivors-react-melania-trump-press-conference

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2026-04-10T13:14:52Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Multiple MAGA influencers are processing their public rebuke from President Trump, who called them out by name on Thursday, referring to them as “stupid people,” “nut jobs,” and “troublemakers.” Trump specifically called out Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, despite praising all of those people in the past.“Well, President Trump came out on Truth Social and attacked myself and all the original MAGA supporters today. And I’m just so sad that whatever’s happened to him has just changed the man he once was,” Jones said. “At the end of the day I just feel sorry for [Trump] and pray that God touched his heart and soul, and free him from the demonic influences that he’s under.... When Trump’s calling for wiping out whole civilizations and acting like a supervillain, I have to come out and say I don’t support it, it’s that simple.” Owens put it more succinctly. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” she wrote.“Go back to 2016, 2020, or even 2024. You’re a die-hard Trump supporter. You have to join one of two groups.Group A is Candace, Tucker, Alex, and Megyn. Group B is Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham, and Ted Cruz,” Owens collaborator Baron Coleman wrote. “Who changed?”“THAT DOES IT. I AM DONE. THIS WAS THE LAST STRAW,” MAGA podcaster Tim Pool seethed. “I’M SO ANGRY.”While Trump made some points in his rant— Owens and Jones are raging conspiracy theorists with despicable track records—they aren’t jumping ship because they suddenly don’t like him. Carlson, Jones, and many of that ilk are leaving Trump because he broke the promises he made to MAGA.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208917/maga-influencers-revolt-trump-put-grandpa-home

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2026-04-10T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The ghouls of privatization have long had their eyes on the community college system. From Devry to ITT Tech, there have been countless versions of the for-profit junior college, and most of them have the same problems. The process to transfer credits from those schools to four-year universities is often a confounding mess for students. Most instructors at for-profit colleges work part-time and are underpaid, forcing them to teach classes at multiple schools to make ends meet, which makes it difficult to give students the time and focus they deserve. More often than not, these schools lure in students who would be better served by their local community college.As if the community college system wasn’t strained enough by these privatization efforts, the tech bros have recently swooped in and are striving to cause further disruption. Community colleges operate with a combination of taxpayer funding, donations, and tuition revenue. But Campus, a predominantly online school that markets itself as a community college, uses a different financial model. The school has been injected with venture capital funding from the likes of Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Joe Lonsdale.Thiel, Altman, and Lonsdale are the types of investor who fund enterprises that could serve a role in remaking the world more to their liking. Like virtually every other of these would-be overlords’ ventures, Campus is a play for even more power and control. And it’s a scammy one at that.The Campus pitch is that it gives underserved students access to professors from elite schools. But after looking into the instructors listed on the school’s site, it’s clear that calling them “professors who teach at the world’s top universities” is deliberately misleading. Most of the Campus teachers either work, or worked, as part-time instructors at the schools advertised under “Also teaches at.” Multiple no longer teach at the prestigious universities Campus leverages in its advertising. At least two of the “professors” were actually graduate teaching assistants. Showcasing the well-known institutions where these instructors also teach, or have taught, is a brazen move to profit from those schools’ reputations. Rather than helping underserved students, this marketing is designed to dupe them.Having been made aware of the more nuanced reality that’s intentionally glossed over in the school’s marketing, former Campus students I spoke with felt misled. Overall, these students say they had good experiences with their instructors. But they felt it was dishonest to call them all professors—and to claim they all still teach at elite universities—when many, in fact, no longer do. This deceptive marketing draws students to Campus, and the ones I spoke with wish the school was more transparent about the people that make up its ersatz “faculty.” One student said that he had been counting on a recommendation letter written by a professor from a top school. He now worries that the recommendation won’t carry the same weight if it comes from an adjunct instructor or graduate teaching assistant.I was a graduate teaching assistant for three years, and an adjunct English instructor for eight. I taught at several schools and found little job stability, but I loved teaching, especially at community colleges. As an adjunct, I often felt like I was doing a better job than some senior faculty members, who, for one reason or another, had grown complacent and out of touch. So my aim here is not to say that classes taught by adjunct instructors are inherently inferior to those taught by tenured professors. But the gulf between an adjunct instructor and a full-time professor is large to anyone familiar with this world, and Campus seems to be banking on the likelihood that most undergraduate students aren’t aware of these underlying structures of higher education.Considering the deceptive marketing, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn that students’ best interests in other areas, including their safety, weren’t always front of mind for Campus leaders. A glib tech entrepreneur, Tade Oyerinde, is the CEO/chancellor of Campus, and he operates with the hubris of a typical tech bro. In the spirit of Shark Tank, Oyerinde hosts an annual competition called Campus Grind where students pitch their business ideas to a panel of judges. The top three win cash prizes of up to $20,000. Along with NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale was a judge for the inaugural Campus Grind. Students knew for a few weeks in advance that Lonsdale would be a judge, but it was only days before the competition when they learned that the event would be held at Lonsdale’s home. Students, most of whom flew to Austin for the contest, weren’t told beforehand that they’d have to sign an NDA in order to enter Lonsdale’s house. They also weren’t told about Lonsdale’s highly contested relationship with a student while he was a mentor at Stanford. To have a chance to win the cash prize, those Campus students, all of whom paid their tuition with need-based Pell Grants, had to sign the NDA on the fly and enter Lonsdale’s home.When I asked Oyerinde about the past allegations against Lonsdale, he said, “That was not on my radar at all.” But wasn’t it his job to know about things like this, especially involving someone students would be around at a school event? “These are all students over 18,” Oyerinde said. “It was the opportunity of a lifetime for them. Think about it. You’re a student. You’re a Pell student. Every student we took there was Pell. Now you get to go to a billionaire’s house, which is, like, the coolest place they’d ever been. And they’re there with their family. They each got to bring a family member with them. Multiple students said it was the best day of their lives.”One student at that first Grind competition was a Mexican immigrant. In 2003, along with Peter Thiel and three others, Lonsdale founded Palantir, the now infamous tech company whose tools for mass surveillance are used by ICE goons to locate and kidnap people like that student and her family. Lonsdale also donated millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Watching those Grind episodes, it’s bleak to see college kids nervously pitch their business ideas to someone who’s dedicated so much of his time, energy, and resources to instituting fascism in the United States—and in that person’s home, no less.When asked if he felt any obligation to tell students about Lonsdale’s extreme politics before the contest, Oyerinde said that he “doesn’t spend time getting into [his] investors’ edgiest, most divisive views.” I also asked Oyerinde how he could justify funding his school with investments from known fascists. “Forget whether or not you agree with Peter or Joe’s vision for what the world should be,” he replied. “There are only a handful of investors in Silicon Valley who are actually trying to build something in America—and that have some mission behind their investments. Peter and Joe are some of the guys who have that vision.” Even if that vision is shaped by an affinity for race science and admiration of apartheid-era South Africa, it didn’t seem to matter much to Oyerinde. After all, in the world of for-profit education, money will always win.Before acquiring MTI College and starting Campus, Oyerinde founded a learning management system, or LMS, company called Campuswire that he still owns and operates. Campus students use this LMS for their classes, giving Oyerinde privileged access to valuable student interaction data. When colleges use Canvas, Blackboard, or any other third-party LMS, the schools get to put restrictions on how much data the LMS company can access. But since Oyerinde owns the school and the LMS, he can decide how to use the data himself—when he’s already demonstrated a concerning level of carelessness when it comes to protecting students. In 2025, Campus acquired Sizzle AI, a company founded by Meta’s former head of AI, Jerome Presenti, who’s since become the chief technology officer of Campus. Sizzle’s mission is to create AI learning companions. Campus’s unique access to student data, such as how they interact with course materials, is no doubt very useful to such an endeavor.This is exactly what people like Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, and Campus’s other V.C. investors want: a privatized education system that entrenches an AI-first agenda instead of rigorously questioning the use and ethics of this technology, as proper educators should do. Teachers at Campus are pushed to integrate AI into their classes, despite overwhelming evidence that LLM use severely inhibits critical thinking. For tech plutocrats, AI is simply easier to control than human educators.Notably, Campus isn’t Joe Lonsdale’s first foray into disrupting higher education. Along with CBS CEO Bari Weiss and two others, Lonsdale started the University of Austin in 2021, offering “forbidden courses” more aligned with right-wing politics than classes at traditional universities. Students at the University of Austin can enjoy courses taught by tech accelerationists and learn about the “epidemic” of anti-white discrimination in higher education admissions. Take a quick look at the University of Austin’s marketing collateral—and the sea of white faces therein—and it’s not hard to get a sense of what that school is about.Considering Lonsdale’s and Thiel’s illiberal beliefs, their reasons for investing in Campus, with its woke-coded marketing and claim to serve underserved students, are opaque at first glance. But this for-profit school is another step toward the goal of privatizing higher education in the United States, which Trump and his oligarchs are eager to accomplish. From the perspective of someone whose mental faculties are wholly consumed with thoughts of accruing more money and more power, public schools are unruly things—too hard to control and too little devoted to the accumulative desires of the plutocratic class. Many Campus students pay for their tuition with federally funded grants that are getting siphoned away from actual community colleges and public universities. Those timeworn institutions are foundational to our democracy, so any chance to weaken them is a prime investment opportunity for the tech fascists who want to shape the future to their ends.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208667/silicon-valley-disrupt-community-college

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2026-04-10T09:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump has been raging at Marjorie Taylor Greene a lot lately. Why? Because improbably, Greene has emerged as a very effective critic of the president. In a striking CNN interview, Greene unloaded, declaring bluntly that Trump is mentally unfit for the presidency, that the people around Trump should rein him in, and that he’s catastrophically failing. This is a watershed moment: Trump’s disastrous Iran war, and his threat to obliterate Iranian civilization, are pushing some in MAGA to look past him. We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, author of a good piece arguing that the Iran debacle is a new kind of problem for Trump. We discuss why JD Vance won’t be able to escape its taint, why Trump’s threat of genocide is a breaking point for so many Americans, and why Greene’s criticism of Trump breaks surprising new ground. (After we recorded, Trump exploded in fury yet again at Greene and other critics.) Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208910/trump-rages-marjorie-taylor-greene-wrecks-cnn-direct-hit

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2026-04-09T20:04:36Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

On Thursday, Melania Trump tried to deny having any connections to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, but the internet quickly produced receipts. The first lady said in prepared remarks at the White House that the first time she met the sex criminal was in 2000 at an event she and Donald Trump had attended together, and that she had no knowledge of his crimes at the time. She also denied being a witness to any of them. “Numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been percolating on social media for years now,” she said. “Be cautious about what you believe. These images and stories are completely false. I am not a witness or a named witness in connection with any of Epstein’s crimes.”Melania Trump: Numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been percolating on social media for years now. Be cautious about what you believe. These images and stories are completely false. I am not a witness in connection with any of Epstein's crimes. pic.twitter.com/dPfcpoMQZS— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026Melania also called on Congress to hold a public hearing for all of Epstein’s victims in her remarks, a surprising move given the allegations against her husband in the Epstein files. Why would Melania Trump say all of this now, out of the blue? Some on social media are speculating that she is trying to get ahead of a major upcoming revelation connecting her to Epstein. In February, several unredacted emails were released from the government’s Epstein archive showing that Melania was in frequent contact with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime criminal associate. Commentators on X quickly posted one of those emails on Thursday in which Melania compliments Maxwell, as well as an often-circulated photo of Donald, Melania, Epstein, and Maxwell together at a party. Melania’s remarks will likely draw more attention to the Epstein files, which had been pushed out of the news cycle thanks to the war with Iran. One wonders what the president thinks about her remarks, and whether they are by design.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208907/melania-trump-distance-ties-epstein

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2026-04-09T19:17:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

First lady Melania Trump on Thursday called on Congress to hold a public hearing for all the women victimized by sex predator Jeffrey Epstein—a surprising development given her husband’s proximity to Epstein and the allegations against him within the files.“I call on Congress to provide the women who have been victimized by Epstein with a public hearing specifically centered around the survivors, give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath in front of Congress with the power of sworn testimony,” she said. “Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the congressional record.”Melania Trump: Now is the time for congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course this does not amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to… pic.twitter.com/2CEtxQp2uL— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026The first lady made the statement during a televised White House announcement on Thursday, most of which she used to reject any rumors or assertions that she had any relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.“I have never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach,” she said. “To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, Maxwell.”Melania Trump: I've never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time… pic.twitter.com/OO3RtPRMsU— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/post/208904/melania-trump-epstein-survivors-testify-congress

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2026-04-09T18:54:32Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump’s solution to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continuing to bomb Lebanon, and thus threatening to upend the entire ceasefire with Iran, is to ask him to tone it down.Trump spoke to Netanyahu on the phone Wednesday, a senior administration official told NBC News, and told him to pull back. Trump later told the network in an interview Thursday that Israel would be “scaling back” its attacks on Lebanon.“I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it. I just think we have to be sort of a little more low-key,” Trump said.What that means is anyone’s guess. Lebanon was supposed to be included in the 10-point ceasefire deal, according to Iran and mediator Pakistan. Netanyahu said Wednesday that he “insisted that the temporary ceasefire with Iran not include Hezbollah, and we continue to strike them forcefully,” and following more bombs on Thursday, claimed his government is ready to negotiate directly with the Lebanese government (but not till next week).These negotiations, Al Jazeera reports, are the result of U.S. pressure. The Trump administration is requesting a pause on Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon to help negotiations with Iran. But Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Thursday that “the war will not be stopped,” even after Netanyahu’s announcement of negotiations with Lebanon.Israeli strikes killed over 300 people in southern Lebanon Wednesday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, with over 1,000 wounded. At least seven people were killed in the southern Lebanese town of Abbassiyeh on Thursday. Democrats and leaders around the world have condemned Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon. Is Trump really going to let Netanyahu just “low-key it” and wait to see what happens next?
https://newrepublic.com/post/208891/trump-netanyahu-promises-low-key-it

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2026-04-09T16:41:29Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The bombs began raining down in Iran on February 28. Israel had successfully convinced Donald Trump to launch a joint attack on the Gulf nation. There was just one thing that the White House had forgotten about: half a dozen U.S. cadets who were working just off the coast, sitting ducks in the Persian Gulf.Five privately owned ships flying the U.S. flag were nearby carrying students from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Merchant Marine, and the transportation industry when the U.S. military started the war in Iran, NOTUS reported Thursday.Unlike previous conflicts, there was no advance word or warning to the ships to evacuate, effectively trapping them as the violence began.“Nobody told them. They were caught unawares,” one source close to the situation told NOTUS. “It was very strange that [officials] weren’t even given a whiff, weren’t even given an indication.”The military had no plan to transport the vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the students were forced to find safe refuge in harbors around the Gulf, living on their ships. They were evacuated a month later, three sources told NOTUS, though it is not known whether all the students have made it back to American soil.“If they’d had even just a day’s notice, they could have gotten them out,” another person familiar with the situation told NOTUS.But the cadets weren’t the only Americans in the region that the White House forgot.The Trump administration also failed to properly notify regional embassy staff of the impending bloodshed that week. In an email delivered February 27, Ambassador Mike Huckabee gave nonemergency workers at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem less than 24 hours to exit Israel, informing them that anyone planning to leave the country “should do so TODAY.”The order and its timeline were highly unusual: Embassy staff are typically provided several days’ notice in order to comply with state-mandated evacuations, with some warnings given as much as a month in advance of the anticipated departure date. By comparison, Huckabee’s 24-hour deadline was shockingly short.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208883/donald-trump-stranded-cadets-gulf-iran

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2026-04-09T15:32:37Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Barack Obama could be about to one-up Donald Trump yet again.Pope Leo XIV met with Obama adviser David Axelrod Thursday morning, reported Substack journalist Christopher Hale, marking a major progression in the quest to land the 44th president a meeting with the Chicago-born pontiff. Obama’s enthusiasm for meeting the pope was made apparent in February, when he joined Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast for a Valentine’s Day episode.“I’ll be honest with you, being president or even being an ex-president, I can kind of meet everybody, so I’ve met a lot of folks,” Obama said at the time. “The person who I have not yet met that I’m looking forward to meeting—and I hope I get an opportunity sometime in the future—is the new pope, who’s from Chicago, and a White Sox fan.”Axelrod worked as Obama’s chief strategist on both of his presidential campaigns. It’s not clear what Axelrod and the pope discussed, but the shrinking degrees of separation between the global figures bodes well for Obama’s dream.The effort to pair the two has been actively in the works since at least March, when Hale reported that the Holy See had been in communication with Obama’s team about arranging a meeting.That could mean that Obama meets Pope Leo XIV before Trump does.Leo became the first American-born pope on May 8, 2025, but Trump has not managed to meet him over the past year. Instead, the Vatican has shied away from the Trump administration, in no small part due to threats made by Defense Department officials who were unhappy with the pontiff’s various criticisms of Trump’s warmongering.Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his “State of the World” speech in January, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. The atmosphere was anything but friendly: Pentagon officials openly threatened the religious ambassador, asserting that the Catholic Church needed to get behind the Trump administration’s global whims due to the country’s military prowess.One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death, and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon.The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”The Vatican also rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208864/pope-obama-adviser-pentagon-threat

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2026-04-09T15:06:21Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump, despite his praise for the U.S. steel industry, will be using foreign steel for his ballroom project. The New York Times reports that Luxembourg-based company ArcelorMittal will be providing millions of dollars in steel for the project, all produced in Europe. Trump said in October that he was offered $37 million worth of donated steel for the ballroom, but didn’t say where it was from. He told ballroom donors at the time that a “great steel company” had come forward with a gift. “He said, ‘Sir, I’d like to donate the steel for your ballroom,’” Trump recounted to the donors. “I said: ‘Whoa, that’s nice.’ And I found out — ‘How much is the steel?’ I called the contractor. ‘Sir, it’s down for $37 million.’ I said, ‘This is a nice donation, right?’”He called the steel “great steel as opposed to garbage steel, because they dump a lot of garbage around. You know, steel is like everything else, including human beings. Steel could be high quality, and it can be low quality. He wants to make sure it’s high quality.”Days after Trump made that announcement last year, he halved tariffs that applied to automotive steel exports that ArcelorMittal happens to produce in Canada. An unnamed White House official told the Times that despite ArcelorMittal being a foreign company, it was benefiting the U.S. through a joint venture with Japan’s Nippon Steel in Alabama and an iron mine in Minnesota, and denied that the company received anything in return for its donation. Last year, the Trump administration allowed Japan-based Nippon Steel to take over U.S. Steel in exchange for a “golden share” in the company, which allows the government to block major decisions such as offshoring or layoffs. Why would Trump get steel from ArcelorMittal when the government already has a close (and controversial) stake in U.S. Steel? On top of that, going with a foreign steel company also contradicts Trump’s stated “America First” ethos, which critics seized upon Wednesday. “While the White House imports foreign steel to build Trump’s ugly Epstein Ballroom, California is opening its first new steel plant in 50 years,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office posted on X. “Thanks, Gavin Newsom!” “Make America Luxembourg Again?” Newsom also posted on his personal account.“Foreign steel in the White House? Are you kidding? We’ve got Iron Range mines shut down & 100’s @steelworkers laid off. Instead, they’re outsourcing one of the most iconic American buildings overseas! American steel built this country, it should build the White House too,” said Minnesota state Senator Grant Hauschild, a Democrat, on X.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208848/america-first-trump-foreign-steel-white-house-ballroom

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2026-04-09T14:31:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Chiles v. Salazar looks at first glance to be a lopsided triumph of First Amendment values—a ringing endorsement of the principle that the state can’t prescribe what is orthodox in the marketplace of ideas.Eight justices agreed that Colorado had violated the First Amendment by taking sides in a social controversy involving so-called “conversion therapy” on minors—efforts to alter a child’s chosen sexual orientation or gender identity.Colorado in fact did take sides in that debate. But a closer look reveals that while the majority’s decision might be doctrinally sound, it is at the same time short-sighted and harmful.In 2019, the Colorado legislature banned licensed counselors from practicing conversion therapy on minors. It did so on the basis of overwhelming professional consensus: The American Psychological Association had found no empirical evidence that any therapy can alter a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity; former participants reported lasting psychological harm including depression, PTSD, suicidal ideation, and family rupture; and the therapy’s core premise—that a gay or transgender identity is something to be fixed—was itself found to stigmatize patients in ways that cause long-term emotional distress.The plaintiff was a licensed Colorado counselor who identifies as a conservative Christian and who wanted to continue offering exactly the kind of talk therapy the legislature had determined is harmful. She did not argue that conversion therapy is always effective or benign. Rather, she said that because her version of treatment involves only speech—no physical interventions, no medications—the First Amendment shields it from regulation.The Court, 8-1, agreed. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority. Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joined a concurrence. The majority held that Colorado was practicing blatant viewpoint discrimination, which is nearly always impermissible. Colorado’s law permitted counselors to affirm a client’s gender identity while forbidding speech aimed at changing it. That asymmetry, Gorsuch concluded, is precisely what the First Amendment prohibits: the government picking sides in an ideological debate and licensing only one viewpoint within the treatment relationship. He closed by invoking the foundational premise of First Amendment law: “a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for finding truth.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lone dissent, and she took the extraordinary step of reading her dissent from the bench, a gesture reserved for rare, vehement disagreement with the majority. Her anchor point was that the majority had failed to appreciate the crucial context: the state had good reason for its action, anchored not in viewpoint discrimination but in the regulation of medical practice—a classic proper area of review for the states.Jackson stressed that all medical standard-setting is unavoidably viewpoint-based. A state that prohibits a dietician from giving an anorexic patient the medically unsound advice to eat less is taking a side. A state that forbids a psychiatrist from encouraging a patient to commit suicide is taking a side. Standards of care are, by definition, the state’s judgment about which treatments help and which harm. So conceptualized, Colorado’s action fit neatly within its well-established police power. The speech “suppression” was incidental to regulation of medical professionals’ conduct—and under that characterization, it should have been subject to more lenient scrutiny.It’s worth examining more closely Gorsuch’s paean to “a faith in the free marketplace of ideas.”The marketplace model works when the harm from speech is epistemic: a listener hears a harmful idea, and the antidote is exposure to better ideas. More speech corrects bad speech. That is sensible for political debate, for journalism, for the ordinary exchange of views.It is not a sensible model for the clinical relationship between a licensed therapist and a vulnerable minor.Consider recovered memory therapy—one of the most catastrophic therapeutic fads in American history, practiced in the 1980s and ’90s by licensed clinicians using nothing but verbal suggestion, guided imagery, and hypnosis. Therapists convinced patients, including children, that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse that had never occurred. The results: shattered families, wrongful prosecutions of wholly innocent childcare workers, patient suicides. More speech didn’t un-implant those false memories. It didn’t un-traumatize children who spent years being convinced they had been abused by their parents or others. States disciplined practitioners. Malpractice verdicts ran into the millions. The harm was medical, not informational, and the marketplace of ideas had nothing to offer it.Jackson’s core argument is that talk therapy is a medical treatment, and medical treatments are subject to state regulation. The fact that this particular treatment is delivered through speech rather than a scalpel or a syringe does not exempt it from the rules that govern every other form of medical care.Chiles remains free to write papers defending conversion therapy, give speeches praising it, tell patients she thinks Colorado’s law is wrong. What she cannot do is practice the therapy. The restriction falls on the treatment, not the speech.The stakes are not abstract. Jackson’s dissent catalogs what the majority has put at risk. Mandatory reporting laws that compel a therapist to speak when a patient presents a threat involve only speech. Prohibitions on guaranteeing cures—speech. Ethics codes requiring humane treatment—speech. Licensing boards’ authority to discipline an incompetent counselor—speech, if the incompetence consists of saying the wrong things. On the majority’s logic, providers who offer cruel speech-only therapies can assert a First Amendment right to carry on.The court’s answer is that malpractice handles it. But as recovered memory therapy demonstrated, by the time malpractice is litigated, lives are already destroyed. Prophylactic regulation exists to stop harm before it happens. That is what a license is for. That is what a standard of care means. It’s facile if accurate to call that discrimination based on viewpoint. But it’s myopic to miss the more central context of regulating medical practice and shielding citizens from quackery. In Chiles, Jackson alone had the clear long-range vision to see the flaws in the court’s brittle approach to the case.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208854/kentanji-brown-jackson-colorado-trans-case-dissent-brave

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2026-04-09T13:01:04Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump plans to automatically sign up military draft-eligible men for a potential draft, an ominous decision to make in the midst of a war on Iran. While registration into Selective Service—the massive database that tells the U.S. how many men they can force into war in the event of a national emergency—has historically been required for every U.S. male upon turning 18, the sign-up process was manual. “On December 18, 2025, the President signed the FY 2026 [National Defense Authorization Act] into law, mandating automatic Selective Service registration. The Agency engaged with Congress throughout the NDAA process regarding the automated legislative proposal,” the Selective Service System said in a public statement. “This statutory change transfers responsibility for registration from individual men to SSS through integration with federal data sources. SSS will implement the change by December 2026, resulting in a streamlined registration process and corresponding workforce realignment.”Multiple Democrats were quick to call out the administration’s misplaced priorities. “If they can automatically register you for WAR, they can automatically register you to VOTE,” Democratic House of Representatives candidate Sarah McGee wrote on X. Others posted old tweets from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller about how young men should vote for Trump lest they be “drafted to fight in Kamala’s and Cheney’s 3rd World War.” The last time the U.S. had a draft was in 1973 for the Vietnam War, which caused institutional and ideological damage that this country is still dealing with today. A draft in this era would be even more catastrophic.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208839/automatic-registration-us-military-draft

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2026-04-08T19:43:37Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Iran expects to make even more money off of a potential peace deal with the White House.Beyond the 10-point peace plan that Donald Trump already signalled he was open to, Iran additionally expects countries to pay $1 per barrel of oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz, reported the Financial Times Wednesday. Tehran demanded that the fee be paid in cryptocurrency, and that importers notify Iranian authorities about the content of their ships ahead of their arrival.“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told FT.The email requirement is a preventative measure to thwart the influx of weapons into the country, according to Hosseini.“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” said Hosseini. “Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush.”But Iran is no stranger to cryptocurrency. The country has built a $10 billion internal crypto economy in recent years, relying on the digital assets as a means to circumvent international sanctions, according to a Yahoo! Finance report published last month.The price of Brent crude, a global oil benchmark, fell to $96 dollars per barrel in the wake of the fragile ceasefire arrangement, a staggering drop from its high of nearly $112 on Tuesday.Iran’s 10-point peace plan includes various demands for an immediate end to the regional violence, including proposals for a permanent end to the war, guarantees that Iran and its allies would not be attacked again, an end to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a halt to all regional attacks.The multi-point deal also seeks the lifting of all U.S. and international sanctions on Iran, and the imposition of a new $2 million toll per ship through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil tradeway situated between Iran and Oman.Trump claimed Wednesday that he planned to turn the Hormuz toll into a “joint venture” that the U.S. would jointly benefit from. It is not clear if Iran is open to that possibility.Meanwhile, a senior Iranian official told Reuters that the strait could be reopened as soon as Thursday or Friday—so long as it is “limited” and “under Iran’s ⁠control.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208811/iran-ceasefire-strait-hormuz-cryptocurrency

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2026-04-08T19:36:48Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Hours before the announcement of a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran, The New York Times published a story titled, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran.” The piece, written by longtime Trump chroniclers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, described in unusually precise detail the private meetings between Trump, Israeli leaders, and his own advisers in the run-up to the war. According to the piece, almost all of the president’s top advisers, including Vice President JD Vance, privately had misgivings about the war. I call bullshit. The war has failed to achieve most of its goals, from installing a new regime in Iran to permanently ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapons program. Trump was left basically begging Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And polls suggest the conflict is the latest anchor on Trump’s already plunging poll numbers. So of course his aides want to distance themselves from the war in America’s most influential news outlet. But they want to do so anonymously to preserve deniability and avoid annoying the president or his base. But we can’t let Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and other senior Trump administration officials off so easily. They have at every turn aided, abetted, and enabled a dictatorial president who constantly ignores national and international laws and casually decides to (try to) overthrow the leaders of other countries. They want the spoils of serving in the Trump administration, from prestigious posts now to potentially even bigger and more lucrative jobs in the future, including the presidency in the cases of Rubio and Vance. So they also need to own and accept the costs of serving with Trump. And right now, that includes being the architects of a stupid, unnecessary war. The Times article is long, in part because it is trying to explain a very important and complicated decision. But it’s also long because it takes a lot of words to list all the misgivings about the war that Trump’s advisers supposedly had. Ratcliffe reportedly said in a White House meeting that included the president that Israel’s hopes of a less anti-Israel regime taking power in Iran are “farcical.” In that same session, Rubio said that Israel’s hopes of regime change were “bullshit.” Vance expressed similar doubts. The article depicts Wiles as worrying that the war could cause a big hike in gas prices, hurting Trump and Republicans in the midterm elections. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, reportedly said in a meeting of Trump and senior aides that attacking Iran would violate the president’s campaign trail rhetoric about keeping the United States out of new wars abroad. The article includes several paragraphs about the private misgivings of three officials, in particular: Vance, Rubio, and Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vance was reportedly concerned about irritating the MAGA base and Iran taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. Caine outright predicted Iran would block the strait. Rubio is portrayed as having been broadly skeptical about the war and thinking that sanctions and other pressure tactics against Iran may be more effective. Haberman and Swan are solid reporters, so I trust that some of Trump’s advisers had these doubts about the war and at times expressed them to one another and the president. But people should read this kind of piece with skepticism. From my years in journalism, including as a reporter at The Washington Post, I can tell you that these kinds of behind-the-scenes political stories usually don’t just emerge from reporters’ digging. Often, presidential advisers and those advisers’ various aides and underlings want to tell their side of the story, particularly if they aren’t quoted directly, meaning they can later claim the reporter got some detail wrong. Almost none of the Trump advisers in this piece did on-the-record interviews with the Times. So I read this story as both a historical account and an attempt at spinning. We are now more than a month into the war. Trump’s advisers can see exactly what went wrong, such as the Strait of Hormuz being blocked. So these advisers (and their aides) can tell reporters, “I anticipated this problem,” and seem wise and prescient. Somehow, these advisers predicted exactly how the war could go wrong, but the president ignored them!What we can’t tell is how emphatically they expressed those concerns, and how often. Or what concerns they expressed that didn’t turn out to be big problems. Broadly, since the war is going poorly, these advisers have a strong incentive to leak their prewar misgivings and downplay any pro-war comments they expressed privately. If a more America-friendly regime were now in power in Iran, this article would likely have been written differently (or would not have been published at all), because Trump’s advisers would have been less eager to distance themselves from the policy. This piece is titled, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran,” but in truth it’s essentially, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran Over the Objections of His Top Advisers.” Wittingly or unwittingly, Swan, Haberman, and the Times have provided a massive platform for Rubio, Vance, and others to point the finger solely at Trump for a misguided war. This piece reads like the first draft of Caine’s memoirs, or how Vance will sound on the campaign trail if he is running in 2028 and trying to distance himself from this war. But Trump advisers shouldn’t get to pass the buck so easily. Even if they expressed some private doubts about this war, they presented intelligence and military plans that moved it forward. None of them expressed public opposition. Even in a piece allowing them to spin their own narratives, only Vance told Trump directly in private that he opposed the war. And Vance of course has the most freedom to disagree—he is the one person in the administration Trump can’t fire. The piece reads like a lot of the accounts of President Biden’s decisions to initially run for a second term and allow Israel to kill Palestinians on a mass scale after the October 7, 2023 attacks. A president can’t run for reelection or involve the U.S. deeply in a war without some of his advisers going along. But some of the books written about the Biden administration feature his advisers expressing doubts about his decisions that the president supposedly single-handedly overrode. In all these cases, what these aides want to do is associate themselves with the successes of a president and pin all the problems on the commander in chief himself. But journalists and members of the public shouldn’t go along with that. No one is required to serve in a presidential administration. If they strongly disagree with a decision, they should quit. They can also express their doubts publicly and live with the consequences: a likely dismissal. What they shouldn’t do is join an administration, willingly implement its policies, and then privately bash the president to reporters when something goes wrong. That’s not governing, it’s reputation laundering. It’s weak and gutless. Usually, aides wait until after the president’s term or after they have left their posts to distance themselves from key decisions. It’s possible that Haberman and Swan are such excellent reporters that they simply unearthed these objections earlier than usual. But my guess is that Trump’s aides already know this war is a debacle and want to essentially announce, “It wasn’t me” as loudly and quickly as possible. But JD, Susie, and Marco—it was you. This is the Trump administration. You own all of his decisions, good, bad, and, in the case of this Iran war, catastrophic. Take responsibility for your actions.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208784/vance-rubio-wiles-iran-war-trump

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2026-04-08T19:19:54Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Now that Donald Trump has backed off his threat to obliterate a nation of 93 million people, his propagandists are already retconning it into proof of his Solomon-like foresight and wisdom. The new spin is that the war with Iran temporarily ended in a ceasefire precisely because he made this threat, forcing Iran to renegotiate on more favorable terms.“Iran ultimately understood—their ability to produce, to generate power, to fuel their terrorist regime—was in our hands,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth told reporters Wednesday, in response to questions about Trump’s threat. Hegseth insisted Trump’s vow to eradicate “a whole civilization” persuaded Iran that he could crush their ability to “export energy” and thus end the entire basis for the regime’s existence.“That type of threat is what brought them to the place where they effectively said, ‘We want to cut this deal,’” Hegseth continued. This talking point has gone out widely: GOP Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a top target of Democrats, suggested that due to Trump’s “extreme rhetoric,” the Iranians “understand for once that they need to actually negotiate.”But there’s a small problem with this spin. It’s that the Iranians were already negotiating with Trump before the war started. Trump largely sabotaged those negotiations, because he was talked into believing the war would be easy and deliver a quick burst of glory. Trump’s approach to the talks made success impossible—deliberately.As The New York Times’s magnum opus on this reveals, Trump had decided to take the plunge (all that remained uncertain was the timing) weeks before those talks with Iran hit their critical phase. This was partly because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talked Trump into believing the risks of war were manageable—that strikes could render the Iranian regime too debilitated to close the Strait of Hormuz (which proved disastrously wrong). U.S. intelligence officials disputed Israeli confidence about all this, the Times reports, but Trump brushed off these warnings—because he “appeared to think it would be a very quick war.”The pre-war talks with Iran were doomed because Trump shifted between objectives in a way that ensured that outcome. The core issue was supposed to be ending Iran’s capacity to develop a nuke. But the Times also reveals that Iran was prepared to make meaningful concessions on that front, yet Trump officials effectively decided only regime change was acceptable, ensuring war.For Hegseth’s story to be true, Iran would have to be more willing to give Trump the concessions he wants than before, due to his mighty threats. But, while the war did badly degrade the Iranian military and kill many senior leaders, here’s what else we know: The regime is still there in more radicalized and brutal form. The strait is being reopened, but as Ben Rhodes notes, the regime’s control over it now appears tighter. The fate of Iran’s nuclear material remains as indeterminate as ever.Will talks now get Trump a better deal than he might have gotten the first time? Maybe, but Iran seems emboldened by its survival to demand more this time. The points that Trump accepted as the basis for talks appear more friendly to Iran than before.“Iran is at the table because Trump now appears willing to base negotiations on a wider range of Iranian demands,” Sina Toossi, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, told me. He cites Trump’s apparent willingness to entertain total relief from U.S. sanctions, continued control over the strait, and some form of uranium enrichment: “The civilizational threat did not factor into the ceasefire.”So what did Trump’s threat—which would have been a massive war crime—actually accomplish? It’s exclusively negative. As Bill Kristol writes: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.Kristol is referring to the overall war’s impact, but Trump’s threat of civilizational erasure is also a factor in ensuring these outcomes. That the American president eagerly vowed to obliterate a nation of 93 million is bad enough. On top of that, the U.S. political system appeared utterly powerless to stop it—largely because one of our major parties revealed that it will not step up even when its leader threatens unthinkably massive war crimes and even genocide.Brian Beutler points out that Republicans who wouldn’t challenge Trump’s maniacal designs got lucky that he blinked. Next time they might not be so lucky—and neither might we. Indeed, it’s also worth asking what sort of dispiriting toll this glimpse of our profound powerlessness in the face of Trump’s madness will take on the millions of Americans who find the idea of their country threatening such wanton, indiscriminate destruction extremely troubling, which surely includes a lot of ordinary Republicans. One can hope that this galvanizes millions into voting against the GOP in the midterms—and it probably will help—but translating this into serious checks against a rerun of this insanity is a tall order. That, too, is a painful realization to endure.In a sense, Hegseth’s spin is doing us a public service. By insisting Trump’s threat drove Iran to the table, it should force a reassessment of why the original talks fell apart, why we went to war in the first place, and what Trump’s vicious, sadistic bluster actually accomplished. This is a story of failure all around, and the threats, too, accomplished only bad things. Which reveals another layer to this catastrophe, blowing another hole in Trump’s claim of victory.That’s because the core story that Trump and Hegseth have told about this war is that it’s showcasing that American strength and power are supreme, unquestioned, and can accomplish literally anything. That includes the mere threat to unleash that power: Because the specter of American military violence and terror can make literally anyone do anything that Trump wills, maximal threats of annihilation are inherently good. Hegseth constantly preens about America’s superlative killing power with unnerving relish and bloodlust in order to tell that story.But it’s taken a big hit. Yes, the war showcased awesome technological prowess. But that cannot accomplish literally anything Trump wants it to. Nor can threatening to rain it down on millions of innocent people with unconstrained brutality and savagery. Trump and Hegseth set out to prove otherwise, and at this, too, they failed miserably.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208794/hegseth-reveals-hole-trump-victory-claim

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2026-04-08T17:36:12Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump is not happy as a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is on the verge of collapsing. On Truth Social Wednesday afternoon, Trump expressed frustration that “Numerous Agreements, Lists, and Letters are being sent out by people that have absolutely nothing to do with the U.S.A. / Iran Negotiation, in many cases, they are total Fraudsters, Charlatans, and WORSE.” “There is only one group of meaningful ‘POINTS’ that are acceptable to the United States, and we will be discussing them behind closed doors during these Negotiations,” Trump continued. “These are the POINTS that are the basis on which we agreed to a CEASEFIRE. It is something that is reasonable, and can easily be dispensed with.”Meanwhile, Iran announced that it is once again closing the Strait of Hormuz due to Israel continuing to bomb Lebanon, and its Tasnim news agency, citing an unnamed source, said the country would withdraw from the ceasefire if the bombings continue. Lebanon is a point of contention in the ceasefire, as Iran and mediator Pakistan say that it is included in the deal while Israel and Trump both say otherwise. Israel on Wednesday launched its largest wave of airstrikes on Lebanon since the war began, reportedly killing hundreds of people,even as Hezbollah announced it was halting attacks. Iran has also included “acceptance of enrichment” for its nuclear program in the Farsi version of the ceasefire deal, but not in its English versions. Trump declared on Truth Social Wednesday morning that there “will be no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust.’”All of this threatens to derail negotiations between Iran and the U.S., which are scheduled to begin in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Friday. Israel’s relentless bombing in spite of a ceasefire is not new; they have bombed Gaza at least 2,073 times since a ceasefire was declared for the territory in October. Will Trump, against his own nature, offer some clarity on this ceasefire deal and prevent Israel from sabotaging it?
https://newrepublic.com/post/208788/trump-fumes-iran-ceasefire-brink-collapse

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2026-04-08T16:45:54Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Up north, Wisconsin Democrats increased their state Supreme Court majority to 5–2 and won a mayoral race in the typically Republican city of Waukesha. Down south, a Georgia Democrat narrowly lost a house district Donald Trump carried by 34 points in 2024.In all, Tuesday was an election night that bodes well for Democrats come midterm season.In Wisconsin—a swing state that Trump won by less than a percentage point in 2024—liberal judge Chris Taylor crushed her GOP-backed opponent, Maria Lazar, by 20 points. It was about double the margin of victory that Susan Crawford, another liberal judge, had attained in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year.Lest one think the Wisconsin Supreme Court is a nothingburger of a political entity, that 2025 race became the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history after Elon Musk funnelled millions into backing the GOP candidate, Brad Schimel, in an attempt to flip what was at the time a 4–3 liberal lean. After Musk’s candidate lost, he quietly moved on to his other passions, such as being racist on social media and tax evasion.Without a majority on the line this year, it was a less extravagant affair: $6.5 million was spent on advertising, compared to $85 million in 2025. (It should also be noted that Taylor greatly outspent Lazar.) Nonetheless, the margin of victory was surprisingly one-sided. Taylor even won the reliably Republican Ozaukee County.In Waukesha, after a Republican mayor who declared himself an independent in 2024 decided not to run for reelection, Democrat Alicia Halvensleben bested Republican Scott Allen in a race decided by 2.4 percentage points. Trump had won the city by six points in 2024.In Georgia, Shawn Harris was not as lucky as those up north; the Democrat lost by 12 points to Republican Clay Fuller for the House seat vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene. But in some ways, Harris’s performance was the most impressive of all. Trump won rural Chattooga County by 37 points in 2024, meaning Harris shifted the district a stunning 25 points to the left.“The takeaway is this: If Democrats, independents, and Republicans can do this in a ruby-red district, the Democrats can win anywhere,” he said in his concession speech. “Nobody ever thought that we would ever be this close.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208780/democrats-elections-swing-state

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2026-04-08T13:12:43Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The most bloodthirsty MAGA acolytes are fuming at President Trump’s two-week ceasefire deal with Iran and his capitulation to its 10-point plan—a major win for the Iranian government.On Tuesday, after he threatened to kill “a whole civilization” and just 90 minutes before his deadline to reach a deal, Trump announced that he’d “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.” He credited positive talks with Pakistan and Iran for the agreement, citing Iran’s 10-point plan as a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” This was devastating news for some of the worst people in the MAGA-verse.“The Islamic terrorist regime of Iran is now more legitimized and emboldened than ever before. Terrorists can’t be negotiated with. They can only be destroyed. The US doesn’t get anything out of this ceasefire that isn’t a ceasefire,” MAGA commentator, Zionist, and proud Islamophobe Laura Loomer wrote on X. “How many missiles did Iran fire into allied countries last night? A lot.”“A ceasefire that leaves the IRGC in power isn’t peace. It’s permission,” self-described “MAGA Jew” Matthew Feinberg wrote on X. “Permission to regroup. Permission to rearm. Permission to do it all over again. That’s not a win. That’s a delay.”“This is a cancer. If you don’t fully get rid of a cancer, it will grow back,” conservative Iranian American commentator Dr. Sheila Nazarian told News Nation Tuesday evening. “China will help, Russia will help, and we will leave a nuclear, fully stockpiled, more knowledgeable Iran for our children and grandchildren to deal with.”The Truth Social comments (at least the few that weren’t bots) weren’t much better for Trump, either.“I’m extremely disappointed in President Trump tonight. I don’t understand how you can possibly believe anything the IRGC says!!” one user replied to Trump’s announcement. “FUCK THAT!!!! END THIS FUCKING SHIT ALREADY!!! YOU CAN’T NEGOTIATE WITH FUCKING TERRORISTS FOR FUCKS SAKE,” said another.This ceasefire is only temporary, and comes as the U.S. and Israel have already killed more than 3,000 civilians in Iran and Lebanon. And yet MAGA’s reaction demonstrates the constant whiplash Trump is oscillating between—from the genocidal Laura Loomer route to the “end to endless wars” route he ran on. Right now, both sides are unhappy.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208762/maga-reaction-trump-iran-ceasefire-deal

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2026-04-08T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”The strongest entries in the series are produced by an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iranian government accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.) Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up. “One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions. Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination. This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day. At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people. As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.” After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it. In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208732/trump-hegseth-pro-iran-propaganda-videos

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2026-04-08T10:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget proposal, sent to Congress on Friday, doubles down on MAGA pet projects while taking a sledgehammer to a number of programs that help the working class. Among the casualties could be new moms trying to buy food and families with moderate incomes trying to buy homes.Congress doesn’t have to pay attention to this budget proposal. In fact, White House budget requests are often ignored. But they reveal where a president’s priorities lie, and this one shows how unserious Trump is as a champion of the country’s working class. Here are just five ways this proposal would hurt the working class if Congress takes him up on it.Food programsTrump’s budget would roll back a 2024 rule that increased the amount of fruits and vegetables available to recipients, cutting current benefits by more than half. “By slashing the fruit and vegetable benefits and not ensuring sufficient program funding, this administration is taking healthy foods away from children and mothers most at risk for nutritional deficiencies,” Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association, said in a statement. The federal nutrition guidelines had prioritized increasing access to fruit and vegetable, but Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scrapped them in favor of protein, contrary to the latest nutrition science.Trump’s budget would also cut other food benefits, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and summer and afterschool meals for kids. Working- and middle-class families rely on these programs at some point in their lives, and fully funding them would ensure more Americans have access to the kinds of whole, healthy foods that officials like Kennedy tout. Cutting them will cause more Americans will go hungry, especially as food prices continue to rise. Assistance for electricity billsA small federal program known as the Low Income Energy Assistance Program helps almost seven million families pay for heating and cooling costs. The program disproportionately benefits the elderly and disabled who live on fixed incomes, and can also be used in some states to weatherize old houses or prevent utility shut-offs in emergencies. Trump’s budget would scrap it entirely, promising to “instead support low-income individuals through lower energy prices and an America First economic platform.”That promise seems especially laughable given that energy prices rose 7.1 percent last year and are likely to rise even more as the war in Iran, the disinvestment from green energy production, and increase in new data centers continues to raise energy costs.Career and Technical EducationCareer and Technical Education, formerly known as Vocational Education, has undergone a renaissance in the past few decades. Once considered a second-tier educational track where students were neglected, a reinvestment and revival in CTE has helped many students access well-paying careers in trades while also providing an alternative path to college.The Trump budget would advance plans to dismantle the Department of Education entirely, which would eliminate CTE funding and move it into the Department of Labor, something the administration has already tried despite legal challenges from Democrats. Advocates say it would return the program to the “bad old days.” CTE is meant to be a broad-based education program that empowers students no matter where their careers take them, but under the Department of Labor it risks becoming a more narrow, short-term, job-training pathway. That move would also pull money out of K-12 and community college systems that offer those programs now.Grants for rural and minority-run small businessesTrump’s budget would eliminate special programs for small rural businesses and minority owned entrepreneurs. It claims that the small-business administration already accomplishes these goals, and that targeting traditionally underserved populations is “woke” and “racist.”It would cut the Rural Business Development Grant program, intended to help small programs with fewer than 50 employees and less than $1 million in gross revenues. In the past these grants have been used to train young and organic farmers and build commercial facilities that can help farmers prepare and transport their products to market, among other programs, all of which benefit entrepreneurship in rural areas with few job opportunities. The budget also eliminates a loan guarantee program with similar goals. Because these programs are small and not often immediately profitable, it’s harder to get private funding for them.The budget would also eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency, which has helped working-class Americans of color start or expand their businesses and helped diversify some fields, like bringing more women into construction trades. These populations were targeted for this special program because they’re disproportionately likely to struggle to get loans elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration claims that that mission is itself divisive and discriminatory. Together, these programs allow working-class Americans to build and create businesses in communities often overlooked by traditional financing. Without government investment, they could disappear.Low-income housing programsA number of programs that aim to expand homeownership, both to people and communities, are on the chopping block. The budget would eliminate Community Development Financial Institutions, which bring financial institutions to communities that traditional banks ignore. They provide a range of financial services, including mortgages to low-income families buying their first homes. The Trump budget would also cut a program that has helped build more than 1.3 million affordable homes since 1992. And it would continue calling for a new Department of Housing and Urban Development policy to stop issuing rental assistance vouchers to new families.Cutting these programs does not save the federal government much money, especially when compared to the increased defense and immigration spending called for elsewhere. It’s also not a new agenda. Republicans have been cutting the social safety net for decades, dismantling the federal government infrastructure meant to help people and leaving everyone vulnerable to the whims of the free market. For all the lip-service Trump has paid to working-class Americans during his campaigns, this is just more evidence he’s always been a corporate-first Republican, serving the wealthy and the warmongering at the expense of everyone else.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208756/trump-2027-budget-hurts-working-class

Nostr event nevent1qqsvms8gghgwgsqn9whn6d7qraaz9m9hxsuvxrfjlqxv8fzn6qkf38szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjrhruna

2026-04-07T21:11:47Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The leader of the Catholic Church has denounced Donald Trump’s warmongering rhetoric.Pope Leo XIV described the U.S. president’s recent threats to obliterate Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable.”“Today as we all know there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable,” Leo said Tuesday. “Here there are certainly questions of international law, but even more than this a question of morality for the good of people.” Trump earlier Tuesday had pledged that Iran’s “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” unless the country’s leadership agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital tradeway in the region that only closed because of Trump’s intervention. He similarly promised to “blow up the whole country.”Trump has repeatedly escalated his threats against Iran since Sunday, demanding that the country’s leadership either reopen the waterway or face total annihilation, highlighting various possible strike targets such as Iran’s power plants and bridges. The president said this despite the fact that carrying out this threat would constitute a war crime.Leo referred to the conflict as an “unjust war” and said that the war is “continuing to escalate” with no clear resolution. It “is only provoking more hatred throughout the world,” he said, according to the Associated Press’s English translation of the pope’s comments, which were made in Italian.But such a severe attack on Iran wouldn’t just be immoral—it would also violate the laws of war. Targeting noncombatants such as civilians and civilian infrastructure is a blatant violation of International Humanitarian Law. Exterminating a “whole civilization” would break several components of the Geneva Conventions, which the U.S. played a foundational role in creating nearly a century ago.The pope urged people of goodwill to contact their local lawmakers to create pressure against the White House–led war effort. Leo emphasized that attacks on civilian infrastructure are “against international law” as well as a “sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction human beings are capable of.”“We all want to work for peace,” the pope said.Trump wrote on social media that Iran had the opportunity to act until Tuesday 8 p.m. Iran has so far rejected potential peace deals.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208755/pope-leo-donald-trump-threat-destroy-iran

Nostr event nevent1qqs2yst6vphf5hzaq5yrq7kelskgzxrl9cn9geckax9dg6xxtt5np6czyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjmtmcrf

2026-04-07T20:57:21Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Annie Ramos, the 22-year-old wife of Army soldier Matthew Blank, was released from ICE custody on Tuesday. Ramos had been detained for five days after being arrested on the Fort Polk, Louisiana, military base where her husband is stationed.“I am deeply grateful to my husband, Matthew, who never stopped fighting for me, and to our families and community who surrounded us with love, prayers, and support. Because of them, I am home,” Ramos said in a statement. “All I have ever wanted is to live with dignity in the country I have called home since I was a baby. I want to finish my degree, continue my education, and serve my community—just as my husband serves our country with honor.”Just a few weeks after the couple were married, Ramos was arrested by ICE agents. The two were checking in at Fort Polk to begin the process that would allow them to live together at the base and earn military benefits. Ramos was then handcuffed, led away from Blank and her new parents-in-law, and taken to a building that Blank said “looked like an interrogation room.”She had no criminal record. Ramos was born in Honduras and is undocumented. She was issued a deportation order when she was 22 months old. But regardless of such orders, U.S. law allows undocumented immigrants who marry U.S. citizens to become eligible for permanent residency. After getting permanent residency, they can apply for citizenship.The couple had even hired an immigration lawyer to assist them as they navigated the complicated citizenship process, before running into Donald Trump’s lawless goons.“I knew she didn’t have status,” Blank said after Ramos was detained. “We were doing everything the right way.”When they’re not milling around airports doing nothing, some ICE agents have been deployed to military bases around the U.S., mostly targeting relatives of military recruits when they show up on visiting days. Ramos’s case was the first reported instance of a military spouse being detained.Thankfully, the couple is now reunited. The Trump administration has presumably realized it is a terrible look to be splitting up military families at a time when the U.S. is literally at war. Sadly, thousands of other families continue to be forced apart under Trump’s immigration policies.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208754/ice-releases-soldier-wife-military-base

Nostr event nevent1qqsfp7r6y8nddnrfuk65km737e900yvl5th6g788e3m0hgaz5uu7f3czyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj7950cz

2026-04-07T19:36:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche proudly admitted his deference to Donald Trump regarding using the Department of Justice to attack the president’s political enemies. “President Trump has made no secret of the fact that he wants to see his perceived political enemies prosecuted,” a reporter asked Blanche at a Tuesday press conference. “So now that you’re in this position, how are you going to balance that relentless pressure with this administration’s promise to end the weaponization of this department?”“First of all we have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now. And it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the president in the past has had issues with, and believes should be investigated,” Blanche replied, offering zero pushback to the notion that Trump is controlling the DOJ. “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.”Under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Trump administration has used the DOJ to go after former FBI Director James Comey, Democratic Senators Adam Schiff and Mark Kelly, former National Security advisor John Bolton, New York Attorney General Letitia James, every Democratic leader in Minnesota, and more. Each one of those people criticized Trump in some way, and nearly all of the DOJ’s attacks against them failed. And while DOJ criminal investigations are supposed to be free of White House influence, it seems clear that Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s lawyer in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, will continue to dutifully carry out Trump’s revenge. “At his first press conference, Trump’s Acting AG says it out loud: The DOJ is there to target Trump’s political enemies,” the press office of California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote. “A disgusting abuse of power!”
https://newrepublic.com/post/208740/new-attorney-general-admits-trump-calling-shots-doj

Nostr event nevent1qqsxctt3cvfea62r0va8gdeq324zra2djhs2wj46asyjw28j2xvzatgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjmklgrs

2026-04-07T18:34:12Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The United Nations is warning Donald Trump against further escalation in the Iran war after he threatened Tuesday that “[a] whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” “Even wars have rules,” the U.N.’s official X account posted along with a link to its human rights office. “The Geneva Conventions protect civilians in conflict and help ensure assistance reaches those in need, without discrimination.”The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, issued a statement against “incendiary rhetoric” and warned that anyone who commits war crimes should face legal justice, strongly hinting at Trump without mentioning him by name. “I deplore the tirade of incendiary rhetoric being used in the Middle East war over the last couple of weeks by all parties, including the latest threats to annihilate a whole civilisation and to target civilian infrastructure. This is sickening. Carrying through on such threats amounts to the most serious international crimes,” Türk said. “Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Anyone responsible for international crimes must be held to account by a competent court.”Will any of this get through to Trump or his inner circle? Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already made clear his disdain for any restraint and his love for violence, calling for “no quarter” and “no mercy for our enemies.” Trump doesn’t have a problem with this, as evidenced by his outrageous threat, and the fact that he seems to get his war news from a staff-prepared daily highlight reel of bombings in Iran.If Trump sticks to his 8 p.m. EST deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and decides to follow through on his threat to bomb the country’s power plants, bridges, and other civilian infrastructure, the results could be catastrophic. That would no doubt be a war crime resulting in a humanitarian nightmare, not just in the eyes of the U.N., but many in the U.S. and around the world. The question is whether the White House or Republicans in Washington actually care.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208728/un-warns-trump-iran-threat-wars-have-rules

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2026-04-07T15:46:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The willing publicization of some of the more sensitive information pertaining to Donald Trump’s White House ballroom has caused federal prosecutors to wonder if he’s inserting himself into the project’s legal filings.Former assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner spoke at length about the issue on his podcast Justice Matters Monday, arguing that certain details spelled out in the filings—such as the national security additions intended to be built beneath the 90,000-square-foot dance hall—were so naïvely included that he wondered if Trump hadn’t picked up his “beloved Sharpie” to edit the documents himself before they were submitted to the judge.“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s kind of curious that this public court filing is announcing not just to the American people, but to the world, including our enemies, exactly what kind of ‘top secret facilities’ this ballroom will contain,” Kirschner said.“I find it impossible to believe that a legitimate, self-respecting Department of Justice attorney authored this garbage,” he continued. “It’s embarrassing. It’s an insult to the court. And more importantly, it’s an insult to the American people because that’s whose interests DOJ attorneys are supposed to represent.”The filings make mention of planned bomb shelters, a hospital, a medical area, protective partitioning, and “top secret” military installations. They also clarify some of the building materials, which include missile-resistant steel columns, drone-proof roofing materials, and bullet-, ballistic-, and blast-proof glass.The court filing is also riddled with typos and unconventional grammar choices, more akin to the president’s litany of social media posts than a judicial filing submitted by the DOJ. The first page is doused in exclamation points, improper capitalization, misplaced parentheticals, redundant synonyms for emphasis, rhetorical flourishes, and run-on sentences.Trump’s idea to build a ballroom on the White House grounds larger than the executive estate itself has been riddled with problems and colored by lies since he first announced the project in July. Initially, Trump pledged that the development would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing.Months later, his construction teams completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress, both of which were conveniently unavailable at the time due to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.The ballroom’s estimated price tag has been similarly difficult to nail down. Trump originally claimed that the project would cost $200 million, but a decision to tack on extra construction to the site doubled its expenses to $400 million. The new building will have 40-foot ceilings, be able to accommodate up to 1,000 seated guests, and would constitute 22,000 square feet of the 90,000-square-foot development, according to projections offered by East Wing ballroom architect Shalom Baranes in January.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208722/donald-trump-secret-ballroom-details-filing