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America’s Orange Jesus

2026-04-16T23:25:07.732Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story In her 2023 memoir, “Oath and Honor,” published the year before Donald Trump’s remarkable return from political oblivion, the Republican apostate Liz Cheney describes watching in amazement on January 6, 2021, as her fellow-Republicans in Congress lined up to sign electoral-vote objection sheets. Cheney, who had been No. 3 in the Party leadership throughout Trump’s first term in office, concluded that her colleagues suffered from a “plague of cowardice,” summed up by their willingness to go along with Trump’s false claims about the “rigged” 2020 election despite understanding full well that he had lost fair and square. “The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” Cheney heard one of them, Mark Green, of Tennessee, mutter as he put his name down. (Later, Green denied having made the comment; the following year, Trump praised the congressman for his many “political talents.”) I immediately thought of Cheney’s Orange Jesus line this week when Trump, amid an escalating public feud with Pope Leo XIV, circulated an A.I.-generated image of himself as the Christian Lord and Saviour, before deleting it and telling reporters the next day, at the White House: I did post it. And I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with the Red Cross, there’s a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. I had just heard about it, and I said, “How did they come up with that?” It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better. I make people a lot better. It is not enough to read these words, as silly and mendacious and incoherent as they are. Trump’s remarks, in my view, make for essential viewing, thirty-seven seconds that showcase the precipitousness of our fall as a superpower. Look at how Trump stares straight into the cameras as he lies. A doctor? Seriously? It’s as though he felt no need to come up with a better excuse—or any excuse at all. (To be fair: the fact that, as Trump said this, he was flanked by a fifty-eight-year-old MAGA enthusiast from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had just delivered to him a bag of takeout McDonald’s in a bright-red “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt suggests that God does have a pretty good sense of humor.) By Wednesday, Trump had reasserted his claim to divine authority, posting another A.I.-generated image of himself standing alongside Jesus, who has his arm wrapped around Trump’s shoulder; both of them are bathed in the soft glow of a heavenly light. Trump’s caption: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!” The point is simply this: in Trump 1.0, Orange Jesus was a snarky shorthand for the hypocrisy of Republicans who knew better but joined up with the cult of Trump anyway. In Trump 2.0, Trump thinks he has actually become Orange Jesus. How else to explain the President’s many otherwise inexplicable acts since returning to office? The gilding of the White House to resemble a profane copy of the Vatican, the ever more baroque lies, the slapping his name on everything, and, perhaps most of all, the repeated reminders that our leader recognizes no earthly limits on his power as he wages war in the Middle East and speaks of conquering other lands. “There is one thing,” he told the Times, in January. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” America First-ism is not the ideology of this Presidency; Trump First-ism is. The fact that he serves up his megalomania with such an excess of dark farce only reinforces how shameful it is that this is the man for whom so many Republicans have chosen to sacrifice what remained of their integrity. On Thursday, a federal commission stacked with Trump appointees voted to approve the President’s plans for a triumphal arch on the National Mall, modelled on those built by Napoleon and the Roman emperors to celebrate their military victories. At two hundred and fifty feet tall, it would be the biggest such structure in the world. Asked last fall by CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe what this modern-day arch was meant to commemorate, Trump pointed to himself and replied, “Me.” One might conclude from the fact that Trump quickly deleted his Jesus post on Monday morning, some thirteen hours after posting it on Orthodox Easter, that he realized he had gone too far, even for many of his most vocal followers. There’s no doubt that the online backlash was swift and laugh-out-loud funny, the worst kind of insult to a man who sees himself as endowed with otherworldly powers. I particularly loved one from Sarah Palin—an image of Jesus seemingly begging Trump to stop making such an ass of himself: “Alright. That’s enough. Give me the phone.” You literally cannot buy publicity this bad for a politician. At such a moment, it would seem to be an extreme case of political malpractice for the President to pick a public fight about the extent of God’s imprimatur on his decision to go to war on immigrants at home and Iranians abroad with no less of an authority on God than the Pope himself. Even before the whole I-am-Jesus thing, Trump’s popularity was plummeting to historic lows as his war upended the global economy and sent prices for oil, gas, and a zillion other products skyrocketing. But the cult lives. On Thursday morning, at a Pentagon press briefing, there was Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, comparing Trump to the Lord once again, as he likened reporters’ “incredibly unpatriotic” coverage of the President’s conflict in the Middle East to the evil Pharisees tearing down Jesus after he had performed a miracle in front of their very eyes. (That same day, it was revealed that Hegseth, during a Pentagon sermon, had quoted fake Bible verses from the movie “Pulp Fiction”—who knew that Trump 2.0 could turn “Saturday Night Live” into a reality-TV show?) At almost exactly the same time that Hegseth was going on about the Pharisees, Pope Leo’s latest missive to his flock landed on X. “Woe to those 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,” the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and Patriarch of the West wrote to his tens of millions of followers. Not long after, Trump was given the opportunity to walk away from his no-win feud. But, no, responding to reporters’ questions on the White House lawn, he suggested that the Pope, in condemning war as the Scriptures demand, was in fact in favor of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon, whereas he, Trump, would not allow that to happen. “I want him to preach the Gospel, I’m all about the Gospel,” the President added. I am not much of a Bible quoter, but it seems pretty clear which side the Lord would be on in this fight between the Orange Jesus and the real one’s personal emissary on earth. The folly of the ancient Roman emperors springs to mind here. History has not judged kindly their demand that their subjects not only build great arches in their honor but that they literally worship their rulers as Dominus et Deus, Lord and God. Those imperial cults of personality, and many of their monuments, lasted no longer than the short period of their rule. Trump may scar our beautiful capital with golden memorials to himself, but how long, really, will it last, this tacky reign of a President who styles himself a MAGA god? ♦

Apr 17, 20269 votes

America’s Orange Jesus

Apr 17, 202620 votes

TMZ Gets Political

2026-04-15T10:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story In late March, grainy photographs of the Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham relaxing at Disney World spread across the internet. One of these images showed Graham gripping a pink-and-blue bubble wand inspired by “The Little Mermaid.” Graham had a dilatory air, as though he’d somehow drifted off to a distant place. The photo’s caption wagged that Graham’s “fantasyland” surroundings, in the “Tangled” section of the theme park, couldn’t be more “on the nose—Congress is living in one, with each side blaming the other for its failure to reach a compromise that would reopen the government . . . believing voters are buying what they’re selling.” This commentary was not from a wonkish TikToker nor a network pundit but from TMZ, the merciless purveyor of celebrity dirt, which published the images of Graham after a citizen vacationer noticed the senator flitting through the theme park and sent pictures. Known for its screeching headlines, up-to-the-second scoops, and contentious practice of paying off sources for scandalous tips, the tabloid has widened its pitiless lens to include officials across the political spectrum. Officials need not be as nationally recognizable as Graham to make the cut: within the last few weeks, TMZ has run surreptitious photos of John James, a Republican representative from Michigan, unwinding in the Caribbean, and others of Marsha Blackburn, a Republican U.S. senator for Tennessee, suitcase in tow, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. TMZ is, to put it generously, a controversial outfit that few would admit to reading regularly. The publication routinely breaks news—such as the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, and key developments concerning the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of the “Today Show” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie—often employing ruthless tactics to obtain such significant stories. Their brutal approach to tracking down entertainers has earned them a litany of enemies. In 2007, TMZ reported on a disturbing voice mail that Alec Baldwin had left for his daughter; nearly a decade later, in a 2016 article, by Nicholas Schmidle, in this magazine, Baldwin described the site’s founder and executive producer Harvey Levin as “a festering boil on the anus of American media.” But even some of TMZ’s usual detractors have applauded its pivot to name-and-shame political coverage. Commenting on a Times story about the phenomenon, one commenter wrote, “I don’t trust TMZ as far as I can throw them but this is a friendly reminder that we do have a voice.” “Sad do-nothings,” another reader quipped, adding, “Give them the B-lister treatment, TMZ!” On Sunday, TMZ reported that Britney Spears had checked into rehab following an alleged D.U.I. arrest; a post on X urged the site to “go back to telling us about politicians.” After the latest U.S. partial government shutdown began, on February 14th, Levin put out a call for photos of congresspeople relishing their spring recess. The public delivered. In one post, the tabloid sniped that more than thirty members of Congress were in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the break. (Headline: “BUST OUT THE BAGPIPES, WE’RE IN SCOTLAND!!!”) Images of the Texas senator Ted Cruz sitting on a plane live alongside TMZ’s ample shots of stars’ breasts—a common enough feature that the site has a dedicated “celebrity boobs” tag. Yet TMZ has taken to ripping elected officials with a searing scrutiny beyond even what it usually reserves for its favored celebrity targets. In doing so, the tabloid has become an improbable fount of accountability in a political era characterized by impasse, fear, and an ad-nauseam passing of the buck. TMZ’s broadened focus on the government is not a swerve but, rather, a circuitous end to Levin’s decades-long quest to fully own the nexus of celebrity and political opprobrium. Long before the site ran scoops about members of Congress traipsing around Edinburgh Castle, a young Levin harbored political aspirations. He studied political science as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and considered a Ph.D. in the discipline. Two years after TMZ made an aggressive début in the tabloid sphere, in 2007, Levin sent an employee to Washington to scope out office space; he wanted to cover Washington, D.C., with the same dishiness that had worked so well for him in Los Angeles. But TMZ’s parent company at the time, Time Warner, balked at potential regulatory snarls that could arise from paparazzi and tipsters descending upon the district, according to a Bloomberg report. The company shelved plans for the TMZ D.C. bureau. (In 2021, Fox Entertainment acquired TMZ from WarnerMedia.) TMZ has covered politics since the failed D.C. bid, sometimes seemingly according to Levin’s proclivities. Two of the site’s staffers told Bloomberg that they were limited in reporting on President Donald Trump’s scandals during his 2016 run—the kinds of stories that TMZ would ordinarily sprint toward. The seventy-five-year-old Levin, a supporter of socially liberal causes who boosted Trump in the early years of his first term, reportedly had a falling out with the President in 2018, over the Administration’s intention to restrict transgender people from serving in the military. Following their beef, TMZ has taken a notably pointed approach to covering Trump, reporting on the sexual accusations against the President in the Epstein files, and posting about how California governor Gavin Newsom “savagely trolled” Trump after the President posted an A.I.-generated image of himself resembling Jesus. Politics has never been TMZ’s focal point, but political issues that aggrieve Levin personally have steered the outlet’s coverage from its inception. While growing up, in the San Fernando Valley, Levin saw fame’s capacity to protect certain people from the consequences of the law. His father, who owned a liquor store, grappled with frequent sting operations from officials claiming that minors were purchasing alcohol there. It incensed Levin that, meanwhile, on the other side of the mountain, teen-age celebrities clinked perspiring glasses of champagne in night clubs, with little consequence. “Harvey thought it was so unfair that these clubs would get away with it, just because they were selling to celebrities,” a former TMZ publicist told The New Yorker in 2016. As a counterpoint to the common media practice of deifying celebrities in well-composed shots fit for print, or attempting to humanize them in clearly planned errand-running shots, TMZ first made a name for itself by publishing pixelated cellphone shots of haggard-looking A-listers. After a casino owner turned TV star first became President of the United States, media networks further beefed up their political coverage by treating it like entertainment, amplifying juicy play-by-plays over granular dissections of policy. CNN’s former president, Jeff Zucker, once told the Times Magazine that he aspired to imbue some aspects of ESPN into CNN’s political reporting—a move that has further framed politicians as entertainers rather than as employees who answer to the American public. Some officials have taken advantage of this, stepping into their roles with panache, mudslinging among themselves, and rattling off speeches primed for virality rather than for substance. The transformation of politicians into celebrities has fomented ideal conditions, in other words, for TMZ to chase elected officials with the same feverish intensity that they employ to snap a rumored celebrity couple leaving the Chateau Marmont together. The partial shutdown began in February, 2026, when the Republican-led U.S. Senate deadlocked over a vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security. The G.O.P. had insisted on shoring up funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection to pass the resolution, a nonstarter for Democrats. Republicans then rejected the revised legislation, and the government shuttered in turn. Then elected officials went on a two-week recess. The fight is less about the Department of Homeland Security and more about the pathologies of modern politics, in which liberals and conservatives alike have been unwilling to cede any political turf—a perpetual game of chicken that’s caused thousands of federal employees to work for months without pay. That this stalemate has dragged on this long has infuriated Levin, who considers keeping the government functioning a basic tenet of Congress’s job. A few weeks into the shutdown, a T.S.A. worker named Rebecca Wolf appeared on “TMZ Live,” a gossipy weekday show produced inside the company’s L.A. studio space, featuring Levin and one of the show’s executive producers, Charles Latibeaudiere. Levin, typically springy, glowered as Wolf told them about how the shutdown had devastated her life. She’d contemplated selling her vehicle, adding that her last paycheck had come out to a paltry $13.53; in another video, Wolf shared that she’d considered suicide. At the end of the interview, Levin speaks directly into the camera, pleading with his fellow-citizens to send photos of politicians doing anything but their jobs. “They can’t reach some agreement, some compromise to pay these people who are losing their houses, losing their cars, losing their livelihood, becoming sacrificial lambs so people can have a political gain,” he seethes. Later in the episode, he adds, if “you see one of the five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress, take a picture and send it to us at TMZ. We will post that picture on our website, on our social media, and we will put it on our television shows. We want to show what they are doing at your expense.” The photos flooded in. Politicians, seeing themselves splashed all over TMZ’s homepage, scrambled to walk back their vacation plans. As if to underscore the outlet’s point, they took aim at their colleagues across the aisle rather than acknowledging that they were eating out on taxpayers’ dimes. Graham claimed that he had been in Florida to meet with Trump officials prior to his Disney World jaunt, adding that he “voted seven times to fully fund the government. Call a Democrat.” (As for the bubble wand: apparently he was holding it for a child using the bathroom.) When TMZ nabbed photos of the Rhode Island representative Seth Magaziner, a Democrat, co-hosting a watch party with the stars of “The Real Housewives of Rhode Island,” he jumped on “TMZ Live” to defend himself, pointing the finger at House Speaker Mike Johnson for dismissing officials before a consensus. Anticipating that someone might tip off TMZ about his presence at Disney World, the Republican Florida senator Rick Scott posted a photo of himself mugging for the camera there. “Hey TMZ. Yes, I’m at Disney with my grandkids. Should we be in DC? Yes! But I don’t get to make that decision,” he wrote in the post. TMZ ran the photo of Scott, scoffing, “It’s sort of like saying, not my job, man.” TMZ has expanded its ranks following the success of this heightened political focus. On April 13th, timed to the week that members of Congress return from their spring recess, the long-awaited TMZ D.C. bureau launched with three reporters; with characteristic snark, the announcement noted that congresspeople were returning to work not on Monday but Tuesday: “gotta make sure they get the full two weeks off, right?” Is TMZ’s political heel turn, then, a net good? A keen observer may be loath to make that claim. TMZ is owned by the Murdoch family, whose tense albeit reciprocal relationship with Trump raises skepticism that the network can truly bring a MAGA-dominated government—one that’s continuously stripping away checks and balances—to task. Then there’s the knottiness of TMZ itself. Paying sources for information is wildly unethical for a media organization. The N.F.L. player Robert Jones, the subject of a TMZ story, sued the outlet for defamation in 2015; TMZ issued a retraction in the piece. Past employees have said that working under Levin is nightmarish; one former colleague of Levin’s filed a gender discrimination complaint against the organization in 2020. (Representatives for TMZ called the claims “inaccurate” in a statement to the Times, and said that the employee had been fired for other reasons.) Another employee spoke with The New Yorker for the 2016 story while wearing a disguise, worried about retribution. Still, scrolling through TMZ’s posts of congresspeople instills a strange rush of Schadenfreude. As a cost-of-living crisis surges, these politicians look foolish and out of touch in their vacation getups, even more so when they try to explain themselves. Wolf, the T.S.A. employee, in her interview with TMZ, noted that she and her colleagues have been pooling together their scant resources to help one another, organizing food drives and collecting gift cards while calling their respective representatives about their struggles to scrape by. “Even [with] all the different calls and the interviews that we’re doing, it doesn’t seem to bother these people who are making this decision on our lives,” she said. When appealing to a congressional answering machine fails, perhaps public embarrassment is the most effective lever to pull. If the tabloid keeps applying this sort of pressure to politicians, one can only hope that these shaming campaigns could effectively prevent Congress from future complacency—even if only to insure that they’re never in TMZ’s crosshairs again. ♦

Apr 15, 202618 votes

TMZ Gets Political

Apr 15, 202612 votes

How Much Has the War in Iran Depleted the U.S. Missile Supply?

2026-04-14T10:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story In a capital where politicians and policymakers often argue one side and then the other, Elbridge Colby has stood out over the past decade for his consistent and often single-minded position that the United States should shift its military and geopolitical world view toward countering the rise of China. Known to friends and colleagues as Bridge, Colby is something of national-defense royalty: his grandfather was William Colby, a legendary C.I.A. director who had served as the agency’s station chief in Saigon in the early years of the Vietnam War. During the first Trump Administration, Colby, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, helped devise the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which directed the department to reorient its focus from the Middle East to China (a perennial-but-never-realized staple of U.S. policy since the Obama Administration proclaimed a “pivot to Asia” in 2011). After Joe Biden was elected, Colby continued to argue that the world was returning to an era of Great Power competition, publishing a book, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” writing op-eds, and leading a think tank, the Marathon Initiative, which he had co-founded with the promise to “develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies the nation will need to navigate a protracted competition with great power rivals.” After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, Colby opposed the Biden Administration’s surge of arms, military assets, and munitions to aid the country in its fight. In Colby’s view, Europe needed to take the lead on its own defense, and the U.S. needed to conserve its weapons for China and the Pacific. As he wrote in an op-ed in November, 2022, “This military scarcity confronting the United States is felt not so much in overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the key sources of advantage in modern warfare—heavy bombers, attack submarines, sea and airlift, logistics, and precision munitions.” The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today. Two weeks after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Colby retweeted a warning based on comments by Samuel Paparo, a top U.S. admiral, that “conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are eating away at U.S. stockpiles of air defenses.” In December, Colby shared a tweet by Mike Waltz—who was soon to be Trump’s national-security adviser—in which Waltz proclaimed, “President Trump received an overwhelming mandate to avoid the U.S. being dragged into another Middle East war on his watch.” Later that month, Trump nominated Colby as his Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy—one of the Pentagon’s most powerful roles. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called him “the intellectual front man for a wing of the political right that argues the U.S. should retreat from commitments in Europe and the Middle East.” Last summer, soon after the so-called Twelve-Day War, in which the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, press reports accused Colby of using his new position to quietly orchestrate a freeze on key weapons shipments to Ukraine—a move that was said to surprise even the White House and which was quickly reversed. (According to a senior Pentagon policy official, last year’s disruption of U.S. aid to Ukraine was the result of “a process foul in the bowels of the Pentagon,” and the reporting that Colby directed—or even recommended—such a pause is “categorically false.”) More recently, the White House made clear in its National Security Strategy that the Administration hoped to avoid in the Middle East “the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down in that region at great cost,” and Colby’s office helped drive the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, which came out in January and highlighted how the U.S. had been focussed elsewhere in recent years as “all the while, China and its military grew more powerful in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s largest and most dynamic market area, with significant implications for Americans’ own security, freedom, and prosperity.” Now, with the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran in a fragile and uncertain ceasefire, it’s clear that there was something to Colby’s arguments all along. Despite spending more than eight hundred billion dollars a year on defense, the U.S. is uncomfortably short on key munitions, weapons platforms, and even some ships and planes after six weeks of fighting Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East. Trump’s Pentagon has made frequent use of Tomahawk cruise missiles—highly advanced multimillion-dollar missiles with the ability to strike targets a thousand miles away—throughout his second term, as part of military strikes conducted in a total of seven countries. Tomahawks were fired at Houthi rebels in Yemen last March; at Iran, during the Twelve-Day War; and at suspected ISIS militants in Nigeria in December. Other reports have indicated that the U.S. may have also used Tomahawks in Syria and Venezuela in recent months. An even steeper toll on U.S. stockpiles, munitions, and weapons systems has been incurred during the latest war in Iran. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., estimates that the U.S. currently has between three thousand and four thousand Tomahawk missiles. (The exact number is classified.) Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Washington Post reported that the U.S. used more than eight hundred and fifty Tomahawks in just the first month of the war in Iran—that’s as much as three billion dollars’ worth of a single weapon. Meanwhile, the 2026 U.S. defense budget funds the purchase of only fifty-seven new Tomahawk missiles. “If you’re in China, you are gleefully counting on a little hand clicker all the Tomahawks that are being expended,” Tom Karako, who directs the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “Iran is not what the Tomahawk is for. Iran is what Small Diameter Bombs—gravity bombs—are for. Thousand-plus-kilometre cruise missiles are for when you have to suppress a wicked thicket of air defenses in China, because you don’t want to fly your bombers in without doing that.” U.S. interceptor missiles and air-defense systems turn out to be similarly ill-provisioned. Last summer, during the bombing campaign against Iran, the Islamic Republic retaliated against Israel with large waves of ballistic missiles. The U.S. deployed two Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense systems, or THAADs, to Israel, which reportedly fired off more than a hundred and fifty interceptors—roughly a quarter of the number the Pentagon has ever purchased. Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor, previously made about a hundred interceptors a year, each of which cost close to thirteen million dollars. (A full THAAD battery, including missiles and radar, costs upward of a billion dollars.) The U.S. has only eight THAAD batteries worldwide. At least one of them has been damaged by Iranian strikes in the current conflict, and the U.S. is now moving in components from a system in South Korea, where it had been considered a key part of North Korean deterrence. “The reports of some number of those eight radars being disabled—even if temporarily—ought to really concern you, because those are the kind of things that they’re small in number, they’re really good at what they do, and they’re going to be really important on a bad day with China,” Karako said. “And—oh, by the way—we didn’t have enough of them already.” A 2023 war game developed by C.S.I.S., and later run for the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, found that, in a conflict with China over Taiwan, the U.S. would run out of key munitions in just a month—and, in the case of one missile, in three to seven days—a worrisome conclusion even before the giant depletion of stockpiles caused by the Iran war. “What we learned, in a protracted war—our defense industrial base does not have the resources it needs to win that war,” John Moolenaar, a Republican House member from Michigan, who chairs the committee, said in an interview on Fox News. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that he worries Chinese officials might be watching the U.S. war in Iran and thinking that the strength of the U.S. military isn’t all that they might have imagined. “They have to be seeing some of the full might of the U.S. and Israel, and that Iran is still standing,” he said. “I’m afraid that they may be amazed at the specificity of our ability to target, but it raises the question of our staying power.” The crisis of American defense production has been slowly worsening since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. “Official Washington added a new word to its vocabulary in the months after February, 2022, and that new word was ‘munitions,’ ” Karako told me. Jon Finer, who served as Biden’s principal deputy national-security adviser, said that the limited ability of the United States to meet the endless need for weapons in the war in Ukraine was the “the most jarring thing that I learned during the entire time I was in government.” Heavy-duty munitions had long been an afterthought in the “global war on terror,” which prioritized close fighting, special forces, and weapons platforms such as the Predator and Reaper drones. “We adjust our industrial base to the kinds of wars that we are fighting,” Finer told me. “I think we got out of the mind-set where we were ever going to fight a very munitions-heavy war again. That was a bit of a failure of imagination.” At the same time, the nation’s weapons manufacturers—part of what is known inside the Beltway as the defense-industrial base, or DIB—have grown cautious after years of fast-shifting congressional priorities. “If you’re a defense prime, you have basically had to use a Ouija board and a divining rod to try to guess what number of munitions that the government will want to buy two years from now,” Karako said. “These are publicly traded companies—they have to maximize the return for their stockholders—and they can’t, unfortunately, as good Americans, build stuff on spec and hope that the government will show up and buy it.” The Pentagon has tried to revamp its famously slow and sclerotic acquisitions pipeline. Last summer, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg began leading the newly formed Munitions Acceleration Council, which focussed on rapidly growing the production of a dozen weapons that the Pentagon believes would be key to a future conflict with China—including Patriot interceptor missiles and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles, known as JASSMs. (In early April, before the ceasefire, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. was redeploying stockpiles of JASSMs from the Pacific to the Middle East, a move that would leave around four hundred and twenty-five of the missiles, out of a prewar stockpile of more than two thousand, for the rest of the world.) Later in the fall, as part of what the Department of Defense dubbed an “Acquisition Transformation Strategy,” the Pentagon laid out how it aimed to rebuild the nation’s defense production; one of the main strategies is to give companies “bigger, longer deals, so they’ll be willing to invest more to grow the industrial base that supplies our weapons.” In September, the Army awarded Lockheed Martin a nearly ten-billion-dollar contract for the production of Patriot interceptor missiles, the largest in the company’s history; in early January, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin announced a deal to more than triple the production of the missiles, each of which costs about four million dollars, from six hundred to two thousand a year. Michael Duffey, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, called the deal “a fundamental shift in how we rapidly expand munitions production and magazine depth, and how we collaborate with our industry partners.” On April 3rd, as the war in Iran approached its sixth week, the White House released a budget request for 2027, which called for $1.5 trillion in defense spending—a more than forty-per-cent increase that, by itself, would be larger than any other nation’s annual defense budget. Much of that money would go to increased investments in munitions and missile-defense systems; Trump said that such spending on “military protection” should take priority over funding for health care and other safety-net programs. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis.” But Iran’s reliance on cheap drones has also exposed the ways in which expensive U.S. systems are ill-matched for many facets of modern warfare. For decades, U.S. war planners had assumed that Iran would be reluctant to fully close the Strait of Hormuz with naval mines because doing so would render it impassable to Iran’s own oil-tanker fleet. But Iran was ultimately able to choke the global economy by enforcing a closure largely with drones aimed at foreign tankers. “The idea of an operation to quote-unquote open the strait is a little bit of a misnomer, because even troops on the coast are not going to do anything about drones fired from apartment buildings, mountains, and whatever else inland,” Finer said. “We never imagined a scenario in which the Iranians were under so little pressure to open the strait for the rest of the world, because they are able to get more of their own product out than they were able before.” Deborah Lee James, who served as Secretary of the Air Force from 2013 to 2017, told me that she hopes the weaknesses the current war has exposed in procurement systems will help spur a moment of innovation. She noted the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s mandate for a “crash program,” in 2007, to rapidly manufacture armored troop transports that could withstand the blasts of improvised explosive devices, which were killing and maiming U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense manufacturers such as BAE Systems and Oshkosh manufactured tens of thousands of mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles at a cost of nearly fifty billion dollars before the program was ended in 2012. “I think this has now gotten that type of attention,” James said. “This is going to, I hope, be an MRAP moment for the United States when it comes to counter-drone [technologies].” The Pentagon, though, has continued to project confidence that, despite the past month and a half of fighting in Iran, the U.S. military is still well positioned to deter China in the Pacific. “The Department is laser-focussed on ‘deterrence by denial,’ ” the Pentagon official said. “Our goal is very simply to convince our counterparts that whatever their ambitions are from a military standpoint, they just are not going to be able to achieve them with the kind of confidence they’re looking for—and so they are better off not trying.” Ultimately, President Xi Jinping’s decision about whether to move against Taiwan will almost certainly be driven by internal considerations—how much confidence he has in his own military leadership, which has faced repeated purges in attempts to root out corruption, and how much progress the military makes in building advanced sea, aerial, and amphibious capability. But some defense analysts believe that the so-called Davidson Window, the period when China could be ready to seize Taiwan, might begin as early as next year—meaning that every missile fired against Iran is a missile unlikely to be replaced by then. “We are vaporizing many billions of dollars of offensive and defensive munitions, specifically the kind that you would want to have in large quantities to deter or fight a war with China,” Karako said. “The biggest danger is that this sets us up for provoking China to do something for which we now have fewer strike missiles and many fewer missile-defense capabilities.” ♦ 获取更多RSS： https://feedx.net https://feedx.site

Apr 14, 20266 votes

What Trump’s Reorganization of the Forest Service Means for Rural America

2026-04-07T10:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story On a recent morning in central Vermont, where I live, it was raining, and the wood frogs had just begun to chorus. The sap run from the maple trees has started to dwindle as the branches begin to bud out. There is a timeless quality to a New England spring (or as timeless as anything can be in an age of rapid climate change), and part of that timelessness is the United States Forest Service, whose land boundaries I wander across most days on rambles through the woods. For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape. Which is why last week, though in the big cities it was barely noticed amid the noisy horror of the war in the Middle East, there was much talk in rural America about the Trump Administration’s sweeping changes to—really, a gutting of—the Service, which operates under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Service’s regional headquarters will vanish, along with most of its research facilities and experimental forests—and also quite likely the sense of mission that has animated the agency for more than a century. The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today. The Forest Service controls a hundred and fifty-four national forests and twenty national grasslands—at a hundred and ninety-three million acres, that’s the second-largest land base, public or private, in the country, trailing only the Bureau of Land Management, which runs the nation’s federal rangelands. Sometimes the national forests are confused with the (much smaller) national-park system, which is understandable—often those parks butt up against the forests, and the uniforms of the two services look a little alike, and that’s before we’ve even considered the Fish and Wildlife Service. But, if you see people driving a minty-green pickup, they’re from the Forest Service, a job that implies a very particular history. The agency’s antecedents date to the nineteenth century, but it was at the beginning of the twentieth, under President Theodore Roosevelt, that it came into its own. Its first chief was Gifford Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, who believed in protecting the country’s natural resources to help power its growth—he wanted there to be plenty of trees for the industrial needs of the country. “Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day,” he said. In his time, however, Pinchot’s biggest confrontation was with the forces of what might be called “preservation,” saving forests not for their industrial potential but for their intrinsic meaning and beauty. The towering figure here was John Muir, and, while it’s easy to overstate the differences between the two men (they were, at worst, frenemies) and their visions, the differences were nonetheless very real. Muir and Pinchot clashed, for instance, over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite, with Pinchot’s take—that it was “the best, and, within reasonable limits of cost, the only means of supplying San Francisco with water”—prevailing, in 1913. But, if providing resources for economic growth was the Forest Service’s founding ethos, over time it has, in patches, reflected a more Muirish view: the national-forest system now includes about half of all the designated “wilderness” in the lower forty-eight states. When you drive into a national forest (and you likely have, since the Service retains the largest road network in the world, eight times the length of the interstate-highway system), you pass a sign that proclaims it a “Land of Many Uses.” In the Green Mountain National Forest, near where I live, there’s not just timber production but, also, the Breadloaf Wilderness, big stretches of the Long Trail (America’s first long-distance hiking trail), snowmobile corridors, ski areas, and a Robert Frost Interpretive Trail with signs every few hundred yards quoting his poems. Although there’s always been pressure on the Service to “increase the cut” and harvest more timber for local mills and builders, and although this has often led to egregious clear-cutting (the Service was once reputed to employ more landscape architects than any other organization in the world, largely to make those clear-cuts less visible from the roads), there’s also been a measurable move toward sounder science. Aldo Leopold, for instance, essentially invented the field of conservation biology while working on game management in the national forests of the Southwest; the U.S.D.A. website, as of this writing, still pays tribute to his un-Trumpian ideas about “the benefit that comes from slowing down and taking the time to listen to nature. In today’s world, being quiet is a valuable commodity; taking time to stop and listen for those minute details outdoors that weave a tapestry of stories all around us is a rewarding experience if we but stop and pay attention.” The Service maintains many experimental forests, which have produced new understandings of woodland ecology, making it clear that the trees that cover about a third of the country are far more than machines for producing lumber or fibre. I was once told, over a beer with one of the heads of the Clinton-era Forest Service, that its research showed unequivocally that the greatest value of those millions of acres was not timber or even recreation but the way that intact forests absorb and filter water, which reduces both flooding and the need for expensive artificial filtration. Sound science, we have learned, is anathema to the Trump Administration, which moved within weeks of taking office this term to demand more timber production from America’s forests. So it was no surprise that part of the “reorganization” announced last week involved the ceasing of most of the experimental-forest research and closure of the research stations in the U.S.F.S. network. These are the sites of experiments that can reach back for decades; since trees, by definition, take a fairly long time to grow, that span allows scientists to understand how forests develop and to look for the changes that a warming climate is producing. But there’s a deeper message in the reorganization, too, which shuts down the Service’s nine regional offices and relocates its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City. Utah is at the heart of what’s been called the Sagebrush Rebellion, which rose during the Reagan era to challenge the prevailing management of federal lands, and, indeed, the entire idea of federal lands. In recent years, Utah’s senator Mike Lee has led efforts to sell off huge tracts of those lands across the West to developers. The Senate refused to act on those plans last year, one of the few defeats suffered by the MAGA right. That was largely because of a huge swell of protests from hunters, fishermen, hikers, mountain bikers, and other recreational users of these lands—and from the businesses that cater to them. The Forest Service reorganization is a backdoor way to achieve some of the same goals: during Trump’s first term, his Administration moved the B.L.M. headquarters from Washington to Colorado, which led many of its key employees to quit. (The Biden Administration moved it back.) It is likely that the same will happen with Forest Service workers (thousands of them have already been DOGE-d). The Service will now have, instead of a regional headquarters, a “state coördinator” in the capitals of states where it has large holdings, and I think it’s safe to predict that these people will service connections to the interests that value timber more highly than those that value, say, water filtration, much less backpacking. The U.S.D.A. last month announced big loans and grants to companies revitalizing sawmills and wood-processing infrastructure. The current chief of the Forest Service, Tom Schultz, as the Sierra Club explained, served as the vice-president of resources and government affairs with a company called Idaho Forest Group, one of America’s largest lumber producers, “where he led timber procurement operations and managed relationships with government officials.” As Schultz put it recently, “The value of National Forest Systems lands is demonstrated by providing various forest products, such as timber, lumber, paper, bioenergy, and other wood products.” It is perhaps beyond obvious that the Trump Administration would look at a forest and see board feet of timber. But the gutting of the Forest Service couldn’t come at a more inopportune moment. This winter was by far the hottest ever recorded across the Western U.S., and that has left the mountains of the West, where Forest Service lands are primarily concentrated, with the smallest snowpacks in recorded history, which, a new study from Western Colorado University found last month, is intimately linked to wildfire danger. The possibility—the probability—of conflagration is on every Western mind. It turns out that conservation really does matter: when you burn too much oil, draw too much water, cut too many trees, you eventually end up in enormous trouble. The Trump Administration seems to have decided that, if we’re in this bad a fix, we might as well make the last few dollars out of it, on every possible front. To borrow, out of context, a Trump quote from last weekend, “All Hell will reign down.” ♦

Apr 7, 202614 votes

Trump, Iran, and the Shadow of Suez

2026-03-30T10:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story Israel moves fast, launching a bold military operation against a weaker Middle Eastern neighbor. It frames the campaign as a preëmptive effort to neutralize a regional threat. Israel’s Western allies join in, bombing the country in what looks like an attempt to oust its government. But things soon go awry. The embattled regime holds on, and closes off a critical shipping lane, disrupting global trade. Politically embarrassed, and economically exposed, Israel’s main Western partner in the campaign becomes overextended; they lack both wider international support and a coherent plan. Early military gains give way to a larger strategic mess. This could describe the past month of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. But it’s also what happened nearly seven decades ago, when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, provoking the Egyptian government to close the Suez Canal for what ended up being a period of five months. The confrontation was set off in July of 1956, when Egypt’s ruler, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, a charismatic populist, nationalized the Anglo-French company that had operated the canal since its creation in 1869, during the colonial era. Britain and France were furious—the canal carried oil and other goods that were vital to European economies—and determined to take back control. Israel, meanwhile, saw Nasser’s rising influence across the Arab world as a danger, and wanted an excuse to cut him down, and to target Palestinian fedayeen militants who were operating in Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, which were both controlled by Egypt at the time. While the U.S. and United Nations spent months trying to negotiate a settlement over the canal’s management, the top leaders of the British, French, and Israeli governments were secretly plotting a military intervention. The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today. That operation began on October 29, 1956, when Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula and rapidly overwhelmed Egyptian forces. Britain and France then entered the war, under the guise that they were neutral parties seeking to stabilize the tensions. But few believed it, especially after the British and French demanded that the warring nations both withdraw at least ten miles away from the canal, a move that would hand Israel a vast expanse of territory. Egypt refused, and Anglo-French deployments followed with air and naval strikes against Egyptian positions; they also sent paratroopers to Port Said, at the northern end of the canal. By November 2nd, Nasser had deliberately sunk into the canal old ships full of debris, so as to block all traffic—the precise outcome that Britain and France had claimed they were trying to prevent. The closure hit Britain especially hard, as it relied on long-standing oil arrangements in the Persian Gulf, with contracts denominated in sterling. That economic pressure was compounded by geopolitical isolation, with both the U.S. and the Soviet Union independently condemning the military campaign. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, just days away from a Presidential election, also worried that the chaos in Egypt undermined the West’s moral position against Soviet aggression and gave the Kremlin political cover to brutally crack down on an uprising in Hungary, which was happening at the same time. Britain and France ultimately withdrew from Egypt in humiliation, and the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was forced to resign. Egypt maintained control over the canal, and Nasser emerged with a huge symbolic victory over the two European colonial powers that had lorded over the Middle East for decades. It’s hard to know where exactly the Iran war is headed. Some reports suggest that President Donald Trump has grown “bored” of the conflict and may want an off-ramp. More signs point to the Trump Administration preparing to deploy ground troops, pulling the U.S. deeper into a war that has already killed hundreds of Iranian civilians and sprawled into a wider regional conflict, with Iran launching retaliatory strikes against its Arab neighbors and—through its closure of the Strait of Hormuz—sending energy prices soaring and disrupting global supply chains. As Trump fumbles with the Pandora’s Box he’s broken open, there’s no shortage of historical analogies to choose from. Could Iran end up like Libya, where a NATO air campaign in 2011 helped topple a decades-old dictatorship, but paved the way for the disintegration of the Libyan state into a thicket of rival factions and warring militias? Or perhaps the U.S.’s wars with Iraq are the better guide. The Gulf War left Saddam Hussein in power, but weakened and dangerous, a source of regional instability for another decade—a pattern that some fear might be playing out in Iran, if the regime emerges from the war battered but no less entrenched. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did topple Hussein, but not without becoming a parable for American hubris and strategic folly. Of all the parallels to invoke, though, Suez might be the most apt, at least in this moment. Just as, in 1956, when France and Britain kept Washington in the dark about their real plans, America’s European and Arab allies say they were caught off guard by Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and have been skeptical of the intervention, instead pushing for a diplomatic solution. The clearest echo, of course, is Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which mirrors Nasser’s decision to thwart passage through the Suez Canal. In both cases, it was a foreseeable response that the attacking parties somehow failed to anticipate: “Instead of keeping the Suez Canal open, the [Anglo-French] action closed it, as the dumbest intelligence analyst, either British or American, could have predicted,” Miles Copeland, a famous C.I.A. agent working in the Middle East in the nineteen-fifties, wrote. Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, recently wrote something similar, on social media, after Iran closed the strait: “This was totally predictable, but Trump has lost control of this war.” The grimmer parallel is what all this may reveal about American power. By 1956, Britain and France were already empires in decline: Britain had let go of its major colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, while France had suffered major losses in Indochina and was in the throes of an era-defining battle to hold Algeria, where Nasser’s anti-colonialist message was proving persuasive. Their failure to retake the canal underscored their diminished status on a world stage. In the wake of the Second World War, Britain had still been considered a third superpower, alongside the Soviet Union and the United States, Alex von Tunzelmann, a British historian and the author of “Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace,” explained. “After Suez,” she continued, “that just drops,” and we hear “more about a binary, bipolar world. What became obvious is that Britain couldn’t act expressly against the will of the U.S.” Now the U.S.’s own ability to exercise its will as a paramount hegemon is in question, according to Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates policy restraint. Trump’s mistaken belief that the campaign against Iran could be done swiftly and neatly, Kelanic said, “shows that the United States doesn’t have the strategic advantages and power that it thought it had, and that it maybe previously did possess.” Despite U.S.-Israeli military dominance, Trump is struggling to beat back Iranian reprisals and prevent the conflict from spiralling wider. Satellite imagery suggests that various U.S. bases in the Middle East have had to be evacuated in the face of Iranian strikes, and Tehran now appears to believe that it can effectively veto shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, even though it shares the channel with its Gulf neighbors. (In fact, Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from daily oil sales than it did before the war began, according to The Economist.) This raises troubling questions about the efficacy and role of U.S. forces in the region. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “What is the point of the entire U.S. military role in the Middle East? If it has any point, it should be to prevent something like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet U.S. military action has only brought about the very problem it’s supposed to prevent.” For Israel, which had to vacate its Sinai conquest in 1956, there are parallels, too. Tactical achievements don’t make up for a lack of strategic gains, and, for all the demonstrated prowess of Israel’s military and intelligence services in Iran, the regime endures, and seems even more firmly in the grip of ideological hard-liners. Nimrod Novik, a distinguished fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and a former adviser to the late Prime Minister Shimon Peres (who, in his younger days, played a key role in planning the 1956 offensive), sees Trump possibly leaving behind a muddle in Iran, where future rounds of conflict are still likely. “In 1956, the British and French proved politically unreliable, certainly once the U.S. banged its fist on the table,” Novik told me. “Israel’s brilliant military achievements produced no lasting stable security environment.” After all, a bit more than a decade later, hostilities would explode anew in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, during which Nasser shut the canal again. “I wonder whether we are in for an equally—even more significant—disappointing ending in Iran, where joining forces with a transformative ambition ends up but another round with more to come,” Novik said. Should Trump decide that he wants to continue the war, one key difference between then and now is that there is no outside power willing or able to stop him, the way Eisenhower did with Britain and France. Eisenhower had little patience with Britain’s late-imperial delusions, and exerted tremendous economic pressure to rein them in, blocking assistance from the International Monetary Fund and threatening to dump U.S. holdings of British bonds, which triggered a collapse in the British pound. The Soviets, meanwhile, warned Britain and France that it would consider striking them with long-range weapons if their campaign continued. The U.N., too, played a central role in ending the Suez crisis and in managing the aftermath; today, the institution is becoming a geopolitical sideshow, and the U.S. President seems more keen to carry out his agenda in defiance of the U.N. than out of duty to it. Russia and China, for their part, have gained simply by staying out of the conflict: the former is making more money from oil sales, while the latter keeps accruing more soft power as America’s credibility erodes. “The Iran war won’t keep the United States from remaining the most powerful country in the world,” Wertheim said. “But it could prove to be a turning point by laying bare the poor quality of American governance and the overstretched condition of America’s military, which is now tasked with providing deterrence and defense in four regions with a one-war force.” Countries that came to rely on American security guarantees—guarantees that expanded as the U.S. consolidated its singular-superpower status in the West in the aftermath of the Suez crisis—are reckoning with new realities. “This war is a violation of international law—there is little doubt about that,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech to German diplomats last week. “It is also a politically fatal error.” Vivian Balakrishnan, the foreign minister of Singapore, described the geopolitical shift underway, in a recent interview: “The underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor,” he said. “But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.” ♦

Mar 30, 202620 votes

The Latest Republican Efforts to Make It Harder to Vote in the Midterms

2026-03-10T10:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story A couple of years ago, when my mother was ninety-six, I drove her to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to get a photo I.D. She no longer had a valid driver’s license or passport, and it seemed prudent for her to have some sort of visual documentation aside from her Costco card to verify that she was who she said she was. Though she had recently moved from Virginia to the bluest of blue—“Don’t blame me, I voted for McGovern”—states, I told her that it was possible that sometime in the near future she might need a photo I.D. to vote. That got her attention. If democracy were a religion, the polling place would be her church. Even the hint that she might not be allowed to vote motivated her to dig through her files until she found her birth certificate. It was the original, issued in 1928. The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today. We navigated the department’s website to schedule an appointment, which turned out to be on an insanely hot day in September. When we arrived, we picked our way across the packed and potholed parking lot—my mother uses a walker—until we stood at the bottom of a ramp outside the building that was pitched at an ungodly steep angle. It took my mother pushing the walker and me pulling it to get her to the door. (I mention all this only to demonstrate that it can be a struggle for many people just to get to their D.M.V.) Not surprisingly, the office was crowded with an assortment of hot and cranky people. (I would put us in this category.) But my mother had an appointment, so I assumed that she wouldn’t have to wait too long. This, as you already know, was a naïve assumption. We took a number and waited and then waited some more. Eventually, my mother wanted to leave. I believe the words she used were “this is stupid.” I reminded her why we were there, and she pointed out that she voted by mail, which didn’t require an I.D. It was in the middle of this argument when her number was called. At the counter, my mother handed over her rent bill to prove that she was a Massachusetts resident and then carefully unfolded her birth certificate—the paper was yellowed and fragile—and slid it proudly across to the clerk. “It’s the original,” she said, and, when the clerk did not respond, she added, “from 1928.” The clerk said that she had to talk to a supervisor. When she came back, she told us that the document was unacceptable. “It’s missing a file number,” she said. “What’s a file number?” I asked. I was not trying to be smart. Not to worry—clearly the clerk thought I was a dimwit. “It’s a number on the birth certificate, for filing,” she said. “Maybe nearly a hundred years ago New York City hospitals didn’t have file numbers,” I said. The clerk shrugged. “You can come back when you have a file number,” she said, and that was that. In the years since, I have thought about that day each time Republicans in Congress have pushed forward the deceptively named Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. They did so in 2024, 2025, and most recently last month, when its newest iteration, the SAVE America Act, passed the House on nearly purely partisan lines, with only one Democrat—Henry Cuellar, of Texas—crossing the aisle. It now goes to the Senate, where Susan Collins, of Maine, has pledged to be the fiftieth Republican to support it. This means that if the Republicans can figure out a way to get around the sixty-vote threshold necessary to bring the bill to a vote—by, say, eliminating the filibuster—Vice-President J. D. Vance would vote to break the tie, President Donald Trump would sign it, and the SAVE America Act would become law. On Sunday, Trump threatened to veto all legislation coming across his desk until the SAVE America Act was passed, writing on Truth Social, “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION—GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY—ILLNESS, DISABILITY.” Threats aside, there may be other ways of pushing through the kinds of provisions in the SAVE America Act, such as bypassing Congress altogether. A year ago, President Trump issued an executive order, Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, which required proof of citizenship to register to vote and decimated voting by mail. That order was struck down in a summary judgment last October, but a draft for a new order goes even further. That draft has been disseminated by a group of Trump supporters who continue to claim interference in the 2020 election, including Peter Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer who has known Trump since high school. According to the Washington Post, they “expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue.” The draft calls for Trump to take control of elections from the states immediately, superseding their constitutionally derived authority, by declaring a national emergency based on a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. (The Post notes that an intelligence review found that China considered “efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them.”) “Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that. But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin told the Post. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.” The draft order would require all voters to re-register for the 2026 midterms, with proof of citizenship in hand. On February 27th, Trump told a reporter for PBS that he had “never heard about” the draft. Yet, in a Truth Social post two weeks earlier, he wrote, “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections whether approved by Congress or not!” Disenfranchising voters who seem likely to vote for the other party has been a long-standing Republican project. Under Trump, that effort—including his call on Dan Bongino’s podcast for the Republicans to “nationalize the voting”—has focussed on another claim, that non-citizens are engaging in voter fraud. Susan Collins justified her support of the SAVE America Act by claiming that “there have been some incidents recently where people have called up town clerks and saying, ‘How do I get a friend of mine who’s from another country to vote here?’ And we’re not hearing a clear answer that only American citizens can vote in American elections.” But, as NPR recently reported, “Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way.” This reality has not dampened Republicans’ zeal for ginning up the spectre of “illegal aliens,” as the President calls them, infiltrating and corrupting the democratic process. An even more restrictive bill, introduced by the Republican representative Bryan Steil, of Wisconsin, which is currently pending in the House, the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a government-issued I.D. to cast a ballot in person. Opponents of both bills say that requiring a government I.D. is burdensome on working people, people of color, students (because school I.D.s are not acceptable), and older Americans. If that claim seems overblown, consider the experience of my mother, a citizen who has voted in every election for the past seventy-five years. It’s hard to believe that her thwarted attempt was an anomaly. And what about someone who works a nine-to-five job and is unable to get to a D.M.V. or a county clerk’s office during working hours? Then there’s the cost. Recently, my mother and I submitted a request to the New York City records department to get a copy of her birth certificate, hoping that it would come with a file number. It cost forty-five dollars. (The first link in my Google search was to a private company charging twice that.) In fact, even that document may not be sufficient. My mother is one of sixty-nine million American women who took their husband’s name when they got married. So, even if she returns to the Pittsfield Registry with an acceptable copy of her birth certificate and a rent bill, the names on them will not match. What then? The short answer is that she will be among the millions of Americans who will be summarily disenfranchised if a proof of citizenship is required to vote. There are other provisions in both the SAVE and the MEGA acts that make it difficult for people to vote, or for their ballots to be counted, such as invalidating mailed ballots that arrive in the days after an election, even if they are postmarked on Election Day. And the MEGA bill puts an end to most voting by mail, something that Trump has been pursuing for years. Not surprisingly, states where everyone is allowed to vote by mail, such as Colorado and Washington, tend to have some of the highest voter-participation rates in the country. If the goal is to limit the franchise, that’s a good place to start. President Trump, in his State of the Union address in February, urged the Republicans to figure out a way to pass the SAVE America Act as he railed against Democrats, saying, “They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re gonna stop it.” As usual, he offered no evidence, but his claims nevertheless have consequences. Of the many ways to suppress the vote, sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the electoral system may be the most insidious, because it undermines what should be our common faith in the integrity of democracy itself. ♦

Mar 10, 202613 votes

The Latest Republican Efforts to Make It Harder to Vote in the Midterms

Mar 10, 202625 votes

The Washington Roundtable on the Iran War

2026-03-05T02:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter. The Washington Roundtable discusses the war that the United States and Israel have started with Iran, how the conflict might evolve and affect the whole region, and the Trump Administration’s rationale for launching the strikes. “I don’t think we have yet heard a clear explanation of what this war is about, what they intend to achieve, what the strategic goals are, and how it’s supposed to end,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says. The group also reflects on the lessons that they learned while reporting on the Iraq War about how conflicts such as these can transform societies. This week’s reading: “Can Donald Trump Win a War with Iran If He Can’t Explain Why He Started It?,” by Susan B. Glasser “Do U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Declare War?,” by Jill Lepore “In the Texas Primaries, a Good Night for James Talarico, and a Bad One for John Cornyn,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next,” by Robin Wright “Has Trump Thought Through the Endgame in Iran?,” by Ishaan Tharoor Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Mar 5, 202613 votes

The Washington Roundtable on the Iran War

Mar 5, 202620 votes

Can the Democrats Get It Together?

2026-03-01T11:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story In December, 2022, President Joe Biden sent a letter to the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee full of soaring language about how the Presidential-primary calendar should reflect the Party’s highest principles. Democrats needed to make sure that “voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process,” and they had to pay attention to the country’s “overall diversity”—geographic, economic, and demographic. Too many candidates, Biden wrote, had faltered early in the small, relatively nondiverse states that voted first (traditionally, New Hampshire and Iowa), leading them to drop out. The Democrats ought to be dedicated to “removing barriers to political participation.” Those fine sentiments aside, Biden wanted to reward South Carolina, which had changed his fortunes in the 2020 primaries, by moving it from the fourth spot on the calendar to the first. And his team discouraged the participation of any Democratic candidate not named Biden, while being far from forthright about his striking decline. To an extent, the process did what the people around the President designed it to do: nationwide, Biden got eighty-seven per cent of the primary vote. Then, six weeks after the last contest, he was forced to drop out. Now the Party is again looking at the Presidential-primary calendar. On January 31st, the Rules and Bylaws Committee met in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to begin considering twelve states for what will be four regional “early window” primary slots: the East (the choices are Delaware or New Hampshire), the Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, Michigan), the South (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia), and the West (Nevada, New Mexico), with room for a possible fifth at-large state. In the next few months, the states will be making presentations to the committee members, as if they were potential Olympic host cities. Minyon Moore, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton who co-chairs the committee, spoke, as Biden had, about the Party’s values. But she added that the goal this time was a schedule that yielded a candidate who could win. “I want to repeat that,” Moore said. “The strongest possible Democratic nominee for President.” A good number of elected officials seem to think that Moore means them. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom; Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro; and, yes, former Vice-President Kamala Harris are all on the road promoting books. Last week, both Harris and Vice-President J. D. Vance, a top prospect on the Republican side (Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who might be another, has said that the nomination is Vance’s for the taking), held events in Wisconsin, a key swing state. Governor Andy Beshear, of Kentucky, has a book coming out, too. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, showed up at the Munich Security Conference. Meanwhile, Senator Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a decorated Navy pilot, has been in court fighting the Pentagon’s efforts to reduce his retirement rank in retaliation for his public statement that troops don’t have to follow illegal orders—a reminder of the stakes in this contest. Because some early states would favor certain candidates—J. B. Pritzker is the governor of Illinois; Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are Georgia senators; former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has a following in New Hampshire—the fight over the primary calendar is one of several proxies for a broader battle about the future of the Party. Democrats are still testing their responses to Trump, both stylistically and in terms of substance, and watching and evaluating one another. (At last week’s State of the Union, some Democrats who chose to attend sat in quiet protest, some heckled, and others walked out.) The midterm primaries offer a parallel set of choices: A mild-mannered seminarian or a confrontation-ready congresswoman in Texas? A seasoned governor or a populist oyster farmer in Maine? In San Juan, such calculations ran through the committee members’ discussion. What state might showcase a candidate’s appeal to young Latino men, to union members, to gun owners? Was the local media market too expensive for grassroots candidates? Was having a red state in the mix an advantage, or might a G.O.P.-controlled legislature sabotage any attempts to move the primary date? New Mexico has the southern border; Tennessee, a committee member said, “doesn’t touch water,” and thus might keep the Party from being too “coastal.” One danger of this exercise is that the Democrats will overlearn the lessons of 2024. For example, Biden wasn’t wrong to emphasize the importance of diversity. When the committee member André Washington asked his colleagues in San Juan how he should assess a would-be early state that was small and affordable but whose population doesn’t “look like America,” the answer was that no single state had to do it all; put together, they would form “a story that we’re telling.” But the Democrats not only have to tell a story—they have to listen to the one that the country, in all its diversity, is telling them. The Party commissioned an “autopsy” of the 2024 loss, but the D.N.C. chair, Ken Martin, has declined to release it. “Getting into the granular detail doesn’t help us,” he told the Miami Herald, raising the question of why there had been a report. Better to focus on the price of television time in northern Virginia, perhaps. There are other risks. The San Juan meeting took place three days after the F.B.I. raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing records from the 2020 race. What is extraordinary about this moment is that election-security concerns extend beyond matters such as hacking to a pending Supreme Court decision that could further gut the Voting Rights Act, and even to the prospect of unlawful actions by the federal government. Some of the talk in San Juan was about safety plans. Trump is not eligible to run in 2028, but his incessant staging of crises makes elections more fragile—and the primary results less predictable. It is hard to know how any given Democratic candidate, in responding to an emergency, might help the Party find its voice. This is a cycle, in other words, in which there is not necessarily a benefit to locking in a front-runner early on. The Democrats need to be ready for anything, including a nominee who is very different from one they expect. Devising the best possible calendar is laudable. But a victory in 2028 can’t be engineered. It will have to be hard fought. ♦ 获取更多RSS： https://feedx.net https://feedx.site

Mar 1, 202620 votes

The Trump Administration’s Chaos in the Caribbean

2025-12-07T11:00:00.000Z Save this storySave this story Save this storySave this story In a federal courtroom in New York City last year, a crime boss from the most notorious drug cartel in Honduras took the stand to testify against Juan Orlando Hernández, the country’s former President. “They should have tried to catch us,” he said, of the Honduran government, which Hernández led from 2014 to 2022. Instead, “they allied with us.” The former President was found to be responsible for more than four hundred tons of cocaine reaching the United States. The Justice Department had been building the case against many of his family members and associates for years, most notably during Donald Trump’s first term. On November 28th, two days before national elections in Honduras, President Trump announced that he was pardoning Hernández, who was just a year into a forty-five-year sentence he was serving in a federal prison in West Virginia. “It was a Biden setup,” Trump said. “I looked at the facts.” Though the White House denied it, such facts had apparently come via the political operative Roger Stone, who’d handed the President a letter from Hernández in which the former President called Trump “Your Excellency” and compared his plight to Trump’s own “persecution.” The two men’s shared resentment of Joe Biden evidently proved more important than Hernández’s rap sheet. Trump didn’t seem troubled by the fact that combatting the flow of drugs into the U.S. is his Administration’s principal rationale for launching a string of boat attacks in the Caribbean. Those attacks, in which the U.S. military, without evidence, has targeted alleged drug traffickers and killed at least eighty-seven people to date, appear to violate national and international law. The same day that Trump announced the pardon, the Washington Post published a story saying that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had reportedly given a verbal order to kill two survivors of a September strike in the Caribbean. It is a war crime to kill anyone who has surrendered or is incapacitated. Hegseth, who had watched the operation from a remote location, immediately deflected responsibility to Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the commanding officer in charge of the operation. “I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said. “This is called the fog of war.” On Thursday, Bradley briefed members of Congress in a closed-door session at the Capitol, where he denied that there had been an order to kill survivors and justified the second strike on the ground that undestroyed cocaine on the boat posed a “risk.” Predictably, the vast majority of Republicans were ready to move on, but lawmakers who saw the footage described the two survivors clinging to part of the boat. “How is that legitimate,” Senator Chris Coons, of Delaware, asked of the strikes, “if President Trump can pardon a convicted narcoterrorist trafficker?” By that evening, Hegseth was facing another scandal: the inspector general at the Department of Defense had just released to Congress its report that he had “created a risk to operational security” by sharing classified details of an attack in Yemen in a group chat on his phone. “Total exoneration,” Hegseth wrote on X. Hegseth’s conduct is a case study in how the Administration’s growing sense of heedlessness and unaccountability is shaping disastrous policy. Because the President had labelled several drug cartels “terrorist organizations” in a series of executive orders, the government simply asserted that suspected traffickers were “unlawful combatants” who could be summarily killed. Trump, citing drug-overdose deaths in the U.S., claimed that the boat attacks were a form of national self-defense. But the drug overwhelmingly responsible for such deaths in the U.S. is fentanyl, which doesn’t come from South America. The idea that these attacks are about stopping drugs was never credible; they instead reflect the President’s increasing fixation on Venezuela and the belief inside the Administration that its authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, needs to be removed from office. Few outside Maduro’s circle of loyalists and abettors deny that he is a repressive, corrupt leader who’s collapsed the economy and brutally punished critics. Last summer, he declared victory in an election that he appears to have lost badly. How to deal with Maduro’s regime is a legitimately pressing question. But wrapped up in the case for his ouster are all of Trump’s most dangerous proclivities, including his anti-immigrant sentiments and his disregard for laws constraining his power. At the start of his second term, Trump declared a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization and falsely claimed that the Maduro government was directing it to use migrants to invade the U.S. This became the basis, in March, for invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law previously used on just three occasions in American history, and only during times of war. According to a source with close ties to the Administration, Venezuela became a natural target: Maduro was an international pariah, and his ability to strike back seemed relatively limited. Trump has now ordered the largest military buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis. Yet key questions remain flagrantly unaddressed: What will happen if Maduro refuses to leave office? In the event that he does leave, how will the U.S. prevent a power vacuum that would lead to further violence and instability? The Venezuelan regime could well survive Maduro’s absence, with his second-in-command, Diosdado Cabello, or any number of other senior figures poised to succeed him. The Trump Administration’s logic has seemed to depend on the notion that the Venezuelan opposition, now led by this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, María Corina Machado, would take over the government in an interim capacity. Experts, however, caution that this would be exceedingly complicated. Machado is opposed by the military officers whose support she would need for her or a close ally to assume power. Machado has championed Trump, in anticipation of his help in dislodging Maduro, but if the regime can reëntrench itself this endorsement would damage her reputation and set back her cause. Much, as usual, will hinge on the unpredictable impulses of the President. When Maduro’s advisers offered to cut a deal with the U.S., in October, Trump called off diplomatic talks. Weeks later, after rumors of an assassination plot against Maduro, the two men spoke by phone. An invasion would be catastrophic, but the current course of brinkmanship isn’t sustainable. Trump is in a bind but doesn’t seem to know it, or care. Hours after Thursday’s briefing about a potential war crime, the Pentagon announced that it had killed four more people in another strike, this time in the Pacific. ♦

Dec 7, 202514 votes

The Trump Administration’s Chaos in the Caribbean

Dec 7, 202520 votes

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