The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

many young people ‘simply’ wanted a change without giving much thought to party dogmas (Die Linke also has many young voters)

‘Populist reason’, as the French theorist Ernesto Laclau called it, functions insofar as it warps political discourse. Not only does it draw excessively oversimplified distinctions in the body politic, but it additionally offers false solutions: politics is identified with “left” and “right”, or today with “woke” or “rational/free/democratic”. And yet something about the spectacle of Trump’s election victory and the New Republican administration remains irreducible to the established notion of populism. To understand Trump’s return, his classification as a populist must be rethought.

A unique enigma of the Trump campaign was the controversial ‘MAGA Communism’ movement: American communists sympathised with the confrontational anti-establishment discourse that Trump deployed, seeing in it an ally against the hegemonic global politics of the Democrats. As irrational as this phenomenon is, it is nonetheless impossible to fathom other so-called populist movements, with similar left vs right rhetoric, appearing under the same conjunction: ‘Nazi Communism’ – even ‘Milei, Bolsonaro, or Meloni Communism’ (all prominent right-wing populist figures) – is unimaginable. As fragmented as it was, the defining trait in the development of communism was to oppose and reject the right-wing populist trends which coloured 20th century Europe, and yet a possibility emerged for its exclusive sympathy with MAGA. The logic of Trump’s politics cannot therefore simply be categorised alongside other populist figures, who would never be assimilable the label of communism. Something about the Trump-MAGA movement remains irreducible to populist reason, and to understand this it is worthwhile to first define what is meant by populism.

The structural logic of populism that Laclau (one of the most recognised theorists of populism) presents is a logic of false solutions: a plurality of different social demands are directed towards a singular cause. In post-WWI Germany, for example, the general destabilisation of economic and political structures found an ‘empty signifier’ as Laclau calls it (a purely virtual solution): the Jews. Populism ignores very real and differentiated social problems and cuts across them with a fictive target, a target that simultaneously satisfies all, and none, of these problems. It is true that Trump has in the past deployed similar methods, including a sweeping condemnation of Mexicans for unrest in the US body politic. Something has nevertheless shifted between the Trump of 2016 and 2024/25. ‘America First’ no longer simply implies US-nationalism and an exclusionist policy towards global markets and geopolitics. Today it has an imperial tone: America First implies American domination, a certain subjugation of the rest of the world to Trump and his tech-billionaire team. Trump’s politics function today not by providing populist solutions to social demands, but by reconstructing these demands according to pre-existing solutions. It is on the perplexing question of Greenland and the abstract notion of ‘America First’ that we can better understand the inversion of populism that Trump represents.

With his threat to take over Greenland from Denmark by ‘military force’, Trump’s former exclusionism/protectionism appears to be slowly replaced with an imperialist tone. Yet this directly contradicts the demands of the body politic he initially captured in 2016. The appeal to domestic policy, to placing American jobs first and to ending a long-standing foreign interference which characterised the financial interests of Democratic policy over the last decades, was in 2016 intended as Trump’s solution to a set of existing social demands by the American voter body: demands to have their own wellbeing protected and to shift government responsibility towards domestic rather than foreign interests. Today, on the other hand, Trump has reconstructed the very demands that he claims to be satisfying. There is nothing exclusionist about annexing Greenland – Trump contradicts his 2016 populist logic, and yet appears all the more popular in consequence. He is supported not for his exclusionist policies, but by his chauvinistic imperialism (Greenland and the Panama Canal being the principal symptoms). His voter base has become concerned with topics that would not have featured for the 2016 Trump-voter – all because Trump’s privately-oriented solutions have the effect of creating their own public demand.

Elon Musk’s tweet as the Greenland spectacle was making headlines only strengthened this paradox: dismissing any concerns for Greenland’s national identity, Musk stated that Greenlanders are “most welcome” to become American. This ‘becoming American’ is not merely an invitation from Greenland citizens to migrate to America, but to universally welcome a US takeover of their country. This freedom to become American is nothing but the freedom of forced choice. Not only can Greenland be annexed, but the public should want this, and welcome this US hostility.

This creation of demands for which Trump subsequently offers a ‘solution’ is a defining element of the emergence of the New Republicans. Greenland, Canada (which Trump stated does not, unlike Greenland, require a military takeover, but only a takeover by ‘economic force’), the teaching of LGBT rights in school, tariffs, Milei-like free capitalist markets… All of these obsessive reference points for the upcoming Republican administration have set new coordinates for the demands and worries of the US citizen. ‘Should the US strengthen its trading position with tariff threats?’, ‘Will my child be turned homosexual if they are not homeschooled?’, ‘Are NATO or Denmark hindering US economic growth?’ – these are everyday categories imposed from the top down. Populist solutions are not simply placed atop a set of social demands, but in an even more denigrating reversal, Trump seems to be instructing the US populace of what they themselves should want.

Trump’s climate change denial is another constituent of this logic: it is widely agreed that the climate crisis will lead to economic catastrophe for populations around the world, including the US. Yet the climate question is at odds with private financial interests and international fossil fuel corporations which drive Trump’s politics. The great task of the New Republicans was therefore to format public demands into a set of coordinates on which ecology does not figure, or for which it cannot be an apparent source of solutions. He described the Paris agreement as a ‘bad deal’ (when is facing up to artificial climate destruction ever meant to constitute a good deal?), and received extensive support for leaving the Paris agreement on his first day in office. Once again, Trump did not merely appeal to ecological concerns by a false (populist) solution, but rather ensured that these concerns themselves would be exchanged for something beneficial to his own interests.

Those who still try to account for Trump’s return by an appeal to the category of populism are therefore missing a crucial point. A new logic is deployed which we cannot merely label as populist: a logic which does not furnish false solutions from an irreconcilable plurality of demands, but rather reconstructs demands in accordance with privately serving solutions without real social origins. Solutions, in other words, with no original demand – this is what the New Republicans offer. In 2016, Trump could indeed be categorised as a populist, but this is no longer the case. Understanding Trump’s politics means understanding that they are qualitatively different from, and irreducible to, the widely used notion of populism.

Washington’s shift on the conflict marks a major break with Europe and coincides with the Trump administration’s bid to repair relations with Moscow.

The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and 14 other
Moscow-friendly countries today on a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for its occupied territory to be returned that passed overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly on Monday.

The U.S. delegation also abstained on its own separate resolution that called simply for a negotiated end to the war after European-sponsored amendments inserting new anti-Russian language also passed the 193-member body by a wide margin.

The votes were a clear sign of opposition by major U.S. allies as well as countries throughout the Global South who were prepared to buck heavy diplomatic pressure from the Trump administration to support President Donald Trump’s efforts to quickly end the war through direct negotiations with Moscow.

When a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts last year, the conservative podcaster Dan Bongino made a veiled threat on social media. “The irony about this for the scumbag commie libs, is that the cold civil war they’re pushing for will end really badly for them,” he wrote. Liberals, said Bongino, had been playing at revolution, and would now get a taste of the real thing. “They’re not ready for what comes next.”

I suppose he was right about one thing: We’re not ready. On Sunday, Trump announced that Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned far-right pundit, would be deputy director of the F.B.I. A man who once claimed that his sole focus was “owning the libs” will now be second-in-command at the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, a position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. Last year on his streaming show, Bongino cackled about the idea that America has a system of checks and balances, saying, with wild, angry eyes, “Power. That is all that matters.” He’s about to have an ungodly amount of it.

Bongino’s boss, of course, will be Kash Patel, the Trumpworld enforcer whom the supine Senate confirmed as F.B.I. director last week. During his confirmation hearings, Patel insisted that, despite publishing an actual enemies list of people he considered deep state villains, he had no intention of turning the F.B.I. into an instrument of retribution. It seemed obvious at the time that he was lying; making Bongino his deputy simply rubs it in our faces. If you wanted to turn the F.B.I. into a Trumpist Praetorian Guard, Bongino is exactly the kind of guy you’d hire.
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The new deputy director of the F.B.I. cut his teeth as a talking head with frequent appearances on the Alex Jones show. He then had a show on NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now-defunct streaming service. Eventually, Bongino became a near-constant presence on Fox News, thrilling a first-term Trump with his apoplectic denunciations of Trump’s foes and, later, his stolen election conspiracy theories.

Bongino and Fox parted ways in 2023 — he says over a contract dispute. He continued to build influence on the right-wing video platform Rumble, a company he owns a lucrative piece of, which also hosts Steve Bannon, the self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Angelo Carusone, president of the watchdog group Media Matters for America, told me that even among the right-wing broadcasters with whom Trump has staffed his nascent administration, Bongino stands out as a conduit between the fever swamps and the president. Now Bongino is in a place to turn wild notions from the right-wing internet into pretexts for federal investigations. Before Trump’s inauguration, for example, Bongino said the F.B.I. was “hiding a massive fake assassination plot to shut down the questioning of the 2020 election.” It is hardly far-fetched to think he’d use this phantasm as an excuse to harass Democrats.

In writing about our country’s rapid self-immolation, I try to ration Hannah Arendt references, lest every column be about the ways “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951, foreshadows the waking nightmare that is this government. But contemplating Bongino’s ascension, it’s hard to avoid the famous Arendt quote, “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Trump could have found a smoother and more sophisticated ideologue to help him transform the F.B.I. into a tool of his will, perhaps someone from the Claremont Institute ready to put an erudite spin on authoritarianism. He wanted the jacked-up hothead.

This administration professes a devotion to merit-based hiring, blaming diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for fostering mediocrity. It should go without saying, however, that excellence is of little interest to the Trumpists, who delight in scandalizing a meritocracy that spurned them. Writing of the conditions in which both Hitler and Stalin arose, Arendt described a spirit of deep, corrosive cynicism and nihilistic glee at the inversion of old standards. “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest,” she wrote. Sound familiar?

We’re in an uncanny interregnum where Trump and his coterie are laying the foundation for autocracy but have yet to fully consolidate their power. The liberal democracy most of us grew up taking for granted is brittle and teetering, but its fall still feels unthinkable, even if it also seems increasingly inevitable. Perhaps this is one reason Democrats, with a few admirable exceptions, seem so frozen. People who’ve spent their lives working within a system of laws and civic institutions may be particularly unsuited to respond to that system’s failure. But an F.B.I. run by Patel and Bongino is a sign that the system — which for all its manifold flaws has provided Americans a level of stability uncommon in history — is falling apart.

On his show last month, Bongino gloated over the angst Trump’s nominees were causing career civil servants, cheering on the president’s “total personnel warfare.” Then he took out two plastic toy robots, an orange one to represent Trump and a blue one he called “liberal screaming Karen.” He used the Trump robot to beat the lady one, smashing it over and over. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “This is how we fix this place.”

Three years ago today, a massive influx of Russian troops crossed into Ukraine to join the troops that had been there since the 2014 invasion. At the time, it seemed that Russian president Vladimir Putin thought victory would be a matter of days, and observers did not think he was wrong. But Ukraine government officials pointedly filmed themselves in Kyiv, and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky refused to leave. Rejecting the U.S. offer of evacuation, Zelensky replied: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.”

For the past three years Ukraine has held off Russia. As Anne Applebaum noted today in The Atlantic, civilian society in Ukraine has volunteered for the war effort, and the defense industry has transformed to produce both hardware and software to hit Russian targets: indeed, Ukraine now leads the world in AI-enabled drone technology. The Ukraine army has become the largest in Europe, with a million people. Ukraine has suffered attacks on civilians, hospitals, and the energy sector, and at least 46,000 soldiers have died, with another 380,000 wounded.

At the same time, Russia’s economy is crumbling as its military production takes from the civilian economy and sanctions prevent other countries from taking up the slack. Inflation is through the roof, and more than 700,000 of those fighting for Russia have been killed or wounded. Applebaum notes that the Institute for the Study of War estimates that at the rate it’s moving, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine.

“The only way Putin wins now,” Applebaum writes, “is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.” And this appears to be the plan afoot, as U.S. president Donald Trump has directed U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, to negotiate an end to the war with Russian officials. Neither Ukrainian nor European leaders were invited to the talks that took place last Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Three years ago, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were key to rallying allies and partners to stand against the invasion, providing war materiel, humanitarian aid, money, and crucial economic sanctions against Russia that began the process of dismantling the Russian economy. Today, Ukraine hosted European leaders, but U.S. officials did not attend.

In the past week, President Donald Trump has embraced Russian propaganda about its invasion. Trump blamed Ukraine for the war that Russia began by invading, called Zelensky a “dictator” for not holding elections during wartime (Russia hopes that it will be able to sway new elections, but Ukraine’s laws bar wartime elections), and lied that the U.S. has provided $350 billion to Ukraine and that half the money is “missing.” In fact, the U.S. has provided about $100 billion, which is less than Europe has contributed, and the U.S. contributions have been mostly in the form of weapons from U.S. stockpiles that defense industries then replaced at home. None of that support is “missing.”

As Peter Baker of the New York Times points out, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said: “we have a pretty good accounting of where it’s going.” Baker’s piece explored how “in Trump’s alternate reality, lies and distortions” will make it easier for Trump to give Putin everything he wants in a peace agreement. For his part, Putin on Saturday launched 267 drones into Ukraine, the largest drone attack of the war.

Today, just a month into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated that one nation must not invade another, one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself, an organization whose headquarters are actually in the United States. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which passed overwhelmingly. China and India abstained.

On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to “Kremlin Headquarters.”

The editorial board of London’s Financial Times noted today that “(in) the past ten days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership.” Instead, it has become an “unabashed predator,” allied with Russia and other countries the U.S. formerly saw as adversaries. The board recalled important moments in which “the US displayed its character as global leader,” and those moments “defined the world’s idea of America.” But a new era has begun. Trump’s assertion that Ukraine “should have never started” the war with Russia, and J.D. Vance’s statement that the real danger in Europe is liberal democracy, are “the dark version of those” moments coming, as they did, “straight from Putin’s talking points.”

Each, the board said, “will live in infamy.” It added that “there should be no doubt that Trump’s contempt for allies and admiration for strongmen is real and will endure.” He is “instinctively committed to the idea that the world is a jungle in which the big players take what they want…. He divides the world into spheres of interest.”

“America,” the board concluded, “has turned.”

It appears Putin thought that breaking the U.S. away from Europe would leave Europe weak and adrift, especially with Germany about to hold elections that Russia hoped Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian party would win and with both Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance having demonstrated their support. But French president Emmanuel Macron, a staunch backer of Ukraine, appears to be stepping into the vacuum caused by the loss of the United States. After the U.S.’s reorientation became clear at the Munich Security Conference on February 14–16, Macron invited European leaders to Paris to discuss the U.S. change.

On Monday, February 17, eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union met; on Wednesday, Macron spoke with the leaders of 19 countries, including Canada, either in person or over videoconferencing. Leaders from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Sweden also joined the conversation.

The far-right German party made gains in yesterday’s election but did not win. Instead, the center-right party won and will form a government with the outgoing center-left party. The incoming party strongly supports Ukraine.

“I would never have thought that I would have to say something like this,” Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said yesterday, but “it is clear that [Trump’s] government does not care much about the fate of Europe.” He said that his “absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.”

Yesterday the European Union imposed more sanctions on Russia. Today the United Kingdom announced a sweeping package of sanctions rivaling those of the war’s early days. They include sanctions against companies in various countries that supply components like tools, electronics, and microprocessors for Russian munitions. The sanctions also include Russian oligarchs, ships transporting Russian oil, and North Korea’s defense minister No Kwang Chol, whom the U.K. holds responsible for deploying North Korean soldiers to help Russia.

Today, Macron visited Trump at the White House, where the visit got off to a poor start when Trump broke protocol by neglecting to greet Macron when he arrived. During the visit, the two men took questions from the press. Macron maintained a facade of camaraderie with Trump, but as Trump slumped in his chair and recited the inaccuracies that in the U.S. often go uncorrected, Macron seemed comfortable and in command. He interrupted Trump to contradict him in front of reporters and called out Russia for being the aggressor in the war.

John Simpson of the BBC noted that “there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change” and that 2025 is on track to be one of them: “a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.”

ICC urged to investigate Biden for ‘aiding and abetting’ Gaza war crimes
US-based nonprofit Dawn also accuses ex-secretary of state Antony Blinken and ex-Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin

A US-based nonprofit organization has urged the international criminal court to investigate former president Joe Biden and two of his cabinet members for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

The request, submitted by the Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) last month but made public by the group on Monday, urges the ICC to investigate Biden, as well as former secretary of state Antony Blinken and former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, for their “accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza”.

Last year, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, who was recently confirmed by Hamas to have been killed, for alleged war crimes relating to the Gaza war.

Dawn’s 172-page submission, which the group says was prepared with the support of ICC-registered lawyers and other war crimes experts, alleges that the former US officials violated articles of the Rome statute, the court’s founding charter, in their support for Israel.

According to a press release, the group’s submission to the ICC lays out what it describes as a “a pattern of deliberate and purposeful decisions by these officials to provide military, political, and public support to facilitate Israeli crimes in Gaza”, including “at least $17.9bn of weapons transfers, intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, diplomatic protection, and official endorsement of Israeli crimes, despite knowledge of how such support had and would substantially enable grave abuses”.

One passage from the submission alleges that “by continuously and unconditionally providing political support and military support to Israel while being fully aware of the specific crimes committed by Netanyahu, Gallant, and their subordinates, President Biden, Secretary Blinken, and Secretary Austin contributed intentionally to the commission of those crimes while at least knowing the intention of the group to commit the Israeli crimes, if not aiming of furthering such criminal activity”.

Dawn’s executive director, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement that “not only did Biden, Blinken and Secretary Austin ignore and justify the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s grotesque and deliberate crimes, overruling their own staff recommendations to halt weapons transfers to Israel, they doubled down by providing Israel with unconditional military and political support to ensure it could carry out its atrocities”.

The statement also points to the political support the US provided to Israel through its veto of multiple ceasefire resolutions at the UN security council.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump signed an executive order that authorizes aggressive economic sanctions against the ICC, accusing the body of “illegitimate and baseless actions” targeting the US and Israel.

In the statement on Monday, Dawn also stated that Trump’s order against the ICC could subject him to “individual criminal liability for obstruction of justice”.

The group also added that if Trump were to implement his proposed plan to forcibly displace all Palestinians from Gaza and to take over the territory, it would also subject him to “individual liability for war crimes and the crime of aggression”.

Raed Jarrar, Dawn’s advocacy director, said the plan merited an ICC investigation, “not just for aiding and abetting Israeli crimes but for ordering forcible transfer, a crime against humanity under the Rome statute”.

If you were to ask the top chief executives in the world to name the best strategy to attack waste in their organizations and balance the books, there is one answer you would be very, very unlikely to hear: Take an ax to accounts receivable, the part of an organization responsible for collecting revenue.

Yet the private sector leaders advising President Trump on ways to increase government efficiency are deploying this exact approach by targeting the Internal Revenue Service, which collects virtually all the receipts of the U.S. government — our nation’s accounts receivable division. Last week, the Trump administration started laying off about 6,700 I.R.S. employees, many if not most of whom are directly involved in collecting unpaid taxes.

Every year, the government receives much less in taxes than it is owed. Closing that gap, which stands at roughly $700 billion annually, would almost certainly require maintaining the I.R.S.’s collection capacity. Depleting it is tantamount to a chief executive saying something like: “We sold a lot of goods and services this year, but let’s limit our ability to collect what we’re owed.”

Perhaps only the company’s competitors would approve of such an approach. Yet here we are. Aggressive cuts to our nation’s accounts receivable function will reduce the amount of tax revenue coming in, which will in turn increase our nation’s deficit and add to our $36 trillion in debt.

So why go down this path? Let’s be clear: Shrinking the I.R.S. will not lower your tax obligation. That’s up to Congress.

Aggressive reductions in the I.R.S.’s resources will only render our government less effective and less efficient in collecting the taxes Congress has imposed. It will shift the burden of funding the government from people who shirk their taxes to the honest people who pay them, and it will impede efforts by the I.R.S. to modernize customer service and simplify the tax filing process for everyone.

I.R.S. employees are mothers, fathers, people of faith, Little League coaches, community volunteers and neighbors. Thousands are also veterans or members of military families. More than 98 percent live outside the Washington, D.C., area, in cities, suburbs and small towns across the country.

And despite what many Americans have heard, more than 97 percent of I.R.S. employees don’t carry a gun. The few who do are law enforcement officers working to disrupt drug dealers, human traffickers and terrorists. For a vast majority who do not, the most dangerous thing on their person is probably a calculator.

Like any bureaucratic institution, the I.R.S. could certainly improve its efficiency and effectiveness. As commissioners, each of us, across various presidential administrations, worked toward this goal. We all sought to deliver the service taxpayers deserve and to reduce the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid. And we all sought to do so while adhering closely to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, including the right to privacy and the right to prompt, courteous, professional assistance. None of us claimed to have had all the right answers, so a fresh perspective should always be welcome. And having served under both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses, we recognize and respect that elections have consequences.

But whatever the future size and priorities of the I.R.S., our country needs a fully functioning tax system.

Nearly 200 million Americans are in the process of completing their tax returns. We urge caution in initiating major changes to I.R.S. operations during the filing season. But even after filing season ends, we believe — and we believe that successful chief executives across the country would concur — that making drastic cuts to accounts receivable as a way to improve cost efficiency just doesn’t add up.

Lawrence Gibbs was an I.R.S. commissioner appointed by Ronald Reagan; Fred Goldberg, by George H.W. Bush; Charles Rossotti, by Bill Clinton; Mark Everson, by George W. Bush; John Koskinen, by Barack Obama; Charles Rettig, by Donald Trump; and Daniel Werfel, by Joe Biden.

On Friday, February 21, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg posted: “A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”

Buttigieg was referring to the struggle at the heart of much of the political conflict going on right now: How should the U.S. raise money, and how should it spend money?

Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people’s ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and healthcare. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business; making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter and education; maintaining roads and airports; and making sure the law treats everyone equally.

Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few if any taxes, both of which hamper a person’s ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.

But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt.

Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection.

That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans’ attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party’s spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster.

Under the control of Republicans, the House of Representatives was unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the government in fiscal year 2025. The government has stayed open because of “continuing resolutions,” measures that extend previous funding forward into the future to buy more time to negotiate appropriations. The most recent of those expires on March 14, putting pressure on the Republicans who now control both the House and the Senate to come up with a new funding package. But first, both chambers have to pass a budget resolution.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s top priority is extending his 2017 tax cuts for the next ten years, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit. If he actually enacted the other tax cuts he promised on the campaign trail—including on tips, overtime, and Social Security payments—that deficit jumps closer to $11 trillion. During the campaign, he insisted that the tariffs he promised to levy would make foreign countries make up the money lost by the tax cuts. In addition to being wildly wishful thinking, Trump’s claim ignores the fact that tariffs are actually paid by U.S. consumers.

So Trump and the Republicans have a math problem. It was always incorrect to say it was the Democrats who were irresponsibly running up the debt, but it was a powerful myth, and Republicans have relied on it for at least 25 years. Now, though, there is a mechanical issue that belies that rhetoric: the debt ceiling, which requires Congress to raise the ceiling on the amount the Treasury can borrow.

On January 21, 2025, the U.S. Treasury had to begin using extraordinary measures to pay the debt obligations Congress has authorized. In order for Trump and the Republicans to get their tax cuts, that debt ceiling will have to be raised. But a number of MAGA Republicans are already furious at the growing debt and the budget deficits that feed it, and they say they will not raise that ceiling unless there are extreme cuts to the federal budget. Other Republicans realize that the cuts they are demanding will be enormously unpopular, not least because for all their rhetoric, it is actually Republican-dominated districts that receive the bulk of federal monies.

This is the mess that sits behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that is claiming to slash federal spending, although its claims have been so thoroughly debunked that early this morning it quietly deleted all five of the five-biggest ticket items it had touted on its “wall of receipts.”

As Democrats keep pointing out, Republicans have control of the government and could make any cuts they wanted through the normal course of legislation, but they are not doing so because they know those programs are popular. Instead, they are turning the project over to Musk.

They are making it a point to look the other way when people, including judges, ask under what authorization Musk and his team are operating. Today, once again, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to say who was in charge of DOGE, a day after Matt Bai reported in the Washington Post that two of Musk’s DOGE employees, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, used their access to payment systems to override explicit orders from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and shut off funding to the United States Agency for International Development. Bai reports that Farritor is 23-year-old dropout from the University of Nebraska who interned at SpaceX; Kliger, 25, spreads conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” attended Berkeley, and is now installed at the Treasury Department.

This afternoon the White House said that Amy Gleason, a former official at the U.S. Digital Service, the agency that Trump’s executive order may have turned into the Department of Government Efficiency, is serving as the acting administrator of DOGE. Reporters reached her by phone in Mexico.

In an interview with NPR, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under President Joe Biden, David Pressman, explained that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán turned Hungary’s democracy into “a system that's designed to enrich a clique of elites to take public assets and put them in private pockets while talking about standing up for conservative values” in what became “a massive transfer of public assets to an oligarch class.” Trump and MAGAs see Orbán as a model, and it is notable that today the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that manages civilian aviation and that Trump and DOGE gutted, announced it has agreed to use Musk’s Starlink internet system for its information technology networks.

But even if Musk is only providing the illusion of savings, Congress still has to figure out the budget. On Friday, the Senate voted 52–48 to advance a budget resolution that called for $175 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement and told committees, including the committee that oversees Medicaid, to find at least $4 billion in spending cuts. All Democrats and Independents, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted not to advance that resolution.

Today the House was supposed to vote on its own budget resolution, and it is here that the stark contrast Buttigieg identified shows most strongly. The House resolution calls for cutting $4.5 trillion in taxes, primarily for the wealthy and corporations, while also adding $100 billion for immigration and border security, $90 billion for Homeland Security, and $100 billion in military spending. It enables those cuts and spending, at least in the short term, by raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.

The plan offsets those tax cuts with a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts, including $880 billion over the next decade in cuts to the part of the budget that covers Medicare and Medicaid, and $230 billion in cuts to the part of the budget that covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. House speaker Mike Johnson claimed that all the cuts would come from the same place Musk claims, without evidence, to be cutting: “fraud, waste, and abuse.”

As Buttigieg noted, this budget cuts benefits for the poorest Americans in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, but the proposed cuts are not enough to get all MAGAs, many of whom want far more draconian cuts, on board. Johnson needed either to corral them or to get Democratic votes.

For their part, the Democrats rejected the proposal, concerned about the concentration of wealth in the U.S.: on Sunday, economist Robert Reich noted that “[t]he top 0.1% of Americans control $22 trillion in wealth,” while “[t]he bottom 50% control $3.8 trillion in wealth.”

Shauneen Miranda of the New Jersey Monitor reported the statement of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) today that 24% of Americans get their healthcare from Medicaid, while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say that two thirds of nursing home patients receive Medicaid. Cuts would devastate American families. “For what, because Elon Musk needs another billion dollars?” Murphy asked. “The scope of this greed is something that we have never, ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”

At a press conference, House Democrats called out what Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) called “this billionaire budget resolution.” “I know that I and my colleagues here today are ready to go to the mat and fight all the way until we stop this budget and finally demand that, instead of a tax break for greedy billionaires, that we actually tax those greedy billionaires and expand the programs that working people deserve,” Casar said.

It took pressure from Trump to get the House resolution across the line this evening. It ultimately passed by a vote of 217 to 215, with only one Republican, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), voting with all the Democrats against it. Earlier this year, Republicans killed a bipartisan push to enable representatives to vote remotely while on maternity leave, so Representative Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) flew across the country with her one-month-old son to “vote NO on this disastrous budget proposal.”

To a certain kind of guy, Donald Trump epitomizes masculine cool. He’s ostentatiously wealthy. He’s married to his third model wife. He gets prime seats at UFC fights, goes on popular podcasts, and does more or less whatever he wants without consequences.

That certain kind of guy who sees Trump as a masculine ideal? That guy is a teenage boy.

Much has been written about Trump’s widening appeal to men, and to young men in particular. MAGA, the story goes, is making masculinity great again. But the version of manhood on display not just from Trump but from many of his closest advisers and appointees isn’t the kind of traditional manhood championed by his vice president, J. D. Vance; it’s a manhood imagined by adolescent boys. (Although of course, plenty of adolescent boys do not look up to Trump.) And at his core, Trump is an adolescent president, surrounded by adolescent flunkies, cheered into office by adolescent men.

Adolescence, the transition period from childhood into adulthood, is a time of rapid brain development. The frontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates impulse control and future planning, is last to mature. Lawrence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University and widely recognized expert on adolescent development, explained adolescence to me as “a developmental mismatch between the development of the brain systems that are used for self-control and self-regulation, and the development of the brain systems that respond to reward and that generate emotions and perhaps lead to impulsive behavior.” Picture that reward response as an upside-down U: It grows as a child does, hitting its apex around 19 or 20, and then decreases in adulthood. This, Steinberg says, is part of why adolescents (and adolescent boys in particular) are such notorious risk takers: That reward center is so arousable in middle to late adolescence that it overrides the system regulating self-control—a system that is itself slower to develop.

Adolescence has not historically been a developmental stage we culturally valorize. In the MAGA movement, though, an adolescent way of moving through the world—high-risk, low-regulation, near-total disinhibition—characterizes leaders and thrills followers.

Cultures differ in how they distinguish between manhood and boyhood, but the reward-seeking, risk-eschewing, low-self-control aspects of adolescence transcend countries and cultures, Steinberg said. In the United States, manhood in a traditional sense has been distinguished from boyhood and adolescence partly by virtue and obligation: Boys may be boys and teenagers may run around thrill-seeking, but real men are expected to provide for themselves and their families, protect those they love, and demonstrate a kind of moral fortitude that justifies their familial and social authority.

There are all kinds of problems with this traditional model, and feminists like myself are among the first to point them out. The masculinity of MAGA, though, is far worse: It rejects commitment and virtue, but still demands power and respect—it is, as Jamelle Bouie put it in The New York Times, “the masculinity of someone unburdened by duty, obligation or real responsibility.”

We don’t see this sort of masculinity only from Trump. Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed as defense secretary by the narrowest margin in history, says he wants a military full of men who are uninhibited “warriors,” free of any attempt to impose moral order on the teen and 20-something men who generally do the nation’s fighting. His book The War on Warriors argues that while “our warriors” were “busy killing Islamists in shithole countries,” liberals insisting on diversity initiatives were ruining the country and lawyers insisting that soldiers abide by the rules of war were ruining the military. During Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, when Senator Angus King asked him if the Geneva Conventions should be observed, Hegseth dodged. “We don’t need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars,” he said. In his telling, “warriors” should operate with pure aggression; restraint is weakness.

He evinces a similar lack of continence in his personal life. Hegseth is currently married to the woman he impregnated while still married to his second wife, who herself was the mistress he married after cheating on his first wife. Life is complicated, and marriage more complicated still. But a series of extramarital affairs—something that also characterizes the president’s personal life—is not typically the mark of a respectable, responsible adult man.

Elon Musk, more keyboard warrior than hardened soldier, is cut from similar cloth. He, too, has fathered many children with many different women. And he, too, seeks power without responsibility. He has put himself in charge of reforming the entirety of the federal government, one of the largest and most complex bureaucracies in the world, despite not growing up in the U.S. and having no government experience. Arrogance is one word for this; delusion is perhaps another. His effort has so far been an abject disaster. But it’s easy to see a teenager’s bravado in his actions—the lack of self-control and self-awareness, the inability to grasp what one may be incapable of doing.

Musk is notorious for sharing edgelord memes on X, the kinds of things that might be passed around by teenage boys. He also has a remarkably juvenile sense of humor. For example, he edited the X bio of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation to say it is 69 percent government-funded (69, get it?). He recently changed his name on the same platform to “Harry Bolz.” His Department of Government Efficiency is itself named after an internet meme about a shiba inu. He proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest” with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He bought Twitter and turned it into X after being annoyed by its moderation policies, which he compared to censorship, but once in charge, he experienced serial emotional meltdowns over content he didn’t like, some of which he then censored. He has gone on sprees of banning accounts that offended him in some way, while allowing white supremacists and Nazis to proliferate on the site. He often communicates on X using video-game jargon, the lingua franca of teenage boys.

Stephen Miller, the Trump whisperer who has long shaped much of his boss’s immigration policy, was an actual adolescent when he ran for high-school student government and asked, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?!” (In defense of adolescents, his peers booed him offstage). As a fully grown adult, he may no longer be the leader of the “Mom, Make My Bed” caucus, but he remains just as petulant, and seems just as tickled by the teenage penchant for provocation. At a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, he echoed the notorious Nazi slogan “Germany for Germans only” when he bellowed, “America for Americans only!” He has also been instrumental in slamming the door shut not just to migrants, but to refugees—even though Miller’s own grandfather sought refuge in the U.S. from the anti-Jewish pogroms of Eastern Europe.

As these psychologically adolescent men work together, they fuel one another’s worst impulses. Much of Steinberg’s work is research on juvenile offenders; adolescent boys and young men, according to crime statistics, commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes. “And they commit their crimes in groups, disproportionately,” Steinberg said. “When they’re with their buddies, their tendency to engage in reckless and risky behavior is amplified.” This is both a result of peer-pressure dynamics—kids who might not otherwise behave badly are pushed to by friends—and a kind of mutually escalating group dynamic.

The realities of human group behavior, so magnified in adolescence, mean that the teen spirit of the Trump administration may animate even those men who might not have otherwise behaved similarly. Zuckerberg, with his gold chain and Shaggy haircut, seems to have embraced dressing like a teenager at roughly the same time that his politics shifted rightward. He attended Trump’s inauguration last month, and blamed former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg for the company’s efforts to create a more inclusive workplace. Zuckerberg’s image has, until now, been fairly straitlaced, standard-issue nerdy, and moderately liberal. But he recently went on über-bro Joe Rogan’s podcast to complain that the corporate world was “pretty culturally neutered” and getting too far from the “masculine energy” and “aggression” men need to thrive.

Perhaps this midlife return to the trappings of adolescence was an inevitable evolution for a Millennial man whose success came so early and so spectacularly, catapulting him into the world of serious adults before he was completely ready. But it’s also not difficult to speculate that our immature cultural moment—spurred on by Trump’s reelection—–is what turned Zuckerberg, whom Musk not so long ago derided as “Zuck the cuck,” from a naive techno-optimist 20-something into a middle-aged man in a gold chain opining about masculine energy.

As each of us moves through the world, we engage in a regular internal, often unconscious calculus of risk versus reward. Young adults overindex on the potential for good stuff to result from the risks they take, and underindex on potential adverse consequences. This kind of impulsiveness also seems evident in the early acts of the Trump administration. When Trump is given the freedom to speak off-the-cuff, he often makes pronouncements that his team later has to walk back, as he recently did when saying that the Palestinians should leave Gaza so that the Strip might be turned into a Riviera of luxury condos. It wasn’t that the thought just popped into his head—Trump’s statement had sufficient detail to suggest that it was something he had discussed before his press conference—but it seemed clear enough that, to the president, the risks of announcing a half-baked plan (not to mention the risks of the plan itself) paled in comparison to the potential payoffs, which largely amounted to attention.

The skills of adult life—emotional continence, more accurate risk perception, self-control, greater precision in future forecasting—are developed in adolescence through physical changes in the brain and body systems, but also through guidance and experience. As anyone who ever had a great but demanding high-school athletic coach can tell you, many teenagers (and most children) have a seemingly inherent desire for authority figures to help contain them as they live with underdeveloped brains and raging hormones. Adulthood in America has been pushed back: Young people are marrying later, procreating later, and buying their homes later, if they do any of those things at all. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that in this era of extended adolescence, a great many unmoored men are, like teenage boys looking to the coach for guidance, seeking straight-talking male authority figures to teach them how to be men. They’re apparently finding these father figures on YouTube, podcasts, and social media—and in the MAGA movement.

Take the author Jordan Peterson. Peterson is notorious for his misogyny and conservatism, but much of his work is focused on self-improvement—and specifically on how young men can impose discipline on their lives. “Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live,” David Brooks said in explaining his appeal. “Peterson has filled the gap.” Peterson tells young men to stand up straight. He orders them to make their beds. He says to turn off the porn, get a job, and take responsibility for their life. A slew of other leading male podcasters—Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, even Joe Rogan—take similar self-improvement tacks. And young men eat it up. They seem hungry for betterment, but also for an authoritative figure to just tell them what to do.

Some have turned their sights to Trump. The president embodies both the aspirational adulthood that is the stuff of teenage fantasies (private jets, models, two Big Macs for dinner), and the punishing father who men wise enough to understand their own need for greater discipline imagine will whip everyone into shape. At a Trump rally in Georgia, Tucker Carlson offered this disciplinarian-daddy vision of Trump’s return to the White House: “Dad comes home,” Carlson told the crowd. “He’s pissed. Dad is pissed. And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’” The crowd broke into a chant of “Daddy’s home!” Mel Gibson used the same metaphor after Trump visited a fire-ravaged Los Angeles. “It’s like Daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off,” he said. The phrase is so ubiquitous in MAGA circles that Roseanne Barr, donning blond dreadlocks and heavily reliant on Auto-Tune, recorded a postelection rap titled “Daddy’s Home.” You can buy Daddy’s Home T-shirts with Trump on them at Walmart.

The reality of governance by teen boy, though, may be less “Daddy’s home” and more Lord of the Flies. Steinberg, the psychology professor, was clear that he couldn’t diagnose Trump, Trump’s lackeys, or anyone else he hadn’t examined. But he told me, “Maybe what characterizes Trump more than anything else is the very heightened reward-seeking. He just has to get rewards from everything he does. And that may generate very strong impulses that he follows.” Whatever self-control the president does possess may simply be insufficient to tamp down those impulses.

The kind of behavior Trump demonstrates, Steinberg said, is unusual. “You need to distinguish between the people who are behaving this way where we would kind of expect it, although maybe not as extreme as this”—actual teenagers—“and people who keep behaving this way long after we would have expected them to have matured,” he said. “The chances that these people are going to mature in ways that we see as normal development, I think, are very small. They would have reached adult levels of maturity by the time they’ve reached their late 20s or early 30s, and if they haven’t, I think they’re probably not going to.”

What does this mean for the nation Trump leads? Steinberg was careful, again, to emphasize that he isn’t in the business of diagnosing strangers, and that Trump is not in fact an adolescent boy. But, he said, “if I asked the average person, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have a 17-year-old running the country?,’ I don’t think most people would say yes. If I said, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have an adult who acts like a 17-year-old running the country?,’ I think they’d say that sounds like a pretty bad idea also.”

Yet a plurality of voters cast their ballots for Trump, so all of us are now finding out just how bad of an idea it is.

This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.

But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.

Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.

Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.

In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.

Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.

Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.

Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”

Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”

A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.

Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself. Trump didn’t turn to Vice President J.D. Vance until 56 minutes into the meeting, and Vance spoke for only 36 seconds.

But Trump appeared to be aware of the popular anger at Musk’s power over the government and today dared the Cabinet members to suggest they weren’t happy with the arrangements. “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON,” Trump wrote on his social media channel this morning. “The Media will see that at the Cabinet Meeting this morning!!!”

“Is anybody unhappy?” Trump asked the Cabinet officers during the meeting. When they applauded in response, he commented: “I think everyone’s not only happy, they’re thrilled.”

Jeff Bezos is muzzling the Washington Post’s opinion section. That’s a death knell
Margaret Sullivan

Owners and publishers of news organizations often exert their will on opinion sections. It would be naive to think otherwise.

But a draconian announcement this week by Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post owner, goes far beyond the norm.

The billionaire declared that only opinions that support “personal liberties” and “free markets” will be welcome in the opinion pages of the Post.

“Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” he added.

The paper’s top opinion editor, David Shipley, couldn’t get on board with those restrictions. He immediately – and appropriately – resigned.

Especially in light of the billionaire’s other blatant efforts to cozy up to Donald Trump, Bezos’s move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization he bought in 2013.

It’s unclear what will happen to such excellent left-of-center columnists as Catherine Rampell, Eugene Robinson and EJ Dionne. And it’s unclear to what extent this ruling eventually will affect the paper’s hard-news coverage, which so far has been unbowed in covering the chaotic rollout of the new Trump administration.

What is clear is that Bezos no longer wants to own an independent news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.

It’s appalling. And, if you care about the role of the press in America’s democracy, it’s tragic.

“What Bezos is doing today runs counter to what he said, and actually practiced, during my tenure at the Post,” Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor until 2021 and the author of the 2023 memoir Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post, told me in an email Wednesday.

“I have always been grateful for how he stood up for the Post and an independent press against Trump’s constant threats to his business interest,” Baron said. “Now, I couldn’t be more sad and disgusted.”

Bezos is sacrificing the Post’s reputation and any hope for its financial stability on the altar of personal gain. Recall that the company lost some 300,000 subscribers a couple of months ago after Bezos forbid the publication, just before the presidential election, from publishing a planned editorial endorsing Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris.

More recently, the Post refused to publish Ann Telnaes’s cartoon that showed American oligarchs, including Bezos, bowing to Trump; in protest, she resigned from the Post, where she had worked since 2008.

This latest move certainly will mean more Post subscribers will flee, partly in protest and partly because the paper – at least on its opinion side – no longer does the job.

Having worked at the Post myself as its media columnist for six years, until 2022, I know the paper’s readership well.

Post subscribers are well-informed, smart and savvy; they know and appreciate the paper’s history, including the way it bravely stood up to presidential power during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate eras when the Graham family were the owners.

These readers span the traditional political spectrum from liberal to old-school conservative. And they understand the sometimes adversarial relationship between government and the press

This outrageous move will enrage them. I foresee a mass subscriber defection from an outlet already deep in red ink; that must be something businessman Bezos is willing to live with.

He must also be willing to live with hypocrisy.

“Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” Baron pointed out, recalling that it was only weeks ago when the Post described itself in an internal mission statement as intended for “all of America”.

“Now,” Baron noted, “its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does.”

It’s all about getting on board with Trump, to whose inauguration Bezos – through Amazon, the company he co-founded – contributed a million dollars. That allowed him a prime seat, along with others of his oligarchical ilk.

“There is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests, Amazon [the source of his wealth] and Blue Origin, [which represents his lifelong passion for space exploration],” Baron said. Now, Baron added, he is prioritizing those interests and, in so doing, “betraying the Post’s long-standing principles to do so”.

As a Post loyalist myself – drawn into my career by the courageous journalism I admired as a teenager in the 1970s, thrilled to join its ranks in 2016 – I’m crushed to see its precipitous decline.

Bezos set out to save the Washington Post from financial ruin when he bought it, and, for a time, he did that and more.

But the best thing he could do now would be to sell it to someone who understands the stewardship of a national treasure.

In Trump’s Washington, a Moscow-Like Chill Takes Hold
A new administration’s efforts to pressure the news media, punish political opponents and tame the nation’s tycoons evoke the early days of President Vladimir V. Putin’s reign in Russia.

She asked too many questions that the president didn’t like. She reported too much about criticism of his administration. And so, before long, Yelena Tregubova was pushed out of the Kremlin press pool that covered President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In the scheme of things, it was a small moment, all but forgotten nearly 25 years later. But it was also a telling one. Mr. Putin did not care for challenges. The rest of the press pool got the message and eventually became what the Kremlin wanted it to be: a collection of compliant reporters who knew to toe the line or else they would pay a price.

The decision by President Trump’s team to handpick which news organizations can participate in the White House press pool that questions him in the Oval Office or travels with him on Air Force One is a step in a direction that no modern American president of either party has ever taken. The White House said it was a privilege, not a right, to have such access, and that it wanted to open space for “new media” outlets, including those that just so happen to support Mr. Trump.

But after the White House’s decision to bar the venerable Associated Press as punishment for its coverage, the message is clear: Any journalist can be expelled from the pool at any time for any reason. There are worse penalties, as Ms. Tregubova would later discover, but in Moscow, at least, her eviction was an early step down a very slippery slope.

The United States is not Russia by any means, and any comparisons risk going too far. Russia barely had any history with democracy then, while American institutions have endured for nearly 250 years. But for those of us who reported there a quarter century ago, Mr. Trump’s Washington is bringing back memories of Mr. Putin’s Moscow in the early days.

The news media is being pressured. Lawmakers have been tamed. Career officials deemed disloyal are being fired. Prosecutors named by a president who promised “retribution” are targeting perceived adversaries and dropping cases against allies or others who do his bidding. Billionaire tycoons who once considered themselves masters of the universe are prostrating themselves before him.

Judges who temporarily block administration decisions that they believe may be illegal are being threatened with impeachment. The uniformed military, which resisted being used as a political instrument in Mr. Trump’s first term, has now been purged of its highest-ranking officers and lawyers. And a president who calls himself “the king,” ostensibly in jest, is teasing that he may try to stay in power beyond the limits of the Constitution.

Some versions of this are not new, of course. Other presidents have taken actions that looked heavy-handed or put pressure on opponents. No president in my experience at the White House, which goes back to 1996, particularly liked news coverage of him, and certainly there have been times when journalists were penalized for their reporting.

After an article on whether Vice President Dick Cheney might be dropped from the re-election ticket in 2004, The New York Times found it no longer had a seat on Air Force Two. President Barack Obama’s team tried to exclude Fox News from a briefing offered to other networks, only to back down when the rest of the press corps stood up for Fox.

But those relatively contained disputes were nothing like what is happening now. The White House takeover of the pool — a rotating group of about 13 correspondents, photographers and technicians given close access to the president so they can report back to their colleagues — upends the way the president has been covered for generations.

The alarm has been felt by media outlets across the spectrum. Just as the other networks backed Fox against the Obama administration, Fox has backed The Associated Press against the Trump White House and its senior White House correspondent criticized the pool takeover. The precedent being set now, certainly, could be used by a future Democratic administration against media that it disfavored.

On Wednesday, the day after Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, announced the takeover, neither the A.P. nor Reuters, two mainstays of the White House press corps for decades, were included in the pool. Newsmax and The Blaze, two conservative outlets, were invited to take their places.

The rest of the broadcast networks remained, as did other traditional organizations like Bloomberg and NPR. The pool got a chance to ask Mr. Trump and his billionaire patron Elon Musk questions at the top of a cabinet meeting for about an hour, proof, according to White House aides, that they are not shielding him from scrutiny.

“A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly over the privilege of press access at the White House,” Ms. Leavitt said when she disclosed the takeover, casting it in populist terms. “All journalists, outlets and voices deserve a seat at this highly coveted table. So, by deciding which outlets make up the limited press pool on a day-to-day basis, the White House will be restoring power back to the American people.”

The move, of course, “does not give the power back to the people — it gives power to the White House,” as Jacqui Heinrich, the senior White House correspondent at Fox, put it on social media. Ms. Heinrich, who sits on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which had traditionally decided pool membership, said the group has long welcomed new voices.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of a major shift in foreign policy as Mr. Trump pivots away from Ukraine and toward Mr. Putin’s Russia. In recent days, he has blamed Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion of it in 2022. He also called its popularly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while offering no words of reproach for Russia or Mr. Putin. “He’s a very smart guy,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin on Wednesday. “He’s a very cunning person.”

Yevgenia Albats, a leading Russian journalist who had to flee her country under threat of arrest after the 2022 invasion, said the developments in Washington over the past five weeks resemble the early days of Mr. Putin’s reign.

“The oligarchs kissing the ring, the lawsuits against the media, the constraints on which media should be in the White House pool, and which are not — all that sounds familiar,” Ms. Albats said.

But she stressed that, unlike Russia, the United States remains a nation with important checks and balances, no matter how frayed. “There is one huge difference,” she said. “You have a working and independent judiciary, and we did not. And this is a hell of a difference.”

And this comparison to Mr. Putin’s Moscow strikes Mr. Trump’s camp as “hysterical,” as Ms. Leavitt put it online, an overwrought analogy by an entitled left-wing elite upset that its own privileges have been challenged by a president making “much needed change to an outdated organization.”

Russia was a place in transition when my wife and I first arrived in Moscow in March 2000 to help cover Mr. Putin’s first election and later returned at the end of the year for a four-year stint. The fledgling democracy that President Boris N. Yeltsin had constructed and handed over to Mr. Putin was deeply flawed, corrupt and increasingly discredited in the public’s eyes.

Economic tumult had cost millions of Russians their life savings and their sense of security, meaning that many equated the very word “democracy” with chaos and theft. But in those early days as Mr. Putin took over, it was still a relatively open and vibrant political environment, where opinions ranged the gamut and were freely and prolifically expressed.

Mr. Putin, arguing that a firm hand was needed to restore order, moved to methodically consolidate power, establishing what his advisers called “managed democracy.” He took over not just the Kremlin press pool but also used lawsuits to seize control of the one major independent television network. He ousted Western-oriented parties from Parliament and eliminated the election of governors so he could appoint them himself.

Perhaps most important, Mr. Putin laid down the law with the once-powerful oligarchs who had become so dominant during the 1990s, promising to let them keep their often ill-gotten fortunes and companies as long as they did not challenge him. Those who disregarded that diktat were arrested or driven out of the country and their businesses taken over. “I control everybody myself,” Mr. Putin said when asked early on what he liked about his new post.

By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time.

There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans.

They worry about an F.B.I. headed by an avowed partisan warrior who has already developed what seems to be an enemies list. They fear that their outspokenness may hurt family members who work for the government. They are gambling that if they lie low maybe they will be forgotten.

After all, this is an administration that stripped security details and clearances from former officials who had angered the president and fired people who were associated with investigations into Mr. Trump or his allies.

The chief federal prosecutor for Washington has sent letters to a couple of Democratic members of Congress questioning them about public comments that he considers incitement to violence. At the same time, his office is being purged of lawyers who prosecuted Trump supporters who actually committed violence on Jan. 6, 2021.

In Russia, it eventually took a far darker path. Ms. Tregubova went on to write a tell-all book that angered the Kremlin. One day, a bomb exploded outside her apartment; she later fled the country. In the years since, independent journalists have been fired, arrested, poisoned or even killed. So have others deemed to be enemies of the people, most famously the opposition leaders Boris Y. Nemtsov, who was gunned down in the shadow of the Kremlin, and Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in prison.

Again, America is no Russia. The history there is so fraught and complicated. Certainly, many Russian journalists would still rather live in Washington these days than Moscow, confident that America’s tradition of free press and democratic ideals remains far stronger than what exists back home.

But in decades of reporting in Washington, under Republicans and Democrats, it has never felt quite like this.

In his first month in office, Donald Trump destroyed federal agencies, fired thousands of government workers and unleashed dozens of executive orders. The US president also found time to try to broker an agreement between two rival golf tournaments, the US-based PGA Tour and the LIV Golf league, funded by Saudi Arabia.

If concluded, the deal would directly benefit Trump’s family business, which owns and manages golf courses around the world. And it would be the latest example of Trump using the presidency to advance his personal interests.