A senior U.S. official read the text of the fourteen-point memorandum of understanding with Iran over the phone to reporters today, and there’s a reason it has ignited a firestorm.
A memorandum of understanding is usually a nonbinding agreement outlining shared goals and intentions, but in this case, although there is much vague or confusing language in the text, what the White House says is an MOU actually has firm language in it.
First of all, after months of the White House insisting Trump does not need congressional approval for his strikes against Iran because they did not constitute a war, the MOU straight up calls the conflict “the current war.”
The MOU commits the U.S. and Iran “and their allies” to stop military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” a reference to Israel’s bombing of what it says are Hezbollah camps there. Israel has suggested it will not consider itself bound by any such agreement, but as Anton Troianvoski points out in the New York Times, the language will enable Iran to pressure the U.S. over Israeli attacks in Lebanon or Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in what Israel calls a “security zone.”
The MOU says the U.S. will “terminate all types of sanctions” against Iran, and it lifts the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, giving Iran the access to world trade the U.S. previously prevented in order to pressure the regime. It also permits Iran to begin selling oil immediately on the world market.
The MOU says Iran will use “its best efforts”—not a guarantee—“for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz “with no charge for 60 days only.” It continues: Iran and Oman will decide how to “define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz,” an indication that Iran intends to charge fees for transit of the strait.
The MOU says the U.S. will thaw frozen Iranian assets immediately and also “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran to repair the damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes. It says the U.S. will grant “[a]ll required licenses, waivers, and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions,” apparently readmitting Iran to full participation in world financial markets.
In exchange for these concessions, Iran “reaffirms” in the MOU that it will not try to develop or procure a nuclear weapon. That word “reaffirms” is important: it signals that Iran is simply reiterating what it said in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Trump tore up in 2018.
But, unlike the JCPOA, the MOU contains no language about a process to guarantee Iran’s promise not to pursue a nuclear weapon. When a reporter asked Trump about that absence, he said that what would guarantee Iran’s compliance is fear of renewed U.S. bombing. But Iran has shown it can withstand such attacks, and in any case, the U.S. has no stomach for them.
It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing.
The costs to the world have been significantly higher in terms both of lives—beginning with more than 175 Iranian schoolchildren and their teachers—and of economies.
Journalist David Shuster reported that the Iranian government is declaring “total victory.”
Former secretary of state Antony Blinken posted: “By President Trump’s own terms, the war is a failure. The Iranian regime is intact and its military wing more empowered, while the Iranian people are more impoverished, repressed and desperate…. The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening [of] the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before the war started. And we will apparently pay Iran to do so…. Don’t expect a return to normal any time soon, if at all,” he warned.
In a press opportunity today in France, where he was attending the Group of Seven (G7) conference, an informal forum of industrialized democracies, Trump twice told reporters that he didn’t want to be like President Herbert Hoover. Although he got the history of Hoover’s role in the Great Depression wrong, Trump’s point seemed clear: he didn’t want to be the person to trigger an “economic catastrophe.”
And therein lay the rub for Trump in his war on Iran: so long as Iranian leaders could credibly threaten the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, they could throttle about a fifth of the world’s oil supply and much of its fertilizer, plunging the globe into crisis. The terms of the MOU heavily favor Iran, but the strait gives its leaders leverage over Trump and the U.S. This was precisely the scenario that past U.S. presidents sought to avoid by negotiating with Iran rather than bombing it.
Selling the MOU in the U.S. is going to be rough. When a reporter asked Trump today why he didn’t “stick around for the signing ceremony with this Iran peace deal,” the famously camera-courting president answered: “I might, but I’d rather, this is a memorandum of understanding. It’s very important, but it might not be the kind of a document that I should be signing.” The reporter responded: “There is some element to this where you send the vice president. If it works out, great. You look like a genius for sending him. If it doesn’t work out, it’s the vice president’s fault.”
Trump responded: “I like that idea…. This way, if it works out, I’m gonna take the credit; if it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D. You better be careful, J.D. He’s gonna turn his plane around and get the hell outta here. Yeah, I like that idea. I think that’s a good idea.”
MAGA lawmakers like Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) seemed willing to go along with the measure, saying: “I trust President Trump. I trust Vice President Vance. We don’t need to listen to anybody up here on Capitol Hill. Let’s trust these two.” But John Knefel of Media Matters reported that MAGA figures who have been all-in on the war on Iran are revolting against the MOU. “Trump’s Iran deal gives the Islamic Republic big wins upfront—and America nothing,” wrote the New York Post.
Journalist David Shuster reported that Republican senators are furious with Trump. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger a month ago, posted: “Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal.
“Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
By tonight, Trump loyalist Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) was defending the idea of Iran having missiles, despite the fact that ending Iran’s missile program was one of Trump’s stated reasons for starting the war in the first place. Marshall told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he preferred that they not have missiles, but that “the key issue” is that “they have to be able to defend themselves.”
National security scholar Joseph Stieb posted: “It’s like the last 40 years of the Republican Party’s foreign policy didn’t happen.”
After setting Vance up to take the fall for the deal, tonight at a dinner with French president Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles, Trump signed the MOU himself. It was a moment when a knowledge of history would have been useful. As MeidasTouch noted, it was at Versailles after World War I that the Allied powers forced Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, “one of the most famous surrender documents in modern history.”
Earlier in the day, asked by a MeidasTouch reporter about Trump’s cognitive decline at the G7, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said: “The president has been humiliated on the world stage, and many Americans are increasingly concerned about his stability and his capacity in the office. It’s deeply distressing to Americans across the political spectrum to see a president so incompetent and so incapable attempting and failing to represent the nation internationally.”
Over a GIF of James Bond saying, “He’s quite mad, you know,” national security scholar Tom Nichols called today “the weirdest and most astonishing day in US foreign policy in decades.”
It took 250 years and 45 presidents, but cage fighting has finally come to the White House.
Donald Trump’s 80th birthday was in many ways the apotheosis of the Trump administration—the Ultimate Fighting Championship held a seven-fight card on the South Lawn of the White House, with the president and members of his family in attendance.
The event was garish, lurid, and crass—perfectly calibrated to appeal to the president. A massive military flyover. The use of honor guards to usher UFC fighters into the cage. “Octagon Girls” in sequined red-white-and-blue costumes parading around the cage between rounds. A UFC fighter, during a post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, praising “my Lord and savior Jesus Christ” before repeating a long-running conspiracy theory: “Michelle Obama is a man!” This smear seemed to bring a half smile to Trump’s face. The main event, a lightweight championship bout between Justin Gaethje and Ilia Topuria, left Topuria bloodied and battered, his face mangled, his vision so impaired that he was hospitalized after the fight. As my colleague Gal Beckerman put it, “Not a single one of these seven fights was even won on points. They all resulted in one man’s rage and another man’s pain and humiliation.”
It was Trump’s version of the Roman imperial games—state-sponsored brutality as public entertainment, staged to please the emperor and his courtiers, desecrating a public space. He clearly relished every second of it. But the MAGA movement—and the 80-year-old man who leads it—is breaking apart.
THE UFC EVENT captured an essential truth of Trump’s second term. He believes that he made a mistake the first time around by hiring too many subordinates who did not allow Trump to be Trump. He wanted full fealty. By discarding institutional restraints, he was convinced he could deliver what he had promised. Trump has always been a man of epic indiscipline, but in Trump 2.0 there would be no brakes. It would be all improv.
Jonathan Rauch and I have argued that, as a result, the world now faces something new and frightening: a psychotic state. The administration is consistently detached from reality; the normal policy process we have seen in past administrations is nonexistent in this one. No one around the president even hints that anything he does is inappropriate, unpopular, or unwise. His Cabinet meetings have become exercises in self-abasement, with one member after another obsequiously groveling, each trying to outdo the next in their adoration. Trump, left on his own without adult supervision, has lurched from blunder to catastrophe.
He started a war with Iran and then, within a matter of months, managed to lose it. He is in the process of breaking NATO, one of the greatest military alliances in history. Inflation is rising. The economy is slowing. And his tariff policies have been a disaster.
The Trump administration has gutted medical research, cut research funding to universities because of political disputes, and triggered a “brain drain” that is dismantling in two years what took 80 to build. It shut down USAID and gutted PEPFAR, the George W. Bush program targeting AIDS that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. This is producing what public-health researchers project will be hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths—the largest reversal of American humanitarian commitment in modern history.
Trump put an anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in charge of public health and a fool, Pete Hegseth, in charge of the world’s most powerful military. He has weaponized the Department of Justice against his political enemies and pardoned January 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol and wanted to hang his vice president. He has transformed ICE from an immigration-enforcement agency into a domestic paramilitary force. Migrants were shipped to foreign prisons without due process. Trump has also converted the presidency into an instrument of self-enrichment on a scale no predecessor came close to matching.
As a result, Trump’s approval ratings have cratered. Consumer confidence has fallen to historic lows. Public sentiment is in “complete collapse” on key issues. The mood of ordinary Americans has soured, with many more dissatisfied than satisfied. For the first time, we’re seeing signs that Republicans in Congress may resist the will of the president. And Trump’s MAGA coalition, which until now has been cultlike in its loyalty, is fracturing and turning on itself. And then there is the matter of age.
FOR HIS ENTIRE ADULT LIFE, Donald Trump has displayed patterns of behavior—grandiosity, lack of empathy, impulsivity, an obsession with power and dominance, a continuous need for adulation, hypersensitivity to perceived slights, a habit of demonizing those who disagree with him, exploitive interpersonal relationships, a chronic distortion of reality to preserve self-image, and an indifference to truth—that reflect his disordered personality.
What’s newer to the mix are the clear signs of his advancing age. His need for adulation is more desperate than in the past; the vanity projects are more grandiose. He’s more disinhibited and impulsive. His rage is more easily triggered, and his displays of temper less intentional and less strategic. He’s more detached than ever from reality. His cruelty and the delight he takes in it, including celebrating the death of people he considered his enemies, is more pronounced now than before. And his environment is populated almost solely by sycophants.
The signs of Trump’s decline are everywhere: meandering soliloquies during Cabinet meetings, unplanned strolls on the White House roof, getting up and wandering to the windows in the East Room during meetings with oil executives. His obsessive fixation on the White House ballroom. The increasing number of deranged, middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts. The fury and indignation at routine questions from the press. And the steady narrowing of his vocabulary, his simplified syntax and reliance on a small number of stock phrases and superlatives. There’s no effort by Trump’s advisers to hide any of this. He won’t allow it.
What must be especially hard on Trump, a man of renowned vanity, are the signs of physical decay—his bruised hands that makeup cannot wholly conceal, his swollen ankles, his stooped posture and slowed gait, his weight, and his face turning the color of a Halloween pumpkin. It is as if these are the outward signs of inward ruin.
The day after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” How it will end is beginning to come more clearly into focus. Trump is seeing the world he has wounded turn against him. He’s discovering that the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. And like another old ruler, vain and volatile, who divided his kingdom and whose reign ended in ruin, Donald Trump is bellowing at the storm, raging at his enemies, raging into the night.
Overnight, Ukraine launched its biggest attack on Moscow, the capital of Russia, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine’s waves of drone strikes on a major Moscow oil refinery have shrouded the city in flames and black smoke. Last week, Russia struck one of Ukraine’s most important religious and cultural landmarks, the thousand-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The ancient monastery, with its churches and bell towers, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, described by the United Nations agency as a “masterpiece of Ukrainian art.”
Russia denied responsibility for the strike. After the Moscow strikes, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky released a video saying: “If Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn too.”
In the U.S., President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are trying hard to sell the administration’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran, which Trump signed yesterday at the Palace of Versailles in a scene that recalled Germany’s surrender after World War I. Trump is posting in all caps on social media that the deal is a triumph and that those who disagree with it “are either jealous, bad people, or stupid.”
Vance is in front of cameras saying that Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed—which is false—and that Iran gets nothing outlined in the MOU unless Iranian leaders change their behavior. The published agreement makes no such stipulation, and benefits, like the ability to sell oil on international markets and the lifting of sanctions, begin to flow to Iran immediately.
The leaders trying to dictate a new global order seem brittle and breaking, while in the United States the crowds jamming the streets in New York City in a ticker tape parade for the NBA Championship winners, the New York Knicks, suggested the momentum has shifted back to the American people. Celebrities like Mariska Hargitay, Timothée Chalamet, Mary J. Blige, Fat Joe, Spike Lee, and Ben Stiller joined the parade to celebrate the Knicks’ win.
At City Hall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani blended the victory of the Knicks with the rising political power of the people. .
“Over these past weeks, as the Knicks kept winning, our city has come together as one,” Mamdani told the crowd. “Neighbors invited neighbors over. Strangers high-fived one another in the street. Subway conductors sang their announcements, and bus drivers danced behind the wheel.
“So often when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy, or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy. For as long as we live, we will remember this feeling of a city together. A city alive, a city overcome by happiness.
“But,” he said, “let’s not pretend that this was inevitable. If you will allow me, I want to travel back in time eight days. Game four. Nine minutes and 33 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The Knicks are down 20. The analytics guys, the sports betting companies, the pundits who watch from far away, they do what they do. They run the numbers. They calculate the odds. They write the Knicks off. They give the Spurs a 99.6% chance of winning the game. A 99.6% chance of tying up the Series 2–2, of reclaiming the momentum with the next game in San Antonio. A 99.6% chance of silencing the Garden, of another year of watching and waiting.
“But there is one thing that the pundits just don’t get about this team, that they just don’t get about this city. It is in that .4% that we go to work. It is in that .4% that Jalen Brunson, the same guy that so many said was too small, proves that not only is he good enough, he is the new standard for greatness. It is in that .4% that OG Anunoby watches the ball float from the top of the arc and start running toward the basket, fingers reaching towards the heavens. It is in that .4% that Karl-Anthony Towns finds the strength to mourn his mother and still pull in rebound after rebound, make block after block. It is in that 0.4% that Jose Alvarado shows every kid growing up in public housing, that a son of Brooklyn and Queens can win for every one of the five boroughs. It is in that .4% that Mitch breaks his finger before game one and says, “Go get the tape.” It’s in that .4% that Josh Hart gets rebounds that break teams, that Mikal Bridges proves he was worth every single draft pick that Landry Shamet pulls up from downtown, that every one of these 18 players transforms the franchise, that Mike Brown keeps this team believing.
“Most of all, it’s in that .4% that the Knicks do what New Yorkers have always done when we are told something is impossible. We find a way. We win. Standing here, before what feels like the entire city, there is a Jalen Brunson quote I can’t stop thinking about: ‘You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario, but you gotta go out there and do something about it.’
“Time after time, we thought about the worst possible scenario. And time after time, the Knicks went out there and did something about it. The Knicks did not just win for New York City. They won like New York City. What is New York, if not your back up against the wall? A dream that feels just out of reach. A rent payment you don’t know how you’ll ever make. What is New York, if not 99.6% of the world stacked against you?
“And who are New Yorkers, if not people who hear those odds and smile? Who look at a .4% chance of success and ask, ‘Why are you giving me a head start?’ This is our city. This is our team. For 53 years, we watched. For 53 years, we waited. Now we’ve won.”
The theme farther west, in Chicago’s Jackson Park, was the same: community, hope, and the power of individuals to create change. For the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, former first lady Michelle Obama and former president Barack Obama welcomed living presidents and first ladies, except the Trumps, who were not invited: President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton, President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush, and President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden.
The crowd at the center was packed to hear speeches by the Obamas and longtime friends and aides, and to hear performances by Christina Aguilera, Marc Anthony, Common, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Marsai Martin, The Roots, Bruce Springsteen, Tems, U2’s Bono and The Edge, Eddie Vedder, and Stevie Wonder.
Tens of thousands of people also packed the nearby Midway Plaisance Park to watch the event on jumbotrons. In both places, the mood was jubilant and warm. Comedians Stephen Colbert and David Letterman and Obama Foundation board chair Martin Nesbitt all showed up in tan suits, a reference to the tan suit Obama wore in the Oval Office in August 2014. Although past presidents including Ronald Reagan had also worn tan suits in the White House, as Jacob Gallagher of the New York Times noted today, Obama’s suit led to a right-wing meltdown about how the suit was too informal for the West Wing: then-Representative Peter King (R-NY) called it “a metaphor for his lack of seriousness.”
The story of the South Side of Chicago, from which the Obamas hail, is “a story of possibility,” a video introducing the center said. “[W]e can come together and create the change we seek. ‘We.’ It’s the single most powerful word in a democracy: ‘We the people.’ We shall overcome. All things are possible. Yes we can. ‘We’ includes everyone.” The emphasis of the event was on new leaders shaping the future. “The future is now, and it starts with us.”
Mrs. Obama urged Americans to make a choice to change the future. “The Obama presidential center is a living testament to the power of choice,” she said, “the historic example that millions of you gave the world about what this imperfect democracy has strived for and achieved.” And, she said, it is “an urgent call to go out there and do it again.”
She said she hoped the center would remind people “of the power of choice. And the steady work of change. The arduous, unglamorous march up that mountain, one foot after another, day after day, generation after generation. But I…also hope you fully absorb the elation of achieving something together. You know, that feeling when you clear the tree line and see a vista that takes your breath away. A feeling that can never be erased.”
“I know that can be hard to grasp right now,” she said, “when everything feels so upside down. When fact and fiction run together, when folks seek to stifle speech, limit access to education, devalue diversity, erase the inconvenient parts of our history. When our phones constantly buzz with the latest outrage.” She hoped the center “can reignite the optimism and empathy and ambition that has always powered this country’s greatest change.”
“[W]e want you to come here and put away your phones and talk and laugh and cry…and make new friends,” she said. “Get your hands dirty in my garden. Push your baby on a swing in the playground. Have a romantic picnic on the great lawn. Because that’s the work of democracy too. Being neighborly. Taking care of public spaces. Having some fun enjoying each other. Shaking out of the isolation and division that have crept too deeply into our lives.”
She championed the power of the people as she urged the center’s South Side neighbors “to make this campus a part of your lives. Be inspired by the world-class art. Check out the books from our beautiful public library—and bring them back on time. Drop some beats in the recording studio, hit some corner threes at home court, hold birthday parties, jump-start clothing drives. Host citywide cleanup dates here. Use this campus to show off this place we call home. This joyful place where Marian and Fraser Robinson taught their two kids to dream big. This hopeful place where an unknown guy with an unknown name took flight. This stubbornly optimistic place where family after family scrapes and claws and laughs and dances their way to a better tomorrow. That’s what this has always been about.”
She told Chicagoans they “have shown the world what we are capable of. You’ve proven that a lasting legacy isn’t an award or a name on a building or a number of zeros in a bank account, but the difference we make in one another’s lives. It’s about seeing each other, and showing up for each other, and carrying each other when we’re weary or faltering or losing faith. That’s how you build something that endures.
“And that’s what you all have done at every twist and turn of this extraordinary journey,” she said. “You have protected and proclaimed the hope that beats within the heart of this campus. You’ve rekindled and renewed this untameable, unpredictable, and unbreakable democracy. And I know that you all are gonna astonish us even more in the months and years ahead. Because you all have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that when we truly see each other, when we strive to bring out the best in ourselves and one another, oh, there is no limit to how high we can go. Thank you all. I love you all. God bless you, and God bless this country we love.”
Surely something about this preliminary agreement between the United States and Iran must have felt familiar to America’s real-estate mogul president. After all, it reads like a real-estate bankruptcy filing — an act of financial capitulation.
It is a measure of how much Iran had Trump over a barrel, and how thoroughly it cleaned his clock, that Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, told Iranian state TV after the details were announced: “The agreement is a record of U.S. failure. People will see it and judge.”
You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to see what happened here. You need to be a domestic policy expert. Trump sold out America’s ally in the war, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states for the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan. Trump knew that the food inflation and high gasoline prices triggered by this war were a prescription for a Republican wipeout in the midterms. He had to stop the war now to get prices down by November, because if the Democrats take the House and Senate, Trump will be looking at endless investigations into how he has used the presidency to enrich himself and his family — and possibly even impeachment.
So, Trump did what he always does: He abandoned all principle and all allies and put his personal interests above all other considerations.
He even prepared the terrain to set up his vice president, JD Vance, for a fall. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.” People laughed — but nervously, because everyone knew it was a joke, but also not a joke. It was Trump’s inner voice speaking.
This was not a war I advocated, but once it started I was sure hoping Iran would lose. As such, I am shocked by the outcome so far — by the sheer cynicism with which Trump and Vance have gone from damning Iran, and telling its people to rise up because “help is on its way,” to praising its leaders, and how this deal has left Iran stronger and all its neighbors more vulnerable to Tehran’s whims.
I would have much more sympathy for Trump’s stress-filled handling of the wicked problem that is Iran if he had just once shown the same to President Obama or acknowledged that he couldn’t deliver now for the Iranian people as he promised. Instead, he just pretends that everything he did was perfect.
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Let us count the ways it is not perfect. The deal not only puts off the question of the disposal of Iran’s near bomb-grade uranium to future negotiations — negotiations in which the Trump administration has already given up its military leverage — but also, most amazingly, it clearly leaves open the possibility that Iran will be able to charge a toll in the future to any ships that want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
Just read the cease-fire agreement: Upon the signing of this memorandum of understanding, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only …”
After billions of dollars of bombs dropped on Iran, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner won from Tehran 60 days of toll-free passage through Hormuz. After that, oil tanker captains, bring your credit cards. Thank goodness we had these crack real-estate negotiators on the case, not wimpy diplomats.
The cease-fire deal not only is silent on any commitments by Iran to curb its development of long-range missiles and its support for proxies undermining the governments of Lebanon and Iraq, but it also makes the 60-day negotiation on Iran’s nuclear future contingent on Israel’s halting its military operations in Lebanon against Iran’s mercenary army there, Hezbollah. If Barack Obama had ever agreed to such a thing, Fox News would have interrupted its regular broadcasting to denounce it.
All of this is the result of the fact that Trump and Netanyahu never took seriously the idea that Iran would do the obvious: close the Strait of Hormuz in response to their attack. So in their attempt to stop Iran from developing a weapon of mass destruction that it was unlikely to ever use — since Israel would immediately use one on Iran — Trump and Netanyahu inspired Iran to develop a weapon of mass disruption, a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, which it can use anytime it feels too much pressure from the United States or Israel.
The message to America’s Gulf Arab allies — the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait in particular — is that we are cutting and running, so you’d better make the best deals you can with Tehran to keep it at bay. This is the biggest geopolitical power shift in the Gulf since the start of the Iran-Iraq war. There is a new sheriff in town. Dial 1-800-Ayatollah.
In case they did not read that between the lines, Trump spelled it out in a news conference justifying why he did not try to curb Iran’s missile development: “What am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” he asked. “Doesn’t work that way, you know, it doesn’t work that way, and missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”
If you are reading those words in Tel Aviv or Riyadh, a shiver just ran down your spine, along with the dawning awareness that the president of the United States no longer is playing with a full deck and you are home alone.
For all of these reasons, it is simply impossible to listen to Trump and Vance without being reminded of Nick Carraway’s famous observation about Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Indeed, shortly before Ghalibaf and his Iranian colleagues were boasting that they had imposed a “failure” on the United States, Trump was declaring the Iranian leaders to be “very rational people.” “They were nice to deal with, they were strong people, smart people,” he added. “They are not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.” He called them “smarter” than past regime leaders.
Compare this also with how Trump and Vance talked to and about President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — the leader of a heroic democracy that has been resisting a Russian invasion for four years: “You don’t have the cards,” Trump told him, urging Zelensky to cut a filthy deal with Vladimir Putin.
That is how they talk about the leader of a people defending the frontier of freedom from its worst enemy. For Iranian leaders — part of a regime that just gunned down thousands of their own people who were seeking freedom — Trump says they are “nice.”
Trump and Vance “have no coherent view of U.S. interests, and they have absolutely no core commitment to democratic values of any kind,” Gautam Mukunda, the author of “Picking Presidents: How to Make the Most Consequential Decision in the World,” told me.
That’s the point. Trump loves to wrap himself in the American flag, but he is the least American president, in terms of his core values, in modern times.
You have to ask how Trump and Netanyahu could have miscalculated so badly as to think they could topple a regime that had been in power since 1979 by bombing it from the air. The same answer applies to both: It’s because they have surrounded themselves with sycophants and purged their parties of anyone who might challenge them.
“There are two ways to make sure your executive is a good leader — either by selecting people of good character or putting limits on what they can do — and America and Israel today have failed at both,” Mukunda said. “This war is the most perfect example of what happens when you disdain all forms of expertise, knowledge and principles, in favor of gut instincts.” Experts had predicted everything that went wrong in the war.
But therein may lie a possible silver lining for both America and Israel: The failed Trump-Netanyahu endeavor to destroy Iran’s Islamofascist autocracy might end up saving American and Israeli democracy. Both countries are facing fateful elections — America’s midterms in November and Israel’s national election in the fall. Trump and Bibi, both sinking in the polls, were hoping that a quick win in Iran would propel each of them or their parties to victory.
The whole world is worse off with a stronger Iran, but it will be triply worse off if Trump and Bibi win their elections. Because five more years of Netanyahu as prime minister would be the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy. And two more years of Trump controlling the White House, the Senate, the House and effectively the Supreme Court would pose the same danger to American democracy.
Is there any way Trump can salvage a good outcome in Iran? Yes, but it has nothing to do with the fate of its nuclear weapons. In the wake of this war, if there is a diminished threat from Israel and America, that might unlock politics in Iran as well. It might just create the space for an Iranian majority to ask: “What does this regime have to show for 47 years in power besides a multibillion-dollar waste of money to get a nuclear bomb and funding militias around the region with cash we Iranians desperately need for our own development and turning our country into a water-starved environmental disaster?”
Who knows what politics, what pressures for regime reform or regime change, would be unleashed in Tehran if Iranian leaders can no longer distract their people with war?
#BrokenPromises
#SenselessWar
#ForeverWar
CNN News Alert:
Iran says it's closing vital Strait of Hormuz, blaming Israeli attacks in Lebanon
Iran’s military command said it will close the Strait of Hormuz due to Israel’s alleged violations of the ceasefire in Lebanon and the
United States “failing to implement” the first clause of the tentative agreement to end the war, Iranian state media reported on Saturday.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a metaphor for the Trump presidency. Beginning in early April, Trump boasted he was going to fix the reflecting pool after what he claimed was gross neglect by former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He claimed the repairs, including sealing the pool and painting it “American flag blue,” would cost about $1.8 million and that it would all be finished by July 4, 2026, in time for the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Repeatedly, he bashed his predecessors over the pool, insisting that his skills would enable him to make it better than ever at minimal cost and that the repairs “could last for 100 years.”
The government declared the pool renovations complete on June 6, and water began flowing back into it. Trump immediately claimed it was a triumph. “Thank you President Trump,” he wrote on social media.
But the story was not over. David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times reported that the repairs had, in fact, run far over budget, to at least $14.2 million. The administration had awarded a no-bid contract to a company Trump first said he had chosen and then said he didn’t know, and had agreed to a 20% profit margin, although a National Park Service analysis found that margin “inflated.”
And then, just a day after the reservoir filled with water, algae began to bloom in it. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the algae were “residual” and a normal part of the process of refilling the pool. “President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden,” she said in a statement.
Experts disagreed, saying that the darker bottom and the sealed seams meant the water would heat up faster than it had before and thus support more algae. By June 16, crews from the National Park Service were pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to kill the algae that had turned the pool bright green even as Trump insisted the pool was perfect.
By Thursday, June 18, the new blue epoxy at the bottom of the pool was peeling off and floating in the vivid green pool. Fahrenthold reported in the New York Times that the National Park Service contracted not only the coating and painting of the pool under a no-bid contract, but also an additional $1.7 million contract for a water purification system.
That no-bid contract went to a firm whose ultimate owner is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by Trump donor John J. Cafaro, whose wife chaired the 2017 International Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago and who lives near Mar-a-Lago at a mansion that is listed as the water treatment company’s address in Florida corporate records. The name of the firm is Greenwater Services.
A spokesperson for the Interior Department said the White House was not involved in the choice of Greenwater Services and the department did not know of Cafaro’s political support for Trump when it awarded the contract.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”
On Friday, former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn, 67, stopped by the pool on a 52-mile bike ride and reached into the water to feel what the detached material looked like. U.S. Park Police officers arrested him for destruction of government property, a misdemeanor. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told David J. Lynch and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
Friday night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By this evening, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
Until his second term in office, Trump has always been protected from the fallout from his own actions, and it appears he has become accustomed to simply describing his fantasy world and expecting that others will agree they see it. If his “fix” for the reflecting pool failed, someone else must be responsible, and they must pay for it.
The pattern Walz identified with regard to the pool applies also to Trump’s debacle in Iran. And not only is the reflecting pool defying his narrative, so are Iran and Israel.
Israel has said it does not consider itself bound by the memorandum of understanding Trump signed at Versailles on Friday. That MOU said the U.S. and Iran “and their allies in the current war” would immediately and permanently stop military operations “on all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Israel has been attacking what it says are Hezbollah camps in southern Lebanon and has occupied parts of the region as a “security zone.”
On Friday, Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times reported that a recent U.S. intelligence report assessed that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to continue striking Hezbollah despite the MOU. Hezbollah is funded by Iran and is continuing to strike northern Israel. David M. Halbfinger of the New York Times reported on Thursday that Israel was “stunned” by the U.S.-Iran MOU and sees it as “a cataclysmic disaster.”
Israel has continued to strike Lebanon, and after additional strikes last night, Iranian officials today announced that in the wake of these breaches of the MOU, they had, once again, closed the Strait of Hormuz.
This afternoon, Vice President J.D. Vance left for Switzerland to join the negotiations, but already Iran has indicated it intends to charge “insurance fees” for the ships going through the strait.
Trump appeared to try to pressure Iran by threatening to impose U.S. tolls on the strait if an agreement falls through. “There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs.”
That Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy is also refusing to go along with Trump’s narrative shows how Trump’s power is crumbling. A former ally, Meloni is now publicly contradicting Trump.
Earlier this week, Trump told an Italian television host that Meloni had “begged” for a picture with him at the G7 conference and that he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni said his comments were entirely “made up,” and the Italian foreign minister cancelled a trip to the United States over the flap.
Meloni highlighted the damage Trump has done to our alliances and indicated allies are done pretending his behavior is okay. “I don’t know why the US president behaves this way towards allies,” she wrote on Instagram. “I can only say it is regrettable he does not show the same determination towards the enemies of the West and towards the enemies of the US—[enemies] whose leaders he instead appears to be far more accommodating with. But there is one thing he needs to remember: neither I nor Italy ever beg.”
But Trump couldn’t let it go. This morning, he posted: “Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni asked, over and over, for a picture with me during the G-7 meeting in France. She is doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity, possibly because she turned down the United States of America, a Country that truly loves and protects Italy, when it came to denying Iran from obtaining or developing a Nuclear Weapon (But so did NATO, for that matter!). She wouldn’t even let us use Italy’s landing strips or runways, a great logistical inconvenience, and this despite the fact the U.S. contributes hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year to protect Italy, and other “so-called” NATO Allies. Now, after the United States defeated Iran militarily, she wants to be friends again in order to get her “numbers up.” No thanks!!!”
Using a vulgar colloquialism, the headline on the front page of the Italian newspaper Libero today translated to “Trump is an a**hole.”
Today it appeared that the National Guard is patrolling the area around the reflecting pool. Tonight, Trump posted that “[m]any additional people have been arrested having to do with the disgraceful Vandalism of our beautiful Reflecting Pool.” The reflecting pool “worked perfectly, including the mirror like finish, perfectly reflecting the two Great Monuments, which it never had before! What these terrible Vandals have done is a true affront to both Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and should be dealt with accordingly.”
Although multiple cameras line the mall and no one has offered any proof either of additional arrests or of vandalism, and although we have all been able to see workers dumping chemicals into the pool to kill the algae, Trump claimed that vandals “took some form of a knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”
“The Reflecting Pool was never so beautiful as it was just one week ago, even going back to 1922 when it opened,” he wrote. “We are very proud of what we have done with this magnificent structure, and we will get it repaired, quickly, to an equal level of Beauty.”
Ever since Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, people have been trying to grasp the scale of his incomprehensible fortune.
Some have noted that a stack of $100 bills amounting to $1 trillion would extend 679 miles high. The economist Steven Durlauf has observed that John D. Rockefeller’s wealth at one point equaled about 1.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product and that Mr. Musk’s wealth now amounts to at least twice as much, at more than 3 percent. It may not escape New York Knicks fans that even Jalen Brunson, who makes about $39 million per year, would need to play more than 25,000 seasons to accumulate that kind of money.
But of all the numbers I’ve seen, the one that struck me most forcefully was a calculation in The Times that Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the average American family.
As a historian of political thought, I immediately thought of Plato, the first Western philosopher to really grapple with economic inequality. In his “Laws,” through the character of the Athenian Stranger, Plato contended that in a thriving republic, if anyone acquired more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens, he should donate the surplus to the city. Not five million times the wealth of the typical family — four times the wealth of the poorest.
To be sure, it is difficult to imagine how a modern economy would operate with Plato’s proposed constraints on wealth acquisition. But it is not hard for a modern reader to understand the concerns that led him to his radical proposal.
Plato grew up in Athens, a city that once was nearly torn apart, as Plutarch wrote, by the “disparity between the rich and the poor.” It was saved by a heroic lawgiver, Solon, who canceled all the debts of the poor, to the great chagrin of the rich. And in Plato’s youth, as the city fought the Peloponnesian War, it suffered three successive class-based civil wars — an oligarchic revolution of the rich against the poor, followed by a democratic revolution of the poor against the rich, followed by yet another oligarchic revolution.
It’s no wonder that when Socrates reflected on inequality in Plato’s “Republic,” he observed that a state characterized by significant wealth disparity is not a state at all but rather “two states, the one of poor, the other of rich men, and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.”
For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates likened this condition to a leaky jug: No matter how much water one pours into it, it will demand more. For some, the desire for money extends only so far as is necessary to cover their needs; for others, the desire is infinite. Plato likened those insatiable souls to slaves who are ruled by their desires.
Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, “a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,” because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, “it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.”
Plato’s fears about insatiable greed have been vindicated by Mr. Musk, who has already set his sights on $10 trillion. He has confirmed Plato’s concerns about the moral failures of the superrich by characterizing empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” With his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he put the U.S. Agency for International Development program “into the wood chipper,” as he gleefully put it, contributing to the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people. Such carnage is a predictable outcome of a society that has chosen to place no upper limits on wealth.
Plato was acutely aware that ideal solutions, such as his 4-to-1 wealth ratio, are impossible to carry out where great inequality already exists. But he did not encourage legislators and citizens to throw up their hands in surrender. Rather, he urged citizens (including the few rich ones with a “sense of fairness”) to do what they could to level society, starting by shaming those with excessive fortunes. He stressed that true poverty “consists not in a lessening of one’s property but in an increase of one’s avarice.”
Only by teaching the evils of extreme greed can society begin to restore the healthy balance of wealth necessary for a thriving republic.
It appears to be more and more clear that the Trump administration is mired in its own mistakes.
There is no way to spin the memorandum of understanding Trump signed last Friday at Versailles to advance peace talks with Iran as a win. Trump deliberately shut off both Congress and allies from the decision to go to war, making the conflict his own. That means the MOU, which achieves none of the goals Trump claimed while at the same time giving Iran access to hundreds of billions of dollars, belongs to Trump, too.
A wide range of U.S. commentators are calling the MOU a “disaster” and saying the United States lost the war. As Isaac Arnsdorf and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported, right-wing hardliner on Iran Mark Dubowitz said: “The actual MOU is deeply flawed. The administration needs to stop defending it beyond stating the truth: It’s a stopgap measure to resupply energy markets, lower gas prices, and help Republicans in the midterms.”
Today, after a quick trip to Switzerland for talks with Iranian negotiators, Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters that Iran had agreed to allow international observers periodically to inspect its nuclear program. Vance called it a “major milestone for the American people, and the first step in permanently denuclearizing or permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran,” and Trump heralded the plan.
In fact, such inspections were part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 under the Obama administration, the agreement that Trump tore up in 2018, and they continued at some sites until Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, a year ago today. After that, Iran refused inspections of the bombed sites. Inspections are good, but they basically just get us back to where we were before Trump took over.
The administration today also waived sanctions on Iranian oil for the period covered by the MOU as that document laid out, increasing the value of Iranian oil exports.
Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the problems with the Reflecting Pool are the product of vandalism by “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE,” and administration officials have stationed National Guard personnel around the Reflecting Pool. They appear to be handing out citations to individuals who touch the water.
A friendly media figure at the White House today noted that in April Trump said he was going to fix the Reflecting Pool “in a week for about a million dollars,” and wanted to know what was going on two months and sixteen and a half million dollars later. Trump answered: “Ok, ready? Barack Hussein Obama, have you ever heard of him?” Trump went on to lambaste what he said were Obama’s botched repairs to the pool.
Officials are now trying to silence both those calling attention to their failures and political opponents.
Trump has reacted with fury at media stories that expose his failures in Iran. In response to a New York Times story saying analysts did not see that the war had accomplished much, Trump called the paper’s reporters “corrupt and unethical cowards” and appeared to object to the First Amendment, writing: “The way the Corrupt and Failing New York Times is covering stories on a very battered and beat up Iran, through FAKE & MADE UP ‘FACTS’ is, in my opinion, ‘TREASONOUS.’ I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!”
Trump is doing more than threatening media figures. He is increasing his effort to use the government against political opponents. In the face of bipartisan opposition, Trump has shoved loyalist William Pulte into position as acting director of national intelligence, overseeing the intelligence gathered by the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies. Pulte officially took office on Friday.
Pulte has no experience in intelligence, although such experience is a requirement for the position. What he does have is demonstrated willingness to use the power of the federal government to attack Trump’s political opponents: it’s Pulte who came up with the idea of harassing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, New York attorney general Letitia James, and U.S. senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) by accusing them of criminal mortgage fraud. He also pushed the ouster of then–Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell by claiming Powell had lied to Congress about renovations to Federal Reserve office buildings.
Last year, Gina Heeb, Josh Dawsey, and Rebecca Ballhous of the Wall Street Journal reported that Pulte’s nickname in the administration is “Little Trump,” and when big Trump announced he would install Pulte as DNI, members of both parties balked. So Trump said he would instead nominate U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, who helped slow walk the release of the Epstein Files, for the position. Despite Clayton’s lack of intelligence experience, the Senate Intelligence Committee scheduled confirmation hearings for June 17 to rush him into office before Pulte could step in.
Then, as The Guardian recounted, on June 17, just hours before the confirmation hearing was about to start, Trump posted that “we are cancelling the Senate Hearing RE: DNI today.” This meant Pulte would indeed become the acting DNI. He showed up at the office the next day—a day early—and ordered staff to list about 300 people to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center.
This follows cuts under former DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who said in August 2025 she would cut 40% of the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Gabbard herself is under increased scrutiny today after an in-depth story yesterday by Jon Swaine of the Washington Post explored her ties to a religious leader of what observers describe as a cult. Swaine tracked the many parallels between what appear to be orders directed at her in conversations sent by email and her official acts when she was in Congress. In one 2015 memo, Swaine writes, the advisor told “TG” “that ‘your position in general’ should be to offer an alternative to other candidates in the ‘dishonest Democratic party.’”
On Friday, Erin Banco, Phil Stewart, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported that the ODNI is sitting on a report that identifies vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting machines. The machines’ software is outdated, leaving vulnerabilities that could be exploited. Gabbard began the report in order to investigate Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged, but the investigation turned up no evidence of such action. Neither did a second report by a government contractor, Mojave Research, which investigated voting machines in Puerto Rico. That report, too, recommended immediate updates to software systems, but it appears those plans have not been implemented.
The administration appears to be trying to intimidate voting rights groups. On June 11, 100 FBI agents and other federal officers raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group encouraging voter participation, especially by voters from groups that have historically been disenfranchised. Then the agents went to the homes of board members, staff, and volunteers, where they seized computers and phones, took documents, and questioned the people they found.
The search warrant said they were looking for voter fraud. As the Brennan Center—along with many others—has established, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. It is vanishingly rare.
Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, which protects voting rights, notes that Project 2025, the right-wing plan for taking over the country after Trump took office, called for using the Justice Department to go after state election officials and voter registration groups to push the myth of voter fraud and make people afraid to vote.
Waldman explained that the leading voter registration group in Ohio is the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. In 2024, he says, it registered 100,000 voters, and it works to stop partisan gerrymandering in the state.
Republicans are working to undermine their opponents with subterfuge, too. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that a network of super PACs that claim to be progressive and are spending millions in Democratic primaries are actually funded by a Republican dark money group, the American Prosperity Alliance. New documents from the Federal Election Commission identify all of the funding for Lead Left PAC, Real Change PAC, and California Blue PAC as coming from Conservative Americans PAC, which is funded by the right-wing American Prosperity Alliance.
But the American people are pushing back on the administration, and it seems wobbly.
Outrage over the Iran deal has risen to such a fever pitch on the right that, as Josephine Walker of Axios reported, on Thursday, right-wing commenter Tucker Carlson announced on a podcast that he was leaving the Republican Party, adding: “And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.” Carlson said he will not support the Democrats either, suggesting he is testing out whether MAGA voters, especially the antisemitic ones who embrace his attacks on Israel, will follow him if he splits from Trump.
Most people don’t seem to be buying Trump’s excuses about the Reflecting Pool, either. Social media is flooded with jokes about “Sealant Team 6” and images of the reflecting pool as the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings films or with the Creature from the Black Lagoon emerging from it. Upon hearing of the arrest of former Olympian David Hearn for destruction of government property after he touched the detached liner of the pool “but didn’t destroy or break or peel anything,” conservative commentator David Frum wrote: “If destruction of government property is a crime, I wonder what they’ll do to the man who tore down the East Wing without a permit.”
Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) posted: “There is a 24/7 camera that shows the reflecting pool. If someone went into the pool and made a 250 foot gash, it would have been seen. trump is lying again. Everyone knows it, but the people at [the Justice Department] are randomly going after people to soothe trump’s fragile ego.”
And today the courts struck back at Trump’s attempts to rig the 2026 vote. The Trump administration has tried to force states to turn over their voting rolls in order to run them through a query system that checks federal databases to make sure no immigrants are collecting benefits for which they’re not eligible. Confusingly, that system—the one used to make sure noncitizens don’t collect benefits for which they’re not eligible—is called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), making it hard to distinguish from the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (also SAVE) that Trump keeps pushing.
An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.
Today U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the administration could not use the SAVE system to check state voting rolls, saying: “The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
Tonight Trump posted a picture of a person dressed in a pink inflatable frog costume with the word “AMPHIFA” written across the belly, carrying a sign that reads: “FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE ALGAE.” Trump called the activist “a crazy pro-algae (likely paid) protestor.”
“Who’s paying team algae?” social media poster The Volatile Mermaid retorted. “George Sporos?”
“If destruction of government property is a crime, I wonder what they’ll do to the man who tore down the East Wing without a permit.”
“Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things - Which will be fully enforced!”
One of the most important things to understand about J.D. Vance is that he is not simply another religious conservative in the mold of Mike Pence or the traditional Religious Right. He represents something different—something deeper, more ambitious, and, in many ways, more radical.
For decades, the American Religious Right focused on familiar issues: abortion, same-sex marriage, prayer in schools, and the defense of what it called “family values.” Whatever one thinks of those positions, their political horizon was largely domestic and moral. They sought to preserve a particular vision of American society.
Vance’s project is different. His concerns are civilizational.
Throughout his speeches, interviews, and now in his book Communion, Vance returns repeatedly to a single theme: the decline of the West. He worries about cultural collapse, demographic decline, weakening institutions, and the disappearance of a shared moral order. The language is not simply about morality. It is about history, destiny, and survival.
In the final chapter of Communion, Vance writes:
“I’m not demanding that you become a Christian, though I’d welcome it. I’m proposing that we have now run an experiment of replacing a Christian culture with something else for decades.”
Elsewhere, he argues that:
“Christianity is America’s creed, the shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond.”
Those statements may appear modest at first glance. Vance is careful to say he is not demanding religious conversion. But beneath that disclaimer lies a much larger claim: that Christianity is not merely one faith among many in American life. It is the essential glue holding the nation together.
That claim deserves scrutiny.
The Myth of a Singular Christian America
The historical reality of the United States is far messier than Vance’s narrative allows.
American religious history is not the story of a unified Christian people. It is the story of extraordinary diversity, conflict, adaptation, and pluralism.
It is the story of Jehovah’s Witnesses challenging compulsory patriotic rituals. It is the story of Buddhists who fought for the United States while simultaneously facing persecution and internment. It is the story of Catholic immigrants who were once viewed by many Protestants as fundamentally alien to American identity. It is the story of Jews, Muslims, atheists, Indigenous spiritual traditions, and countless other communities who helped shape the nation.
America has never been one thing.
The notion that the country once enjoyed a singular Christian consensus—and that contemporary problems stem from its loss—requires simplifying the past into a myth.
But that simplification serves a purpose.
If one wants to explain declining birth rates, social fragmentation, political polarization, and cultural anxiety with a single cause, then the loss of Christianity becomes an attractive answer. It transforms a complex social reality into a story of fall and restoration.
And that story sits at the center of Vance’s worldview.
The Fear Behind the Politics
One of the more revealing aspects of Communion is the personal anxiety running beneath its political arguments.
Vance writes about mortality. He writes about legacy. He worries about being forgotten.
At one point, he reflects on the fear that his children might never visit his grave when he is gone. That concern may seem deeply human. Most people wonder, at some level, what they will leave behind. But what is striking is how often Vance’s reflections return not to the suffering of people in the present but to the endurance of civilization itself. His central concern is not whether people have healthcare today. Not whether families can afford housing. Not whether children are hungry. Not whether communities have access to clean water or economic opportunity.
His concern is whether the civilization survives. Whether the cathedrals remain standing. Whether history remembers. The result is a politics oriented less toward human flourishing in the present than toward preserving a particular vision of cultural continuity.
Christianity as Social Cohesion
Perhaps the most revealing passage in the book comes when Vance writes:
“As our leaders have ushered in an unprecedented increase in demographic diversity through immigration, they’ve simultaneously discarded the most powerful force for cultural cohesion: Christianity.”
Notice what Christianity becomes in this formulation.
It is not primarily a source of spiritual transformation.
It is not primarily about compassion, mercy, service, or care for the vulnerable.
It is a mechanism of cohesion. A force that creates unity. A tool that binds a society together.
This distinction matters.
When religion is viewed primarily as a source of cultural cohesion, its value shifts from spiritual truth to political utility. The question becomes less whether Christianity is true and more whether Christianity is useful.
Useful for maintaining order.
Useful for preserving identity.
Useful for creating conformity.
And throughout history, projects centered on cultural cohesion have often demanded something from those who do not fit.
The Danger of Enforced Unity
There is a warning here that history repeatedly offers.
Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who witnessed the aftermath of Nazi Germany and helped prosecute war criminals at Nuremberg, understood this danger clearly.
In one of his most famous observations, Jackson wrote:
“Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
The insight is profound. Movements that begin by seeking unity rarely stop there. When voluntary agreement fails, pressure follows. When pressure fails, coercion becomes tempting.
The logic is simple: If national survival depends on cultural cohesion, and if cultural cohesion depends on religious conformity, then dissent becomes a threat. And once dissent becomes a threat, increasingly severe measures begin to look justified.
This is why arguments about Christian nationalism cannot be dismissed as harmless nostalgia. They are not simply about restoring old traditions. They are about deciding who belongs, who does not, and what role the state should play in enforcing those boundaries.
A Return to Christendom
What ultimately distinguishes Vance from someone like Mike Pence is the historical horizon of his imagination.
Pence’s idealized America was the 1950s: postwar prosperity, traditional family structures, and a broadly Christian public culture.
Vance seems drawn much further back.
His imagination often points toward Christendom itself—a civilization organized around religious hierarchy, cultural uniformity, and shared faith.
The symbols are cathedrals, not suburbs.
The aspiration is civilizational grandeur, not merely social conservatism.
But history reminds us that these societies were never as harmonious as their admirers suggest. Their unity often depended on exclusion. Religious minorities were marginalized. Dissenters were punished. Entire populations existed outside the circle of belonging.
The beauty of the cathedral was often built upon the suffering of those who had little choice but to support it.
That is the tension at the heart of Vance’s vision.
A society organized around a single religious identity may achieve a kind of cohesion. But cohesion always raises a question:
Who pays the price?
The Real Question
The debate over Christianity’s role in public life is not new. Nor is the question of how societies maintain common values amid diversity.
But Vance’s argument pushes beyond those debates.
He is not merely asking whether Christianity should have influence.
He is asking whether Christianity should serve as the organizing principle of national identity itself.
That is a profoundly different proposition.
And history suggests that when nations attempt to achieve unity through religious conformity, they often discover that faith imposed from above does not produce belief. It produces resentment. It produces exclusion. It produces conflict.
People can be forced to attend church.
They cannot be forced to believe.
They can be compelled to conform outwardly.
They cannot be compelled to love.
The challenge of a pluralistic society has always been finding ways to live together without demanding sameness. That project is messy. It is often frustrating. It lacks the elegance of a single creed.
But it may also be the only alternative to the coercive pursuit of unity that Justice Jackson warned about—a pursuit that, in the end, achieves only “the unanimity of the graveyard.”
I'm pretty sure #8 is a war crime.
