The Last Conservatives

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 03, 2026

 

Like most other numbskulls, Donald Trump is a profoundly incurious man, and so it probably is the case that he wandered down to the Supreme Court as another halfhearted attempt at bullying the justices, who, thanks in part to their individual characters and in part to constitutional design, are very hard to bully. But maybe he really did simply want to know what the hell is going on with the Supreme Court, which has left the president both perplexed and irritated by doing the one thing Donald Trump never has and never will do: its job. 

 

Ideological progressives and partisan Democrats have been engaged in a shameful yearslong smear campaign against the Supreme Court, an intellectually dishonest attack on the institution’s legitimacy. I have written from time to time about the “Supreme Court legitimacy watch,” i.e. the habit our friends on the left have of declaring that the high court’s legitimacy is at stake every time it looks like it might not give them their way on a policy question. The runup to Dobbs may have been the high-water mark of “legitimacy” hysteria, but the habit endures.

 

That a policy question is not the same thing as a legal or constitutional question is something that vexes and confuses progressives from both directions: How could the arch-conservative Antonin Scalia be on the ACLU’s side of a flag-burning case? How is it possible that most of the court’s liberal justices sided with the conservatives in an 8-1 ruling in the recent “conversion therapy” case? The answer is the same in both cases: The First Amendment protects speech, including—especially!—speech that powerful people do not like.

 

What is sometimes described by the aggrandizing term “judicial activism” is not really jurisprudence at all, properly understood: It is what happens when judges (and the legal commentariat) decide on the outcome first—“Of course Colorado can use the law to silence those homophobic creeps!”—and then fill in the legal arguments post hoc and willy-nilly. But the desire for such outcome-driven jurisprudence, long a hallmark of the progressive model of social change, is increasingly prevalent among Republicans, for obvious reasons: There is no one in these United States more offended by a display of principle—or by adherence to official duties—than Donald Trump, who is the most profoundly morally corrupt man ever to occupy the office he holds.

 

We have Trump’s own word on this, conveniently: He insists that by refusing to give him his way on matters he cares about, especially tariffs, justices “openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them.” For Trump, the high court is simply another instrument of electoral power: “The Democrats on the Court always ‘stick together,’ no matter how strong a case is put before them — There is rarely even a minor ‘waver.’ But Republicans do not do this.” And in case you have any doubt: “The decision that mattered most to me was TARIFFS! The Court knew where I stood.”

 

There is a reason my colleague Sarah Isgur describes the Supreme Court as the “Last Branch Standing” in her new book of that title. The court is usually described as being divided 6-3, conservatives outnumbering liberals, and the court does hand down a fair number of 6-3 decisions—but in many of those 6-3 cases, one of the court’s liberal justices is among the six and one of the conservatives is among the three. For example, in FCC v. Consumers’ Research, a case about the constitutional limits of delegation, the ruling was 6-3, with Elena Kagan in the majority and Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito in dissent. Whatever that is, it is not an example of a politicized high court in which conservatives use their 6-3 majority to deliver the political goods for Republicans. As our friends at SCOTUSblog run the numbers, during the 2024-2025 term, only about 10 percent of the Supreme Court’s rulings were 6-3 with the three liberals in dissent; by way of comparison, the largest share of Supreme Court decisions—a 42-percent plurality—were unanimous. The liberal Justice Kagan was in the majority in 70 percent of non-unanimous cases and more than 80 percent of cases overall during the same term. Over the course of the past 20 years—years supposedly dominated by ruthless right-wing judges—about 90 percent of all Supreme Court cases had at least one liberal in the majority.

 

Like any of its predecessors, the Trump administration appeals only a small number of losses in the lower courts and then takes an even smaller share—the cases it thinks it is most likely to win—to the Supreme Court. And how is that going? The Supreme Court has rejected Trump on tariffs and on domestic deployment of the National Guard, and it seems almost certain to reject the administration on birthright citizenship. The court has stymied the president’s efforts to purge the Federal Reserve and to deport people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act. Where the Trump administration’s top policy preferences have been in conflict with the law—as they often will be in a lawless administration—the Supreme Court has reliably sided with the law.

 

The Supreme Court’s record is not unblemished, and Chief Justice John Roberts has a great deal for which to answer, in my view, including his truly incredible stretch to save the so-called Affordable Care Act and his creation ex nihilo of a presidential immunity privilege found nowhere in the Constitution. Elena Kagan was very cagey about a supposed constitutional right to same-sex marriage during her confirmation hearings but wasted no time in inventing one once she had secured lifetime tenure. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the lone vote against free speech in the Colorado “conversion therapy” case, is, for the moment, the member of the court who appears most outcome-oriented in both her votes and her writing. Such departures have produced bitter criticism, not least from me, and I continue to believe that such criticism is justified—at the same time, the Supreme Court as an institution has perhaps earned some benefit of the doubt.

 

The court has, indeed, emerged as the federal government’s preeminent conservative institution. That is not to say conservative in the sense of politically right-wing—the American right, currently in revolutionist mode, has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, and the high court’s conservatism can be seen in its limiting of Donald Trump’s abuses and pretenses as clearly as anywhere. The Supreme Court, rather, is conservative in the sense of defending and fortifying the American constitutional order, which is what it is there to do. In anno Domini 2026, a branch of government that is content to simply try its best to do its job is as great a display of conservatism as a realistic American could hope to see. 

Hegseth’s War on America’s Military

By Tom Nichols

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

 

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

 

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

 

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.) When two Army helicopters buzzed a political rally and then flew to MAGA favorite Kid Rock’s house, Hegseth short-circuited the Army’s suspension of the pilots and squashed an investigation into their actions. Following the best American civil-military traditions, George and other senior military leaders have been remarkably disciplined in keeping their thoughts out of the public eye.

 

Of course, the tone at the Pentagon was set by the commander in chief. Last June, Trump spoke at Fort Bragg, where he tried to turn his appearance into a political rally. Again, George (and Driscoll) said nothing, at least in public, about this shocking violation of civil-military norms. Trump, after all, is the commander in chief, and his behavior can be curtailed only by the Senate or the American people.

 

Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

 

These dismissals are not defensible even as the product of some high-minded strategic reform. Rather, as Pentagon officials told The New York Times, they are the “product of Mr. Hegseth’s long-running grievances with the Army, battles over personnel and his troubled relationship” with Driscoll. Hegseth’s beef with Driscoll may be a product of insecurity: When Hegseth was stepping on rakes in the aftermath of Signalgate, Driscoll was an obvious choice to replace him. The Army secretary also took on important tasks that Hegseth either would not—or could not—do. Last fall, Driscoll, not Hegseth, was part of a high-level Pentagon delegation that traveled to Geneva in an attempt to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

 

Perhaps that was just as well. Hegseth—now scathingly called “Dumb McNamara” by some Pentagon staff—has busied himself with culture-war nonsense rather than substantive defense and security issues. But Hegseth apparently need not worry: Driscoll, according to reporting from my colleagues Ashley Parker and Sarah Fitzpatrick, is now rumored to be one of the next senior appointees facing likely dismissal. (Hegseth may not know much about strategy or leadership, but he knows how to fight a war of attrition.)

 

The petty vendettas of a passed-over major mattered less until the war in Iran, a conflict that may be escalating beyond American control and is now sinking both Trump’s popularity and the global economy. Pentagon pissing matches are the stuff of legend, and George is not the first general to get an unwanted retirement invitation from an irate civilian leader. But America is now engaged in its biggest conflict in decades, with thousands of troops headed into possible combat on the shores of a country the size of Alaska with more than three times the population of North Korea—and with a president whose only formal speech on the war so far consisted of 19 minutes of jumbled thoughts. The American people deserve to know why so many of their top officers are being tossed out of their jobs.

 

Pete Hegseth has never shown a willingness to explain himself to the public, nor has he demonstrated the character required to take that kind of responsibility. But now that Randy George, along with other senior officers Hegseth has fired or pushed to resign, are about to be civilians, maybe they can step forward and tell their fellow citizens what on earth is going on in Hegseth’s Pentagon.

Pam Bondi Couldn’t Possibly Succeed

By Jonathan Chait

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

Pam Bondi’s 421 days as attorney general of the United States came to an end in the only way they could have: with her being fired ignominiously via a social-media post. Donald Trump announced that Bondi, though a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend,” will be “transitioning to a much needed and important new job” that, despite its great importance, remains a secret. Also, her new job will be in the private sector, which makes it a strange thing for a president to be determining—or at least it would be strange if the administration still observed traditional boundaries between public and private, which it does not.

 

The attorney-general position under Trump has become a short-term gig not unlike the drummer in This Is Spinal Tap. Back in 2017, Trump chose his first nominee, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, specifically for his loyalty—Sessions was the first senator to endorse his campaign. But Sessions disappointed his boss by recusing himself from the Russia investigation and generally following department procedure, leading to his termination.

 

Trump replaced Sessions with Bill Barr, who had auditioned for the job by submitting a memo attacking Robert Mueller’s investigation. Barr faithfully upheld Trump’s priorities, but the two men did occasionally find themselves at odds. Barr maintained at least the appearance of rule-following, and complained privately that Trump’s insistence on ordering him in public to do his bidding undermined the department’s credibility. Barr left after enraging Trump by stating that he could not find voter fraud at a scale large enough to have flipped the 2020 election result.

 

When his second term began, Trump sought out an attorney general whose loyalty would not waver under even the most trying circumstances. Bondi did not bother pretending to uphold the Justice Department’s independence. She announced to the staff upon taking office, “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.”

 

Bondi faithfully echoed Trump’s messaging, calling him “the greatest president in the history of our country” and scolding Democrats in Congress two months ago for investigating his administration when the Dow Jones Industrial Average had topped 50,000. (It is currently at 46,000.)

 

Most important, Bondi investigated and brought charges against seemingly anybody Trump wanted her to. At minimum, Bondi tried to investigate a long list of Trump targets, and if she refused any of his demands, no evidence of doing so has made its way to the public. Her problem turned out to be that it remains very difficult to convict Americans of a crime they did not commit, even more so when those targets have competent lawyers. And so, as Bondi kept bringing the cases Trump ordered up, she kept losing them, which made Trump angrier and more determined to compel Bondi to bring flimsy charges against his enemies.

 

Trump reportedly wishes to replace Bondi with Lee Zeldin, his administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, whom Trump is said to currently admire because he wins his cases. The difference, of course, is that it is far easier to win an environmental challenge, especially given the decades of groundwork the conservative movement has invested in weakening environmental law and confirming friendly judges, than it is to manufacture a criminal case out of thin air.

 

The president apparently believes that Bondi is failing to lock up his enemies because she isn’t smart enough. He will eventually discover that Zeldin, or whoever replaces Bondi, also lacks the power to persuade juries to convict Trump’s enemies of imaginary crimes. And so the next attorney general will also eventually transition to a new job at the Shield of the Americas or a farm somewhere upstate, where they can run and play.

 

 

Trump Shocks the Press by Refusing to Retreat from Iran

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

Ahead of Wednesday night’s formal address to a nation whose support for the Iran war Trump did not solicit in advance, political media outlets forecast a speech that would have been unlikely to reassure anyone.

 

Politico, for example, anticipated an address in which the president declared premature victory in Iran. Trump was expected to say that America’s work in Iran was all but done. He would insist that whatever remains of the Iranian threat was everyone else’s problem. And after declaring his intention to bug out, Trump would lay into America’s NATO allies — perhaps even going so far as to announce his intention to withdraw the United States from the Atlantic Alliance.

 

If that version of the president’s speech existed, it was not the one he delivered. Trump didn’t declare the war complete. He didn’t lash out at NATO. He didn’t even abdicate any American responsibility for contributing to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the president established a sobering predicate for the war against the Islamic Republic, and he outlined the successes the campaign has enjoyed so far while relating in as much detail as information security allows about the mission still ahead of us.

 

Iran, Trump said, has been a malignant presence on the world stage and a threat to American life for nearly half a century. They were behind the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing and the roadside bombs that took over 600 U.S. lives in Iraq. They had a role in the October 7 massacre and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. And they killed, he claimed, 45,000 of their own citizens in the streets in January.

 

The regime had every intention of resuming its nuclear weapons program, Trump added, and it planned to do so from behind an arsenal of ballistic missiles that would render future efforts to disable that program cost-prohibitive. The president restated the U.S. objective in this war: “Systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside its borders.” And he described how America had made speedy progress toward that goal.

 

Trump departed from his triumphalist tone, however, to address Americans’ concerns about rising energy prices — an anticipated burden associated with this war that he should have prepared Americans to bear. But the pain Americans are feeling today would pale before the “decades of extortion, economic pain, and instability” the nation and the world would experience if Iran held the strait hostage from behind an arsenal of fissionable weapons, he said. In addition, Trump (accurately) noted that Americans are more insulated from energy price shocks than they were in previous decades.

 

The president did attempt to internationalize the crisis in the Persian Gulf, noting (again correctly) that the U.S. is less reliant on the commodities that transit the strait than other countries. Those nations “must grab it and cherish it,” he said of Hormuz. If the world is feeling the pain from this conflict, it can do two things: buy American energy exports and “build up some delayed courage” to “go to the strait and just take it, protect it.” Trump did not wash his hands of the crisis. “We will help,” he added. But “the hard part is done, so it should be easy.”

 

And while the president did insist that America’s wartime objectives are mostly secure, the work is not yet done. He forecast another two to three weeks of high-intensity combat operations, at which point he will seek a negotiated cease-fire. If no deal is possible, though, Trump said he would intensify strikes on civilian infrastructure like Iran’s electricity generation capabilities.

 

But the president did not prepare Americans for the prospect of deploying ground troops to the conflict. Indeed, while he didn’t rule much out, Trump did appear to put the kibosh on a fraught and complex operation to secure Iran’s “nuclear dust” — i.e., its roughly 1,000 pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium. It’s buried beneath the ruins of Iran’s nuclear program, which is “under intense satellite surveillance.” If it moves, so do we.

 

The president’s ad-libbed moments were, as ever, unhelpful. He said the American economy is at present the best it’s ever been. It was “dead and crippled” in January 2025, but now it’s back, and with “no inflation.” He may be right to anticipate that the strait will “open up naturally” when combat operations are complete, but that does not convey to Americans that Trump is implementing a plan or that he even has one. It sounds flippant to call this dangerous war in which 13 U.S. service personnel lost their lives “a little journey.” And Trump did not solicit America’s patience with the conflict and the hardships they must endure to support it.

 

But he was justified in asking Americans to observe some perspective. In each of America’s wars in the last century or more, he said, from World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan, the fighting was measured in years. Iran, by contrast, has unfolded over the course of just “32 days,” he said, pausing for effect and allowing his voice to drop a full octave. Ending Iran’s “sinister threat to America,” Trump closed, is “a true investment in your children and your grandchildren’s future.”

 

NATO Off the Hook?

 

Prudence might have prevailed last night, but the outrage in this administration toward America’s European allies is real.

 

“It’s like these m*********ers always talk about Article Five,” one irate “person close to the White House” said in remarks to Politico that forecast the direction this speech might take. “Okay, well, Iran has been blowing up our soldiers and ripping their wings off for, you know, half a century, and we finally responded, and now they’re going after all our major non-NATO allies and the United States, and you guys are not only saying we’re not going to help but you’re closing your airspace to us — really?”

 

It’s a fair point. And it’s one that not only the president but also his appointees share.

 

Asked earlier this week if the president was reconsidering America’s role not just as NATO’s primus inter pares but as a member of the Atlantic Alliance, Trump said the matter was “beyond reconsideration.”

 

“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine,” Trump told The Telegraph. “Ukraine wasn’t our problem. It was a test, and we were there for them, and we would always have been there for them. They weren’t there for us.”

 

America’s allies may be used to the president’s casual hostility toward NATO, but his skepticism is now being echoed even by the Atlanticists in his administration.

 

“Ultimately, that’s a decision for the president to make, and he’ll have to make it,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday on the subject of America’s relationship with NATO. “But I do think, unfortunately, we are going to have to re-examine whether or not this alliance that has served this country well for a while is still serving that purpose, or has it now become a one-way street where America is simply in a position to defend Europe, but when we need the help of our allies, they’re going to deny us basing rights and they’re going to deny us overflight.”

 

At the outset of the Iran war, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government attempted to block the United States from using its airfields to stage attacks on Iranian targets. The Spanish and Italian governments have denied U.S. military assets involved in the campaign overflight rights. The U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands have mused lethargically about the acute threat posed by the perpetual throttling of commodities traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Still, they’ve done little but complain about the position in which they find themselves.

 

Yet, the threat to Europe posed by Iran extends well beyond the Persian Gulf. Iranian terror cells are active inside Europe. They are engaged in efforts to execute deadly attacks on European facilities and civilians. Iran developed the capacity to hit European soil with long-range ballistic missiles in violation of its self-set limits. Iran is threatening European energy security — a threat it long held in reserve — taking the Continent hostage in ways it recognizes as unacceptable when it’s the Russians doing the hostage taking. And whether they like it or not, Trump is correct when he observes that Europe and Asia rely far more directly on the commodities that transit the strait than the United States.

 

No honest broker could begrudge the Europeans a little pique. Trump administration officials spent the first year of the president’s second term gratuitously antagonizing America’s European allies, including threatening military action against them. Trump’s Pentagon berated NATO allies for failing to see to affairs within its theater of operations in Europe, only to pivot now to displays of irritation over NATO’s refusal to act outside its theater.

 

But Europe has succumbed to the same irrational pique to which Trump is often prone.

 

An American reassessment of its role in NATO would be felt most acutely by the nations on the alliance’s frontier with Russia, but it would not end there. The United States benefits immensely from the preservation of security on the Continent. History has proven that the United States cannot extricate itself from European security, and uncontained conflicts in and near NATO have a gravity that predictably compels U.S. involvement. A fissure would be bad for everyone, but neither Brussels nor Washington seems capable of seeing beyond their own navels.

 

Yes, Trump cannot unilaterally withdraw the United States from NATO. That is a Senate-ratified relationship, and, in 2023, Congress passed language confirming that the president cannot “suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States.” Well, the law certainly hasn’t prevented the president from issuing any denunciations. Trump can’t just pull out of NATO, but he can frustrate its activities and render its mutual defense provisions all but defunct. “If Trump decided military force wasn’t necessary, the treaty might still exist de jure, but the American security guarantee for European allies would be a dead letter,” the Wall Street Journal’s Marcus Walker wrote.

 

But Trump has had those tools at his disposal for years — years he also spent lambasting the NATO alliance. Trump’s grievance is not with NATO per se but some of its constituent members in what Donald Rumsfeld once derisively deemed “old Europe.” In the end, the president bet that a rational appraisal of Europe’s interests in the Middle East would create the conditions for cooler heads to prevail.

 

NATO’s success as a deterrent against aggressive action from its adversaries is self-evident. It wouldn’t be the longest-lived military alliance in human history if its value were debatable. But the work of generations can be undone in a fit of all-too-human, albeit reckless and shortsighted, mutual vexation.

 

ADDENDUM: During her appearance at the Democratic Socialists of America forum on Tuesday night, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caused a stir far beyond the convention hall when she was asked if she would oppose all future “spending on arms for Israel,” including defensive ordnance. “Yes,” she confidently replied.

 

New York magazine wondered whether AOC’s new standard, which apparently includes even opposition to funding for interceptors that limit the deadly effect of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian rockets, would catch on across the Democratic Party. It seems it has.

 

In the hours since, Democratic progressives and moderates alike endorsed AOC’s position (even as she subsequently softened it). It seems only a handful of Democrats, like Representative Josh Gottheimer, recognize that limiting the deadly effect of Iranian and terrorist missiles saves not just Jewish lives but Arab lives as well, insofar as it reduces the Israeli imperative to conduct dangerous expeditionary missions outside its borders to neutralize the threat from its point of origin.

 

AOC deserves some credit for forcing her fellow Democrats to abandon the ambiguity to which they once clung. It’s not so much that an anti-war faction within the party has captured the Democrats. They’re not anti-war at all. They’re just backing the other side.

The Mystery Speech

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

The interesting thing about the president’s prime-time address last night is how uninteresting it was.

 

It wasn’t the first time he’s delivered a major televised speech that turned out to be pointless, you may recall. The same thing happened in December. But that was year-end yada-yada about what he’d accomplished in his first 11 months back in office. Last night was supposed to be a war speech. And there was good reason to believe he would make news.

 

He did not. The closest thing to meaningful information in his remarks was the hazy timeline he offered for winding down operations. “We are going to hit them extremely hard,” Trump warned. “Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.”

 

Discussions about … what? What are we asking Iran’s government to do at this point?

 

Don’t say “regime change.” The president explicitly disclaimed that as a goal last night while adding that it’s been achieved anyway. “Regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death,” he said. “The new group is less radical and much more reasonable.”

 

Don’t say “denuclearization.” That, too, has supposedly been accomplished. Hours before he spoke, Reuters asked Trump about the uranium that’s buried under rubble at Iran’s enrichment sites. Not a problem, the president replied: “That’s so far ⁠underground, I ​don’t care about that. … We’ll always be watching it by satellite.” He pronounced Iran “incapable” of building a nuclear weapon.

 

Oh, and don’t say “reopen the Strait of Hormuz.” After many weeks of the president pressing Iran to reopen the strait, it turns out that the passage’s closure to commercial oil traffic isn’t a problem—for us. “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” Trump observed in his speech, blind as ever to the fact that gas prices in the U.S. depend in part on global supply. He urged countries that do rely on the strait for energy to “just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy.”

 

It hasn’t been easy for the U.S. military, but it’ll be easy for Europe?

 

Ending the war without reopening the strait would be the equivalent of cops chasing down a criminal on the street, seeing him take a bystander hostage, and walking away muttering that the neighborhood watch can take it from here.

 

“What does the White House actually want from Iran?” was one of the two mysteries of last night’s remarks, although solving that one doesn’t require much more sophistication than the average Scooby-Doo episode. Forget the 15-point list: The president would be ecstatic, I’m sure, if the powers that be in Tehran gave him the standard Venezuela package—converting their country into a satrapy for him and handing over lots and lots of oil.

 

The other mystery has to do with the purpose of the speech. Why did Trump feel obliged to address the war in prime time a month after operations began when he had nothing meaningful to say, especially when he hadn’t cared enough to warn Americans about an impending conflict before the fighting began?

 

I don’t think it’s because his polling is tanking. If you do, you probably missed yesterday’s newsletter.

 

My hunch is that the president was planning to announce something genuinely important but TACO’d out shortly before stepping in front of the camera. What was it?

 

Theories.

 

Maybe he was planning to declare the imminent end of operations. That’s how Politico made it sound in a piece published Tuesday before the address, reporting that Trump was prepared “to declare that the month-long war in Iran is winding down.”

 

And he did do that, sort of, in specifying a two- or three-week timeline to accomplish America’s remaining objectives. Whatever those might be.

 

But the intended audience didn’t seem reassured. Oil prices spiked following the speech while market futures fell, proof that investors came away thinking that a ceasefire is less probable than they’d hoped. And no wonder: Elsewhere in the speech, Trump threatened again to bomb Iran’s power plants if no deal is reached and mused that the country’s oil infrastructure would be “the easiest target of all.”

 

If the regime calls his bluff and he follows through, the likely result will be a humanitarian disaster and Iranian retaliation against oil output across the region. Militarily and economically, this clusterfark will become considerably more farked.

 

The president intended to avoid all that by using his speech to announce a proper TACO in the days to come, we might speculate, only to be talked out of it at the last minute by regional allies who worry how a wounded but not beaten Iran will behave once the U.S. leaves the region.

 

It could also be that he planned to do the opposite.

 

Rather than winding down, maybe he was preparing to ramp up by announcing that U.S. troops might soon be introduced into the fight. That would explain why he didn’t address Americans before the war but felt compelled to do so now. Once the battle moves from a turkey shoot in the air to a grind on the ground, the American people expect a gesture of accountability from their leader.

 

That theory has problems, though. The White House wouldn’t want to confirm its plan to use infantry to the enemy by revealing it publicly beforehand. And despite the buildup of U.S. troops in the region, I suspect all parties believe Trump will ultimately find an excuse not to put soldiers in harm’s way. Never mind the steep bipartisan opposition to doing so: By nature, the president is averse to any fight he’s not guaranteed to dominate. The risk of “looking bad” if U.S. casualties were higher than expected in an invasion is too great.

 

But you never know. There’s certainly a chance that a man “high on his own supply” of military power planned to excitedly announce that the Marines would soon be raising the American flag over Kharg Island. And that sober White House aides terrified of the political fallout descended on him before he spoke and begged him, successfully, to reconsider.

 

Either way, Tom Nichols is right. If Trump does end up using infantry after passing on his big opportunity to prepare Americans for the possibility, he’ll have deceived the country about his intentions in a momentous way. (Although not as much as when he ran in 2024 on “the pro-peace ticket.”) We’ll probably know by Sunday, as it would be characteristic of this administration to want to launch a ground attack on a Muslim country on Easter.

 

There’s a third possibility of what the president planned to announce, however, which I think is the likeliest of the bunch. To all appearances, he was preparing to say something about NATO and/or Europe that would have altered the alliance in an irreparable way.

 

There was reporting about that, too, in fact. Trump “intends to harshly scapegoat NATO allies for the biggest unresolved matter of the war, Iran’s ongoing restrictions of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz,” Politico alleged in a piece yesterday. Thinly sourced speculation? Not at all: In a pre-address conversation with Reuters, the president himself “said one element of his speech would be to express his disgust with NATO for what he considers the alliance’s lack of support for U.S. objectives in Iran.”

 

He’s gone out of his way in interviews lately to spin Europe’s reluctance to join America’s war as the straw that broke the back of an alliance for which he’s never held any real regard. Last night seemed destined to be the moment when he made antipathy to NATO de facto U.S. policy, egging on an audience of millions to blame the Euroweenies for any economic pain they might suffer from the war going forward.

 

Surprisingly, he didn’t. The word “Europe” was uttered once in his speech, the word “NATO” not at all. The closest Trump got to “harshly” articulating his “disgust” was referencing unspecified countries that rely on the Strait of Hormuz for oil and exhorting them to “build up some delayed courage” by reopening the strait themselves. Handed a big stage, it seems he TACO’d out of pressing a case that he’d been pressing with reporters informally for the better part of a month. Why?

 

It can’t be that he was scared off by the federal law that bars him from withdrawing from NATO unilaterally. He doesn’t need to formally exit the treaty to destroy the alliance; all he needs to say is that, per his authority as commander in chief, he won’t issue any orders to U.S. troops to defend Europe under Article 5. No one can make him do so.

 

Plus, let’s be real. Trump never has been and never will be cowed by some statutory limit on his power.

 

There has to be another solution to the case of the missing NATO tirade.

 

A broken alliance.

 

One obvious guess: markets.

 

Markets are usually the explanation whenever the president pulls a TACO. It was a year ago today that he announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, only to pull back a week later when trading in stocks and bonds began tilting toward a major financial crisis.

 

Markets also explain Trump’s bizarre vacillations over the past month between threatening Iran in apocalyptic terms and chirping about major progress in peace negotiations—an out-and-out lie, by the way, according to the New York Times. He’s simultaneously trying to scare Iran into submission and to talk markets up every time the Dow dips due to fears of a prolonged war.

 

Again, there’s nothing he fears more than “looking bad.” A market crash under The Greatest Economic President in History would look really bad.

 

Maybe someone in his orbit reminded him before the speech that, with markets already anxious, abruptly ending the transatlantic alliance and declaring Europe fair game for Russia would … not have a calming effect. So he backed off. The formal break with NATO is postponed for now, delayed until (if?) the global economy stabilizes enough for investors not to lose their minds about the official end of the Pax Americana.

 

It seems like a textbook TACO, in other words … except for one thing. NATO is already as good as dead, and markets have surely priced that in already.

 

An unnamed German official put it well to Politico. “With Trump in office, NATO is worthless,” he said. “We might have NATO, but we no longer have an alliance.” Last night’s silence didn’t undo the president’s longtime habit of “hollowing out” the organization by criticizing it repeatedly, casting so much doubt on his commitment to it that many Europeans now question whether U.S. membership still meaningfully deters enemies.

 

The organization will nominally exist, but there can’t be a single official from London to Vladivostok who’s still basing their security plans on America honoring Article 5 if Europe is attacked. “The United States now seems part of the problem of world disorder,” the Times said of opinion on the continent, citing a senior European official. “The country is no longer the solution and the guarantor of last resort.”

 

Weirdly, the indignant outrage at Europe among some Republicans for not joining America’s war seems completely deaf to that political reality.

 

I think it was foolish of some European governments not to let the U.S. at least use their airspace for staging attacks on Iran, but I also sympathize with their predicament. After the idiotic tariffs, the Putin-esque play for Greenland, the disparagement of European soldiers’ sacrifice in Afghanistan, and endless gratuitous insults in between, Trump is so poisonous to European electorates that even far-right parties feel obliged to run away from him. Voters are turning anti-American and understandably so. Joining an unpopular American war of choice under the circumstances would be immensely politically risky for any elected leader.

 

Yesterday the Financial Times reported that the president went as far as threatening to stop selling weapons to European nations for Ukraine’s use if those nations refused to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which nicely encapsulates his general attitude toward Europe. Having already weakened Ukraine’s defense by significantly reducing U.S. aid to the country, Trump is now promising to cripple it entirely to extort Ukraine’s allies if he doesn’t get some help—of questionable utility—with a problem of his own making. He regards U.S. support for European security as a pure favor, not something that’s in our own big-picture national interest.

 

And he treats it as a favor they can never fully repay, no matter how much blood they shed in the war on terror. They’re forever obliged to do anything we might ask of them and to do it with a smile, even as he derides them for their weakness. That’s why Trump can only understand it as ingratitude and disloyalty when the leaders of NATO states respond to elementary democratic political gravity, telling him no because their constituents would be incensed after the past 14 months if they did otherwise.

 

All of which makes it odd that he pulled his punches last night when given a chance to impugn those leaders on national television and blame them for his own failure in the strait.

 

Leverage.

 

I can think of only two explanations.

 

One is that some cooler head sat him down yesterday afternoon and explained that Europe’s best shot at reopening Hormuz is to approach Iran diplomatically, not militarily. “There’s no way to reopen the strait permanently without Iran’s acquiescence,” I wrote on Monday. The reopening of the strait “can only be done in coordination with Iran,” French President Emmanuel Macron observed on Thursday, as officials from 40 nations (but not the U.S.) gathered to discuss a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

 

If Macron and I are right, Europe joining a military operation to reopen the strait would antagonize Iran, killing the diplomatic effort, and might very well fail to accomplish its goal. (Even if it succeeded, how would it keep the strait open permanently?) The U.S. is better off letting NATO members play good cop to its bad cop in feeling out what’s left of Iran’s ruling regime for a settlement.

 

The other (admittedly unlikely) explanation is that Trump had a last-second “eureka” moment before his speech, somehow awakening to the fact that continuing to alienate Europe might eventually have consequences for our country and his presidency.

 

“By abdicating responsibility for the strait and saying it should be someone else’s problem, America is inviting into existence a rival economic and military alliance,” Jonathan Last argued today at The Bulwark. “Trump is giving China the green light to exert its influence in the Indo-Pacific. He is opening the door for Chinese cooperation with Europe. He is putting Taiwan—and hence the global supply of semiconductors—at China’s mercy. He is prompting the rest of the world to organize a new global order according to their interests.”

 

Just as Russia is the big winner of Trump’s war with Iran, China is the big winner of Trump’s cold war with Europe and Canada. It was just two days ago that Beijing rolled out the red carpet for lawmakers from the European Union, the first visit by any such delegation in eight years. We can only guess what, if anything, might have clued the president into the risk of a Sino-European alliance that leaves America out in the cold, but his vision of a new world order based on “spheres of influence” has always plainly imagined the U.S. able to go on working its will anywhere on the planet it desires.

 

As it dawns on him that our country might potentially be maneuvered into its own limited “sphere” by alliances among powerful adversaries, maybe he’s begun to think better of antagonizing Europe when he doesn’t absolutely need to.

 

The fact that European leaders acted in concert to defy his demand for help with Iran may itself have been a wake-up call. Because they were willing to risk alienating the U.S. by telling him no, he may have deduced that he has less leverage over them than he thought—and that what little is left will be squandered entirely if he formally pulls the plug on NATO. Perhaps last night’s silence was a rare case of him behaving prudently, opting not to forfeit that last bit of influence by scapegoating Europe for begging off a probably futile effort to avert a major strategic defeat. He’s lost enough influence with formerly friendly constituencies as it is.

Yes, Boldly Go

By Rich Lowry

Friday, April 03, 2026

 

So much for journalistic objectivity.

 

The BBC science editor covering the launch of Artemis II couldn’t contain her enthusiasm when the first plumes of smoke spread out from the launch pad. “Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed, clapping like a school girl.

 

As the rocket lifted off, she got visibly emotional: “It’s not just what you see and you hear as the rocket lifts off. You can feel the force of it through your body. This is the most powerful rocket that NASA has ever built!”

 

Rebecca Morelle can be forgiven for falling in love with the subject of her story.

 

A rocket launch is an awe-inspiring event — a controlled explosion hurling a gigantic projectile into the ether. There’s the sheer power, the unavoidable risk, the questing spirit. A rocket feels and looks like the future, and there’s something very human about gazing into the sky in wonder.

 

NASA hasn’t been glamorous in decades. Once upon a time, kids were putting up glossy photos of Apollo rockets and astronauts on their bedroom walls. But the Apollo program was killed long ago — civil-rights activists were among those mobilizing against it, oddly enough — and nothing has captured the imagination the same way since.

 

The Space Shuttle made space flight routine and boring, and there was nothing particularly ambitious about the International Space Station. Rovers and telescopes were worthy endeavors, but not thrilling.

 

There is no substitute for manned space flight. The Artemis project is not exactly boldly going where no man has gone before, since it seeks to return to the moon after we were there a half century ago. But sending astronauts 250,000 miles from Earth as part of a project eventually to set up a base on the moon is the most enterprising NASA project since Apollo.

 

This is all to the good, but Artemis has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. NASA hasn’t been able to replicate the urgent, mission-driven approach that characterized the Apollo program. It took eight years to get to the moon the first time, while Artemis has been going for nine years and we still aren’t back.

 

NASA projects tend to get caught in a cycle: One president proposes a big new initiative only for it to get canceled by his successor, who proposes his own initiative that is canceled in turn.

 

The worst-case scenario is that a Democratic president elected in 2028 nixes Artemis because President Trump favored it.

 

That said, the space expert Robert Zubrin notes that space is particularly appealing to Americans as a people defined, in part, by the frontier. JFK talked of “the New Frontier,” and the famous open of the TV show Star Trek called space “the final frontier.”

 

Certainly, the American space program is a marked contrast with that of the Europeans, the European Space Agency. NASA’s budget is several times larger. We’ve sent men to the moon whereas they haven’t. And we’ve sent multiple successful landers and rovers to Mars (the first lander in 1976, the first rover in 1997), whereas the ESA has only managed two unsuccessful landers.

 

Getting back to the moon is nice, but it is a manned mission to Mars that should be our ultimate objective. It would truly be another giant leap for mankind, opening up a vista of homo sapiens as a multi-planetary species. The technological challenge would be significant, requiring Apollo-like exertions, while there’s much of scientific importance to be learned on the Red Planet.

 

Right now, the most popular movie in America is Project Hail Mary, a sci-thriller about a desperate mission into space. The film plays to our inherent interest in journeys into the unknown, and to our admiration for those who have the courage to explore new worlds, from Francis Drake to Neil Armstrong.

 

Artemis II tapped into the same thing, which is why that BBC reporter — and so many of the rest of us — were so moved.

Europe’s Right-Wing Parties Can’t Afford to Neglect Young People

By Matthew X. Wilson

Friday, April 03, 2026

 

This week, Reform UK, the insurgent right-wing party that continues to maintain a decisive lead in opinion polling ahead of Britain’s next general election, pledged that, if elected, it would oppose any adjustments to the country’s state pension system. Announcing that Reform would leave intact Britain’s “triple-lock” guarantee — the longstanding commitment that state pension payments will increase annually by whichever is the greatest of the annual inflation rate, average earnings growth, or 2.5 percent — Reform leader and odds-on prime ministerial favorite Nigel Farage argued that “[t]he people to whom pensions are being paid, in vast majority, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those that have actually worked and paid into the system.” 

 

Farage and Robert Jenrick, the party’s spokesman for economic affairs, asserted that the fiscally unsustainable (particularly given Britain’s bleak economic trajectory) triple-lock guarantee could be preserved through a combination of slashing foreign aid, cutting funds spent on housing illegal migrants, and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in public benefits spending. 

 

There’s no doubt that Reform’s announcement made political sense: The triple-lock guarantee is broadly popular among the British public and, unsurprisingly, enjoys colossal support among those aged over 65 (though a plurality of young people have no opinion on it). No major British political party supports abolishing guaranteed annual pension increases. Even the Conservative Party, which has tried to position itself as the right’s fiscally responsible alternative to a supposedly heavy-spending Reform, has stood by the triple lock. 

 

Still, that Britain’s major political parties unanimously support the continuation of guaranteed annual pension increases did not stop Farage’s announcement from being met with a wave of online backlash — particularly from young right-wing voices. Critics observed that young people — already in a historically perilous position in modern Britain, with housing costs at record highs and graduate job postings extraordinarily limited — would singularly bear the long-term cost of keeping the triple lock through higher taxes and increased borrowing. Others noted that retirees’ contributions to the pension system during their working years fell far short of the amount that they are receiving now. 

 

Reform’s commitment to guaranteed pension increases also provided an opening for Restore Britain — a small, breakaway right-wing party that has yet to emerge as a national political force but has amassed a youthful, online, and intensely committed base of support. Restore leader and member of Parliament Rupert Lowe published an open letter to Britain’s young people, arguing that his party was “on your side” and was committed to a “meaningful debate” about the triple lock, which he noted “simply isn’t financially sustainable in its current form.” 

 

“You’re told by people who bought their house for 40k and got university education for free that cutting down on the cappuccinos will solve all of your financial problems,” Lowe wrote. “That’s just not true. The system is crushing you.”

 

Britain is not the only European country in which generational tensions have spilled into politics. France has long been beset by similar debates over reforming the country’s unaffordable state pension system. Last year, the country’s prime minister was forced to resign after the National Assembly moved to oust him for seeking to freeze annual pension increases and allow a raise in the national retirement age from 62 to 64 to move forward.

 

In a series of blistering statements just before he left office, Francois Bayrou blamed “boomers” for bringing France’s politics to a standstill and not permitting the country’s grave financial woes to be seriously addressed. But in France, as it could be in Britain, it was not the tax-and-spend left that blocked the country’s finances from being brought into working order — it was the right-wing National Rally party that provided the crucial legislative votes to block much-needed pension and retirement reforms. 

 

To be sure, National Rally’s moves to court older voters by upholding France’s untenable fiscal status quo could be just enough to propel them into power. Their likely candidate in next year’s presidential election, Jordan Bardella, commands a wide lead in first-round polls and would be the favorite against a hard-left candidate in the runoff.

 

Similarly, it’s increasingly looking as though Britain has but two options at its next general election: a Reform government or Reform-led right-wing coalition with Farage as prime minister, or a hard-left coalition hell-bent on an agenda of mass migration, illiberal multiculturalism, crippling taxation, unsustainable spending, and net-zero authoritarianism that would probably push the country past the point of no return. 

 

It’s a simple reality: The right must win if Britain is to be brought back from the brink, and so Farage must walk through the doors of 10 Downing Street as soon as possible. But if Britain is to be saved, the leaders capable of doing the saving must first be elected — and those leaders must be unflinchingly committed to enacting the policies necessary to do the saving, such as aligning state pension systems with financial and demographic realities.

 

Across the world, the votes of young people have made the crucial difference in elevating right-wing torchbearers of change over the architects and enablers of failed left-wing governance. Donald Trump would not have won the White House in 2024 if not for the enormous and historic gains he made among young voters. In Argentina, Javier Milei rode a wave of youthful dissatisfaction with a corrupt Peronist establishment to capture the country’s presidency. 

 

Whether it’s Britain, France, or elsewhere, Europe’s right-wing parties must be cognizant of the risks and limitations of building an electoral coalition around pension-drawing retirees. Placing the concerns of young people second and selling older voters the fantasy that fiscal status quos can be maintained without change is a recipe for electoral and policy failure. 

Post-Truth Won’t End With Trump

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

One of the ironies of the low-trust society—and that is the kind of society we are building, to our detriment—is that its deficit of trust is mirrored by a surplus of gullibility.

 

What Umberto Eco wrote (describing the view of G.K. Chesterton) about God is true about lesser authorities as well: that when men stop believing, “it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

 

You know what I am talking about: The same people who go on and on (and they do) about how they don’t trust “Big Pharma” are ready to believe anything they see on the internet about ivermectin or raw milk or drinking water with borax dissolved in it. (Please do not drink borax.) Certain people who believe that climate change is a hoax accept at face value wild claims about Satanic pedophile rings operating out of Washington pizzerias, people who reject evolution as a fanciful hypothesis believe that aliens from distant planets secretly walk among us, etc. You can read essays calling for “evidence-based government” or “science-based” health tips in the Washington Post and then check the horoscopes.

 

The mess of distrust and gullibility gets very tangled: At my gym, I have spoken to at least a half-dozen young men who 1) are constantly engaged in betting on professional sports and 2) believe that professional sporting matches are rigged. I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would permit this sort of thing to happen where his financial interests are concerned?” The response: “He’s in on it, obviously.” And I ask: “Do you really think that such a man as Jerry Jones would put at risk billions of dollars of his own wealth and many billions more worth of intellectual property he controls in exchange for whatever paltry sums he might get from entering into a conspiracy—a conspiracy requiring the cooperation and disciplined silence of dozens of hot-tempered, high-testosterone, notoriously talkative 24-year-old men whose financial interests would in fact be much better served by betraying any game-fixing conspiracy they were invited to join—to make a little side money gambling? And do you really think that the people who run the gambling businesses would allow themselves to get taken that way? Because if you do believe that, I can tell you why Jerry Jones is rich and you are not.” And the response invariably will involve some half-remembered series of supposedly unlikely fourth-and-long coincidences communicated via whatever it is the kids who are over TikTok are watching today. I further inquire: “If you think it is rigged, why on earth are you betting on it?” And then they usually lapse into junkie thinking: They are somehow special and can intuit what direction the rigging is going—not that their bankrolls reflect any such special talent.

 

The political world has always attracted its share of conspiracy cranks, from those peddling profoundly silly accounts of international economics (often seasoned with antisemitism, as taste dictates) to “intelligent design” charlatans. Cranky people often develop boutique political interests: There is a reason so many on the American right are at most one degree of separation from the Moonies while the left has thrown up a series of cults over the decades, from the Democratic Workers Party to MOVE. (Many cults crossed the political aisle over the years: The Lyndon LaRouche cult began as a left-wing movement before it was John Birch Society-adjacent, while the Children of God has had both hippie and more traditional fundamentalist aspects in its various iterations.) American celebrity culture exhibits its own cult-y enthusiasms (Scientology, the Esalen Institute, a parade of Hollywood gurus) while many cults and cult-adjacent groups (Synanon, NXIVM) have come out of the great American self-improvement tradition. Wealth and celebrity can produce cultlike devotion (Donald Trump,  of course, but also Taylor Swift) or inspire fever dreams of Luciferian conspiracies (George Soros, Charles Koch, Bill Gates) or both at the same time, depending on whether the subject in question comports with one’s own cultural preferences. Cults fill a longstanding demand in the marketplace: They tell people who they are.

 

In a similar if less dramatic way, quackery is aesthetically conditioned and comes in flavors tied to cultural affiliations and identity markers: The people who believe very deeply in the healing power of crystals or the wisdom of horoscopes are almost never 40-year-old married men with hunting licenses and season tickets for their local college football team; the people who will lecture you about the supposed benefits of an all-meat diet are almost never Jewish grandmothers. Our conspiracy theories, quackery, and other irrational beliefs generally have less to do with considered views about how the world works than they do with implicit assertions about ourselves, about what kind of people we are, and which communities we feel that we belong to—and which communities we reject, compete with, or hate.

 

Put another way: The problem of social trust is, at a certain level, a problem of diversity.

 

There is a considerable political science literature on trust and diversity, which you most often will hear cited by conservatives as a reason a Scandinavian-style welfare state could not work in the United States: That kind of thing, the argument goes, works only in small and relatively homogeneous societies, to the extent that it works at all. There is a good deal to that, of course, though it is, as any intelligent person would expect, more complicated than the maxims would imply: Singapore, for example, is small (6 million) but diverse, and it has some features that would please American free-market champions (relatively modest social spending) and some that would confound them (state ownership of 90 percent of the land). Germany is a large country that once exhibited very high levels of social cohesion (not always to the betterment of the world, or of Germany) but more recently has seen its sense of social solidarity decline as it has become more diverse, to such an extent that formerly muted concerns—e.g., that the German welfare state is too expensive—are now part of the ordinary political conversation.

 

But even if ethnolinguistic homogeneity were the solution to the problem of building or rebuilding social trust, homogeneity is not a practical option for these United States, and it never has been, not even at the beginning. We had 13 different colonies for a reason. Of course there are political principles that can partly mitigate the challenges associated with American scale and diversity—federalism, subsidiarity, etc.—but here the generally unspoken American superstition that all social problems can be solved by passing better laws runs upon the rocks. But if you tell Americans that what is necessary is a change of the national heart and a renewal of the national spirit, they will (go and check the comments section) try to turn that into a simple, simpleminded, and simply beside-the-point question: “Okay, but who should I vote for?”

 

The relevant concerns here are prior to elections.

 

Populists—in Europe and the United Kingdom as much as in the United States—have contributed to building the destructive, low-trust political environment through the ordinary means of natural bumptiousness and weaponizing (or monetizing, in the case of Fox News and right-wing influencers) class resentment and social anxiety; elites, in turn, have done their part by abusing the privilege of their position to pursue narrowly self-interested policies (as though the working poor were crying out in the night for solar panel subsidies, college loan relief, and a more generously compensated support staff for the associate dean of students) and to structure the political discourse in such a way as to try to exclude nonconforming views associated with despised social groups, for example by pretending that the disputes involving climate and transgender issues are scientific questions, subject only to expert advice, rather than democratic political disagreements about tradeoffs and priorities and the distribution of burdens.

 

The electoral success of populists, autocrats, and demagogues from Donald Trump in the United States to Alternative für Deutschland is the result of collapsing trust, not the cause of it. The work of populism is less like what happens in a policy shop and more like what happens in a dress shop: It is a species of fashion, not very much subject to rational evaluation as a series of public policy proposals. Donald Trump has been on every conceivable side of almost every possible issue—whatever it is his devotees see in him, it did not come out of a white paper.

 

None of this is exactly new. It is an old thing that is getting worse and more common, like comedy podcasts or antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. Hannah Arendt considered the problem in the context of totalitarianism:

 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and that the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

 

Our situation is still more antinomian than totalitarian—more chaotic than coherent—but it is easy to see how the former clears the way for the latter.  The destruction of the idea of truth and that truth-affirming sense that Arendt wrote about creates a kind of epistemic vacuum—an opportunity for the talented political entrepreneur with grander and darker ambitions than the merely grasping, lowbrow caudillo politics of Donald Trump and his gang. Crankery and quackery are not mere organic craziness arising naturally from the ferment of our affluence—they are instruments for creating identities and for mobilizing them.

 

What is important to understand here is that there is a reason socially entangled phenomena such as conspiracy theories, diet fads, and medical quackery tend to spread in ways that are largely (though by no means exclusively) congruent with the lines of political allegiance. Ivermectin is not about health care policy, and raw milk is not about casein. “We could pay for all the good things if only the billionaires would pay their fair share” is not about balancing the federal books. These are attempts, however desultory or incompetent, at mythography—morally charged stories intended to provide a sense of social orientation to people who feel lost and disconnected and who cannot identify any obviously trustworthy and authoritative party to whom they can turn for guidance or judgment.

 

The great institutions—the churches, the government, the press, the universities, the professional communities and organizations at the commanding heights of business and culture—have given many people substantial reasons to doubt them, and the great demagogues—in the churches, the government, the press, the universities, etc.—have encouraged that doubt, often inflaming it beyond what is reasonable, in the pursuit of their own interests. Social capital accumulated over decades and centuries is not easily replenished once depleted to the critical level, and trust squandered is not easily reestablished.

 

If you think this problem is going to resolve itself by some mysterious self-actuating means at noon on January 20, 2029, then you are going to be disappointed.

Lions Led by Donkeys

By Eliot A. Cohen

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

The trope that the British soldiers of World War I were “lions led by donkeys” is somewhat unfair. But the phrase can and should be applied to the current Iran war, at least insofar as the United States is concerned. The U.S. is waging a struggle against an unquestionably malign enemy, using a military that is highly competent but in some respects under-equipped, and with the worst wartime political leadership America has ever had.

 

Admittedly, some of the criticism of America’s leadership is wide of the mark. The notion that it has no objectives, or that those objectives are unclearly articulated, is exaggerated, because the depressing truth is that in wartime, objectives are usually muddled, occasionally implicit, and always changing. Take, for example, the most recent supposedly clear-cut case of goal setting in war.

 

George H. W. Bush’s four stated objectives for the Gulf War fall apart on close examination. They were: ensuring the safety of American citizens in the Gulf (a reference to hostages held by Iraq, who were released before the war), driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, restoring the legitimate government of Kuwait (a monarchy representing perhaps a quarter of the population), and ensuring the safety and stability of the Persian Gulf. Only the second of these was actually achieved. There were also unstated objectives such as the elimination of the Iraqi nuclear program (pretty much finished off by postwar inspections, not air strikes) and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s rule, which occurred 12 years later, after another war. Most important, there were unintended consequences. America extended a degree of protection to Kurdish and Shia minorities, imposed continued inspections and unpopular sanctions on Iraq, and sustained a large American military presence in Saudi Arabia. War is about politics—and therefore, objectives, which are particularly political, are often ambiguous and subject to change.

 

Some of the Trump administration’s goals are clear enough—destroying or severely damaging Iran’s navy, its military industries, its missile- and drone-launching capability, and its residual nuclear program. Others, such as overthrowing the leadership of the Islamic Republic, are aspirational. Still others, including reopening the Strait of Hormuz in the face of Iranian threats to mine it, may be emerging—or not, depending on President Trump’s mood.

 

In and of themselves, these uncertainties and changes are more or less normal aspects of wartime leadership. What is not normal, and what is stunningly incompetent, is just about every other facet of the administration’s conduct of the war. It is impossible to excuse the failure to explain the war to the American people, aside from a presentation by the president in his summer home while he wore an unserious white baseball cap. Or the failure to bring Congress into wartime decision making, or at least secure its approval for the war. Or the failure to bring allies along with a minimum of surprises and a maximum of persuasion to support the war.

 

But the egregious failures do not end there. The best wartime political leaders attempt to minimize internal friction and feuds. Not Trump, who, in the midst of a war with a state sponsor of terrorism, has persisted in picking fights over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security. He has likewise made doomed attempts to revoke birthright citizenship and to meddle in states’ election administration, moves that seem almost calculated to enhance internal divisions. The very notion of national unity in a time of war seems utterly beyond this president, who follows his capricious instincts and continues, as ever, to spray venom at domestic opponents (and, for that matter, allies) when they are needed to wage and win the war.

 

His advisers are, if anything, even worse. Rarely has a president been surrounded by such an array of toadies and lickspittles, operating beyond their competence in an atmosphere of organizational chaos. A deliberate National Security Council process might have included interagency planning for wartime risk insurance, diplomatic outreach to allies, and planning for supplemental defense appropriations. But no such process exists, and therefore those things did not happen.

 

Never has the United States had a secretary of defense less capable, more egregiously belligerent, or less suited to provide civilian direction of a war than Pete Hegseth. He, like Trump, cannot unify, deciding in the middle of this war to turn down the promotions of four officers—two Black, two female—for reasons that do not seem to transcend mere prejudice. He can strut and hurl bombast; he has yet to show that he can do the more serious business of directing a war.

 

The civilian leader of the Department of Defense, in a war with an Islamist power but in which the U.S. has partnered with other Muslim states, has decided to place his own, peculiarly militant Christian beliefs at the center of his public rhetoric, a decision of unconscionable stupidity. More serious yet: It is an open secret that the senior echelons of the U.S. military hold in contempt this bullying and posturing former National Guard major whose military and civilian careers (except as an incendiary television commentator) were failures. When things go badly during a war—and they always do—it is essential that the civil-military dialogue be based on mutual respect even in the toughest moments. Hegseth has forfeited that.

 

The president’s other key advisers—Vice President Vance, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby—have all avoided leadership in this war as best they can. Vance is an isolationist, Colby an Asia-firster, Rubio a Latin Americanist by instinct. And so they are all silent. Diplomacy has been handed over to the president’s real-estate friend Steven Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, neither of whom know the first thing about war.

 

The only positive thing one can say about Trump and Hegseth as war leaders is that they have few compunctions about talking about winning. But even here, they endanger and degrade their own cause. The use of childish internet and video-game memes to describe violence is coarse and unworthy of the men and women who go in harm’s way.

 

On October 1, 1939, a month into World War II, Winston Churchill gave a speech in which he described the Royal Navy hunting U-boats “night and day, I will not say without mercy—because God forbid we should ever part company with that—but at any rate with zeal and not altogether without relish.” Less than a month into the Iran war, Hegseth cried, “No quarter, no mercy, for our enemies.” Quarter is the technical term for sparing the lives of enemies who have surrendered. Denying it is a war crime. The first of those remarks was delivered by a resolute and, when necessary, ruthless but principled statesman; the second by a thug, who proclaims a faith of meekness even while he celebrates cruelty and killing.

 

There is a reason that even those of us who fully recognize Iran’s menace and are pleased with the elimination of much of its military capabilities, and who hope for the eventual fall of this brutal and dangerous regime, find it impossible to advocate for what is, in many ways, a just war. With political leadership so feckless, so dysfunctional, so incapable of planning, so willing to betray friends and allies for short-term advantage, so willing to lie and advocate criminal behavior, our military is simply not in responsible hands. It may yet succeed, and even succeed greatly, but that will be a tribute only to the lions, not the donkeys.