The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem

By Tom Nichols

Monday, February 23, 2026

 

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

 

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

 

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

 

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

 

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson told Politico. But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem.

 

***

 

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush repudiated the former Klan leader David Duke, who was running as a Republican to be Louisiana’s governor. Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

 

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?

 

When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. A liberal Black Republican, Edward Brooke, had just finished two terms as our junior senator from Massachusetts; the liberal Republicans Lowell Weicker and John Chafee represented Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. In college, I worked in the Massachusetts state House for our hometown representative, a young and principled working-class Democrat (my GOP membership was not a disqualifier; imagine that). I got to know Republican legislators on Beacon Hill because they were close friends with my Democratic boss. Party affiliations were about political disagreements among Americans, not markers of antithetical worldviews.

 

I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants (something I objected to at the time).

 

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

 

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

 

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

 

Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

 

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

 

Soon after McCain’s loss to Obama, the Tea Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

 

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

 

***

 

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party? To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

 

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

 

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

 

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

 

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. When I told him how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

 

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

 

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

 

But Reagan’s dominance of the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

 

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

 

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

 

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

 

***

 

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

 

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Some of these trolls are merely pasting swastikas on their nihilism, but their ideological sincerity is irrelevant. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, his 1961 novel about a man posing as a Nazi: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

 

Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

 

The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

What the Roberts Court Is Actually Trying to Accomplish

By Sarah Isgur

Monday, February 23, 2026

 

By striking down President Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court has once again shown that it is no partisan instrument of Republican power. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the decision, has a much more ambitious goal in mind.

 

A common myth holds that the current court is a 6–3 conservative institution that protects Trump and the GOP—that it is “enabling” him and giving him a “free pass” or a “blank check.” But basic accounting shows that this isn’t true. Last term, for instance, only 10 decisions, or 15 percent of decided cases, were 6–3. The Court’s liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—were the sole dissenting votes in six of those cases. The Court’s most conservative justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—were the sole dissenting votes in the other four.

 

Among both 5–4 and 6–3 cases, the Court’s liberal justices dissented together 15 percent of the time. Conservatives likewise dissented together in 5–4 and 6–3 cases 15 percent of the time. Most of those closely divided cases—70 percent—were a mixed bag of conservatives and liberals on both sides. And almost half of the Court’s cases were unanimous.

 

Of course, this Court has decided plenty of cases, including high-profile ones such as those overturning Roe v. Wade and affirmative action in higher education, with the six conservatives siding against the three liberals. But consider that last June, each liberal justice wrote a unanimous opinion in an ideologically charged dispute—including cases involving religious liberty, gun-manufacturer liability, and reverse discrimination. The decisions had all been closely watched during the term as “big cases.” But once they were decided unanimously, with the decisions written by the Court’s liberals, they weren’t discussed as so “big” anymore.

 

The Court’s six justices appointed by Republican presidents don’t vote in lockstep. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—both Trump appointees—voted together in closely divided cases only half the time last term. In the term before that, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson were all more likely than Alito and Thomas to be in the majority. It’s hard to argue that Republicans control the Court when Jackson is winning more than Thomas.

 

Plenty of people nevertheless argue that this Court is in the bag for Trump. But in his first term, Trump had the lowest success rate at the Supreme Court of any president in at least a century. In fact, the first Trump administration was the first modern presidential administration more likely to lose than win before the Supreme Court, including in cases involving immigration and the census. Not to mention that the Court unanimously rejected Trump’s attempt to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Perhaps the Court’s pushback against Trump simply reflects that he acts unlawfully more than past presidents did, but the narrative that he always wins doesn’t hold up. Although he fared well on the Court’s interim docket over the summer, in his second term, he has not only lost on the tariffs case; the Court also blocked him from federalizing the National Guard in Chicago and using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process.

 

Why does Trump keep losing at the Court? Because the larger project the Roberts Court seems to have undertaken is reining in the power of the presidency and making the president more politically accountable. Trump’s tariffs and Joe Biden’s student-loan-debt-forgiveness cases were both about whether a president could act without clear congressional authorization. The 2024 Loper Bright decision, which held that executive-branch agencies no longer get to define the scope of their own authority, also stripped power from the executive branch. So did the vaccine-mandate case (Biden) in 2022 and the tax-records case (Trump) in 2020. This is a through line across administrations.

 

At the same time, the Court is putting the president more fully in charge of his branch of government. In that sense, Trump is winning. In Trump v. Slaughter, which involves the question of whether presidents can fire members of so-called independent agencies, the Court appears poised to let him have more direct control over those agencies and their personnel to execute his preferred policies. But that’s only after the justices, in Loper Bright, took power away from those agencies and handed it back to Congress, where it belonged. Trump will be a more powerful president over a weaker presidency.

 

The Court’s 2024 criminal-immunity decision might seem to run counter to Roberts’s project—all the more so because of how brazenly Trump is currently abusing the power of his office. But it does fit. The Court held that a president exercising the powers of his office is presumptively immune from criminal prosecution unless the prosecution wouldn’t hurt a future president’s ability to do his job. In the meantime, it’s up to Congress to impeach a scofflaw president. Criminal prosecution, no matter how deserved it might seem, can’t be a substitute for political action by Congress—just as executive orders, no matter how desirable, can’t be a substitute for legislative action by Congress.

 

Too often, casual Court watchers think that the Supreme Court is deciding whether policy X is good policy. But in reality, the Court is often tasked only with deciding who gets to decide. The Supreme Court didn’t decide in West Virginia v. EPA and Garland v. Cargill whether banning carbon emissions (under Biden) or banning bump stocks (under Trump), respectively, was constitutional. It decided who has the power to ban carbon emissions or bump stocks. The answer in both cases was Congress, not the executive branch.

 

In preventing presidents from both parties from digging up decades-old statutes with vague language as the basis to expand their own power, as Trump tried to do in the tariffs case, the Court is forcing Congress to assert itself. Democrats in the past have criticized these kinds of decisions, arguing that the experts in executive-branch agencies are better positioned to address emerging crises than Congress is. But in Trump’s second term, they might now be realizing the value in limiting the power of presidents. After all, this is the logic by which the Court has stopped Trump from implementing worldwide tariffs at a whim and deploying the National Guard into cities. I predict that the justices will rule against Trump for the same reason in the upcoming birthright-citizenship case.

 

As Gorsuch wrote in his concurrence on the tariffs case:

 

Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.

 

This is the project the Court has been undertaking. It is not to help one political party. It is to shrink the presidency back to size and force 535 people to figure out a lasting solution to our problems, one that everyone can live with. This is no small thing: If the power of the legislative and executive branches were more equal—if Americans knew that every presidential election wasn’t “the most important election in our lifetime”—perhaps our politics wouldn’t be so broken.

150 Days

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, February 23, 2026

 

I’ve gotten used to cowardice from congressional Republicans, but I’ll never get used to horses—t like this.

 

After the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday, GOP sources assured Axios that the legislature would have acted to limit the president’s tariff authority soon if the court had not. “A ‘messy’ full-scale revolt on the issue was just around the corner,” those sources claimed. According to one senior House Republican, “Patience was running thin, and in some respects the Supreme Court decision makes a messy breakup unnecessary."

 

We’ve been waiting 11 years, through a coup attempt and four criminal indictments, for a “full-scale revolt” against Donald Trump by right-wing invertebrates in Washington that has never come. If Axios’ source really did believe that revolt was “just around the corner,” one would think, he wouldn’t have insisted on being quoted anonymously. The only thing more pathetic than licking the president’s boots is licking them while swearing that you’ve almost—almost, but not quite—gotten sick of the taste.

 

So long as craven House and Senate Republicans have a say in the matter, there will be no revolt. The tongue-shining will continue.

 

What’s interesting about the president’s latest move on tariffs is that, under the law, they might no longer have a say.

 

Hours after the court nuked his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), Trump issued an executive order imposing a 10 percent global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. (He raised it to 15 percent a day later, just because.) He preferred to use IEEPA as his cudgel on trade because it came with no strings attached—no restrictions on how high the tariffs could go, no requirements that he explain himself to Congress and, importantly, no time limits on how long the tariffs might remain in effect.

 

Section 122 does come with strings. In particular, any tariffs imposed by the president under its authority expire automatically after 150 days … unless Congress votes to extend them.

 

That means the deadline for Trump’s new tariff authority will detonate like a grenade in the House and Senate in late July, with the midterm campaign in full swing. Interestingly, most state primaries will be over by then, theoretically freeing nearly all congressional Republicans to oppose the tariffs without fear of losing their party’s endorsement this cycle.

 

Nothing will stop them from doing so—except, I suppose, the prospect of the president throwing a gigantic tantrum and urging right-wing voters not to turn out in the general election for “disloyal” Republicans. Which he’s perfectly capable of doing.

 

Side with the tariff-hating American majority or with the tariff-loving vindictive Peronist autocrat: That’s the intriguing dilemma that House and Senate Republicans will face this summer, 100 or so days out from a national election. How likely is it that the “full-scale revolt” we’re forever being promised might arrive at last in July?

 

Not very, I think. But a full-scale revolt won’t be needed to kill these tariffs dead.

 

Let someone else handle it.

 

The average Republican coward’s approach to restraining Trump has been clear and consistent for a decade. Five simple words: Let. Someone. Else. Handle. It.

 

That meant forcing House Democrats to impeach the president after January 6 with almost no Republican support. It meant leaving it to the criminal justice system to stop him from returning to office instead of Senate Republicans disqualifying him at his second impeachment trial. And it meant crossing one’s fingers and making a wish that the Supreme Court would blow up his IEEPA tariffs in lieu of Congress doing it.

 

“Let someone else handle it” will also be the way congressional Republicans approach Trump’s new tariffs. And someone else—namely, the courts—almost certainly will do so.

 

That’s because the Section 122 tariffs are illegal. By its own terms, as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explains, the statute empowers the president to act when there are “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” The White House seems to believe “balance-of-payments deficit” is a fancy term for “trade deficit,” but it isn’t: They’re two different things. There’s a yuuuuuge trade deficit right now thanks partly to Trump’s trade war but no balance-of-payments deficit whatsoever.

 

Absurdly, his own Justice Department is on record as agreeing. In defending the president’s IEEPA authority, the DOJ argued that he couldn’t use Section 122 instead because there’s no national emergency involving a balance-of-payments deficit, only one (supposedly) caused by a trade deficit. Now, I suppose, they’re going to have to argue the opposite.

 

It won’t work. The courts are going to block these tariffs—and for many congressional Republicans, that will provide a convenient excuse to support extending them as the 150-day deadline approaches. Why risk your neck with Trump and MAGA by voting to kill the Section 122 levies if the judiciary is likely to do it for you, sparing you from swing voters’ wrath in November? Let someone else handle it.

 

In fact, House and Senate Republicans might use the ongoing litigation as a justification to try to extend them. If Congress hasn’t acted by late July, an appeals court weighing Trump’s Section 122 authority might declare the matter moot and dismiss the case, reasoning that the tariffs have now lapsed. “We need to extend these tariffs simply to keep the case alive and give the judiciary a chance to decide the ‘balance-of-payments’ issue,” the GOP might claim, not very convincingly.

 

Caesar and the Senate.

 

The president will inevitably try to spare them from having to make that argument, though.

 

As we approach the 150-day deadline, my guess is that he’ll try to extend the deadline unilaterally via executive order instead of following the statute by asking Congress to do it. There’ll be no “full-scale revolt” among Republicans because they’ll be too busy pretending that Trump can reset the deadline on his own authority. In this iteration of “let someone else handle it,” the president himself is “someone.”

 

He did something similar, remember, when he repeatedly extended the deadline for TikTok’s sale despite the fact that nothing in the statute allowed it. Extending the Section 122 deadline unilaterally would be even more absurd, as the whole point of the 150-day time limit is to bar the president from setting trade policy indefinitely without congressional approval.

 

But he’s going to try it—not primarily because he’s worried that Congress won’t pass an extension, I suspect, but because he resents in principle the idea that he should have to ask the legislature for permission to do anything. We live in a world in which Trump’s party controls the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court and yet he still grasps for excuses not to seek authorization from other branches. It’s not because he can’t win a vote in Congress, it’s because the thought of having to do so offends his Caesarist prerogatives on trade.

 

Although, for the record, he almost certainly can’t win a vote in Congress on Section 122.

 

That’s the third reason there’ll be no “full-scale revolt” against the new tariffs among Republican lawmakers. There’s no need. The margins in the House and Senate are now so narrow that even a tiny revolt within the GOP will suffice to block legislation that would extend the 150-day deadline—and that tiny revolt is already underway, as we’ve seen in other recent tariff votes.

 

In the Senate, four Republicans have already voted more than once to block other Trump tariffs. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell owe the president nothing, and Rand Paul is a libertarian ideologue who’s unlikely to buckle on trade. Those four votes together with all 47 Democrats in the chamber would be enough to prevent a Section 122 extension.

 

Meanwhile in the House, six Republicans joined Democrats earlier this month in voting to end the fake “national emergency” that Trump cited to justify slapping tariffs on Canada. With one exception, those members are either retiring (Don Bacon, Dan Newhouse), answer to major Democratic constituencies back home (Brian Fitzpatrick, Kevin Kiley), or have gone full maverick (Thomas Massie).

 

There’s no reason to think any of those five would flip on a gut-check Section 122 vote. (The sixth, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, has already been savaged by the president as a RINO who should be primaried, so flipping on the new tariffs wouldn’t do him much good either.) With all House Democrats joining them, that should guarantee that legislation to extend the new tariffs will fail.

 

What incentive is there, then, for a “full-scale revolt” among the rest of the GOP caucus? If Massie et al. are willing to do the dirty work of killing the bill, then there’s no downside to the average House Republican in casting a futile vote to pass it. Doing so will earn them the gratitude of Trump and MAGA, and the bill’s failure should spare them the wrath of swing voters satisfied by the outcome. Win-win. Let someone else handle it!

 

Lame duck.

 

Is there any scenario in which we really might see a broad revolt among congressional Republicans against extending the 150-day deadline?

 

The only one I can think of is if the bottom fell out of the president’s job approval before July, making him an especially lame duck, which is unlikely but not unthinkable. In particular, if the cause of his slide were economic—a new surge in inflation, for instance—tariffs would become a harder sell to the American public than they already are. And they’re a pretty hard sell already.

 

For once, the House and Senate GOP would have an electoral reason not to let someone else handle it.

 

On Friday, YouGov published a snap poll about the Supreme Court’s tariff decision. Americans supported it to the tune of 60-23 while independents split 63-16. Even more notable were the results when respondents were asked what effect they thought Trump’s tariffs have had on costs. Forty-one percent of those surveyed believe prices have increased “a lot” and another 25 percent think they’ve increased “slightly” because of his policies. Among independents, those numbers were 44 and 24 percent, respectively. Among Republicans, 13 and 31 percent.

 

In the midst of a major cost-of-living crisis, in other words, a heavy majority of the public and a near-majority of his own party believes the president’s trade policy is partly responsible for their pain. When I said last year that tariffs were the biggest political mistake he’s made in his second term, that’s why. By deliberately making life less affordable, he’s taken ownership of an economy with which most Americans are dissatisfied; if that economy takes a dive this summer, congressional Republicans will be desperate for ways to offload blame for it.

 

That’s when a vote on the Section 122 tariffs would get interesting.

 

The mere fact that the 150-day deadline guarantees five more months (at least) of tariffs as a scalding hot political potato also threatens the GOP, as it might cause midterm-minded voters to start asking uncomfortable questions about the policy. For instance, why did Trump impose 10 percent global tariffs after Friday’s court ruling and then immediately jack them up to 15 percent the next day? What was the careful deliberative logic behind that decision?

 

It must be the first time in U.S. history that Americans were hit with a major tax hike because the president is mad at the Supreme Court.

 

Another question: Didn’t he just negotiate a bunch of trade deals with foreign powers, some of whom promised to invest heavily in the United States? Are those deals affected by the new 15 percent rate? What happens to a country that signed a deal with a tariff rate higher than 15 percent?

 

Did the White House give a moment’s thought to any of that in its rush to spite the court by replacing the IEEPA tariffs as quickly as possible?

 

A show about nothing.

 

Here’s a particularly good one, per Vox’s Benjy Sarlin: Won’t these new Section 122 tariffs obviously fail to achieve the president’s goals on trade?

 

His goals on trade, I thought, were to reshore jobs and investment in the United States by forcing trade partners who’d been “taking advantage of us” to come to the table. The IEEPA tariffs made sense in that context. Because they were unlimited in scope and duration, they were well-suited for a long-term protectionist project to rebuild American industry. Trump could, in theory, have gone on using them to try to bring manufacturing back to the United States for the duration of his presidency.

 

But Section 122 is limited. As I’ve explained, the new tariffs will be kaput in court eventually and kaput in 150 days regardless since there’s virtually no chance they’ll be extended by Congress. They’ll expire before the president can use them to achieve any long-term protectionist goals. And given the immense legal and legislative uncertainty around them (a Trump specialty!), foreign nations now have no incentive to negotiate new trade deals with him. They’re better off sitting tight until July and waiting for the tariffs to expire.

 

Protectionism by executive fiat is dead thanks to the Supreme Court, and rightly so. So why, voters might wonder, are we still doing tariffs? If Trump is unwilling or unable to get Congress to agree to take the baton on repatriating jobs by taxing imports lawfully, why continue to subject Americans to the ludicrous volatility of imposing disruptive here-today-gone-tomorrow levies?

 

Many will struggle to understand it—but not us. You and I know why: The president yearns to govern as a king, and arrogating all power over trade was one of his most kingly pretenses. Economist Noah Smith correctly identified why the IEEPA tariffs mattered so much to him:

 

It allowed him to conduct foreign policy entirely on his own. It allowed him to enrich himself and his family. It allowed him to gain influence domestically, by holding out the promise of tariff exemptions for businesses that toe his political line. And it allowed him to act as a sort of haphazard economic central planner, using tariffs like a scalpel to discourage the kinds of trade and production that he didn’t personally like.

 

In other words, I think that although the tariffs had their origin in 1990s-era worries about trade deficits, they ended up as a way to make the Presidency more like a dictatorship.

 

Trump relishes the pardon power for similar instrumentalist reasons, because it grants him leverage over would-be courtiers. It’s a royal shield for those willing to do His Majesty a favor. His tariff authority was far greater, though, a royal sword he could and did hold to the throats of everyone from heads of state to captains of industry to ensure their cooperation with whatever new demand he had made of them.

 

To a megalomaniac, it must have felt like a bona fide superpower.

 

Now it’s gone, and there’s no such thing as a superpower that lasts for only 150 days. The clearer it becomes to voters that Trump’s ongoing interest in tariffs has more to do with protecting his personal influence than with protecting the American economy, the heavier that liability will become for him and his party. If you’re still holding out hope for that long-awaited “full-scale revolt” among House Republicans, that’s your best shot.

The Court Has Acted on Tariffs. Now Congress Must Act, Too.

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, February 23, 2026

 

Anyone is free to disagree with Justice Clarence Thomas’s legal opinions—but only a fool fails to take his views seriously. I am always a little nervous when I find myself on the opposite side of a legal question from Justice Thomas, but Chief Justice John Roberts does Thomas the courtesy of a very thoughtful response to his dissent in the recent tariffs case, a response that contains what I think we might consider a “Kinsley gaffe,” i.e., stating a truth that is more than one meant to say. The chief justice writes:

 

Suppose for argument’s sake that Congress can delegate its tariff powers to the President as completely as Justice Thomas suggests. Even then, the question remains whether Congress has given the President the tariff authority he claims in this case—or whether the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.

 

Chief Justice Roberts is a very careful writer, and his words here, while couched in the form of a question, are plainer than I am accustomed to reading from him or from any other member of the court: “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” One need not be an esoteric Straussian to assume that the word whether should be omitted to access the sentence’s true meaning.

 

Of course “the President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” He also seeks to exploit imaginary statutory language to aggrandize his own power, and seeks to exploit phony emergencies to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Venezuelan fentanyl to aggrandize his own power, to exploit imaginary Haitian cat-eaters in Ohio to aggrandize his own power, to exploit an absolutely ignorant misunderstanding of trade deficits to aggrandize his own power, etc. The president of these United States is not an aspiring autocrat but an actual autocrat acting outside of the constitutional powers of his office in matters ranging from imposing illegal taxes on Americans to carrying out massacres of civilians in the Caribbean. Speaking with his trademark stroke victim’s diction, Trump insisted:

 

I am allowed to cut off any and all trade or business with that same country. In other words, I can destroy the trade. I can destroy the country! I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country-destroying embargo. I can embargo. I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge $1. Because that’s not what it says, and that’s the way it even reads. I can do anything I wanted to do to them but can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country, but it can’t be a little fee.

 

We have there what would have been another Kinsley gaffe coming from the mouth of anyone else—the president’s attachment to the erroneous and unconstitutional idea that “I can do anything I want”—but, given that Trump has been talking about himself as a god-emperor for as long as he has been in politics, the statement surely is not unintentional.

 

“The President is seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power,” writes the chief justice—out of context, yes, but that is where the truth is. And the Supreme Court now has acted, in its modest way. Trump, being Trump, has announced that he will set about subverting this ruling by any means he can find “to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.”

 

Back to the traumatic brain injury ward:

 

More is a symbol of economic national security. And also, I would say, just for our country itself, so important because we’re doing so well as a country. We’ve never done so well. The good news is that there are methods, practices, statutes and authorities, as recognized by the entire court in this terrible decision, and also as recognized by Congress, which they refer to, that are even stronger than the IEEPA tariffs available to me as President of the United States.

 

Attention to Mike Johnson, the gutless worm who serves as speaker of the House—that is the sound of history calling your name. The Supreme Court has done what the Supreme Court can do, but now it is time for Congress to get in the game—long past time, in fact. The best time for Congress to rediscover its self-respect (as opposed to its self-importance) would have been 40 years ago—the second-best time is now. Never mind the fantasy of a Republican Congress impeaching and removing Donald Trump from the presidency, a prophylactic measure that should have been taken at the very latest after the attempted coup d’état that crowned his first administration but which was not, thanks in part to the catastrophic miscalculation of the risk-averse Mitch McConnell, then the Republican leader in the Senate. Congressional Republicans, having grown accustomed to (and perhaps even fond of) the taste of cordwainer’s leather, will not be weaned from their boot-licking ways so quickly. What could be done instead—what should be done but almost certainly will not be done—is to remove all of the president’s current statutory authorities touching trade in such a way as to invite his taking the opportunity “to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.”

 

And while it is the case that as a political reality Donald Trump cannot be impeached, is it so impossible to think that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick or Kevin Hassett, the president’s top economic adviser, could? If not by gutless Republicans today, then by a new Democratic majority come January? Can you imagine how much fun it would be to have a halfway competent economic inquisitor (I know, I know: Democrats) putting one of those guys through some tough questions (including ethical questions about Lutnick’s self-dealing) in front of the cameras for a couple of weeks? Hassett, who does not believe a word of the bullshit that comes out of his mouth but really likes to ride on Air Force One, would, from the Democratic point of view, make an excellent face for the Republican Party in its current intellectually vacant, shifty, self-serving, amateur-hour incarnation.

 

The Trump administration’s tariff policy is—and I cannot write was, inasmuch as they are going to try to ignore the Supreme Court ruling—bad on three counts.

 

1.      Least important is the fiscal calculation: The tariffs will bring in some money, but the extra revenue is had at the expense of decreased economic efficiency and increased economic chaos. There are easier ways to raise a couple hundred billion dollars a year.

 

2.      Slightly more important, in the long run, is the ideological content: Protectionism is a dumb and backward economic policy that may serve the short- to middle-term interests of a small number of market incumbents but which does not serve the overall economy very well. The relatively dynamic and risk-exposed U.S. economy has lifted Americans’ standard of living relative to the rest of the world, while the relatively statist, risk-averse, protectionist economic policies of the rich nations of Europe have produced relatively low growth, to such an extent that U.S. GDP per capita is now half-again as much as Germany’s and twice the average of the European Union. Japan’s GDP per capita is lower than that of West Virginia or Mississippi, our two poorest states. Trump’s notion that the rest of the world has been getting over on the United States through crafty trade policy is utterly unsupported by the facts—it is pure flat-earther economics. The fact that ignorant protectionism is on the upswing in both parties—Joe Biden’s trade policies were substantially similar to what Trump pursued in his first administration—is a catastrophe for American economic thinking.

 

3.      Most important—and most often overlooked—is the procedural issue: It is really, really important that presidents not be permitted to do things beyond the constitutional power of their offices. The president of the United States already has made war on Venezuela and Iran, threatened to make war on NATO, and reshaped the tax environment for American businesses (tariffs are taxes on American businesses) with no congressional authorization, only by “seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” Contrary to the popular assumption, overpowered executives unmoored from procedural and constitutional restraints do not produce order by consolidating power—they produce chaos by making one man’s whimsy the law of the land. Recall that Trump—by his own account—raised tariffs on Switzerland because his feelings were hurt in a conversation with the Swiss prime minister, a person who (and I, for one, think this part still matters) does not actually exist. (There is no prime minister of Switzerland.) We have separation of powers to prevent precisely this sort of thing by requiring that big, important changes to public policy—or big, important actions such as arresting people—require the cooperation of at least two of our three branches of government.

 

As a paragon of management excellence once said to an underling: “A nutless monkey could do your job.” If the other job candidate is Mike Johnson, I’d hire the nutless monkey. But perhaps there is someone in Congress—and I do not much care which party that someone belongs to—who is willing to stand up and do his goddamned job. Chief Justice John Roberts has done his. Your turn.

 

And Furthermore ...

 

I’ll admit being a little irritated with my friends at National Review when I read this editorial about Virginia and gerrymandering.

 

In 2024, Donald Trump carried 90 of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent cities. Even in Spanberger’s blowout victory over Winsome Earle-Sears in the 2025 gubernatorial race, Earle-Sears won 83 of them. West of the Brunswick County line, covering some two-thirds of the state’s land mass, Spanberger carried only four counties. She also lost most of the upper Chesapeake area in the state’s east.

 

That’s true. But do you know which countries Winsome Earle-Sears won? The ones without any people in them, which is why she got only 42 percent of the vote. As a native of West Texas, I can assure you that counting counties does not tell you very much about the people of a state: When I was at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, our sports department covered something like 40 counties that had a total of maybe 500,000 people in them, which, according to my English-major math, means an average county population of not very damned many.

 

Republicans—beginning with Texas Republicans—need to get their heads around the fact that they are really good at winning counties that don’t have very many people in them and really, really bad at winning counties that have a lot of people in them. The fact that the Texas GOP is going to win both Hartley County (population 5,382) and Armstrong County (population 1,848) does not somehow undermine the fact that the Democrats are going to win Harris County (population 5,221,006) and Dallas County (population 2,656,028). Whoever the Republicans end up nominating for the Senate race this time around (Ken Paxton is a corrupt imbecile, so you have to assume he has the inside track) is going to have to stitch together a lot of little counties to overcome the fact that the Democrat is going to win every city larger than Fort Worth—and may win Fort Worth, too. Texas’ four largest cities have about 6 million people in them altogether, and Democrats are very likely going to win very large majorities of those city voters as well as majorities of the larger urban counties around them. I mean, hurray for Deaf Smith and Jim Hogg counties and all, but that isn’t where the people are.

 

County-counting is a silly way of arguing about voting, and about gerrymandering.

 

Words About Words

 

A reader sends this in from Axios:

 

After small businesses sued to block Trump’s tariffs last year, a quick ruling was expected. The delay underscores the enormity of a decision that, either way, could rattle the global economy.

 

An old bugaboo: It is true that Donald Trump thinks the Supreme Court decision was an enormity, but I myself disagree. An enormity is not a big thing, it is an evil thing, a crime: the enormities of Jack the Ripper, the enormities of Trump’s interior decorator, the enormity of needless poverty, etc.

 

A better word there would be importance or gravity.

 

In Closing

 

Charles Murray has suggested that a millennium hence what will be remembered of the 20^th century is World War II and the moon landing. Looking a little less distantly into the future, I think that it is entirely possible that outside of a few serious scholars, what most educated people 200 years from now will know about the United States in the 20^th century will consist of: the two world wars and the Cold War, which will be remembered as essentially one complicated, century-spanning conflict; the emergence of the internet as a mass medium; and the moon landing already referenced. If any matters of domestic politics throughout the whole of American history still register, they will be the American founding itself, possibly the New Deal, and—almost certainly, I think—the civil rights movement.

 

What the American founding, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement have in common is that each changed the fundamental assumptions about the nature of the relationship between state and citizen in ways that were significant not only for the United States but for all the world. Liberal democracy in the form of constitutionally limited government incorporating a concept of inalienable rights began in Philadelphia and became a global norm among advanced countries; the New Deal was not the first model of the modern welfare state—Otto von Bismarck had a program, and Jonah Goldberg has done very interesting work on the New Deal’s authoritarian cousins—but it was the model that proved most compatible with the principles of liberal democracy exported from the United States, having been so successful that 21^st century Europeans can talk about a “Green New Deal” without anybody having to explain the reference to Spaniards or Belgians; the civil rights movement began with the question of a single racial minority group in a single country but established both the principles of dignity and fundamental equality for minority groups of many kinds (ethnic, religious, sexual, etc.) and provided an influential working model for a political program to put those principles into action.

 

I myself am not an admirer of the New Deal, but, setting aside the question of personal preferences, these are historically consequential ways in which the domestic political development of the United States shaped not only our own republic but the world. These are what will ensure that the United States will not—at least for a long time—end up with the epitaph T.S. Eliot imagined for his adopted Great Britain:

 

And the wind shall say: “Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”

 

Some readers were a little surprised that I argued that history will judge the late Rev. Jesse Jackson kindly in spite of his grifting, his philandering, and his troublesome record of antisemitism. The Rev. Jackson’s sins were common, the sort of thing that happens every day, but the civil rights movement was not the sort of thing that happens every day, and the Rev. Jackson’s historical significance proceeds from his association with that series of events. The fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi was a health crank and a little bit of a sexual weirdo has not much diminished his reputation save among certain historical specialists; Thomas Jefferson’s contemptible hypocrisy on the matter of slavery is consequential not because contemptible hypocrisy per se is interesting, which it isn’t (it is as common as fleas) but because of how it colors our understanding of the universalist principles he championed; the Rev. Jackson’s girl-chasing and featherbedding are lamentable, but also banal and ordinary, and probably will have very little effect on his historical standing—less even than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s adultery has had on his. Admirers of Donald Trump who profess to be shocked and offended by the Rev. Jackson’s significant moral shortcomings are, of course, beneath contempt, but we may take some comfort in the fact that none of these ignoramuses will have very much influence on how history is written.

 

“Is it your reputation that’s bothering you?” Marcus Aurelius asked himself. “Think of how soon we all will be utterly forgotten. The abyss of endless time swallows all. Consider the emptiness of those applauding hands and remember that the people who praise us are capricious and arbitrary.”

 

It is worth thinking a little more about the fact that so many of the main figures of the civil rights movement were religious leaders, Christian and Jewish. The Rev. Jackson may have seemed to have forgotten his vocation from time to time, but, at his best, he made clear the biblical context of his times and his project. Recalling the death of King, Jackson cited Genesis and the story of Joseph, whose brothers said: “Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say some evil beast hath devoured him. And we shall see what will become of his dreams.” Launching from there into a sermon in which he argued that King’s famous line about “the content of their character” was being used in a way that let the world off too easily, the Rev. Jackson insisted that justice only comes

 

with the sacrifice of blood—Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney—two Jews, a black, and Viola Liuzzo. And churches bombed and dogs biting flesh and the horses kicking people. Through the rush and the blood of it all, and the lives lost, and sacrificed, martyrs, we wrote the Voting Rights Act in blood. It was co-signed. And Mr. Johnson said, “We will lose the South for 25 years, but we must say now ‘We Shall Overcome’ together.”

 

Dr. King would still be around here preaching if he had just dreamed abstract, non-threatening, conservative, privatized dreams. He changed the law. ... It was always a call to action, a challenge, a threat to the status quo, to Pharaoh, to Nebuchadnezzar, to George Wallace, to Bull Connor—challenging some present, powerful, oppressive force.

 

One might criticize the Rev. Jackson for being too much the politician and too little the man of the cloth, for thinking and speaking—and preaching—almost exclusively about the affairs of this world, and not infrequently in a way that served his own ambitions. But there is a place for charity here (forgive us our trespasses, etc.) as well as for reality—and the reality of Jackson’s life was in many times and places extraordinarily brutal and ugly:

 

My father got off the train in Washington coming home from the Second World War, but, going south to Virginia, he had to sit behind Nazi prisoners of war because of skin color. My high school class could not take its picture on the lawn of the state capitol. Dogs could.

 

Jesse Jackson famously got a “D” in preaching when he was in seminary, and he himself observed that there was little if any difference between his sermons and his political speeches. If his ministry was not always directed at otherworldly heights, perhaps it was because he was thinking of that state capitol and what the men who worked there could do to him and had done to him. The world weighed on him. It was not theology that cost John the Baptist his life but political criticism—there are precedents for a ministry such as Jackson’s.

 

"After all these years, what remains for me, is God is a source of mystery and wonder,” Jackson said toward the end of his life. “Scripture holds up. The righteous are not forsaken.” The Rev. Jackson now has gone to face a judgment beyond the judgment of history—in the one court in which we are all truly equal, because we are all equally condemned save for that borrowed righteousness in which Christians place their hope. “I will have mercy and not sacrifice, for I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” Let us hope that Scripture does indeed hold up, such that it is not only the righteous who are not forsaken but also the ordinary hapless fallen sinners chained to transgressions that are not even grand but petty and venal and embarrassing—meaning you and me and the late Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Europe’s War on Digital Speech

National Review Online

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

 

‘The U.S. will in the coming months — that’s certain — attack us over digital regulation,” predicted French President Emmanuel Macron.

 

This attack can’t come soon enough.

 

Europe long ago abandoned the idea that its economies would ever produce important or competitive companies in the digital age. Apple alone is larger than the entire German stock market. Instead, Europe has decided to become a “regulatory superpower” and hopes to influence the development of tech industries by setting policy. The most visible aspect of this to Americans is that, when traveling in Europe, you need to click several extra times to grant permissions to your own phone to load the websites you want to visit.

 

National governments in Europe and the EU itself have long simmered with hatred for Silicon Valley, which they see as having an unfair tax deal at the EU’s periphery, in Dublin. They have responded by engaging in bureaucratic hostage-taking, extracting enormous and punitive fines from the likes of Facebook, Google, and X, under the implicit threat of expulsion from the continent. The offenses are usually made up. X supposedly had “misleading” verified checkmarks and “opacity around algorithmic recommendation.” Google has been fined for acquiring potential competitors.

 

Europe is threatening to institutionalize and expand its “regulatory superpower” framework with the Digital Services Act, which will target what it defines as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPS) of 45 million active users in the EU. That means Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, and X. Again, only companies born outside of Europe. An ITIF report from last April made it clear that the EU’s tech regulations amount to “a de facto tariff system” targeting American Big Tech firms.

 

But it’s actually worse than this. The European Commission and many national assemblies want U.S. tech companies to act as political bodyguards and watchdogs for the European establishment. They want the major platforms to act as censors, fact-checkers, and information assistants. This is a project that has been abandoned in the United States. Mark Zuckerberg initially, and stupidly, accepted responsibility for Donald Trump’s 2016 election and for Brexit. He subsequently tried to manage the political speech of over 1 billion users. This began furtively in Europe, with his cancellation of pro-life ads in Ireland’s abortion referendum.

 

Since then, Zuckerberg has publicly repented of his company’s post-2016 efforts to superintend the political speech of the globe and readopted the internet’s original ethos of spreading free speech globally through technology. Europe’s political class, however, still believes that it can head off populist challenge or critique through censorship of the online commons, banning speech critical of governments or of mass migration.

 

This clash of values, which Macron anticipates, is what drove Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference. Vance did not criticize Europe’s traditional speech restrictions on Holocaust denial or the preaching of ethnic hatreds. His examples concerned the criminalization of common political opinions about immigration or of Christian prayer performed where authorities think it doesn’t belong. Vance was calling Europe away from betrayal of our common civilizational values and warning that our tech companies could not be misused as political weapons against democracy itself. He was right then. We join him in urging Europe to turn back from its censorial course, and in supporting America’s innovative tech companies in their renewed commitment to democratic values — especially the robust freedom of speech on which everything else relies.

We Need a Vote on Iran

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, February 23, 2026

 

‘President Trump,” reports NPR, “says he hasn’t decided whether he’ll launch a military strike on Iran.”

 

This is a remarkable sentence for a citizen of a free republic to read. All that elegant constitutional infrastructure, all that cluttered democratic input, and we’re sitting around waiting to see if he has decided whether he’ll launch a war with Iran. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, there are 100 members of the Senate, and yet the most sacred decision that a nation’s political leadership can take will come down to one man’s mood. We might wake up tomorrow and discover that the United States is engaged in Persia, and we might not. Who knows? Better hope the president sleeps well tonight.

 

I am of the view that, absent congressional authorization, it is unconstitutional for the president to make a substantive, non-defensive change to America’s foreign policy. By design, the war-making power lies with the legislature, and what is currently being mooted by the Trump administration is closer to a declaration of war than to any of the semantic alternatives.

 

At a push, one could characterize last year’s strikes on Iran’s enrichment facilities as a responsive act, on the grounds that the United States had limited time to prevent its acquisition of a nuclear weapon, and that legislative debate was therefore impossible. Likewise, when the protests of late last year began in earnest, and reports surfaced that tens of thousands of Iranians were being killed for their defiance, one could have plausibly defended an intervention with the understanding that to wait would have been to accept an indefensible number of deaths. But this time? This time, there is no such “hook.” It is true, no doubt, that Iran is an adversary of the United States, that Iran is seeking to obtain weapons that the United States does not wish it to have, and that, in various places around the world, Iran is directly or indirectly involved in attacks on American personnel. But this was also true 40 years ago. If the United States has finally decided that Iran’s government must be changed, that is understandable. But, by definition, that would represent a profound alteration in American policy — one of the sort that Congress, not the executive branch, has been empowered to design.

 

Perhaps you dissent from my legal view. That’s fine. Many do — including some I admire. But the Constitution aside, would it not, as a matter of elementary political hygiene, be better for a decision of this magnitude to be made out in the open, rather than behind closed doors? If President Trump decides to go into Iran, that decision will be permanent. In an instant, we will all be committed to the course, with the only opportunity to push back coming after the fact. Instinctively, I am open to the argument that Iran is a big enough problem to warrant extraordinary measures. But I would like to hear the matter debated by people of different opinions, from different places, and with different agendas to advance. This administration has not, at any point, made an extended case for broader intervention in Iran. Indeed, one of the views for which its leader, Donald Trump, is most famous is that the United States should not get involved in any more conflicts of choice in the Middle East. If that has changed, the change ought to be accounted for — and not implicitly, by means of an order that is reported ex nihilo on CNN, but explicitly, over the course of a number of days, with the eyes of the voters trained on its advocates. One of the key advantages of a legislature is that it contains multiple people who wield equal power. The president is the undisputed master of the executive branch, with all others subordinate to his authority. But the lawmaker? He has one vote, the same as everyone else, and is thus required to account for his position with his wits rather than his sovereignty. I would like to see my representatives do this — not only so that I might hear their explications, but so that I can hold them to their word at the ballot box the next time I get a chance. To rob me of that opportunity is a sin.

 

Since the presidency of Harry Truman, the habit of our politics has been for the president to make most of the decisions related to war and peace, and for the Congress to timorously acquiesce until it could no longer stomach its own impotence. In making this plea, I am thus aware that I am fighting against the tide. Still, I might ask those who have grown accustomed to this practice whether they believe that its results have been happy. By and large, have our president-led wars worked out well? All in all, has Congress’s abdication of its role made our system of government more functional, our politics more harmonious, and our ability to assign blame easier? Or has it been a slow-motion disaster that ought to be rethought from the ground up, lest one again read casually in the newspapers that the temporary custodian of the executive branch is flirting casually with taking the country unto the breach?

Jack Hughes or Eileen Gu?

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

 

The Winter Olympics had its thrills and spills — and a deep philosophical divide represented by two American, or American-born, athletes.

 

Jack Hughes, the gold-medal-winning American hockey player for the U.S. team, gave voice to a patriotic reflex in his heartfelt expressions of love for his country.

 

Eileen Gu, the gold-medal-winning American-born freestyle skier competing for China, exemplified a cosmopolitan ideal that floats above mere nationhood.

 

This difference — between the bloody-mouthed hockey player draped in his own country’s flag and the exceptionally talented part-time model resistant to any questions about national loyalty — drives many of the divisions in American society.

 

Is loyalty to country a matter of choice or an unalterable commitment? Do borders mean anything? Is our common culture essential or dispensable? Is the appropriate attitude toward America one of fundamental gratitude or critical distance?

 

These types of questions are involved in disputes over immigration policy, over American history and how to teach it in schools, over the status of the English language, and over how much we should care about so-called international opinion.

 

It was a subtext at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks ago when Marco Rubio said that we must fight for Western civilization, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rendered “Western culture” in sneer quotes, as if it were a fiction or contemptible concept.

 

The right is naturally drawn to the patriotic or nationalistic attitude, whereas the left is more cosmopolitan, tending to believe that attachment to one’s own is narrow-minded and that patriotic displays are crude and simplistic.

 

Cosmopolitanism has a long history. As I note in my book The Case for Nationalism, the term “cosmopolitan” has its root in the Greek word kosmopolites, or citizen of the cosmos or world.

 

The fourth-century b.c. Cynic philosopher Diogenes is the first recorded person to use what has now become a cosmopolitan cliché: “When he was asked where he came from, he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’”

 

That was a radical, or even senseless, statement, since the Greeks considered citizenship possible only through the polis, or city.

 

During the Enlightenment, the cosmopolitan idea was expressed in the notion of Weltbürger, or world citizen.

 

This tendency has been given stark expression by the likes of the novelist Virginia Woolf, who urged the rejection of “pride of nationality,” and the titanic Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who thought it “obvious that patriotism as a sentiment is bad and harmful; as a doctrine it is stupid.”

 

Cosmopolitanism has always been open to the charge that, whatever its real or purported idealism, it cultivates a disregard for what’s near, immediate, and tangible for what’s far off.

 

Behind cosmopolitanism is what the British writer Paul Gilroy has called “the principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history.”

 

The problem is that no one is really a citizen of the world, but rather of particular nations that have formed us in obvious and subtle ways. Yes, people emigrate, and there are literary and intellectual exiles, but most of us have an attachment to home that feels natural and important.

 

One reason that people were so moved by the U.S. hockey team was the palpable bonds of the players — to one another, to their country, to the memory of their tragically deceased former fellow player, Johnny Gaudreau. These weren’t bonds that were chosen, so much as accepted and embraced; they were true to their teammates and nation.

 

In contrast, Eileen Gu claims to be true to herself. If asked if she is proud of the accomplishments of her countrymen, she might have to ask, “Which countrymen?”

 

It is certainly the case that the Olympics bring athletes around the world together, but the games themselves are a testament to the enduring power of patriotism. It was, after all, a unique kind of sports joy to witness the triumph of our boys in red, white, and blue.