Regime Change Without Nation Building

By Jonathan Schanzer

Sunday, April 05, 2026

 

America and Israel are at war with Iran, a fact that should be neither shocking nor surprising. Both countries have been targeted by the Islamic Republic since its inception in 1979. Both countries have engaged in painful battles with the regime’s proxies. Both nations battled Iran for 12 days last year; Israel targeted nuclear assets and other key military targets, paving the way for a crescendo of American strikes that hammered Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

 

But the regime refused to back down. It continued to pursue its nuclear program and its violent proxy project. Its ballistic missile stockpile also grew at an alarming rate.

 

Seven months after American planes did their damage, U.S. President Donald Trump parked a massive armada in the waters surrounding Iran. For weeks, he exhorted the regime to negotiate and surrender its illicit nuclear program. Concurrently, the Israelis threatened war if the regime continued to stockpile missiles.

 

The clerics refused to stand down, thus triggering a widening war. And so we begin anew the debate inside the United States since the last helicopter escaped the American compound in Saigon in April 1975. What is the role of the American military in achieving American aims, and should American aims include using force to change regimes we believe violate the international order and pose a long-term threat to us and to the West? Never mind that the Iranian regime has all but asked for this war since 1979. The conversation is not about Iran; it’s about the United States almost exclusively—with Israel thrown in as well. The 21st-century meaning of “America First,” the vague slogan that Donald Trump revived when he began his political career in 2015, is now being hashed out and defined in real time.

 

***

 

The moment war erupted, critics hammered Trump—and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Tucker Carlson called the war “disgusting and evil.” He declared, “Just because the prime minister of Israel wanted a regime change… It certainly wasn’t a good idea for the United States.”

 

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene lamented, “Trump, [Vice President JD] Vance, [Director of the Office of National Intelligence] Tulsi [Gabbard], and all of us campaigned on no more foreign wars and regime change.” She later stated, “We voted for America First and ZERO wars.”

 

The anti-Trump left piled on. Senator Elizabeth Warren released a statement saying. “‘America first’ doesn’t mean dragging the United States into another forever war built on lies while ignoring the needs of Americans here at home.” Representative Ro Khanna posted on X decrying the “illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk.”

 

Critics on both sides seek to discredit Trump by invoking the phrase “America First” and claiming that it means something other than the war Trump launched in 2026. They suggest that he has betrayed his voters and tricked the American people by wielding those words and then using massive force against a faraway country many Americans know little about. To be fair, Trump did repeatedly declare that he would steer America away from costly foreign entanglements. But we don’t know the cost or impact of this war. Moreover, declarations and actions are two different things. Over the past few decades, presidents have fallen into the habit of speaking belligerently and then acting cautiously. Trump has done almost exactly the opposite and seems (as of this early writing) unfazed by the complaint that he has been untrue to his own doctrine.

 

Wars have a way of destroying presidential legacies or securing them. For Trump, his presidency’s success, both now and in history’s retelling, hinges on battlefield performance and a paradigm shift. He must first bring down the Iranian regime while limiting the spread of the conflict. But he also cannot commit to costly and futile nation-building. Finally, he must avoid Iran’s maddening complexities, especially its sectarian and nationalist baggage. In short, he must pursue “America First” regime change. But what does that mean, exactly?

 

***

 

Not all regime change is bad or disastrous. The U.S. has overthrown more than three dozen hostile regimes in modern history. Some have been remarkable successes.

 

The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 was the product of total war culminating in Germany’s unconditional surrender. The Marshall Plan directed billions of dollars into rebuilding West Germany. Over time, Germany emerged as a stable and democratic European ally. Similarly, the defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 ushered in a military occupation led by General Douglas MacArthur. U.S. authorities dismantled Japan’s institutions and oversaw the adoption of a democratic constitution and parliament. Today, Japan is one of Washington’s most important Asian allies.

 

In 1983, U.S. forces entered Grenada to evacuate U.S. citizens, restore stability, and prevent the spread of violence after the government collapsed. Approximately 7,000 U.S. troops, alongside Caribbean forces, rapidly defeated the Grenadian military and Cuban forces on the island. The United States then supported constitutional elections in 1984 that restored civilian democratic rule, which Grenada still boasts today.

 

In 1986, the United States toppled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos after fraudulent elections that rocked the country. As mass protests and military defections grew, U.S. officials worked to facilitate a peaceful transition. In February 1986, the U.S. evacuated Marcos to exile in Hawaii. Subsequent American efforts focused on democratic institutions and economic stabilization. Today the Philippines is among America’s oldest and most important allies in Asia.

 

In 1989, the United States removed Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, a figure indicted in U.S. courts on drug charges. Approximately 27,000 U.S. troops were dispatched to the region. Noriega surrendered in January 1990 and then stood trial in the United States. After a period of transition, Panama remained stable and democratic.

 

More recently, America toppled the dictator of Venezuela, a narco-state that undermined American security and national interests in South America. The U.S. attempted to pressure President Nicolás Maduro to leave power under threat of military action and an oil blockade. Even with a massive fleet positioned off the coast of Venezuela, Maduro refused to yield. American forces arrested him in Caracas, removed him from the premises, and shipped him to America to stand trial. Trump then threatened Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s successor, with a “big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she did not cooperate. She has since cooperated with American demands: passing pro-business oil laws, cutting off oil sales to American adversaries, and releasing hundreds of political prisoners.

 

***

 

Admittedly, not all regime change efforts have ended well. For example, in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, whose Communist leanings also alarmed Washington. However, the new regime of Carlos Castillo Armas was unstable. He was assassinated in 1957, triggering a series of military takeovers, insurgencies, and weak civilian governments.

 

In the early 1970s, the Richard Nixon administration sought to derail the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. Economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and covert support contributed to the 1973 military coup that marked the rise of General Augusto Pinochet—who did everything to derail efforts later in his rule to let free elections take place.

 

A more recent suboptimal outcome was the 2011 Libya intervention. The United States and allies combined sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and limited military force to topple strongman Muammar Qaddafi during the Libyan civil war. NATO enforced a no-fly zone, enabling an air campaign that targeted Libyan military infrastructure while supporting rebel advances. Washington froze billions of dollars in regime assets to finance the new government. After Qaddafi fell, however, the Libyan government failed to consolidate power. Rival Muslim states backed opposing forces, yielding a deadlock that has endured since the re-eruption of the civil war in 2014.

 

***

 

Iraq and Afghanistan are America’s ultimate regime-change failures. In the case of Afghanistan, the war was just; the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks. President George W. Bush’s error was trying to forge Afghanistan into a flourishing democracy, using American taxpayer dollars, during an ongoing insurgency. The total cost reached $2.3 trillion, with more than 2,300 U.S. service members dead, before a cringe-inducing American withdrawal in 2021.

 

The 2003 war in Iraq was equally destructive but also less just. The rationale for intervention centered around allegations that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had “chemical and biological weapons” and was “seeking nuclear weapons.” That turned out to be wrong. But Bush’s gravest error in Iraq was the same one he made in Afghanistan. He sought to turn Iraq into a democracy during an asymmetric terror campaign to derail America’s efforts. The war cost American taxpayers more than $2 trillion, with 4,300 U.S. service members dead.

 

America didn’t lose because regime change was bad. Regime change was hard, and it was made insuperably so due to the interference of one key player in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That player was Iran. Iranian training and material support for Iraqi militias enabled deadly attacks against American troops. The Pentagon assesses that Iran was behind 603 deaths (more than one-quarter) of American service members in Iraq. And while numbers are not available for Afghanistan, William Wood, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said, “There is no question that elements of the insurgency have received weapons from Iran.”

 

Questions linger as to why President George W. Bush chose not to widen the War on Terror to include the Islamic Republic. He included it in the “Axis of Evil,” after all. But given the long history of Iranian attacks against the United States, it’s fair to ask: Why did presidents over the course of 11 terms of office across 46 years refuse to act against the regime that was the most implacably hostile to America?

 

***

 

The trail of blood began in 1979, with the hostage crisis during which 52 Americans were held by the nascent Iranian regime for 444 days. President Jimmy Carter appeared feckless, hoping to resolve the crisis with diplomacy. The election of Ronald Reagan ended the ordeal, but Tehran was not deterred. In 1983, the regime was behind a suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. The culprit was Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terror group. Later that year, Hezbollah carried out a truck bombing at a Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241 service personnel. The following year, Hezbollah kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut, later killing him. Hezbollah then managed to hijack two different airplanes, killing three Americans. Reagan followed the advice of his defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, and repeatedly stood down.

 

President George H.W. Bush had an early brush with Iran-backed Hezbollah when it killed U.S. Marine Corps Colonel William Higgins after kidnapping him in Lebanon. Result: nothing.

 

President Bill Clinton was no more challenging to Iran than his predecessors had been. During the 1990s, amid an American push for Middle East peace, Iran armed and funded proxies in the Palestinian arena, where it shed more American blood. Car bombings and suicide bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad not only derailed America’s foreign policy but also killed and wounded scores of Americans.

 

The regime grew bolder. In 1996, a truck bombing rocked Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans. The Iran-backed Hezbollah Al-Hijaz was blamed. Then, with the assistance of Hezbollah, al-Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding thousands. Clinton’s flaccid response to terrorism in the 1990s is the greatest foreign policy stain on his reputation.

 

By contrast, President George W. Bush’s War on Terror was expansive. But it was arguably not expansive enough. The 9/11 Report concluded that Tehran enabled the travel of 9/11 terrorists, noting “strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan.” Bush declined to hold the regime accountable.

 

Similarly, Bush appeared paralyzed during the second intifada (2000–2005), when Iran-backed terrorists embarked on a terrorism rampage in Israel. Hamas suicide bombings continued to claim American lives. In 2003, Iran-backed terrorists even killed three U.S. diplomatic personnel in Gaza.

 

The Barack Obama presidency was marked by appeasement. The 2013 Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) yielded hundreds of millions of dollars to the regime in exchange for the mullahs’ agreeing to sit at the table. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) gave the regime billions in exchange for fleeting restrictions on its illicit nuclear program. The agreement never addressed terrorism.

 

President Donald Trump’s first term saw a spike in Iranian aggression, particularly after he exited the JCPOA in 2018. In 2019 and 2020, attacks by Iran-backed militias targeted American forces in Iraq. This prompted Trump’s famous drone strike, which felled Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani. Iran, however, was not deterred. In September 2020, American intelligence exposed a plot to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to South Africa.

 

The presidency of Joe Biden began with a push for renewed diplomacy with the regime. This did not halt Iranian aggression. Iran-backed militia attacks killed or wounded American soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Syria between 2021 and 2023. Then, the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, plunged the Middle East into chaos. Iran-backed Hamas killed at least 48 Americans and kidnapped at least 12 Americans that day. As the war widened, American service members were hit with multiple Iranian proxy attacks, resulting in dozens of injuries and three deaths.

 

In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced charges against an Iranian national and two American accomplices for plotting to assassinate President Trump. A U.S. jury then convicted agents of Iran for plotting to assassinate Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad. Former U.S. officials Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, and others were also targets of Iranian assassination plots. In March, as the bombs were falling on Tehran, a man working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was convicted of entering the United States in 2024 with the intent of killing former Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley.

 

In short, Iran’s war against America has been relentless. There is no question as to whether the current war is just. It is. The debate is not about Iran. It’s about America’s role in the world.

 

***

 

None of Trump’s war critics question American military competence right now. What they question is the cost of the war, Trump’s endgame, and what they perceive as similarities between this action and the wars of the Bush era. In essence, Trump is being pressed to explain how the “America First” president who vowed to avoid foreign entanglements intends to steer America through this war.

 

Trump has already rejected the Pottery Barn Rule, a heretofore-unknown principle adduced by Secretary of State Colin Powell that supposedly required the United States to repair Iraq once we had “broken” it. Trump’s rejection is commendable. Just because America stands up to another country’s aggression does not mean that its taxpayers must finance the removal of rubble, let alone the rebuild. This was a novel precept, and it is one that Americans broadly eschew. Americans today seem to understand that the world is a dangerous place and that dangerous actors may require overwhelming responses—but they want to prevent the spilling of American blood or treasure for the benefit of others.

 

The Venezuela model for regime change is therefore, on the surface, an appealing model for the future. Minimal risk, all-but-certain mission success, and the promise of oil profits all sound ideal. However, surgical opera-tions with little destruction or bloodshed were never in the cards when it came to engaging Iran. Hundreds of top leaders and thousands of targets have been wiped out, with oil facilities in flames. The United States may yet find an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez should the regime begin to buckle. Then again, it’s hard to overestimate the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic. The task of finding pragmatists inside the regime may prove Sisyphean.

 

Here is where it is useful to remember that the people of Iran are arguably the country’s greatest resource. They are educated. A less radical, more pragmatic regime existed in Tehran in the memories of everyone older than 55, and the experience of living under theocratic tyranny has been the only experience young Iranians know.

 

Is Iran ripe for regime change? In 2009, Iranians overwhelmingly voted for liberalization, only to have the mullahs fix the result—leading to an uprising that had to be crushed, though not nearly as brutally as the killing spree in January 2026 that showed the regime’s truly murderous colors in the mass slaughter of tens of thousands. Indeed, Iranians have in recent memory sought to carve a different path and, just two months ago, were in open revolt. This is not a quiescent population whose will has been shattered.

 

Unfortunately, little is known about the opposition on the ground right now. But Iranian unity will be crucial to any effort to reach a stable end state in this war. We’ll soon see if the Persian-speaking majority can join forces with the complex patchwork of Iranian minorities.

 

Self-defined experts on these matters look at the prospect of Iranian common cause with deep skepticism. But we Americans are hardly the best judges of the ways to achieve common ground. Our divisive politics have in recent decades rendered American foreign policy schizophrenic, with key principles shifting violently every four or eight years. The debates over military intervention, regime change, and even America’s place in the world have yielded chaos and confusion, both at home and abroad.

 

While Americans have been exceptionally vociferous in expressing their varying political views in recent years, the Iran war has finally brought a major fault line to the surface. This heated battle on both the left and the right is between neo-isolationists and interventionists. For those who believe no good can come of war and that America fails when it fights, no argument exists that will penetrate their hard shell of determinist defeatism. But foreign policy theorists in the neo-isolationist camp—those who do not want to appear to be isolationist but rather realist—warn that whatever America does is merely a distraction from the real issue of the 21st century. That issue is our “great power competition” with China. Any cent we spend for any purpose other than countering China is a penny wasted. Of course, since China is allied with Iran and sees Iran as an extension of its sphere of interest, an American defeat of Iran would serve the purpose of putting China on notice that we will not look kindly on another totalitarian regime’s effort to spread its shadow across the globe. Nor will we sit idly by.

 

The task before Donald Trump is finding a middle ground that appeals to the isolationists and interventionists, on the left and the right, all of whom fervently believe that they are putting “America First.” To secure his place in American history, and to end this war on his terms, he must find a way to validate both camps while engineering a decisive victory in Iran that heralds a new Middle East, sets back rivals like China and Russia, and does not empty out the U.S. Treasury.

 

None of this is simple or intuitive. But history is replete with American regime-change experiments that did not bankrupt America and did not thrust it into a forever war. Should Trump find a way of repeating that history, and not the failures of the early 21st century, while vanquishing the greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East, “America First” won’t just be a political slogan. It will be a blueprint for other important battles amid the litany of geopolitical challenges that lie ahead.

 

 

Trump’s Purge May Be Just Beginning

By Ashley Parker & Sarah Fitzpatrick

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others leaving the administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said that the timing is uncertain and that President Trump has not yet made up his mind. But what was once an unofficial motto of the second Trump term—“no scalps”—no longer applies.

 

Trump had been reluctant to get rid of any of his top lieutenants, viewing firings as a concession to the Democrats and the media. Even in the past few months, there had been an edict that no Cabinet officials would be removed prior to the midterms, though a series of dismissals were planned for after Election Day. But the president’s declining support since he launched the Iran war has changed the political calculus. The odds of confirming replacements, advisers know, are only growing longer. One person close to the White House told us that Trump was buoyed by the reaction to his decision to remove Noem and that it made him more likely to move ahead with Bondi. (Still, an administration official cautioned that after Noem’s ouster, optics were a concern; officials worried that getting rid of Bondi would be viewed as jettisoning only the most “attractive” women, while keeping the men.)

 

During her 14 months on the job, Bondi tried so hard to do everything right. She titillated the MAGA base by appearing on Fox News and promising that the Jeffrey Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” awaiting her review for release. She relinquished all pretense of leading an independent Justice Department, going after Trump’s political foes and enemies, even when other prosecutors might not have brought charges. And to the president and his allies, she continued to project the perky, kind, warm Florida persona that had once earned her the girlish nickname “Pambi.”

 

Bondi did everything right—or, at least, everything Trump asked her to do—but in the end, it was not enough. For Trump, and for his succession of attorneys general, it is almost never enough. In some ways, Bondi’s official service to Trump seemed preordained to end the way it did, with a singular moment of crystalline humiliation, after weeks of low-grade indignities. The case of Jeff Sessions, her distant, first-term predecessor, is instructive here. In early 2016, Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump’s seemingly long-shot presidential campaign, and was rewarded with the nation’s top law-enforcement job when Trump became president. But after Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump viciously turned on his onetime loyalist, publicly and privately excoriating his attorney general until finally pushing him out in the middle of his first term.

 

“No one can succeed in this job,” someone close to the White House mused to us. “Why would anyone want this job?” Only someone with “unbridled ambition,” the person concluded, would aspire to be Trump’s attorney general of the United States.

 

Bondi was not Sessions. She would not recuse herself; she would not draw lines; she would not do anything other than loyally serve the president. Her relationship with Trump went back more than a decade and was far deeper than his relationship with Sessions. In 2013, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to a political group supporting her Florida attorney-general campaign. (Shortly after, Bondi, in her capacity as the state’s attorney general, declined to take action against Trump University, despite multiple complaints—launching the first of several controversies in which the two would find themselves embroiled.) She remained in his orbit thereafter, speaking at both his 2016 and 2020 conventions.

 

Bondi’s trouble as U.S. attorney general, however, started early, during the first full month of Trump’s second term. It was then that she—under pressure from Trump’s base to release the Epstein files—summoned a group of conservative influencers to the White House, handing them thick white binders labeled, in red, The Epstein Files: Phase 1. Those close to Bondi acknowledged that her comments on television that month suggesting that Epstein’s alleged client list was “sitting on her desk” marked her ownership of the entire debacle and her failure to adequately protect the president and those close to him who were friendly with Epstein. There was no client list, the binders contained no new revelations, and “Bondi must go” murmuring began in earnest.

 

The stunt further thrust the topic of Epstein—which Trump hoped to avoid—into the news. But that wasn’t what ultimately cost Bondi her job. Rather, it was Trump’s perception that she was a weak attorney general, unable to sufficiently prosecute his perceived enemies. Multiple people familiar with the president’s thinking said that the failed efforts to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, among others, were a particular source of anger. Bondi was perceived by the president as lacking “smarts and guts,” as one person told us.

 

The Department of Justice declined to answer specific questions but pointed us to Bondi’s post on X saying that she would “continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration.” Bondi characterized her tenure as “highly successful” and declared it “easily the most consequential first year of the Department of Justice in American history.” Multiple lobbying firms were trying to hire Bondi this afternoon, as they fielded calls from corporations and other clients with matters before DOJ.

 

***

 

Some Trump allies (and many of his critics) believe that he asked Bondi for the nearly impossible—to win convictions for seemingly unwinnable cases—and then blamed her when she earnestly attempted yet still fell short. But other members of the Cabinet and the administration have expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us.

 

Those sympathetic to Bondi say that she was ordered to perform legal miracles with a deeply weakened Justice Department. The president’s demand for absolute loyalty among the department’s rank and file resulted in a profound loss of institutional expertise and a sharply reduced talent pool. Multiple prominent Republican attorneys told us that they’d considered joining the second Trump DOJ. But the requirement to take what they viewed as an oath of loyalty to the president—not the Constitution—was a step too far. “The president has a view that he is ultimately the head of the Justice Department, and the attorney general’s job is to carry out his orders,” one person close to the White House told us.

 

Officials in other departments told us that they regarded the Justice Department’s errors as harmful to the administration’s credibility with judges; they’d blown up what should have been easy wins for the president. “This has been festering across the administration for a while,” a second person close to the administration told us. “It’s the Epstein stuff, partly. It’s also the critiques of the indictments, like Comey. It’s a general sense of WTF—she’s not logging a lot of wins, not clocking a lot of good media.”

 

Bondi also enthusiastically enabled one of the president’s most fervently held beliefs: that the 2020 election had been “rigged.” Bondi directed multiple U.S. attorneys to pursue wide-ranging probes into election “interference” and “irregularities,” and her department has pursued lawsuits in 30 jurisdictions to obtain unredacted voter information that Trump’s legal critics believe are an effort to prevent significant numbers of Americans from voting in future elections. In perhaps a last-minute attempt to save her job, Bondi announced on X on Tuesday that she was elevating yet another U.S. attorney to “play a key role in ensuring the integrity of American elections.”

 

***

 

When Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee in February, she came prepared with well-honed, pre-written insults for the Democratic lawmakers, in the hope that her fiery attacks would appeal to the only audience that mattered: Trump. But even that approach backfired; she was widely mocked for a non sequitur—“The Dow is over 50,000 right now!”—as well as for her pages of scripted invective. (It turns out that in Trump’s eyes, burns are cool, burn books less so.)

 

Now the defining image of Bondi’s tenure may be her testimony on Capitol Hill, specifically the image of her refusing to look at Epstein victims seated in the rows behind her, even when asked to multiple times by members of Congress. Weeks later—almost exactly a year after the initial Epstein flare-up—the buzz at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, where Bondi is a frequent presence, was that Trump was looking to get rid of her and hoping to have a replacement confirmed by the November midterms. Multiple people at the Justice Department and close to the White House familiar with Bondi’s tribulations told us that she has come close to being fired multiple times previously, including in the past few months. One thing that extended Bondi’s tenure, several people said, was her warm personal relationship with Trump and with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who both genuinely like her. “Pam and I have been friends for more than 15 years, and I think she’s one of the finest people I know,” Wiles told us in a brief phone call.

 

In response to our questions, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in an email that “Trump has the most talented cabinet and team in American history. Patriots like Kash Patel, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Dan Driscoll are tirelessly implementing the President’s agenda and achieving tremendous results for the American people.”

 

Despite the attorney-general role being among the most thankless in the Trump administration, there is no shortage of people eager to replace Bondi. Sensing the attorney general’s weakness, Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Jeanine Pirro, a television judge who is now Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, have been jockeying for the job, both directly to Trump and to his allies at Mar-a-Lago. So, too, have EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

 

Yet the two people close to the White House, as well as a top White House official, told us that Todd Blanche, the Bondi deputy who has now been elevated to acting attorney general, has long coveted the top job and will attempt to transform his interim role into something more permanent. “I think Todd will distinguish himself,” the White House official said, speaking anonymously to share internal thinking. “It’s sort of a trial for him.”

 

Tales of Bondi’s demise had been brewing since almost the beginning, and we asked the White House official: Why now? Why today? They responded that there was no particular “rhyme or reason” but that Bondi and Trump had “been talking back and forth for some time.”

 

“Ultimately, he was talked out,” this person explained, “and she was talked out.”

Sasse, Zinsmeister, and Republican Virtue

By Andy Smarick

Sunday, April 05, 2026

 

Two remarkably talented, independent-minded, service-oriented conservatives are in knock-down, drag-out fights with cancer. They’ve been models of courage and good cheer in their battles, but they were also models of American republican virtue in their professional lives. Our nation must find ways to identify and elevate more people like them instead of the hot-tempered, partisan commentators who now dominate the public square yet never serve in public capacities.

 

Beyond their dire diagnoses in middle age (and willingness to discuss their struggles in public), Ben Sasse and Karl Zinsmeister share a great deal. Both had relatively brief but influential tenures at the pinnacle of the federal government: Sasse as a U.S. senator, Zinsmeister as the top domestic policy adviser in President George W. Bush’s second term.

 

Both are products of rural America, and neither lost his rootsy sensibility. They worked like dogs, and though they always seemed honored to serve their nation, they gave the impression that Washington never felt like home. Both are comfortable in their own skin, never putting on airs or trying to be part of the club. Each has a social-entrepreneurial streak and an unusually active intellectual life.

 

Had the GOP been led by more conservatives like Sasse and Zinsmeister over the last generation, we would’ve been quicker to catch and address populist rumblings. If more leaders like them were in charge of public institutions today, we could trust that a conservative governing agenda would be expertly executed. Instead, the right has been largely fueled by anti-institutional activists and helmed by governing novices, meaning conservatism of late has produced too much venting and too few meaningful policy wins.

 

Sasse’s story is well known. Raised in Nebraska, the son of a wrestling and football coach, he detasseled corn in the summers. Ivy-educated and earnest, he became a professor and worked in elite management consulting before serving as president of a small, struggling college in his hometown. He delighted in talking Husker football and sharing real-time updates of his daughter’s toiling on a cattle ranch. He’s the preternaturally accomplished Midwestern everydude Mayor Pete is trying to become.

 

Sasse won a Senate seat in 2014, voted conservatively, and soon distinguished himself through his work on the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees and willingness to buck President Trump. He wrote two books while in office and left the Senate to become president of the University of Florida. Politics and policy are not everything.

 

I worked for Zinsmeister at the White House domestic policy council. He was a shoe-leather think-tanker, editor, and journalist by trade. He wanted to understand real people doing real work. During my West Wing interview, he didn’t want to talk about my philosophy or politics; he liked that I’d battled a recalcitrant school district for years while helping start a charter school for disadvantaged kids. In his free time, he rebuilt houses. He embedded with a combat unit during the war in Iraq and then wrote books and produced a documentary about it. A native of upstate New York, his most passionate stories were about manual labor or getting lost on an off-trail mountain hike. He is a boots-on-the-ground as well as a nose-in-the-books kind of guy.

 

Though he was often the smartest one in the room, he had the egalitarian good sense to never lust after a position in the White House and to be skeptical of those who did. After leaving federal service, he didn’t stick around Washington to become a lobbyist or cable news instigator. Instead, he was an executive at a historic woodworking company and worked in philanthropy. In total, he’s written more than 20 books on topics as varied as education, populism, food, and the family.

 

Our nation has an extraordinary ability to generate people like Sasse and Zinsmeister. In towns you’ve never heard of, there are terribly bright, high-energy, accomplished, patriotic Americans who love their communities and are willing to serve their nation. They are not the lawyers and technocrats who profit off Washington and never leave the confines of the Acela corridor. They are not angry commentators or aspiring influencers who thrive on social media melees without ever getting their hands dirty with real public service.

 

Federal governing would be stronger — and America’s public square would be healthier — if Washington’s top figures were sharp, gritty, serious, experienced individuals doing short tours inside the Beltway. Uncle Sam would better understand America, and America would better understand Uncle Sam. Our national leaders should not be a different species than county, city, or state leaders. They should just be our best who temporarily leave their communities to lend a hand in Washington.

 

The phrase “republican virtue” has fallen out of vogue, but it’s as important today as ever. We need people to think about the public good instead of private gain; to work quietly in public capacities, not shout for attention; to act in terms of duties instead of rights. Sasse and Zinsmeister have done themselves and America proud. They are highly talented, decent, patriotic citizens with full lives who dedicated a chapter to the nation’s business and then returned to other honorable pursuits. May they find strength and peace in their fights, and may we find more like them.

Passover Acknowledges Antisemitism. But It Does Not Center It.

By David Wolpe

Wednesday, April 01, 2026

 

Every rabbi—and, more broadly, every community leader—struggles with the question of antisemitism in both a professional and a personal register. If I give a sermon about the Sabbath, I will be greeted with polite nods and smiles. Speak about hatred and the rafters will ring. Conflict, danger, and hatred are, by their nature, arresting; they cut through the ambient noise of communal life. Our reaction to antisemitism is immediate, visceral, and impossible to ignore.

 

That reality presents an obvious temptation: to return again and again to antisemitism as a central organizing concern of Jewish life. Within the Jewish community, this is not merely a rhetorical question but an ongoing and often heated debate. How central should antisemitism be to our communal agenda? How does it compare in urgency to education, to internal cohesion, to spiritual growth, to the myriad responsibilities that attend any religious, ethnic, and—yes—tribal community? Is it the defining issue, or one issue among many?

 

I find myself holding a response—quite literally—in my hands. It is the Haggadah, the book that guides a Passover Seder. The rabbis who shaped the Haggadah some two millennia ago understood the depth of enmity Jews faced. But they did not permit it to overwhelm their spiritual sensitivities. The Haggadah is not a denial of antisemitism or an evasion of it, but a calibration of its place. Although the Haggadah is perhaps the best known work to Jewish laypeople, it is also a template for communal leadership.

 

The Haggadah’s most famous declaration is stark and unambiguous: In every generation, they rise against us to destroy us. This is not a metaphor. As former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban is said to have once written, “There are things in Jewish history too terrible to imagine, but none so terrible that they did not happen.” This line functions as both memory and warning, collapsing past and present into a single moral horizon. The Haggadah insists that Jewish vulnerability is a recurring feature of history. Who today can doubt that declaration?

 

At a climactic moment in the Seder, we open the door and recite a passage asking God to “pour out Your wrath upon the nations that do not know You.” Each year that moment is both emotionally raw and theologically charged. But we are not pleading for human vengeance; rather, we plead for divine justice. The anger is real; the retribution is not ours. The Haggadah teaches us to voice the pain of the community without letting anger or pain metastasize into self-destructive fury.

 

Paying homage to the pain of the past is well known to those who have attended a Seder. Yet the overwhelming majority of the text is devoted to other themes: liberation, education, memory, gratitude, and ultimately redemption. The narrative of oppression is the precondition of the story, but it is not the story itself.

 

The Seder begins not with denunciation but with invitation: Let all who are hungry come and eat. Before we remember our historical travails, what was done to us, we say who we are—a people mindful of those in need. Morality mixes with memory, for each is essential to the other.

 

The Haggadah is, above all, a teaching document. The Four Questions, each asking something about the anomalies of the Seder (e.g. “Why is this night different from all other nights”) are traditionally asked by the youngest present and frame the entire experience. The Seder is designed to provoke curiosity, to stimulate inquiry, to ensure transmission. The rabbis understood that transmission is both general and particular: The message endures but must be filtered through the ability and temperament of different students. The Four Children—the Wise, the Wicked, the Simple, and the one who does not yet know how to ask—are not a charming literary device. Each is provided with an answer, which together form a theory of education. Every child comes to the table differently, and the obligation of the teacher is not to deliver a uniform message but to find the point of entry particular to each learner. The text repeatedly insists on telling the story “to your child”—in language suited to this child, in this moment. Attention is a deep form of homage and even of love.

 

The Seder is about character formation. That is why the matzah is a central symbol—called the “bread of affliction,” it is also the bread of haste, of transition between slavery and freedom. The bitter herbs evoke suffering, but in the framework of redemption. Through all of these, the background of slavery is presupposed, but the experience of the Pesach is not focused on the agony of oppression. It is the road to redemption.

 

No more striking instance could be given of the philosophy of the Haggadah than its ending. It ends with songs—playful, repetitive, even whimsical. “Chad Gadya,” “Echad Mi Yodea”—these are children’s songs, placed at the end so that children will sustain their delight throughout the evening. The final declaration—Next year in Jerusalem—transcends anger and grievance and looks hopefully to a time when the world will not be convulsed with human suffering.

 

If we read only the line about enemies rising in every generation, we might conclude that the central task of leadership is vigilance against threats. As important as vigilance is, defending matters because there is something worth defending. The primary work of the community is not to fixate on its adversaries but to cultivate its own internal life—to educate, to transmit, to celebrate, to bind its members to one another and to a shared story of purpose.

 

A beautiful midrash (a rabbinic legend) on the Song of Songs makes this point. When God offers the Torah to Israel, the people are asked to provide guarantors—figures who will vouch for their commitment. They propose the patriarchs. God declines. They propose the prophets. God declines again. Only when Israel offers its children as guarantors does God accept. The future, not the past, secures the covenant. The burden of transmission falls not on the heroes of the past but on the living generation. The Haggadah embodies this insight. Its orientation toward children is not merely sentimental; it is strategic and theological.

 

To focus exclusively—or even predominantly—on antisemitism is to misread the lesson of Passover. The Haggadah leaves no doubt that antisemitism must be confronted and resisted. But the Jewish people are not about the hatred that had swirled around them; we did not survive because of animus but in spite of it. Judaism is the evidence that tradition and wisdom and covenant can keep a people alive for thousands of years.

 

The genius of the Haggadah is that it both remembers and teaches. It acknowledges danger and celebrates deliverance. It gives voice to pain and channels it toward a higher moral horizon. It insists on the reality of threat while refusing to allow that threat to monopolize the our imagination.

 

For those of us charged with leading communities today, the Haggadah is a roadmap. At each Seder we open the door in hopes of redemption, that Elijah the prophet will walk in and announce the coming of the Messiah. But Elijah’s failure to appear does not leave us with despair, but with the tools to build our lives and our world, and prepare to open the door again next year.

 

To hold a Haggadah is to hold more than a ritual text. It is holding the wisdom of our ancestors, reminding us that human enmity is not new, dangers have been faced before, and resilience, faith in our future, and trust in God have ever been the path forward.

Firing Line

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, April 03, 2026

 

A part of me grieves whenever anyone loses his or her job. So let me say something nice about Pam Bondi:

 

She may be the worst attorney general in American history, but surely not for long. The “I miss Joe Biden” era is already upon us; a year from now, when an even more horrifically servile goblin is inevitably atop the Justice Department, the “I miss Pam Bondi” era will be in full swing.

 

That’s not very nice, actually. Let me see if I can do better.

 

How’s this? While Bondi will be remembered for presiding over the ethical destruction of federal law enforcement, anyone else whom Donald Trump might have nominated for her position would have done the same. Remember, she was his second choice for attorney general after Matt Gaetz. Matt Gaetz.

 

As much of a travesty as her tenure was, travesty was baked into the cake when voters elected a postliberal kakistocracy vowing “retribution” in 2024. The utter corruption of the DOJ was the most foreseeable symptom of re-empowering a civic cancer like Trumpism, and Americans did it anyway. Blaming Bondi for what happened next is like a four-pack-a-day smoker cursing the tumor in his lung.

 

See? I can be nice when I want to be.

 

Bondi was the third attorney general nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate during his two terms. The first, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russiagate probe to avoid a conflict of interest. The president never forgave him for behaving ethically, eventually fired him, then foiled his political comeback by endorsing Tommy Tuberville in the 2020 Alabama Senate primary. The second, Bill Barr, also drew an ethical red line by contradicting Trump’s claims of widespread vote-rigging after the 2020 election. The president pushed him out, too, and would have ultimately handed the Justice Department over to conspiratorial stooge Jeffrey Clark if not for threats of a mutiny had he followed through.

 

Repeatedly, to his dismay, Trump has discovered that his choices to lead the Justice Department just aren’t quite dishonorably ruthless enough to satisfy him.

 

It happened with Bondi, too. Despite her seeming resolve to carry out any task he assigned to her, no matter how corrupt, the president reportedly complained frequently to aides “about her inability to prosecute the people he hates,” especially former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The DOJ did try (and continues to try) to indict both, but a good postliberal like Trump will never accept procedural excuses for failing to produce the results he wants. His old lawyer, the notoriously amoral Roy Cohn, would have found a way and not let any rule or ethical standard obstruct him.

 

That’s the standard Bondi was up against. The president continues to search for a new Cohn, for a sociopath whose loyalty to him is so total that not even the law can restrain it. Every political appointee who serves him makes a devil’s bargain of trading their soul for power, but agreeing to serve as his attorney general is the purest devil’s bargain there is.

 

That probably explains why Trump’s announcement yesterday about Bondi’s departure, half-heartedly alluding to some “much needed and important new job in the private sector,” had the air of Poochie dying on the way back to his home planet. The president is so bitterly disappointed that his latest AG couldn’t contrive some corrupt way to toss the targets of his vendettas in jail that he can’t pretend to care what happens to Bondi next. Where’s his Roy Cohn?

 

It’s always satisfying when unfit Trumpist toadies who abase themselves for public influence are stripped of it unceremoniously and exiled to disgraced obscurity. (You’re next, Kash.) But my schadenfreude at the Bondi news left me wondering why she got the axe while Pete Hegseth, who was also in the news yesterday, hasn’t.

 

Reverse DEI.

 

On Thursday, the secretary of defense told Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, that it’s time to retire despite the fact that George had more than a year left to serve in his position. Two other Army generals were also sent packing.

 

That’s a curious thing to do in the middle of a war with Iran, particularly at a moment when the president is threatening to target infrastructure like the power plants on which Iranian civilians rely. My first thought was a dark one: What if Hegseth ordered the Army to commit one of those war crimes he likes so much and was refused, prompting him to dismiss George and the others and to start searching for his own Roy Cohn inside the Pentagon?

 

But in a way, that scenario gives him too much credit. Hegseth has been purging high-ranking officers since practically his first day on the job; it wouldn’t take a momentous act of defiance for him to find grounds to dismiss someone as esteemed as George is. The true reason for George’s dismissal must be much stupider, I surmised.

 

And it is. It’s extremely stupid.

 

According to the New York Times, George and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll have recommended 29 officers for promotion to the rank of one-star general. Hegseth objected to four—two of them black, two of them women. He pressed George and Driscoll to remove them from the list, but they refused, believing all four merited the distinction due to their exemplary service. Two weeks ago, George requested a meeting with Hegseth to discuss that matter “as well as the general’s view that Mr. Hegseth was interfering unnecessarily in Army personnel decisions overall.” The secretary refused. Now George is out.

 

Is it believable that Pete Hegseth would upend the Army’s chain of command during wartime because he cares that much about blocking worthy nonwhite and female officers from promotion? Uh, yes. Entirely believable.

 

Half the reason he got this job was because of his Trump-pleasing culture-war tirades about “DEI” on cable news. Ridding the Pentagon of all vestiges of diversity programs was a top priority for him after being confirmed, and not just because it was one of the few initiatives a former junior officer who’s grossly out of his depth might logically feel comfortable undertaking. It’s an artifact of Hegseth’s broader postliberal delusion that all American failures are due to being too “soft”: If the military isn’t winning every war, it can only be because the rules of engagement are too restrictive or because the “woke” establishment keeps elevating supposedly undeserving blacks and women to positions of authority.

 

“Reverse DEI,” in which well-qualified officers of the wrong race or sex have their careers ruined by a grossly unqualified Fox News blowhard, was another foreseeable symptom of America’s Stage IV Trumpist cancer.

 

This morning, citing nine separate U.S officials, NBC News reported that Hegseth has blocked or delayed the promotions of more than a dozen black and/or female senior officers, “some of whom are seen as having been targeted because of their race, gender or perceived affiliation with Biden administration policies or officials.” Last month, sources told the Times that his chief of staff went as far as to inform Driscoll that the secretary opposed one officer’s promotion because “President Trump would not want to stand next to a black female officer at military events,” in the paper’s words.

 

Not a great look for a president who wouldn’t be in the White House right now if not for surprisingly strong support among nonwhite voters in 2024. Yet it’s Pam Bondi, not Pete Hegseth, who’s at home today wondering if there’s room for one more newly unemployed Trump apparatchik on the right-wing vaudeville circuit. Why is that?

 

Is Pete next?

 

There may be some truth to the idea that the president finds scapegoating women more appealing than scapegoating men. It would be characteristic of Trump to conclude that his support is plummeting because he’s perceived as too “weak” when the obvious truth, per his polling on the Iran war, is the opposite.

 

If so, no one in the Cabinet is at greater risk right now than Tulsi Gabbard, and no one is safer than the preposterous he-man tryhard Hegseth.

 

The problem with the sexism theory is that the president is reportedly thinking of dropping the axe on some of his male deputies as well. FBI Director Kash Patel could be on the chopping block after embarrassing the White House repeatedly, as might Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. If you believe journalist Michael Wolff (always a risky proposition), Trump has also been asking confidants whether they think Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “crazy.” (Spoiler: yes.)

 

Even Hegseth himself might not be safe for much longer, as juicy leaks about him having supposedly underestimated Iran’s capabilities are dribbling into the press. Unless the war ends much more favorably for the United States than seems likely, the president will need someone afterward to blame—Israel perhaps, Europe certainly, and Pete Hegseth possibly. The sooner the better, too, as Trump’s dwindling political capital will make Senate confirmation more difficult the longer he waits.

 

There’s circumstantial evidence that the defense secretary is worried about it.

 

One administration official told the Washington Post that Randy George wasn’t the real target of Thursday’s purge. “Hegseth can’t fire [Army Secretary Dan] Driscoll,” the source alleged, “so he’s going to make his life hell” by removing his allies, of which George was one. Driscoll is an old friend of Vice President J.D. Vance, was tapped in lieu of Hegseth as a liaison to Ukraine in peace negotiations last fall, and has been touted as a potential replacement as defense secretary previously. Perhaps fearing that his job security has grown precarious, Hegseth might be moving to marginalize his likeliest successor.

 

So maybe that’s the answer to why Bondi got the boot while Hegseth continues to lick boots at Cabinet meetings. He’s on his way out the door, too, but Trump doesn’t want to fire him while combat is ongoing lest it be taken as an admission that the war is a mistake. As soon as things wind down, the secretary will be back on Fox hawking ED pills or whatever.

 

I don’t think that explains everything, though. There are meaningful differences between the two, attitudinal and structural.

 

Ruthless people.

 

Pam Bondi always seemed to speak MAGA as a second language. There’s an unmistakable sadistic relish to the rhetoric used by true-blue Trump disciples that the mere opportunists among them lack, and which usually can’t be faked. It’s the difference between Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio: Rubio dutifully mouths the words expected of him, but his eyes never shine at the promise of cruelty like Miller’s do.

 

Bondi’s eyes never seemed to do so either. She was a more or less respectable person 10 years ago and was willing to forfeit that respectability for the sake of power, but she never evinced the telltale joie de vivre about persecuting the president’s adversaries. The awkward spectacle of her testimony before the House in February is the supreme proof. Try as she might to impress her boss with sick burns of the Democrats questioning her, she seemed pained on some level by how undignified her behavior was. Trump supporters sensed her discomfort, too, I suspect, as her forced attempt at crowd-pleasing didn’t seem to please them overly much.

 

Hegseth, the war-crimes enthusiast, speaks MAGA fluently. The delight he seems to take in ruthlessness and brutality toward enemies feels authentic, as does his obsequiousness toward Trump. Bondi’s toadying to the president always came off like calculated brown-nosing aimed at protecting her job, whereas Hegseth’s has the appearance of earnest power-worship. And while there’s no reason to think the DOJ’s institutional culture will improve with Bondi gone, there is reason to think the Pentagon’s might once Hegseth departs. His malign anti-DEI jihad against black and women officers may not be as high of a priority for his successor, particularly if it’s Driscoll.

 

Trump sensed all of that, perhaps, and reasoned that replacing Bondi would be easy enough, as there’s no shortage of soulless, legally trained careerists on the right. But finding a heartfelt fascist to lead the military who’s (very questionably) qualified to do the job and confirmable by the Senate? Much harder.

 

Bondi also had a structural disadvantage. The department she led was doomed to face more problems carrying out Trump’s commands than the one led by Hegseth.

 

The Pentagon answers to the judiciary in matters of law, of course, but most of its business is conducted under the auspices of discretionary executive military authority with which judges are reluctant to meddle. Not so for the DOJ. If they want to inflict pain on you, they need evidence, the cooperation of grand juries and trial juries, and sufficient diligence about proper procedure to satisfy the skeptical eyes of trial and appellate courts.

 

If Pete Hegseth wants to inflict pain on you, he orders a missile strike on your fishing boat in the Caribbean.

 

Go figure that a gorilla-channel-watching authoritarian like Trump would be pleased with the performance of the Defense Department as it mercilessly imposes his will on enemies and disappointed at the Justice Department’s failure to do the same. That’s the essence of postliberalism, really, wanting the law to carry out the leader’s wishes as ruthlessly and efficiently as the military does. The Bill of Rights set up Bondi for failure with the president in a way it didn’t for Hegseth.

 

And there’s surely some import in the fact that, to Trump, the Pentagon is a sword whereas the DOJ is supposed to be both sword and shield. It’s supposed to target his enemies and protect him ruthlessly from any legal or political trouble gathering on the horizon. Sessions’ great failure in the president’s eyes was letting the Russiagate probe persist instead of using his authority as AG to shut it down. Bondi’s great failure was neglecting to somehow suppress the Epstein files, something the president has complained about repeatedly in private.

 

Pete Hegseth’s duties don’t require him to be a “fixer” for his boss. Bondi’s did: Trump obviously views the Justice Department as his personal law firm, right down to having his picture on the building. She did her best to protect him from the consequences of his actions, up to and including asserting his right to simply stop enforcing laws he disagrees with, but in the end she couldn’t fix his Epstein problem.

 

Roy Cohn would have, you know. She wasn’t ruthless enough.

 

The replacements.

 

Whoever replaces her will need to be.

 

Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA administrator, is being talked up for the job, but Deputy AG Todd Blanche plainly wants it. He sure seems to be auditioning for it, at least. Yesterday he went on Fox News to declare that no more Epstein documents will be released, and last week at CPAC he rejoiced in the fact that every person at the DOJ who worked on a criminal case against Donald Trump has now been purged.

 

That’s just the sort of sleazy nihilist “fixer” the president is looking for to lead federal law enforcement. “No one dedicated to the rule of law should have any interest in serving as attorney general in this administration,” National Review’s Ed Whelan warned yesterday. No wonder Blanche is interested.

 

There’s also been idle chitchat about mega-corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton being plucked from his Senate primary race and offered the job (although he’s almost certainly unconfirmable). Or Sen. Mike Lee, a formerly respected constitutional stickler turned postliberal social media troll. Or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s nearing the end of his term and of his political relevance if he doesn’t score another splashy position soon.

 

They’re all qualified under the Whelan standard, I think, as all three would understand Trump’s post-Bondi expectation that the law is no excuse for failing to carry out the president’s wishes. DeSantis in particular desperately needs a way to worm himself back into the MAGA right’s good graces before 2028, especially with Vance accumulating political baggage from the Iran war by the hour. He’d be eager to parade his ruthlessness in the job, as enthusiastic as Bondi was ambivalent.

 

But if he runs up against some ethical red line he can’t stomach crossing, fear not: He’ll be canned too.

 

“They can never fire the guy they need to fire,” The Bulwark’s Will Saletan said yesterday of Bondi’s departure, accurately enough. But that’s the way Americans wanted it. Our four-pack-a-day country knew Trump couldn’t be held criminally accountable for what he might do in a second term and wouldn’t be held politically accountable by cowardly Senate Republicans via impeachment—and decided to put him in charge of enforcing America’s laws anyway, in a job from which he can’t be dismissed. Now our lungs are full of tumors. There will be more.

Western Europe Gets Thrown From Its High Horse

By Seth Mandel

Monday, March 30, 2026

 

Once upon a time it was noteworthy that Jews in Eastern Europe felt safer than Jews in Western Europe. Now it is a mundane fact.

 

In the time it went from noteworthy to mundane, October 7 happened. And from October 7 to now, the collapse of Jewish security in Britain proved not only that Eastern European Jews were justified in feeling safer but that Western Europe’s once-earned sense of democratic superiority is fading.

 

It also provides a fair amount of evidence that different countries’ public discourse on Israel is a key reason for the disparity.

 

Eight years ago, Evelyn Gordon wrote a Commentary post about this, based on the regular survey conducted by the Joint Distribution Committee: “In the east, a whopping 96 percent of respondents felt safe, while only four percent felt unsafe. In the West, 76 percent felt safe, and 24 percent felt unsafe. Respondents from places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania—countries routinely accused of having anti-Semitic, borderline fascist governments—felt safer than Jews in liberal countries like France and Germany by a 20-point margin.”

 

Gordon pointed to evidence from the survey that strongly suggested a correlation between the way Israel was portrayed in each country’s media—a general stand-in for public discourse, though arguably not public sentiment (U.S. media is overwhelmingly, ferociously anti-Israel, but the American public is not)—and the level of anti-Semitism.

 

Gordon granted that this correlation was speculative. The JDC’s most recent such survey, published in 2024, certainly buttresses that idea. From the survey:

 

Concern about antisemitism increased in both regions, with leaders across the continent now regarding combatting antisemitism as their top priority. The rise in concern, though, was much greater in the West (from 77% to 86% vs. 50% to 55%.), and while Westerners ranked it the most serious threat, Easterners ranked it only 7th.

 

Westerners were also more than twice as concerned as Easterners about terrorism and violence against Jews as a serious threat (72% vs. 34%). Correspondingly, Easterners overwhelmingly reported (95%) that their cities remain safe for Jews, in contrast to a marked deterioration in the West.

 

There was one more data point in the 2024 report that caught my attention and, I believe, deserves much wider discussion:

 

“[L]eaders in the West give higher priority to functioning as a pressure group in national politics, scoring it a 7.1 (vs. 6.8 overall), substantially higher than their Eastern counterparts’ 5.7.”

 

In the past, one might have argued that this discrepancy is in part due to the fact that governments in Western Europe are more open to being pressured by Jewish and pro-Israel groups. But that is obviously not the case today, when Western European governments (Germany excepted, and for exceptional reasons) could not possibly care less what their Jews have to say or how the governments’ rhetoric and policies make Jews unsafe.

 

Indeed, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and the leftists in its orbit have shown an almost sadistic pleasure in raising the temperature of the rhetoric against the Jewish state even as the level of violence against Britain’s Jews increases along with it.

 

The recent London firebombing of ambulances owned by a Jewish charity—ambulances that serve all people, and therefore whose disabling might very well cost Jewish or non-Jewish lives—seems to have made the anti-Semitism crisis undeniable even to the sleepy establishment and the Jew-baiting media. But it has inspired exactly zero practical improvements from Keir Starmer and his merry band of incompetents.

 

Starmer is very sorry all of this is happening to the Jews, of course. Or at least he says he is. Emmanuel Macron in France is slightly better, but only slightly. The French do take security as a general issue more seriously than British Labourites, but neither country’s government has shown a desire to tamp down state-encouraged anti-Zionism and therefore prevent the need for that increased physical security in the first place.

 

Which is to say, plainly: You can publicly combat anti-Zionism and the demonization of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, or you can watch ambulances get blown up and synagogues attacked and Jewish businesses picketed and vandalized.

 

In the parts of Europe where governments don’t kowtow to violent anti-Zionist mobs and don’t demonize Israel, this is far less of a problem.

 

Which brings us back to the reason for the discrepancy between Eastern and Western European Jews’ prioritization of acting as a political pressure group. It’s less important to influence the government’s rhetoric and policies on Israel in the East, because those policies need less influencing.

 

One can, correctly, assign the term “authoritarian” to Eastern European leaders much more readily than to Western European ones. But what does that mean for the Jews of London who are arrested for literally showing up in public wearing identifiably Jewish items because it is considered provocative to the marching Hamasniks? An Israeli-owned factory was broken into, vandalized, and had property destroyed by sledgehammer-wielding “anti-Zionists” who were acquitted at trial despite admitting to their actions because the jury sympathized with their desire to attack Jewish sites. What kind of democracy is that? Democracy for whom?

 

Extend the blessings of democracy to the Jews, and perhaps you can claim some bragging rights over Hungary or Poland. But at the moment, Western Europe does not, in fact, offer substantially more freedom to its Jews than Eastern Europe, and it often offers far less security.

 

Let’s call this what it is: democratic backsliding. And let’s be clear on what to call the engine driving this backsliding: anti-Semitism. Any reasonable way forward begins by admitting the the truth of those two statements—and then actually, you know, doing something about it.

 

 

Whom Have Trump’s Tariffs Helped?

By John R. Puri

Thursday, April 02, 2026

 

The Cato Institute has a great analysis today, on the anniversary of President Trump’s “liberation day” speech, of the effects of Trump’s tariff regimes after one year. We can see the costs of the tariffs clearly:

 

·         Higher Prices: The 2025 tariffs were passed through to American buyers at a rate as high as 96 percent, reversing the downward price trajectory of both imported and domestic goods. Today, prices of retail goods are around 6 percent higher than they would have been under the pre-tariff trend.

 

·         Greater Uncertainty and Complexity: The Trade Policy Uncertainty Index hit the highest level ever recorded in 2025, as tariff rates and categories were constantly changed. Overlapping tariff regimes also piled red tape onto U.S. importers.

 

·         International Isolation: As America cuts them off, other countries are actively deepening trade ties with one another. The United States has effectively ceded the field of good-faith trade diplomacy, leaving its economy less interconnected and letting competitors like China and the European Union fill the gap.

 

On the flip side, there is little apparent evidence of how the tariffs have helped the U.S. economy:

 

·         Declining Manufacturing Employment: America has many fewer manufacturing workers today than on liberation day. Employment in the sector has been falling since 2023, so job losses aren’t novel, but tariffs certainly have not led to a manufacturing resurgence as proponents promised. Investment in new factories also continued to decline last year, so tariffs have not even demonstrated that they will create many manufacturing jobs in the future.

 

·         Steady Trade Deficit: The trade deficit has no effect on Americans’ incomes or welfare, but reducing it was a stated aim of President Trump. Yet the measure barely budged in 2025, and the deficit in goods actually increased from 2024.

 

·         Stagnant Foreign Investment and Economic Growth: Despite all of Trump’s fantastical claims of money pouring into America thanks to trade deals, quarterly foreign direct investment has fallen since April 2025. Worse still, 70 percent of last year’s foreign direct investment came in the form of retained corporate earnings — not new investments — compared with just 20 percent in 2016. Economic growth has also declined slightly, so tariffs have not, in fact, created the “strongest economy in history.”

 

When we broaden our view of employment to include all blue-collar jobs, not just manufacturing, the picture is even worse. Blue-collar employment numbers turned negative in 2025 after years of gains, driven by sudden losses in transportation and warehousing and stagnation in construction jobs:

 

 

It’s possible that job losses would have occurred without the tariffs. But logistics and construction are both heavily exposed to the added costs tariffs impose. Duties have raised the prices of merchandise, potentially reducing consumer and business demand that requires transportation to meet. They have also increased the cost of building materials.

 

To be fair, there are at least two groups of people that tariffs have helped: lobbyists and lawyers. The Cato Institute notes that 2,000 importers have filed suit to “obtain refunds for more than $160 billion in tariffs paid to the federal government” that the Supreme Court struck down as illegal, plus interest. Meanwhile, the number of clients represented by firms lobbying for tariff-related issues jumped to 382 last year from just 12o the previous year. The Rust Belt may still be struggling, but K Street is doing peachy.

 

Is that whom protectionists were trying to help by taxing economic efficiency? If not: What were Trump’s tariffs supposed to do, and why haven’t they done it yet?