How Trump Killed Conservatism

By Peter Wehner

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

The “Make America Great Again” movement is the beating heart of the GOP, the dominant political party in America—which makes MAGA the most important political movement in the world. And that is why some recent developments within the MAGA movement are so disquieting.

 

Earlier this month, the College Republicans of America, one of the oldest youth organizations affiliated with the Republican Party, hired Kai Schwemmer as the group’s political director. Schwemmer has past ties to the white supremacist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and his Groyper movement, a loose network of white-nationalist activists and internet trolls who gravitate around online influencers, primarily Fuentes.

 

College Republicans of America President Martin Bertao defended the hire on X, writing that he had reflected on the decision and chose “to apologize … to absolutely NOBODY,” adding, “CRA will never back down to the WOKE mob!” For his part, Schwemmer told Fox News Digital that he and the College Republicans are “done feeding into the ‘eat your own’ cancel culture paradigm of division that only seeks to advantage the left.”

 

Schwemmer is hardly an isolated case. Last year, Politico reported on leaked Telegram chats spanning seven months from leaders of Young Republican chapters in several states—chairs, vice chairs, and committee members exchanging racist and anti-Semitic messages.

 

While some figures in the GOP criticized the comments, Vice President Vance came to the defense of the Young Republicans, saying that the “reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys.” Vance added, “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do.”

 

Several of the worst offenders were in their 30s.

 

A few months later the Miami Herald revealed that leaked chats from a Republican group at Florida International University showed participants using racial slurs, repeatedly expressing a desire to violently attack Black people, and describing women as “whores.” The text messages contained jokes about gas chambers, slavery, and rape. There was also plenty of praise for Adolf Hitler. Such praise appeared so regularly that at one point, the group was renamed “Nazi Heaven.”

 

These incidents are evidence of the normalization of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric among younger Republican activists.

 

Among the older generations, a ferocious, intra-MAGA civil war is being waged between high-profile media and political personalities, including people such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Matt Walsh on one side and Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin on the other. There’s also Laura Loomer versus Elon Musk, and Musk versus Steve Bannon, and Bannon versus Dinesh D’Souza, and D’Souza versus Carlson. On and on it goes, with no end in sight.

 

The most recent bitter recriminations center on the Iran war and Israel. Consider an exchange between two former friends and Fox News colleagues, Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly.

 

Levin, a popular radio-talk-show host who strongly supports both the Iran war and Israel, took to social media last Sunday to describe Kelly, a critic of both the war and of Israel, as an “emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck” who is “utterly toxic.” Kelly, who hosts one of the most-listened-to podcasts in America, responded by calling him “Micropenis Mark Levin,” and by claiming, “He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.” Levin soon fired back. “Busy Sunday morning for Megyn Kelly,” he wrote. “She wakes up and has ‘micropenis’ on her mind. Suffice to say, if it talks like a harlot, and posts like a harlot, it’s … well, you know the rest. Shalom!”

 

Then Donald Trump weighed in, posting a defense of Levin on Truth Social, calling him “a truly Great American Patriot” who is “far smarter than those who criticize him.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, sided with Kelly. “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis,” she wrote. “It’s the most deserved insult and I don’t care if it’s vulgar.”

 

The MAGA movement, like other radical political movements before it, is eating its own.

 

***

 

In January 2016 I was a lifelong Republican, having served in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. Yet that month I wrote in The New York Times that Republicans should not vote for Trump under any circumstances, even if his opponent was Hillary Clinton. I described him as a “virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness.” But I went beyond that.

 

Trump’s nomination, I said, would threaten the future of the Republican Party, because although Clinton might defeat it at the polls, only Trump could redefine it. I added this:

 

Mr. Trump’s presence in the 2016 race has already had pernicious effects, but they’re nothing compared with what would happen if he were the Republican standard-bearer. The nominee, after all, is the leader of the party; he gives it shape and definition. If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.

 

What we have seen in the decade since is the realization of those worst fears. To be clear, the MAGA movement’s rancidity isn’t due to only Trump. The impulses now on display within MAGA existed long before he entered politics. But those impulses were, for the most part, confined to the fringes. Republican presidents and other political leaders did what they could to keep it that way.

 

But from the moment Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, he sought to cultivate and encourage the ugliest passions within the GOP, dousing the embers of hate with kerosene. Among Trump’s most consequential legacies has been his deformation of the temperament and disposition of virtually the entire Republican Party. It has been a remarkable shift to observe: The very qualities that early on made Republicans, including evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, uneasy about Trump are those they have since come to accept and embrace. He rewired their moral circuitry.

 

I don’t mean to suggest the Republican Party pre-Trump was anything close to perfect. Like any political party, it had weaknesses, and its record was mixed. It was hardly the ideal embodiment of conservatism; no political party could be. But under Trump, the GOP has become a profoundly different, and a far more malicious, party. Within the Republican Party, from top to bottom, Trump has made cruelty and transgressiveness cool. And in the process, he killed American conservatism.

 

Trump has overturned many long-standing public-policy commitments of conservatives—supporting free trade, reforming entitlements, supporting foreign assistance to save lives and advance American interests, standing by NATO, and standing against Russian oppression at home and aggression abroad. But the deeper and more lasting damage he has done is to conservatism as a sensibility.

 

***

 

One of the most important figures in the history of conservatism is the 18th-century Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, his most famous work, Burke warned about the dangers of a revolutionary zeal aimed at completely redesigning a civilization. Burke rightly feared it would unleash destructive passions and horrifying violence. He believed reason alone was not ennobling. He warned, too, that if “the decent drapery of life” was torn off, barbarism would follow.

 

A few years later, in Letters on a Regicide Peace, Burke wrote, “Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.”

 

Burke believed that manners and mores, customs and norms, codes of conduct, and beauty itself made life more humane. Burke had his critics, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who believed that Burke’s argument on behalf of the beauty of tradition sought to make oppression and inequality tolerable. But Burke’s key insight was that stripping civilizations of their beauty and sense of reverence would lead to spiritual impoverishment and, eventually, to terror. And like his contemporary Adam Smith, Burke believed that the cultivation of human sympathy, including the capacity to feel the pain of others, was essential to a good society.

 

A century and a half after Burke, the influential British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, in his essay “On Being Conservative,” argued that conservatism “was not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.” To Oakeshott, to be conservative is to be inclined to think and behave in a certain manner. The conservative disposition, Oakeshott said, “breeds attachment and affection.”

 

“The man of this disposition,” he wrote, “understands it to be the business of a government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down. And all this, not because passion is vice and moderation virtue, but because moderation is indispensable if passionate men are to escape being locked in an encounter of mutual frustration.”

 

British conservatism is somewhat different than American conservatism; the latter has traditionally been somewhat more forward-leaning, a bit more rights-based and ideological, and focused more on the individual as opposed to the community. But there has been a lot of overlap, including respect for tradition and order, the importance of institutions, the rule of law, and the complexity of human society, along with a wariness of radical change. And both recognize the importance of the education of character, the cultivation of decency, and the taming of the dark passions.

 

MAGA is not just antithetical to conservatism; it is at war with it.

 

It’s important to acknowledge that many rank-and-file MAGA voters haven’t knowingly rejected the conservatism I’m describing; they voted for Trump and attached themselves to the MAGA movement for a variety of reasons, including economic dislocation and feelings of cultural displacement. But it long ago became clear what they signed up for. At the core of the MAGA project and Trumpism is disruption and destruction, the delegitimization and razing of institutions, and the brutalization of opponents. Its leader, the president, abuses power, hurts the innocent, and mocks the dead before their families have even begun to grieve.

 

On Saturday, minutes after the death of Robert Mueller was reported, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” This comes 15 weeks after Trump lashed out at the Hollywood actor and director Rob Reiner—“I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned”—after Reiner and his wife were stabbed to death in their home.

 

The MAGA ethic celebrates dehumanization. It is lawless, crude, and combative. Its entire ecosystem—social media, podcasts, and talk radio—is committed to spreading lies and conspiracy theories, to stoking rage and resentment. The disciples of the MAGA movement define themselves by what they hate much more than by what they love. They pursue culture wars with revolutionary zeal even as they vandalize our civic culture.

 

If a public figure today talked the way conservatives once talked—about the virtue of compassion; about the importance of good character in our leaders and resisting our baser impulses; about the need to encourage courtesy and decency, and refine manners and morals—they would be mocked as woke, as weak, as a “cuck.”

 

The MAGA movement represents the betrayal of the temperamental tradition of conservatism. And as a result of the disfigurement of the Republican Party, conservatism is politically homeless. That is a terrible loss for the GOP, and a greater loss for America.

 

Even people who don’t identify as conservatives and see blind spots within its tradition can, I think, acknowledge the contributions of conservatism at its best—its embrace of epistemic humility and skepticism of utopian thinking; the importance it places on institutions and civil society; the priority it places on character formation; and its instinct to preserve when others are pushing for radical change. The conservative scholar Yuval Levin says that conservatism begins with a vision of what we love in the world and is driven by the defense of what is best about the world.

 

Trump and the key figures within the MAGA movement rejected conservatism not because they failed to understand conservatism well enough but because they understood it all too well. If conservatism is to ever again find a home in the GOP, it will be because the party decides that what is true and good and beautiful is indeed worth conserving. Right now the Republican Party is light-years away from that, and those who cherish conservatism should say so.

The Party of Psychological Distress

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

As Axios reporters Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein amusingly put it, the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential aspirants are kicking off their respective campaigns in a “striking way.” Their introductory pitch to potential Democratic primary voters leans heavily into the “childhood traumas” they experienced, including “childhood resentments, family chaos, and fighting with their parents.”

 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote extensively about his “unhappy childhood home” in his recently published memoir, Where We Keep the Light On. The experience taught him how to deal with emotional distress and keep it contained. “I had to anticipate a problem or a pain point before there was a blowup,” he wrote.

 

Likewise, California Governor Gavin Newsom also let America in on the psychological abuse he reports experiencing in his youth. The governor recalled how his mother tried to acclimate him to a life of being “average,” how his father’s absence scarred him, and the emotional pain associated with his mother’s assisted suicide.

 

As he prepares his own against-all-odds bid for the White House, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker let the country in on the anguish he felt at the deaths of both of his parents before he turned 18, leaving him orphaned but also “extraordinarily wealthy” as the heir to the “Hyatt hotel fortune.”

 

“Not every likely 2028 candidate is leaning into family trauma,” the reporters note. Never one for stoicism, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker emphasizes the “transcendent love” he received from his parents in childhood. That may be admirably honest, but it’s not going to get you far in a party that prizes most highly a plausible claim to victimization. At this point, the experience of psychological distress is so common among self-identified liberals that being well adjusted is liable to be regarded as a mark of inauthenticity.

 

In the spring of 2023, Columbia University epidemiologists found that rates of depression among students, while high across the board, were “increasing most sharply among progressive students.” Since then, similar studies have also concluded “that the rise in psychological distress is significantly more pronounced among self-identified liberals than conservatives of both sexes.”

 

Explanations for this phenomenon abound. David Brooks, until recently a New York Times columnist, postulated a few, including the extent to which the left’s hostility to “the established order of things” and detachment from the durable social bonds of marriage and community contribute to their dissatisfaction. Beyond that, “on personality tests liberals tend to score higher on openness to experience but also higher on neuroticism,” he wrote in 2023. “People who score high on neuroticism are vigilant against potential harms, but they also have to live with a lot of negative emotions — like sadness and anxiety.”

 

Brooks has that right. In fact, one’s predisposition toward neurosis may be a leading indicator of one’s politics, and not the other way around. As psychology writer Eric Dolan wrote of a recent study published in the International Social Science Journal, “young people with higher neuroticism may turn to liberal ideology because it often critiques hyper-competition and advocates for social safety nets that offer protection against risk.”

 

Abusive parents (and siblings) and broken homes can leave a lasting psychological impact. Estrangement from the moderating influence of family is a source of trauma. That’s just one reason why it was so ill-considered when the activist left did its utmost to advocate dissociating from one’s loved ones if they voted the wrong way.

 

“Even the New York Times recently published an essay titled, ‘Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,’ in which former Obama speechwriter David Litt wrestles with whether to stay in contact with his conservative brother-in-law,” the clinical psychologist Chloe Carmichael wrote last year:

 

The piece reads less like someone awakening to the dangers of ideological cutoffs and more like someone reluctantly conceding a grudge. That this question — whether to maintain ties with family — was posed at all in a national newspaper shows how far the goalposts have shifted. Ostracizing loved ones over votes once seemed extreme. Now it’s mainstream content.

 

It stands to reason that if you want to be taken seriously by Democratic primary voters, any sensible consultant might advise you to meet those voters where they live. And where they live is a fetid quagmire of anxiety punctuated occasionally by crippling bouts of depression.

 

There’s nothing unusual about presidential candidates leading in the biographical phase of their campaigns with the hardships they encountered throughout their lives. Typically, the story those candidates are telling is one of endurance and fortitude. They overcame those challenges, after all, and look at where they are now. Today’s Democrats are not emphasizing how they managed to overcome their hardships, if they overcame them at all. Rather, those events and the misery that accompanied them have come to define these candidates even in adulthood.

 

If there’s anything the average Democratic primary voter can identify with, it’s that.

Lefty Influencers Embrace Poverty Tourism on Havana Junket

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

 

Ladies and gentlemen, joy is back again. While the rest of America was nervously eyeing shipping reports from the Strait of Hormuz, some of the worst people you know decided the time was right to draw the media world’s attention to the one target on Marco Rubio’s (s)hit list the United States hasn’t used military force against yet: Cuba. And what fantastic timing they have chosen.

 

No doubt concluding that it’s too late for Venezuela or Iran, the infamous communist “anti-war” group Code Pink has decided it is time to raise awareness about the looming imperialist threat posed by the United States to its humble authoritarian neighbor. (The United States has choked off Cuba’s oil supply in recent months via tariff threats.) To that end, it gathered together the West’s most annoying young leftists — among the American subset Hasan Piker, Isra Hirsi (daughter of Ilhan Omar), and the sartorially obnoxious editor of Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson — for a big junket to Havana. They were going there to raise the consciousness of the online masses, to see just how oppressed this beautiful nation is by Uncle Sam, and presumably to also engage in some light third-worldist cosplay.

 

The “Nuestra America Convoy” was also theoretically supposed to bring humanitarian supplies and food along with it — a page ripped from the Gaza Flotilla playbook, in other words. But its real purpose — as far as the participants were concerned, at least — was to give hundreds of well-connected and compensated influencers access to the creature comforts the Cuban regime historically doles out to its privileged guests: being carted around to restaurants, concerts, and VIP meetups, put up in Havana’s Gran Hotel (the city’s lone five-star lodging), and given carefully guided tours. Why, the brave convoy members were even given a special performance by “anti-colonialist” Northern Irish rap-rock act Kneecap! (I had to double-check here to make sure this wasn’t a case of the communist regime momentarily reverting to its natural preference for torture.)

 

And because these “influencers” are, to the last of them, obnoxious self-promoting narcissists, the story of the visit is no longer about the Cuban regime or an oil embargo. It’s about the hilariously oblivious poverty tourism of the leftist influencer class. Witness pampered pink-haired ladies as they snap photos of unemployed Cubans from the comfort of their air-conditioned tour bus! Witness Hasan Piker, off to visit the barrios of Havana while dressed in a $690 short-sleeved beach shirt!

 

Things got even more gloriously ironic when power went out across almost the entire island of Cuba on Saturday — except for the one hotel in Havana that Nuestra America Convoy VIPs were staying at. The Castroite regime called forth security reinforcements to guard the safety of its foreign guests, should rampaging protesters have decided to converge upon the one place in the entire city left with internet, air-conditioning, and electric light. And Hasan Piker, podcasting with flawless internet from one of the few functioning hotspots on the entire island, understood whom to blame: America. “The [U.S.] government makes it illegal for us to stay where we want in Cuba. We have to stay in five-star hotels.”

 

Current Affairs mayordomo Nathan J. Robinson, always the refined aesthete, found the proper framing as he adjusted his cravat: “The blackout here in Cuba is eerie and disturbing. Whole streets with zero light, every window dark, and then you see shapes moving in the darkness and realize people are trying to live their lives. I cannot believe how cruel this US policy is. We could stop this.”

 

I have an alternative proposal, Nathan: First you leave your luxury hotel, and then the Cuban regime can end censorship, empty its jails of political prisoners, and hold free and fair elections. But of course accepting that deal would defeat the point for leftists of supporting Cuba, which has never been about helping the Cuban people as actual people — about improving their measurable quality of life — but rather about the victory of Marxist protagonists against capitalist antagonists.

 

Until then, I hope the power stays on for all those lefty influencers on their Cuba junket, even as it unavoidably fails for the actual citizens of the country they’re touring. It feels like orthodox Marxism to me: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” May their podcasts all stream seamlessly: These people will only humiliate themselves further if given the opportunity. But they should remember why they are allowed to speak while all around them are forced into silence. Not just because God is a punishing comedian who specializes in gallows humor, but because they are being paid to perpetuate a fraud whose widespread suffering they are perfectly capable of seeing.

 

Do I Have to Talk about Joe Kent?

 

No, I don’t. You know the story already. Last week Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. (Bet you didn’t know it even existed — but that’s a gripe for another day.) My editor in chief has already spoken eloquently enough for me in the above link. So I’m moving on, on the grounds of “Obvious Troll Is Obvious” if nothing else.

 

This was the sort of lunatic result Trump was destined to provoke from the moment he forced a GOP Senate to confirm Joe Kent, who despite his service record always came across as Alex Jones with a more chiseled jaw and less mature hairline. Put bluntly, the only reason Trump ever supported this guy is because he “looked the part” and was running in 2022 to primary a Republican (Jaime Herrera Beutler) who had voted to impeach him in 2020. That didn’t work out well, either in Washington State’s third congressional district or in Washington, D.C.’s bloated post-9/11 alphabet soup counterterrorism octopus. Now it’s up to Tucker Carlson to reap the poisoned fruits of promoting a madman to nominal public responsibility, and the Trump administration to regret sowing its seeds in the first place.

 

I will only point out that every aspect of Joe Kent’s political career has been predictable from start to finish (and now, afterlife). It is a tale of serial failure — fumbling away a Republican congressional district (twice!) due to crankishness, scoring an administration gig as an act of pity/patronage, resigning in a public huff once better options surface — and Kent has naturally cultivated the sorts of “outsider” media relationships to match. (See: the entirely predictable circle of podcast appearances Kent is now making.)

 

That’s it, that’s all. Well, that and this: I’d also bet a shiny nickel that Joe Kent has, since the day he was confirmed in July 2025, been leaking like a sieve to the same sorts of people whose shows he is now appearing on. Trump always hires the best.

Trump’s Giant Face Is Everywhere

By Gal Beckerman

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

Strolling through the capital these days, you can’t go far without encountering an image of the president’s face. It drapes down over the front of the Department of Labor building, and peeks out from behind the trees that cluster at the entrance to the Department of Justice. What is the expression playing out on his lips, magnified to a hundred times their actual size? There is something of a Mona Lisa quality to this particular photo of Donald Trump. He could be scowling, or maybe slyly smiling. His glowering eyes, though, are less enigmatic; they seem to follow the pedestrians scurrying around the city from above.

 

The U.S. Department of Labor building, where Trump shares face time with Theodore Roosevelt. Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

The U.S. Institute of Peace, stamped with a new name. Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

   The rollout of these banners, and the placement of Trump’s name in front of those of institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace, continue the president’s long history of shameless branding (see: products as varied as Trump steaks and Trump University). Except in this case the brand is being emblazoned on federal institutions that Trump himself does not own—for example, the Department of Agriculture. Last May, a 31-foot banner with that same brooding portrait hung (temporarily) down the side of the USDA building next to one depicting Abraham Lincoln, who established the department. The display, accompanied by the motto Growing America Since 1862, reportedly cost taxpayers $16,400.

 

The festooning of his face and name all over D.C. might be Trump’s personal way of compensating for the disappearance of his name from New York City projects—including a golf course, skating rinks, and a number of buildings—but it is also consistent with a predilection common among authoritarian leaders. You don’t need to equate Trump with Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong to recognize a shared desire to loom over their citizens from a variety of public places. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s portrait was everywhere, from the public square to the “red corner” in people’s homes. These pictures had the sacred quality of religious icons. In his book The Stalin Cult, the historian Jan Plamper described a group of students, including some World War II veterans, who flipped the Stalin poster in their dorm to face the wall before talking candidly about their wartime experience. The image of the leader was meant to inspire fear and reverence, to appear simultaneously distant and omnipresent—a remote father figure whose gaze could not be escaped.

 

Trump stares out from a corner of the headquarters of the Department of Justice.

 

 

The Kennedy Center has undergone a leadership shake-up and a name change, and soon faces a two-year closure. Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

Authoritarian leaders want their face in your face. Their ubiquitous images personalize the state, making it synonymous with one man’s power. And they turn the citizen’s relationship with that leader into an emotional one. Mao had the Mona Lisa thing down well. In the 20-foot-tall portrait that still hangs over the gate to Tiananmen Square, he seems to be smiling in a way that could seem kindly, but also menacing, or at the very least projecting the kind of watchfulness that seems like a threat.

 

Adulation and fear are not the only goals. To me, the everywhere portrait also seems intended to create a sense, through repetition, that the leader is an organic, immutable part of the landscape. A truism among brand consultants is that for a campaign to be effective, a potential consumer needs to see the same slogan or hear the same jingle multiple times until it feels almost natural—what other soap or cereal could you possibly buy? What other president could you imagine than the one whose gigantic face is everywhere?

 

He could be scowling, or maybe slyly smiling. His glowering eyes are less enigmatic; they seem to follow the pedestrians scurrying around the city from above. Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

A Quiet Place

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

Two wars, roughly 25 years apart. One begins with 76 percent of Americans in favor, the other opens with a sizable majority opposed.

 

Which one inspires widespread protests?

 

The intuitive answer isn’t the correct one. The Iraq war of 2003 was broadly popular (initially), whereas the Iran war of 2026 is the least popular conflict in modern U.S. history. But it was the former that drew the largest anti-war demonstrations since Vietnam, while the latter has made barely a ripple in America’s streets.

 

Weird, no?

 

The more you think about it, the weirder it gets. George W. Bush spent months building public support for attacking Iraq, sought and received bipartisan authorization from Congress, and even got some cover from the United Nations Security Council. That’s as much political legitimacy as a war can conceivably have. In opting to attack Iran this month, Donald Trump dispensed with all of that.

 

Yet it was Bush’s war, not Trump’s, that brought out the hippies.

 

Neither man ran on a war platform before being elected, but Bush was handed a popular mandate by 9/11 to behave belligerently against Middle Eastern bad guys. Not Trump. He positioned himself and J.D. Vance explicitly as “the pro-peace ticket” in contrast to Democratic warmongers. His mandate was to avoid foreign interventions, seal the border, and focus on making life in America more affordable.

 

Then he turned around and bombed Iran—twice. There may be no starker ideological betrayal by a president in my lifetime than Trump dumping “America First” at the earliest opportunity to chase regime-change glory. Yet that betrayal has been met with conspicuously fewer public displays of outrage than Bush’s Iraq policy was.

 

Weirder still, Trump is partnering with Israel in this conflict at a moment when support for the Jewish state has collapsed on the left and is being weakened by postliberals on the right. One would think progressive anger at Israel’s war in Gaza might spill over into big, energetic rallies with support from the groyper wing of the GOP against a joint U.S.-Israeli campaign in Iran.

 

Nope. It’s crickets out there right now.

 

Some obvious possible explanations for the silence end up collapsing upon contact with reality. For instance, maybe Iran’s regime is so monstrous that war critics are reluctant to go to bat for it by protesting. If that’s so, why were critics willing to protest a campaign targeting the every-bit-as-monstrous Saddam Hussein in 2003?

 

Americans don’t get upset about war until they feel the consequences personally. There’s something to that, as we’ll see below, but I’d say we’re well already into the “feeling consequences personally” stage of the conflict. Have you been to a gas station recently?

 

This war lacks a pat narrative about “settler-colonialism,” the core foreign policy grievance that motivates the post-Iraq left. Does it, though? Israel’s involvement provides a ready-made villain in that mold. Washington and Tel Aviv could easily be accused of trying to make the Middle East safe for Western hegemony by pushing so hard for regime change in Iran.

 

Anti-war leftists don’t want to make common cause with the “America First” right. I have no doubt that progressives would balk at co-sponsoring protests with Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson, but to eschew demonstrations altogether for that reason? C’mon. Some polls have Democratic opinion on the conflict at 7-89. There’s no way that would be true if the left were being negatively polarized by the anti-war right.

 

We need better explanations for why people aren’t protesting. Let’s see if we can find some.

 

No infantry. (Yet.)

 

The obvious difference between the Iraq and Iran wars is that Bush’s operation called for placing 175,000 soldiers in harm’s way, while Trump’s has relied entirely—so far!—on airstrikes against an enemy whose defenses have been pulverized.

 

That’s the grain of truth in the point about Americans not objecting to wars until they feel the pain directly. A turkey shoot 30,000 feet above Iran with hundreds of casualties isn’t going to cause as much anxiety as a ground invasion and occupation in which U.S. fatalities might, and ultimately did, reach into the thousands.

 

In fact, I’m not sure the public considers air wars to be “wars” at all anymore. After Kosovo, Libya, the first Iran attack last year, and many, many drone strikes on jihadists all over the world since 9/11, raining death on enemies at a safe remove is just something America does now. It’s unremarkable. If you protested such things, you’d spend half your life out in the streets.

 

That’s the unspoken reason Trump was able to start this war without asking Congress’ permission and without anyone except Dispatch columnists getting too exercised about it. We’ve arrived at a constitutional modus vivendi in which the president gets to declare war on anyone he likes, provided that the risk of U.S. casualties during operations remains negligible. The public seems fine with it.

 

Beyond that, I think memories of Vietnam informed anti-war opinion in 2003 to a degree that memories of Iraq and Afghanistan haven’t matched in 2026. More than eight times as many American soldiers died in that earlier conflict as in the two more recent wars, and many were in theater involuntarily, because of conscription. They left behind a huge population of Gold Star families, friends, and sympathizers traumatized by their loss. That population is much smaller today due to the passage of time.

 

It would be too simple to call “no infantry, no protests” a hard-and-fast rule, but as long as Trump keeps boots off the ground in Iran, he’s considerably less likely to see mass demonstrations against the war. Stay tuned.

 

Trump’s fickleness is an asset to him.

 

Generally speaking, the president’s attitude toward governing is that he’s going to do the things he wants to do and, barring court intervention, Americans will have to live with it. Maybe they’ll like it, maybe they won’t, but how they feel doesn’t matter terribly much and so he won’t waste much time explaining himself. He won the election. Now he gets to follow his bliss until January 2029.

 

In some ways, that attitude works in his favor.

 

When George W. Bush set about making the case publicly for invading Iraq in 2002, he also placed anti-war activists on notice about his plans. That gave them time to formulate arguments against the war, agitate, and eventually organize the mass rallies that preceded the invasion. Trump, on the other hand, barely said a word about striking Iran—not even dwelling on the subject during his State of the Union address four days before the bombs began falling.

 

And so, go figure, there was no anti-war movement poised to rally against him when he gave the order to go.

 

Viewed that way, maybe it’s not so counterintuitive that Bush’s popular war produced mass demonstrations whereas Trump’s unpopular one hasn’t. In one case, the president invested heavily in messaging and created strong feelings on both sides of the debate. In the other, he attacked without warning and left Americans disgruntled—and disorganized.

 

In doing so, Trump might even have inadvertently robbed would-be protesters of a motive to rally. In 2003, broad support for Bush’s war gave demonstrators a reason to turn out and register their dissent. In 2026, broad opposition to Trump’s war has made that unnecessary. Most of the public already dissents; the anti-war crowd has, in a way, already won the debate.

 

Trump’s fickleness also distinguishes his war from Bush’s war in an important way. Unlike Iraq, this one could end at any moment, again without notice to the public of what’s coming.

 

I think most Americans expect it. The president’s comments about the state of the conflict have become a preposterous hash of happy talk about peace one minute and threats to plunge the Iranian people into darkness the next. (As I write this on Monday afternoon, we’re back to happy talk.) A bully by nature, he’s never seemed to have the stomach for a protracted fight that could end in humiliation. He prefers to dominate opponents who can be made to submit with little exertion, like Venezuela.

 

In other words, TACO is always a live possibility—and everyone understands that. In which case, why bother organizing an anti-war rally? Even if you manage to pull one together in a few weeks, the conflict will probably be over by the time the big day arrives.

 

Slacktivism and isolation.

 

A relative in New York City told me there was a modest protest against the war there recently. In watching news coverage of it, she was struck by how many of the demonstrators seemed … old.

 

That rang a bell.

 

Last fall’s “No Kings” protests also appeared to draw a disproportionately high percentage of older people. (There’s no way to quantify it, of course, so “appeared” is the best we can do.) I suspect that’s more than a coincidence. Young adults were the engine of protest during the Vietnam era, but protesting requires, well, going outside and being around people.

 

And young Americans aren’t outside and around people much anymore.

 

I’m sure you’ve seen the statistics about this at some point. People, especially young people, don’t socialize face-to-face nearly as much as they used to, with predictable consequences. Pandemic lockdowns, social media, video games and streaming platforms, and dating apps have conspired to remove entertainment, companionship, and even courting from real spaces to virtual ones. You can get practically anything you need delivered to your door. If you work remotely, days might pass without once needing to leave home. (Don’t ask me how I know.)

 

A culture in which fewer people are comfortable gathering in public spaces, including restaurants, will by definition be a culture with fewer mass protests. Why bother carrying a “TRUCK FUMP” sign at a rally when you can register your dissent on Twitter or Bluesky from the comfort of your bed? In post-social America, activism is destined to give way to slacktivism to some meaningful degree.

 

The George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 are an interesting exception to the trend, although maybe not so surprisingly given the unique circumstances of the time. They were held during the height of COVID, when Americans who had hunkered down for months were desperate for an excuse to break social distancing rules. And their theme of racial equality recalled the civil rights movement of the 1960s, obviously by design. To draw a proper parallel with Martin Luther King Jr.’s marches, activists had to march as well.

 

For whatever reason, the legacy of Vietnam-era demonstrations hasn’t mattered enough to Iran war opponents (so far) to bring them out in the streets in emulation the way the legacy of the civil rights era did for BLM. Maybe that’s specific to protest culture, as King’s example in agitating for racial justice has no equal among anti-war agitators. Maybe race relations simply have more salience to Americans as an issue than foreign policy does. Or maybe, six years on, the trend toward isolation among younger Americans has reached the point where the BLM rallies simply couldn’t happen again today.

 

If they did, perhaps only the grandmas and grandpas who dimly remember Vietnam-era protests and who came of age before life was lived entirely online would show up.

 

Exhaustion.

 

But if it’s not isolation that’s keeping war critics at home, it’s probably exhaustion.

 

Exhaustion was one of the reasons I cited the last time I wrote about the curious decline of protesting in America. Given how unpopular the One Big Beautiful Bill was in polling, I asked last summer, why weren’t we seeing demonstrations against it?

 

My theory was that “10 years of authoritarian populist nonsense have … sapped the will of Americans to resist” and have so demoralized some of us that we “simply don’t take [our] government or [our] country as seriously as [we] did even eight years ago.” That’s why huge protests organized under the banner of the Women’s March greeted Trump the day after he was inaugurated in 2017, at the dawn of this experiment in postliberal madness, whereas only the came-and-went “No Kings” rallies have matched that in scale during his second term—despite Trump 2.0’s vastly more aggressive postliberal agenda agenda.

 

When he won reelection, many of us just gave up.

 

The Women’s March was a show of force aimed at communicating to the new president and his fans that the left wasn’t going anywhere. He may have won the election, but the traditional rules of politics still applied, and Democrats—whose candidate had won the popular vote—had the numbers. Those demonstrations were a sort of preemptive rejection of Trumpism, a way to signal participants’ belief that his first victory was anomalous.

 

No one believes his second victory was anomalous. Voters got a hard dose of his lunacy for four years and asked for seconds, and now they’re getting what they deserve. If one were to protest the Iran war, what would one be protesting, exactly? The unfairness of Americans having to live with the foreseeable consequences of reelecting an unbalanced authoritarian with delusions of grandeur?

 

It’s not clear to me who the target audience for such protests would be. Trump? He won’t listen. He’s “high on his own supply,” already eyeing his next regime-change operation in Cuba, and term-limited in any event. Congress? If they cared about public opinion, they would have already impeached him for launching an unpopular war without legislative approval. Congress functionally doesn’t exist anymore. The wider public? As noted earlier, they don’t need persuading because they already oppose this conflict. And the fact that they do seems to matter not a bit in our nominal democracy.

 

We don’t live in the sort of autocracy where you’re likely to get shot for protesting, but we do already live in the sort of autocracy where protesting is basically futile as a tactic to encourage policy changes. Even in Minneapolis, where local unrest caused Trump to shift tactics on immigration enforcement, I’m skeptical that anything would have changed if not for the caught-on-film PR catastrophe of two different Americans being killed by masked federal goons.

 

When you choose to be governed by a megalomaniac who yearns for autocracy, you implicitly also choose to reduce politics to a spectator sport in which we’re all along for a four-year ride that will go wherever our driver wants to take us. The fact that Trump ran against war as a candidate and then steered straight into another Middle Eastern snakepit less than 16 months later is an unwitting satire on how little influence The People have over their own destiny. Even when voters resort to electing a nutjob because he’s preaching peace, he turns around and becomes Bush on steroids anyway.

 

So why bother protesting? Why spend any more energy objecting to all of this unless you have the extraordinary privilege of making a living by writing a daily newsletter about it? The war will end when the president feels it in his bones. Accepting that is the extent of the civic engagement you’re supposed to have with the matter.

 

And given the lack of protests, I think most Americans do accept it. In 2026, there’s only a brief hiccup in the news cycle when the president celebrates a political enemy’s death because we’re all very, very tired and have come to expect nothing less. So too with Iran: Whether it’s “mean tweets” or new wars, the frogs have been boiled sufficiently by now that we’ve all gotten used to the heat. Quiet streets in a country where an illegal war is threatening to wreck the global economy is what giving up looks like.

‘Imminence’ Is the Wrong Standard for Iran

By Douglas J. Feith

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

 

On March 18, Senate Intelligence Committee members grilled National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard on a misguided question: Did Iran pose an imminent threat to the United States? Gabbard fumbled her response, saying that only the president can decide whether a threat is imminent. Her questioners contradicted her.

 

Both sides in this exchange, however, were chasing a red herring.

 

Gabbard did President Trump harm by failing to reframe the intelligence debate intelligently. She allowed his opponents to use a wrong concept to discredit his decision to use force against Iran.

 

“Imminence” is not the sensible standard. It is not a precise or objective term that presidents should employ only if intelligence experts endorse it. In national security affairs, it is almost always debatable and, besides, “imminence” is not the right concept for deciding whether and how to respond to a grave threat from abroad.

 

To grasp why it is not right, ask yourself: When did the September 11 attack become imminent? When did the attack on Pearl Harbor? When did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? When did the Holocaust? When did the threat of British tyranny that justified the American Revolution? The concept of “imminence” offers no useful guidance for confronting complex threats of this kind.

 

Is a threat imminent when the enemy becomes hostile? When the enemy begins developing the means to attack us or only after they are perfected — or only after the enemy puts them in motion as part of an attack? Is it imminent if the enemy might still call off the attack, or only after the attack is launched and cannot be stopped? Does it matter if the enemy appears unstable or ideologically fanatical? Does it matter if the enemy’s means of attack are apocalyptic — nuclear weapons on long-range missiles, for example?

 

The relevant concept is unacceptable risk, not imminent threat. Presidents have the duty to decide whether a foreign threat poses risks that require a U.S. response. They have the responsibility to take all the relevant facts and circumstances into account and decide whether a threat is grave enough — and no means short of war can reduce the risk to an acceptable level — to make war necessary. That is not a judgment for intelligence experts to make. It is inherently political, and it falls on the president’s shoulders. Congress, of course, has a role to play, but it would be good if its members enlightened rather than confused the public debate.

 

If Gabbard had a firmer grasp on her responsibilities, she would have said that deciding how much risk is acceptable for the nation is the job of the president, not intelligence analysts. Instead, by entering into the “imminence” debate, she helped the president’s opponents muddy the waters.

 

Let’s dip back into history. In 1962, when President John F. Kennedy faced the threat of Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba, he did not argue that those missiles would pose an imminent threat. He said they would create unacceptable risks for the United States. His response — the naval quarantine, which international lawyers argue was an act of war — aimed to eliminate those risks before they matured. Does anyone believe that Kennedy would have been wiser to wait until the threat became imminent, after the missiles were fueled, targeted, and ready for launch?

 

The “imminence” standard produces paralysis in the face of increasing danger. One reason it gets attention is its role in domestic law enforcement. As a rule, only an imminent threat justifies police officers in using deadly force. But is it sensible to import that concept into national security affairs today — when a country like Iran calls over decades for “Death to America,” commits numerous murderous aggressions and devotes enormous resources to developing terrorist proxy networks, nuclear weapons, and long-range missiles?

 

International law never provides indisputable answers to such questions — and, anyway, it evolves over time. It was 200 years ago when an American secretary of state popularized concerns about “imminent threats” in world affairs. New technologies have changed the security picture. If scholars now argue that international law bars the United States from using military action against Iran’s nuclear and missile threats until those threats are “imminent” — that is, only moments away from implementation — they are consigning international law to irrelevance in the world of practical affairs. Can such law win adherence if its logic is patently self-defeating?

 

A pacifist may choose to argue that U.S. military action against Iran is unjustified because the Iranian nuclear threat is not imminent, and then argue, after the threat becomes imminent, that U.S. military action would be too risky because Iran has nuclear weapons. That makes sense, but only if one is a pacifist. As the saying goes, a pacifist is someone who believes that non-pacifists should run the show.

 

Americans should skeptically examine the decisions of their presidents, especially regarding war and peace. It is reasonable and patriotic to ask whether a decision to go to war was sound. But it is unreasonable and irresponsible to argue that President Trump should have refrained from action against Iran until its nuclear threats against the United States were “imminent.”

The Eagerness for Trump’s Humiliation

By Noah Rothman

Monday, March 23, 2026

 

It’s not so much that there is an eagerness abroad in the press for an American defeat in its ongoing war against the theocratic regime in Tehran. If, however, Donald Trump is sufficiently humiliated at the end of this campaign, it seems that, for some, an American defeat is acceptable collateral damage.

 

What other conclusion could you draw from the American press corps’ reaction to Trump’s announcement on Monday morning that he will delay for five days his promised attacks on Iranian power plants following “in-depth, detailed, and constructive” talks with Iranian representatives? The statement resulted in a stampede of journalists alleging that the president had capitulated. “TACO” Tuesday came early this week.

 

Such was the political press’s commitment to the default notion that Trump backed down that they took the Iranian regime’s pronouncements at face value. “There is no direct contact with Trump, not even through intermediaries,” Iran’s Fars News Agency reported. “Trump retreated after hearing that our targets would be all power plants in West Asia.”

 

Why did so many assume that a notoriously mendacious regime was, in this instance, telling the truth? Why was it so hard to believe, as Axios’s Barak Ravid subsequently reported, that regional powers such as Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan are shuttling indirect communications between the U.S. and Iran? For some, it was easier to conclude that the president was deliberately and baselessly attempting to manipulate international markets.

 

Maybe these reporters weren’t following the international press coverage of the conflict all that closely, particularly from outlets that are well-sourced in the Gulf region. If they had, they’d see plenty of indications that the United States isn’t the only party to this conflict that is feeling the pressure.

 

Tehran’s representatives are still beating their chests, of course. But they, too, are signaling a desire to repair the damage their attacks on Gulf state civilian targets have done.

 

“The lying . . . US President,” read one Iranian statement, “has claimed that the Revolutionary Guards intend to attack the water desalination plants and cause hardship to the people of the countries in the region.” But at the outset of this war, Iran did attack Bahrainian desalination plants designed to make seawater potable. That’s a blink.

 

Additionally, reports indicate that Iranian officials are increasingly wary of executing additional attacks on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, particularly Riyadh’s energy infrastructure, for fear of instigating a direct hostile response from the Saudis. “If you target civilian infrastructure, we will be forced to strike you,” one Saudi official publicly warned Iran. Iran has also pared back strikes on targets in Qatar after Doha expelled Iran’s military and security diplomats following Iranian strikes on its natural gas fields. Those are blinks, too.

 

Of all Iran’s neighbors, the United Arab Emirates is perhaps the most fed up with the Islamic Republic’s behavior:

 

 

And the UAE’s posture seems indicative of the prevailing sentiment toward Iran in the Gulf region.

 

“Iran is public enemy number one to all six [Gulf Cooperation Council] states,” said one UAE-based academic. “The pressure will mount for the GCC states to switch from a defensive to an offensive posture — especially as interceptor stocks run low,” Ali Bakir, a professor of international security at Qatar University, agreed. “The US decapitating the Iranian regime for good is definitely the only option we have now,” declared Muhanad Seloom, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, whose authorship of a piece for the Qatar-based outlet Al Jazeera declaring the U.S.-Israel war strategy both effective and desirable sent shockwaves through the region last week.

 

There were plenty of indications that Iran was feeling the pain of this war as much as Trump before the president abruptly postponed his deadline for specific strikes on specific targets. That should not have been difficult to recognize even before Iran all but admitted that it was, in fact, lying about indirect talks with the United States (imagine that!).

 

These fast-moving developments and the undue eagerness to lend credence to Iran’s claim that Trump “backed down” all on his own were, however, clarifying. “From Tehran’s perspective, this is a notable achievement,” Atlantic Council fellow Danny Citrinowicz wrote, “they didn’t fold, didn’t back down, and may have forced Washington to recalibrate its objectives.”

 

For those of us who are invested in America’s success in this war, that would be pretty bad news. It’s too early to render such a pronouncement, of course, and it’s obvious that the Trump administration is reeling amid Iran’s successful effort to put unanticipated pressure on the global energy market. But Iran is reeling, too, and CENTCOM’s stated endgame for this war remains unchanged. The gleeful assumption that Trump is suffering a personal indignity seems to have crowded out the prospect of more sophisticated analysis.

 

No wonder Americans think we’re losing. All the smartest people seem to think so. And they don’t need to wait around for evidence to confirm that conclusion.