To Hell With Assimilation

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

How racist can a party’s voters be if they’re willing to nominate a guy named “Vivek Ramaswamy” to be governor of Ohio?

 

How prejudiced can its leaders be if they’re comfortable placing Harmeet Dhillon, a native of Chandigarh, India, in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division?

 

And how bigoted can its establishment be if, as seems inevitable, it intends to fall in line in 2028 behind a man married to an Indian American woman, with whom he has four half-Indian children?

 

It isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, particularly those of Indian descent. But it is true that the modern Republican Party relies to a considerable degree on voters who hate nonwhites—particularly those of Indian descent.

 

In fact, after five years of watching J.D. Vance’s political star ascend, that’s the only argument I’ve come up with for wanting him to be president. It’s gratifying to imagine chuds like Bo French having to cope with the reality of first lady Usha Vance:

 

 

French’s career illustrates the extent to which racism has and hasn’t gone mainstream in the Republican coalition. By political standards he’s a nobody, a former GOP county leader in Texas who’s never held public office. Last year, after he posted a poll on Twitter asking whether Jews or Muslims are a greater threat to America, even the state’s very Trumpy lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, denounced him. He doesn’t represent the average Republican’s opinion. (I think.)

 

However.

 

French managed to overcome opposition from Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott to win a GOP primary for railroad commissioner (which regulates Texas’ oil and gas industries) this year despite—or because of?—a history of posting dreck like the tweet above. In July, Texas Monthly ran through some of his lowlights as a Very Online postliberal in the age of Trump:

 

He’s called for 100 million people—nearly a third of the American population—to be deported, and for two nonwhite Texas House members to be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country. He wants some Native Americans—“third world savages”—to be kicked out of America too. French says Texas needs to “ban Islam” and “round up every Muslim” for deportation. Last week he told his followers it was “time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” McCarthyism and the Christian Crusades, he argues, didn’t go far enough. And this week he referred to America’s “not in labor force” population—an economic term for nonworkers that includes retirees, students, and those with serious handicaps—as “low IQ parasites.”

 

He’s also called on the United States to become “Rhodesia” before it becomes Zimbabwe, which is as straightforward as one can be in declaring oneself a white nationalist without using the term. None of it was enough to derail his campaign. On the contrary, per the New York Times, French “demonized Muslims and immigrants” repeatedly en route to winning his primary—again, for railroad commissioner, a position that has zippo to do with the culture wars.

 

If it isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, it is nonetheless true that the modern Republican Party will nominate someone for statewide office who hates nonwhites and who makes no bones about it.

 

French’s tweet complaining about Indian American students in the stands at this weekend’s University of Texas football game was denounced by other Republicans with varying degrees of indignation. The strongest criticism came from state lawmakers—and from John Cornyn, who was ousted by his party in this spring’s Senate primary. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized?” the senator wrote, pointing to French’s post. “This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.”

 

Other officials with more to lose by antagonizing GOP voters than the retiring Cornyn were cautious, though. “That is not my message,” Abbott, who’s up for reelection in November, said of the post in a statement before pivoting to a vague call for unity and reminding readers that he froze H-1B visas for immigrants at Texas universities.

 

As for the man who beat Cornyn in his primary, Ken Paxton piped up to trollishly declare that he condemns racism “in all its forms”—and named his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, as the real racist on the ballot this fall. He didn’t even mention French’s tweet in his comments, which figures: It would have been awkward for Paxton to condemn an outspoken white nationalist whom he actually endorsed months ago.

 

Why did a post by an obscure-for-now Texas politician get so much attention from his own party?

 

Assimilation.

 

One reason was the sheer churlishness of it.

 

Bad enough that French would begrudge nonwhite students a moment of joy, much worse that he chose a joyous moment in which most of the rest of the state was also luxuriating. The Longhorns came back from 20 points down on Saturday night to defeat top-ranked Ohio State; the average Texan celebrating that win will look at the photo and find the students more relatable than French’s reaction to them.

 

There’s also a glaring incongruity between the right’s traditional support for meritocracy and French’s apparent preference for reverse affirmative action.

 

“State law requires that Texas high school students ranked at the top of their class—in the top 5 percent for the 2027-28 school year—be automatically admitted to the University of Texas at Austin, and that they compose up to 75 percent of the class,” the Times noted in its story on French’s post. International students are a mere 10 percent of the student body by comparison. In all probability, the kids in the photo are Texans born and raised who made the cut because they excelled academically. French couldn’t care less, I assume. For him, a brownie’s a brownie.

 

By far the most common response on social media to his tweet, though, was to point out that the “foreign”-looking students in the photo are doing precisely what Republicans have always asked immigrants to do. They’re assimilating. Nothing is more quintessentially American than getting decked out in your school’s gear and going berserk at a college football game. The kid in the foreground of the photo is wearing a cowboy hat, for cripes sake. All that’s missing is one of them firing off a six-shooter in celebration.

 

You want Them to assimilate? Congratulations. They’ve assimilated.

 

Not only have they assimilated into American culture, but increasingly they’ve assimilated into the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s gains with nonwhite voters were probably the difference between victory and defeat in 2024; among Indian Americans specifically, he improved from 22 percent of the vote in 2020 to 31 percent four years later. “Our culture is very conservative,” an Indian American candidate for local office in Frisco, Texas, told the The Texas Tribune earlier this year. “Fiscally, heavily conservative, and culturally, we focus on education, family values, small businesses, less government. I think a lot of Indians are waking up to this, realizing we’re conservative too.”

 

In a conservative party, a guy like that would have no issue. But in a party led by postliberals, whose activist vanguard is postliberal, and whose next generation is likely to be postliberal, he has a big problem. Namely: Postliberals don’t care about assimilation.

 

It’s not that they don’t believe assimilation is possible. (I think.) If you told French that the students in the photo grew up in Texas and like all the same things that white kids their age like, I imagine he’d nod and say, “And?”

 

For postliberals, assimilation is a non sequitur, an inclusion-minded solution to a problem that can only be solved by exclusion.

 

Tribes.

 

The point of postliberalism isn’t to make sure that immigrants and their descendants adopt the civic and cultural preferences that Americans have traditionally held. How could it be when postliberals themselves don’t share many of those preferences: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy rather than right-wing autocracy, and so on? The point of postliberalism is to secure the political and cultural dominance of one’s racial/religious tribe.

 

The problem with nonwhite kids at UT isn’t that they’re failing to assimilate or are unassimilable. The problem is that they’re nonwhite, and therefore their personal and professional success threatens the long-term dominance of white Christians.

 

That’s where the nonsense about “Heritage Americans” comes from. It’s a postliberal bid to establish a hierarchy for the United States that would preemptively exclude rival tribes from accruing the sort of prestige that strivers in this country have historically aimed for. That hierarchy also helps explain why MAGA chuds have singled out Indian Americans for special venom among nonwhite groups, a phenomenon that’s common enough to have attracted attention from prominent right-wingers of Indian descent like Dhillon and Dinesh D’Souza.

 

Indian Americans aren’t caricatured the way immigrants from Latin American usually are, as gangsters and welfare leeches whose cheap labor undercuts blue-collar wages. The opposite: The core populist grievance against them is that they’re too successful, stereotypically high achievers who do well in school and go on to lucrative professional careers. The anger about granting H-1B visas to Indian tech engineers isn’t that they’re going to come to America and start defecating in the streets; it’s that they’re going to outwork and outcompete many American students for what should, supposedly, be “their” jobs. Indian Americans aren’t a potential underclass, they’re a potential overclass.

 

An aggressively anti-intellectual political movement dislikes a demographic broadly seen as intellectual. Go figure.

 

The nature of prejudice against Indian Americans is similar to antisemitism but with the “foreign” quotient dialed up a few notches due to their skin color and Americans finding Hinduism more exotic than Judaism. One local GOP chairman captured the ambivalence toward a “model minority” perfectly in an interview with Politico when he described the challenge Ramaswamy is facing in Ohio: “Most of us, the only time we’ve ever been in a room with someone of color like him was when you went to see your doctor.”

 

Postliberals abhor the “melting pot” because it threatens to dissolve the tribal hierarchy they’re desperate to construct to preserve their traditional dominance. A stark example: In its reporting on local hostility to Indian Americans in Frisco, where that group now accounts for 19 percent of the population, the Tribune noted that “a clip of Boy Scouts leading the Pledge of Allegiance before a Frisco City Council meeting went viral, attracting thousands of reposts, many with hateful language, because the boys were Indian.”

 

To a conservative, there’s no better example of America doing what America does best than a child of nonwhite immigrants becoming a Boy Scout. To a postliberal, there’s no greater provocation. The Boy Scouts are Americana in its purest form, like mom and apple pie, and Americana to a postliberal is defined by one race and one religion.

 

Silence.

 

It’s no wonder, then, that French’s tweet got so much attention. It sits right on the fault line between conservatives and postliberals, two groups united by Trumpism in an uneasy anti-left coalition that risks breaking apart once the president retires and his gravitational pull is no longer strong enough to hold them together.

 

It’s also no wonder that J.D. Vance continues to remain embarrassingly ambivalent about Israel and the extent to which he shares his friend Tucker Carlson’s worldview. Vance is in an odd spot, suspicious to conservatives because of his hostility to Reaganite economics and foreign policy and suspicious to postliberals because his own family is a racial “melting pot.” He’ll need both parts of that coalition to win in 2028, which requires him not to stray too far from the fault line himself. Sometimes he’s anti-bigot, at other times anti-anti.

 

And it’s no wonder that so many prominent Republicans chose silence this weekend in lieu of taking a position on French’s tweet.

 

The same thing happened when Texas Monthly profiled French’s habit of Jew-baiting his Democratic opponent for railroad commissioner, Jon Rosenthal, in July. The author of that story allegedly reached out to Abbott, Patrick, and Paxton as well as “numerous top French donors” for comment and got no response. Yesterday Rosenthal himself predicted that French’s post about the Texas football game would likewise draw mostly crickets from Republicans, and it did.

 

Among GOPers with a national profile, only Cornyn and Rep. Dan Crenshaw hit him hard. Coincidentally, both men lost their most recent primaries and will be out of politics soon, casualties of the right’s postliberal drift. Abbott may have spoken up only because he calculated that he stood slightly more to lose than to gain in his own reelection bid by biting his tongue: As a longtime incumbent, Republican partisans would likely let him slide for criticizing French very mildly—but Indian American swing voters might not have let him slide if he didn’t.

 

That’s what coalition management looks like in a party in which one faction wants immigrants to assimilate, another wants to expel nonwhite undesirables to preserve its own tribal preeminence, and a third has been conditioned to mindlessly view any reluctance among Republican leaders to behave ruthlessly as evidence of “weakness” regardless of the circumstances. It wasn’t just ardent postliberals whom Abbott risked alienating if he had criticized French harshly; it also would have annoyed that third group of rank-and-file partisan idiots who’ve spent 10 years under Trump being retrained to believe that any sort of moral squeamishness aimed at the far right is proof of furtive communist sympathies.

 

So, for most of the Republican establishment, the opportunity French’s tweet presented to weigh in on the great assimilation debate was one they were happy to decline. Why take a side and inevitably annoy one or more of those factions by doing so? When your coalition consists of Reaganites, racists, and nihilists, there’s no “sweet spot” on the question of what number of dark-skinned, foreign-looking kids attending American colleges is appropriate.

 

Besides, the right’s political class has also been reshaped morally in certain ways by the past decade. Sen. Susan Collins was asked recently why she hasn’t followed Liz Cheney’s lead, standing on civic principle in opposing Trump and letting the electoral chips fall where they may, and seemed perplexed by the question. What influence does Liz Cheney have anymore? Collins responded. She has no impact on anything.

 

That’s a fine, pithy explanation for the Republican silence around French’s post. The notion of doing the right thing because it’s the right thing, as a service to the country, is as foreign to the GOP establishment as it is to its leader. If Collins doesn’t stand to benefit personally from making herself an enemy of autocracy—or of French-style postliberalism—then why should she stick her neck out?

 

It takes a long time, and many enablers, for a party to reach a point where attacking a fellow member for racism is politically riskier than the racism itself is, but here we are. “If the power of scandal goes away, then we’re left with a vicious cycle in which moral or legal wrongdoing doesn’t lead to consequences, which undermines trust in the government and public institutions, which in turn widens polarization and allows more corruption, abuse and lawbreaking,” the Times wrote this morning, presciently, in a piece about the death of shame in American politics. That’s 10 years of Trump, several years of French posts, in one sentence. The bill is coming due.

Influencers Are Schmucks

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

Owing to my occupation, there are some things I keep up with very closely. But my natural temperament is something more appropriate to a Georgian rural clergyman—one of those unprepossessing characters in a Jane Austen novel nobody is rooting for. Or, more to my point today, never mind the Jane Austen novels and think instead of the films based on them: I know that the thing about actors is that they act, but how remarkable it is to someone like me, without the dramatic gift, that David Bamber made such a rueful and impressive Cicero on HBO and such a sniveling and repulsive Mr. Collins in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries. I should be grateful that no one is likely to make a movie about me and that, if someone did, Rowan Atkinson probably will not be available to provide a portrayal that is spiritually true if physically somewhat off the mark. Sitting around thinking about who would play you in the movie is a very dumb 21^st-century thing to do—but, in these times, it is difficult to live a less mediated kind of life, to escape from the trap of thinking of oneself not as a human being in action but as a human being under observation.

 

As I was saying, there are many things I do not keep up with all that closely. E.g., at the gym (stop laughing) the other day, I noticed a television advertisement for Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s is, not to my credit, something to which I have paid excessive attention over the years, but what I thought was: When did they start allowing hard liquor advertising on television? I had thought of whiskey and cigarettes as two of the things that our weird moralistic sensibilities simply would not allow on television, where they would morally cheapen the wall-to-wall sports-gambling and erectile-dysfunction advertising. Many of you are perplexed right now, wondering why I have imagined there is some kind of ban on liquor advertising. There was, for many years, but the industry’s voluntary forbearance was lifted way back in 1996, and liquor ads returned to television no later than 2001, with a Smirnoff spot on Saturday Night Live. I somehow missed that. Or, if I knew that the prohibition had been lifted, I forgot that I ever knew it.

 

Another related thought I had during the same visit to the gym: Who is this schmuck with the camera on the tripod?

 

Influencers and the broader social media-driven culture of self-promotion are a plague on modern life and, in particular, a plague on public places, especially the fancier or more famous kinds. But they work their way down to the less rarefied levels of American life, too. I do not go to a fancy gym in Manhattan or Beverly Hills or even one of the more glittering parts of Washington, D.C. Where I live is several hours’ drive from any major metropolitan area. It is not the sort of place that attracts celebrities or that produces many of them. I am not fundamentally opposed to that sort of thing—I used to go to a Bikram class in Union Square where the usual participants were three or four gentlemen employed in various capacities on Broadway, about 20 models, and … me, which worked out about how you’d expect it to—but it is not the sort of thing I go out of my way to encounter, either, and it wasn’t exactly what I signed up for when I moved to a small town that is not very close to much of anything.

 

The fellow with the camera on the tripod—and another camera pinned to his stars-and-stripes headband—was an influencer of some kind. I don’t know him, but, then, I wouldn’t. Many of the young men in the gym did, speaking in low voices to one another about how so-and-so was here.

 

The financial incentives are easy enough to understand. One survey estimates that social media influencers with more than 1 million followers typically earn about $14,000 a month from their online activities, with elite influencers earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Set that aside, for now. Most of the people engaged in cultivating a social media audience make little or no money at all from doing so—they are in it simply for the pleasure of being observed. Wimbledon has just announced that it will ban influencer shenanigans after complaints from players at the U.S. Open—ring lights and such will be disallowed, and influencers will not be given press credentials. Good on the All England Club. But such steps mainly cover the professionals, whereas observers say that most of the disruptive behavior comes from the amateurs.

 

You know: schmucks.

 

The novelist David Foster Wallace was a pretty good psychoanalyst, in his way (but, you know: “Physician, heal thyself!”), though there is one passage in Infinite Jest that I keep coming back to, trying to decide whether he got it right. In the scene, a guru advising young tennis stars aspiring to the professional tour informs the young athletes that the envy they feel for star athletes is a one-way relationship, that envy is an unpleasant feeling with no pleasant reciprocal feeling of being envied. Of course, we all know people—not only the influencers and that sorry set—who spend a great deal of time and effort setting themselves up to be envied, and there is something about that in our time that is distinct from mere boasting. E.g., how much money does one have to spend to make a wedding at Lake Como positively tacky? This much, as may be estimated from a report about the recent wedding of former Call Her Daddy co-host Sofia Franklyn. (Getting the blessed occasion into the New York Times confirms the tackiness of the affair.) I suppose that the difference is that boasting—and the Age of Trump is the golden age of boasting, at least—involves asserting one’s own virtue or success or status, whereas the desire to be envied, and the consequent need to place oneself on display for the observation of others, is a slightly subtler thing, an invitation for others to assert, if only implicitly, one’s virtue or success or status.

 

But the need to be observed and to have one’s status confirmed by strangers is, of course, a confession. I am reminded of the football coach who advised against end-zone celebrations on the grounds that players scoring touchdowns should act like they’ve been in the end zone before and expect to be there again. “Look at me!” is shorthand for “Look at me—I’m a fraud!”

 

Envy me—I need it!

 

My wife once had a pretty large social media following, into six figures. We took a pretty fancy honeymoon (in lieu of an expensive wedding; we got hitched at the take-a-number wedding bureau in New York; Mrs. W., being bold, wore a white dress on the subway), and I do not believe that a single picture from it ever made its way onto her social media account, which was focused on some pretty obscure physics-related stuff rather than pictures of her on boats or on airplanes or in nice hotel suites. I do not know anybody who loves a first-class hotel breakfast as much as Mrs. W. does, but I cannot remember ever having seen her take a photograph of a waffle, and she is a very able photographer.

 

Not everybody needs to be seen to enjoy themselves. As it happens, I was at Lake Como for an entirely different wedding a couple of years ago and spent a few minutes chatting with a very nice woman where we were having lunch. She asked me what I did, and I told her I was a writer, mostly of political journalism. She told me she was a writer, too. “What do you write?” I asked. Not political journalism: Sex and the City. (Not Candace Bushnell but a writer on one of the films, I believe she was.) She did not, as far as I can recall, photograph her cocktail or her sandwich for Instagram—she acted like she’d been to Villa d’Este before and expected to be there again whenever it suited her. Spike Lee doesn’t need people on social media to appreciate his courtside Knicks seats for him—he’s been there before, and he expects to be back next season. Not so, I think, the people who disrupt Wimbledon or the U.S. Open with the creation of their “content.”

 

The need to be observed—it is a curious thing. A woman just walked by me with an adorable little toddler on her hip. She was wearing a T-shirt reading: “God Hears Your Prayers.” I believe that God hears our prayers. (I also believe that He often has a good laugh about them.) I have no doubt about the sincerity of the woman wearing the “God Hears Your Prayers” T-shirt. But I do wonder what it is in her that makes her desire to be seen as someone who makes a point of communicating her belief that God hears our prayers. I do not think that anybody who is not mentally damaged in some way really believes that putting a bumper sticker on a 15-year-old Subaru is going to help us “Free Tibet” or “COEXIST” or combat climate change or whatever. But I see many, many of those stickers, and they all read the same way to me: “Look at me caring about the poor and the oppressed more than you do!”

 

Esse quam videri. It was good advice when Cicero said it. It is good advice now.

Schools Should Teach the 9/11 Heroism of the American People

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

The other night, we watched the brief but powerful 9/11 documentary Boatlift with our kids. Made in 2011 and narrated by Tom Hanks, Boatlift is a 12-minute film on the largest waterway evacuation in American history.

 

The story is simple: As the towers fell and people ran through the chaos of lower Manhattan looking to escape the danger without access to mass transit and with roads and bridges closed off, the Coast Guard put out a general call for a volunteer boatlift. The massive response created a civil convoy that surpassed anyone’s expectations and produced one of the better stories of American selflessness and heroism in the country’s history.

 

Yes, in the country’s history. Just to give readers an idea of what this boatlift accomplished: According to Britannica, the Dunkirk evacuation in World War II carried 338,000 British, French and Belgian troops to safety over nine days.

 

The 9/11 boatlift ferried 500,000 people to safety in nine hours.

 

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, of course, but hopefully it at least paints a picture of the magnitude of the ad hoc effort.

 

“I saw four businessmen lifting up an old woman with a seeing-eye dog… and they lifted her up like a surfboard and passed her over the handrails” and onto a boat, recalled one official. Sometimes spouses, separated and each unaware of the other’s fate, were reunited on these boats.

 

We talk a lot about the lessons of 9/11, of the changed world that emerged from it, of geopolitical realignment, of domestic security policy, of Islamist terrorism and the War on Terror. For my generation in particular, born after Vietnam but too young to fully appreciate the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was a defining moment.

 

And one unforgettable element of that day was the heroism. Younger Americans have no memory of that day, and what they are missing out on, aside from the terror and the grief and the anger, is the way the civilian response filled one with a deep sense of gratitude for the cosmic gift of being an American.

 

Which is why 9/11 education ought to be mandatory, and young Americans should learn not only the Big Ideas around this earthshattering event but what happened on that day itself at the granular level.

 

Here’s what I mean. The Associated Press this week produced a state-by-state summary of 9/11 curriculum requirements. Much of it is optional or flexible, and much of it misses the point.

 

Arkansas requires students to learn about the “change and continuity in foreign policy since 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.” One world history prompt for California 10th-graders states: “Since 9/11, the hopes for a more peaceful world that the end of the Cold War spawned have been displaced by a resurgence of international conflict.” In Idaho, we learn, “High school U.S. history students now must assess government responses to terrorism, ‘including those after Sept. 11, 2001, and analyze the causes, progression and aftermath’ of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” In Missouri, high-schoolers are tasked with “unpacking post-9/11 foreign policy.”

 

After 9/11, since 9/11, post-9/11, etc. Those are important lessons! So are the ones that require students to talk about what happened before 9/11. But what about on 9/11?

 

I admit I was, at first, rather appalled at the list provided by the AP. But it is just a summary and should not be taken as the full extent of what actually goes on in classrooms around the country, where teachers and administrators have plenty of flexibility to shape students’ understanding of 9/11 and how it should be memorialized. And there is bound to be a range of differences among the 50 states.

 

But I also noticed that some states pretty much nailed it. Here is the AP’s description of Florida’s educational approach to 9/11:

 

A 2023 Florida law requires at least 45 minutes a year of 9/11-related instruction in some middle and high school classes. The statute lists points to cover: historical context on terrorism, the attack timeline, acts of heroism and charity, the ‘importance of respecting civil liberties while ensuring safety and security,’ and more. It notably mentions not only those killed and wounded but also people who fell ill after being exposed to toxins when the World Trade Center’s burning twin towers collapsed. State standards go into still more detail. It’s all intended ‘to ensure this important event in America’s history is not only remembered but also integrated into civics and resiliency education statewide,’ the state Department of Education said.

 

Exemplary. New York’s requirements are a mixed bag with plenty of potential. Pennsylvania’s aren’t bad. Both states were directly affected by the attacks themselves, so it’s no surprise to see their plans include moments of silence on each anniversary.

 

Virginia has the right idea, too. There, middle-schoolers give “special attention to the heroism displayed by passengers on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. High school juniors analyze 9/11 and other ‘key events and conditions that have given rise to terrorism as an attack on democracy and the United States’ role in defending democracy.’”

 

Children aren’t born knowing what happened on 9/11. We have to teach them. And among the earliest lessons that are appropriate for young students is one that reminds them what that day means for Americans, including the miracles that the American people are capable of in the face of terror and tragedy.

The Lynching Epidemic That Wasn’t

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

 

Even paranoiacs have enemies, they say, but sometimes they are just paranoid.

 

Representative Ayanna Pressley, a founding member of the “Squad,” organized 59 Democrats to co-sign a letter demanding a federal investigation of a spate of supposed lynchings that never happened.

 

The document pronounced its signatories “extremely alarmed by reports of Black people found hanging from trees in numerous states throughout our country.”

 

“The series of deaths,” the letter continues, “raises significant suspicion of foul play given the role of lynching in our nation’s history.” Pressley and her colleagues call for a federal investigation of every hanging death of a black person in the U.S. and insist that “inaction by the federal government is tantamount to complicity.”

 

The letter deems all of this “a national crisis.”

 

In a post on X, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said how proud she was to sign the missive. She noted that “this year, there have already been ten reported hangings of Black people in the U.S.,” and how we must “address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”

 

It apparently didn’t occur to AOC or any of the other signers to do Google searches of local-news stories about the hangings. If they had, they would have learned that most of them were acts of suicide — awful in their own right, but not evidence that we are once again living in the Deep South circa 1892.

 

These news stories invariably recount how the local police have concluded that a person found hanging on a tree killed himself or herself — as well as all the speculation on social media that something more insidious must have been at play.

 

In one horrifying case, a young African-American woman was found hanging from a tree outside an abandoned house in Jackson, Miss., and her death was indeed ruled a murder. A CNN report several days ago related the heightened scrutiny around the crime given “Mississippi’s long history of racial violence involving hangings.” The police have now arrested a 51-year-old suspect and charged him with murder, although he doesn’t advance the narrative of the Pressley letter — since he, too, is African-American.

 

According to CDC figures, more than 11,000 people in the United States killed themselves by hanging or a related means in 2024 — or, on average, more than 30 a day. Hundreds of these people were African Americans. In this context, a handful of black suicides by hanging occurring out of doors over the space of half a year or more wouldn’t necessarily be shocking.

 

The will to believe the worst, though, is very strong among the people who signed the Pressley letter. They are perpetually convinced that the KKK is on the verge of riding again and making the U.S. the equivalent of the Reconstruction-era South.

 

One line in the Pressley letter says that black people have been found hanging from trees in places as dispersed as “Mississippi, Michigan, and New York.” The geographic randomness suggests a widely dispersed social phenomenon; the signatories conclude instead that there are racist murderers seeded throughout the country, all carrying out brutal, symbolically resonant killings.

 

This is a terrible thing to believe of one’s own country — not just of its people, but of all the law-enforcement authorities who must be suppressing evidence of systematic racial violence. No matter. The Squad and its ilk have a dim view of the United States and — as racial obsessives who consider themselves fearless crusaders for justice — must find great emotional satisfaction in the notion that they are fighting the same battle as, say, the legendary scourge of lynching, Ida B. Wells.

 

Wells, though, didn’t have to make up outrages, whereas the current crowd tends to give credence to every story based on a fake noose, or a hate-crime hoax.

 

Pressley and Co. clearly hoped to stir up a social panic, but the weakness and irrationality of their argument serves only to underline their own profound and disturbing racial paranoia.

Republicans Should Run Against Medicare for All

National Review Online

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

 

Democrats are partying like it’s 2019.

 

Coming off a successful midterm election year and convinced that socialism was where the energy of the party would be, Democratic presidential candidates lined up that year to embrace a government takeover of the health-care system they branded as “Medicare for All.” But in relatively short order, questions about the staggering cost and massive disruptions associated with the idea helped sink the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, and ultimately helped catapult Joe Biden (who endorsed more incremental expansion of government-subsidized health insurance) over Bernie Sanders.

 

This year, Medicare for All has reemerged. Democrats have nominated a number of candidates who support the idea, including in two of the most competitive Senate races — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine.

 

The pitch for Medicare for All starts off quite simply. We’re the richest country in the world, we spend all sorts of money on weapons, we should be able to afford to provide free health care to everybody. The promise is of a paradise in which there is no more dealing with being denied care by insurance companies or struggling to pay for prescription drugs.

 

Yet once anybody examines the details, the sales pitch becomes much less appealing. To start, there is the incredible cost. Back in 2019, the progressive Urban Institute estimated that a Medicare for All system along the lines of what Sanders proposed would cost about $34 trillion over ten years. To be clear, that was not the total cost of the program, but how much it would be expected to increase federal spending on top of the trillions a year we already spend on health-care programs. After seven years of inflation, the number is certainly higher today. An updated analysis from Stephen Parente of the right-leaning American Action Forum estimated that the cost of such a system over the next decade would be $47.4 trillion.

 

The immense cost of health care doesn’t disappear when it’s absorbed by the government — it just is paid in the form of taxes and debt rather than premiums. At the time, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that a $30 trillion increase in health-care spending could not be financed through simply taxing the rich, and would actually require the equivalent of a 32 percent increase in payroll taxes or doubling all income tax rates — actions that could shrink annual economic output by over 7 percent.

 

Efforts to contain costs by denying care do not go away — the only difference is that in socialist systems like the U.K. and Canada, it is a government bureaucrat saying “no.”

 

Lately, Sanders has been pointing to an analysis done by Medicare for All–supporting authors from the Yale School of Public Health last month claiming that implementing such a system would save lives while reducing health-care spending by $1 trillion a year. But the assumptions required to get that estimate are ridiculous. For instance, under the current system, doctors and hospitals earn less money from treating Medicare patients, which they are able to do by shifting costs onto privately insured patients. But the Yale analysis assumes that the new program would be paying Medicare rates for all Americans — which would be financially unsustainable for medical providers and would reduce access for Americans, especially at more cash-strapped rural hospitals. The analysis also assumes a 51 percent reduction in costs for prescription drugs, without any discussion of how that would impact research and development.

 

In addition to the costs and disruption to health-care access, a true Medicare for All system would necessitate the elimination of private health insurance, meaning most Americans, including the 161 million Americans who obtain insurance through their employers and the 36 million seniors who have chosen Medicare Advantage plans, wouldn’t be able to keep their coverage, even if they liked it. There was a massive backlash when Americans realized they wouldn’t be able to keep their plans under Obamacare, and that was a comparatively small few million people.

 

Republicans, facing headwinds in the midterms, would be wise to spend this fall making a sustained case against Medicare for All.

Donald Trump Can’t Bribe His Way Out of November’s Reckoning

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

 

Folks, time is now officially running out. The Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas has come and gone, and I wish I could say that the GOP has now emerged from the midsummer mire and is heading into November with a fresh head of steam. Instead, the sinkhole grows ever deeper. Donald Trump currently sits at a -16 percentage point approval rating in the RealClearPolitics polling averages, and things get even grimmer once you poke beneath the hood. (Next time you fill the tank up at the pump, you’ll understand that cool -38.6 percentage point approval rating he currently sports on the issue of inflation. Don’t worry, Americans historically aren’t known to vote on pocketbook issues . . .)

 

There’s no getting around blunt electoral realities here; you can’t plead with the mechanical gears of electoral politics to stop grinding. The hour is late. Voter attitudes about the economy, Trump’s various foreign policy adventures, and his . . . ahem, “highly personal” way of governing in his second term are now set and fixed: The cement has dried. (Early voting in Virginia begins in three days.)

 

It’s the sort of desperate situation that absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part, and Trump is always the man for such things. So he went and did his typical Donald Trump “thing,” rambling unscripted in Dallas through nearly two hours of self-praise after publicly pledging to stroke a $5,000 check to every adult voter in America if (and only if) they find it in their hearts to ratify his last two years in office by returning his party — and he very much wants you to know he thinks of it as his — to power. How would he do it legally? How would the American economy respond to the instant injection of $1.5 trillion? Don’t know!

 

And obviously I don’t have to know either, because — just like those DOGE checks, and those tariff rebate checks — it will never happen, nor was it meant to. It was the sort of wild gambit Trump has become infamous for over the years — he didn’t even bother to warn top Republicans of it in advance — and the sort of blarney you only offer because you know you’ll never have to pay up on it.

 

In any event, Trump’s little shamanistic rain dance failed to please the fickle electoral gods. Even Byron Donalds, running for governor of Florida as Ron DeSantis’s anointed MAGA successor, had to pump the brakes on the president’s inflation-inducing fantasy: “When it comes to additional checks going out the door, I have concerns, I’m not sure how you’re going to pay for that long-term.” (Don’t worry, we won’t have to.)

 

What cares Donald Trump for the “long term?” At this point, it should be amply clear that the president’s true north star is a mirror. He will never be on the ballot again and is seemingly indifferent to the reality that his legacy will be. After his heroic convention peroration, he sat down with Laura Ingraham for an interview where she eagerly queried him on whether he realized that he needed to campaign hard until Election Day.

 

“No,” he answered. “I’m a little bit tired of politics,” he sighed. He knows. Instead, Trump is on semi-vacation in Ireland, making casual comments about reunifying the island, capriciously suspending Irish whiskey tariffs (which he imposed) to thank them for their hospitality, and returning to what he enjoys best: playing king of a republic saddled with him for two more years.

 

The midterm results remain an ugly little beaten package, wrapped carefully and mailed with intent, for Republicans to unpack in November. What’s in the box? Something many of us haven’t really come to grips with yet, is my bet. (Maybe it’s a historic Senate loss in Kansas!) Either way, nothing will really change the course of events now. So I understand the core impulse behind the midterm convention: Maybe partying will help.

 

Just Shut the Kennedy Center Down at This Point

 

Bad news! For all the world knows, today may be officially be the day that the “Trump–Kennedy Center” closes for the foreseeable future . . . that is, unless, those dastardly courts relent, and allow the beleaguered, federally funded showcase for the arts to heal itself financially by restoring Donald Trump’s glorious visage to the visible exterior of the building.

 

Or so the pitch to the court goes, per the Washington Post. Yes, this particular phase of this increasingly pathetic saga of Trump’s desperate attempt to co-opt the Kennedy legacy is drawing to its close, as administration figures warned in a court filing last week.

 

Leaders of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, installed by President Donald Trump, say the center is on the brink of bankruptcy and argue that putting the president’s name on its facade — and thus ensuring his fundraising efforts — may be the only way to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

 

It’s a bold pitch, for sure, given that the crisis is entirely self-engineered, but there’s more!

 

The presentation makes clear that Trump’s support hinges on getting public credit for his involvement. The financial resolution says Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the Center from bankruptcy” while the building undergoes a sweeping renovation. But it says Trump is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” of that project or lead a financial rescue without “appropriate recognition” of his role.

 

Read that paragraph again. The Kennedy Center is a public trust, a federally owned (and statutorily named) venue. But now Trump frankly acknowledges that he will hold it hostage, and even shutter it, unless his name is attached to it.

 

The proper answer, of course, is for the courts to agree with Donald Trump: Fine, shut it down. This is not mere jest: The Kennedy Center is clearly not a viable institution so long as Trump remains president. He refuses to disassociate himself with it, and nobody will agree to perform — as a direct tribute to his ego — so long as he is around to claim credit for it in any way. Once he is gone, reopen it under new management — and make sure that management is independent of the administration. Then it will flourish again, with or without refurbishing. As for now, the Kennedy Center should be shuttered — and that will be the truest tribute to Trump’s ego of all.

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption

By Anne Applebaum

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

In the summer of 2025, the government of Brazil suddenly found itself in a deep crisis. The Trump administration had unexpectedly imposed 50 percent tariffs on the country’s products, threatening everyone from coffee planters to shoe manufacturers. At the same time, the United States canceled the visas of eight Brazilian supreme-court justices and placed unprecedented financial and travel sanctions on a powerful justice and his family.

 

Many things about this crisis were novel. For the first time anyone could remember, an American administration had used tariffs not for economic reasons but as a tool to influence the internal politics of a friendly democracy. President Trump was publicly fulminating against what he called the “WITCH HUNT” against Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, who was then on trial for plotting to carry out a coup after losing an election in 2022. Some of Bolsonaro’s followers had stormed Brazil’s Parliament and other federal buildings, likely inspired by the actions of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. Steve Bannon, who called the Brazilian insurrectionists “freedom fighters,” was one of many MAGA boosters who cheered them on. When combined with local grievances, the language of American election denial was right at home in Brazil.

 

The U.S. has used financial sanctions and visa bans in the past—but only to punish dictators, criminals, and people accused of grand-scale international corruption or brutal atrocities. Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes had never been credibly accused of any of this. But by the Trump administration’s reckoning, he had two strikes against him: First, de Moraes’s court was trying Bolsonaro; second, he had provoked the ire of Elon Musk, Trump’s largest election donor. De Moraes “needs to leave,” Musk said, comparing him to Voldemort, after de Moraes threatened to fine X and ordered it to block accounts accused of spreading disinformation.

 

The crisis was novel in other ways too. In normal times, the Brazilian government is reasonably well connected in Washington, regardless of who runs either country. The tenth-largest economy in the world, Brazil cooperates extensively with U.S. law enforcement and regional organizations. Yet at this crucial moment, with billions of dollars in the balance and Brazil’s sovereign democracy under attack, Brazilian officials suddenly found that nobody in the Trump administration would speak to the formal representatives of their left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s ambassador to Washington found herself isolated. The foreign minister, a diplomat who had known U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for decades, could not get through to anyone. A junior official told me that even his graduate-school classmate at the U.S. Treasury would not answer his calls.

 

The Brazilian finance minister at the time, Fernando Haddad, finally managed to schedule a call with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But two days before the meeting was to take place, the Treasury Department canceled it—and then Bessent used the same time slot to meet with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son. The younger Bolsonaro—who lives in Texas, has befriended Donald Trump Jr., and attends Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meetings—was flaunting his connections in Washington, which were manifestly better than those of Lula’s administration.

 

That put the Brazilians in a strange position. “All the official channels that we have, they just suddenly went out of touch,” the junior official told me. “And what happened is that myriad informal actors just started knocking at our doors. And that was interesting.”

 

Some of these visitors were types not previously known in Washington: lobbyists advertising their relationships not with government officials but with the people who hang around Mar-a-Lago, or with MAGA influencers whose X accounts can attract the president’s attention. Others were business operators offering government favors while seeking to make deals for themselves: An investor who claimed to own a vacation home near Bessent’s offered to arrange a meeting with the Treasury secretary in exchange for access to crucial minerals for himself. The Brazilians declined that offer.

 

A truce was finally arranged, multiple people told me, with the help of Joesley Batista, a billionaire whose meatpacking company does business in both the U.S. and Brazil, and whose American subsidiary had donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration (more than the contributions of Amazon, Meta, and Google combined). Batista had no official government role, but his money may have given him the clout to influence Trump’s meetings with Lula at the 2025 United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, and at a summit in Kuala Lumpur, where the two elderly populists, each with grievances against their respective establishments, hit it off. The tariffs were reduced.

 

The détente was temporary. When I visited São Paulo and Brasília this past spring, the State Department had just appointed a new senior adviser on Brazil policy. Before working for the administration, Darren Beattie founded Revolver News, a website that promoted the “Fedsurrection” conspiracy—the belief that federal agents were behind the riots on January 6, an obsession that would naturally appeal to Brazil’s election deniers and displease the elected president. When Beattie asked to visit Brazil for a minerals conference, the Brazilian government refused to grant him a visa, in part because it suspected that his true purpose was to visit Jair Bolsonaro, then in prison.

 

Among the journalists, analysts, and officials I met in Brazil, the main topic of conversation was not whether the U.S. would intervene in the country’s elections this fall but how. Flávio Bolsonaro, another of the ex-president’s sons, is running for president, and the Trump administration seems to be looking for ways to help. In June, when a Brazilian court handed Flávio’s brother Eduardo a prison sentence for seeking to get the U.S. to intervene in his father’s trial, Trump’s State Department denounced the conviction as “lawfare.” In July, the administration planned to send two envoys to Brazil to meet with election deniers and “investigate” the Brazilian electoral system; their visa requests were also turned down. A Brazilian public-policy professor told me he wouldn’t be surprised if American social-media platforms quietly began to help Bolsonaro. These tech companies have already shown that they will “flip ideology” to align with changes in the American government. So why not in Brazil?

 

Slowly, the Brazilians were learning the same lesson as other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can.

 

***

 

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” Karl Marx wrote. He was wrong about many things but not about this: In modern times, every major revolutionary movement has sought to change not just the politics of a single country but the international system itself. Napoleon marched the French Revolution across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky believed that their Bolshevik Revolution would succeed only when the Soviet Union was surrounded by other Communist states. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors built proxy movements to spread their ideology across the Middle East.

 

The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government is no different. Wrongly described as “isolationists,” many of its true believers don’t think of themselves as ordinary Republicans who won an election and will temporarily hold power until the next election. Nor are they mere appendages of Trump. They believe they represent something much greater: the vanguard of a movement that will alter not just America, but the world.

 

Like earlier revolutionaries, they do not believe that their opponents are legitimate rivals or, as John McCain once described Barack Obama, decent citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Their enemies are existential, and they are international: super-spreaders of a “wokeness” plague, or proponents of a fictitious “censorship-industrial complex,” or advocates of “regulation” that will hamper American business, or self-hating promoters of “mass migration” who want to drown Western civilization in a sea of brown-faced aliens. To maintain their power and defeat these enemies, the predators, like their Bolshevik counterparts, cannot rely on traditional diplomacy, because they don’t trust its practitioners.

 

Nor do they trust many of the leaders of the democratic states that have long shared the same political and economic values as America. Although the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to cooperate closely with allied governments, the ideologues in and out of the administration are actively seeking to replace them with people and parties who share their disdain for liberal democracy and for what were once considered, at least aspirationally, to be American values. To do so, they need to expand their global influence, manipulate elections in former partner nations, and alter the flows of money and power, especially inside other democracies. Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists.

 

Like all revolutions, this one has many faces. The Bolsheviks had an ideology, a plan to destroy the old social order and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. But a motley array of other people—advocates of free love, avant-garde painters, grifters fleecing ex-aristocrats—took advantage of the chaos to promote their own agendas. Different kinds of revolutionaries are now pushing the “Make America Great Again” movement in different directions too.

 

Some are ideologues such as Bannon and Beattie, people who believe that Western civilization is being destroyed by racial diversity, secularism, and the commitment to human rights. “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Beattie once wrote on X. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” Bannon first compared himself to Lenin and talked about smashing the “administrative state” more than a decade ago.

 

These ideas, once marginal, are now central to American foreign policy. At last year’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President Vance assailed “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” At this year’s Munich Security Conference, Rubio said the same thing more politely. In the face of “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies,” Rubio, the son of immigrants, called on America and Europe to work together in the name of our “shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” He said nothing about a shared commitment to democracy, transparency, or the rule of law.

 

The corollary to this thesis, expressed last year in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, is that America has a special interest in the politics of the historically white, Christian nations of Europe, and in promoting the far-right political leaders and movements working to keep Europe white and Christian, even though most of them are not currently in power. That document made it clear that although America will no longer intervene to promote democracy at all, anywhere in the world, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory”—language that justifies direct U.S. intervention in European politics to prevent what the document enigmatically calls “civilizational erasure” and to help the allies of the ideologues take power. In “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” an essay published on the State Department’s Substack, a 27-year-old Trump appointee named Samuel Samson accused Europeans of waging “an aggressive campaign against Western civilization.”

 

The fight against this existential threat is under way. Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, told Congress this year that America is now “fully utilizing all the tools at our disposal—exchange programs, cultural heritage initiatives, micro-grants, and more—to advance the President’s America First agenda.” In practice, this means that the American government is using diplomatic pressure, visa bans, and cultural funding to support political parties and leaders deemed to be “civilizational allies” in its international struggle and to undermine its opponents, even when those opponents are the leaders of legitimate governments that have long-standing relationships with the U.S. Samson has held friendly private meetings with far-right European leaders and party representatives, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD); Rogers had a much less friendly meeting with representatives of an actual European government. On a recent visit to the United Kingdom, Rogers denounced what she described as a migrant-led crime wave and accused those present of failing to contend with their country’s problems. In reality, British crime levels have been falling, but genuine facts about Europe—a continent where people live longer, have better health care, and are far less likely to die in mass shootings than Americans—are rarely allowed to undermine the narrative.

 

In its own hemisphere, the State Department is committed to a more openly imperialist project. The National Security Strategy implies that other governments in North and South America should capitulate to the demands of American officials or companies, and that if they don’t, the U.S. will work to change those governments. As in Europe, the Trump administration will push hard to elect, and to keep in power, politicians who support American dominance: We “will reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy,” the National Security Strategy declares. When Trump ordered U.S. Special Forces to seize President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela and his administration exploited the country’s oil, that was understood by legitimate democratic leaders in our hemisphere (which Maduro was not) as a warning: This can happen to you.

 

For some regional politicians, this looks like an opportunity. In October 2025, Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate, suggested that the U.S. could expand its military attacks on small, allegedly drug-carrying fishing boats. Wouldn’t the American military like to “spend a few months” in Guanabara Bay, off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, he asked, “helping us fight these terrorist organizations?” When the U.S. State Department duly designated two Brazilian crime syndicates as “terrorists” this past spring, against the wishes of the Brazilian government, some wondered whether the U.S. was preparing the justification for a future intervention.

 

***

 

Others have different, more immediate reasons for wanting to “Make America Great Again.” These include executives from the oil-and-gas, cryptocurrency, and rare-earth-mining industries, and above all big tech companies. Their motivations differ from those of the ideologues, but they share the belief that only power matters, and that only superior humans—richer, more intelligent, usually male and white—should have it. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in January, “but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Miller’s words surely appealed to the business leaders who are delighted to see the tools of American government and diplomacy being redeployed, not to build a world that’s safe for democracy, or even safe for Americans, but to create a world that’s profitable for them.

 

Many of the unconventional figures who now act in the name of the U.S. are already working to make this dream real. In January, Steve Witkoff, the real-estate dealer turned U.S. special envoy, told a roomful of European presidents and prime ministers gathered in Paris to discuss support for Ukraine that he was already negotiating energy and mineral deals for American companies with Russia, to be implemented after the war. This surprised many of the meeting’s attendees, whose main concern was bringing peace to Ukraine. (A White House spokesperson denied that Witkoff made this statement.) Witkoff also specifically mentioned the role that the U.S. investment company BlackRock could play in the reconstruction of Ukraine, an unusual comment for a peace negotiator. But maybe not a surprising one: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has sat next to Jared Kushner while he negotiated with the Ukrainians, according to The New York Times.

 

Trump’s Board of Peace, the quasi-governmental organization whose rules read like those of an exclusive golf club—Trump, as chair, has the right to name his successor, select the board, and determine the mission—presents the same dilemma: Is this organization, much of whose funding is not transparent and comes from member states in the Persian Gulf, designed to make peace, or make money? Does it represent the views of America, or of its funders? In the name of rebuilding Gaza, the board, according to The Guardian, has sought to grant itself the power to seize Palestinian land and buildings, perhaps paving the way for American companies to enact the “New Gaza” plan, a redevelopment project proposed by Kushner, a private citizen (and Trump’s son-in-law) who is of course a board member, as well as Witkoff’s negotiating partner on Russia.

 

Other projects are more narrowly designed to benefit family members and friends of the president. Last year Trump, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, helped negotiate access to one of the world’s largest untapped tungsten reserves, in Kazakhstan, for a low-profile American mining company. The New York Times reported that the deal, which is supported by $1.6 billion in federal financing, benefits Trump’s sons, who are partial owners of an investment bank with a stake in the project. Lutnick’s sons oversee another company, Cantor Fitzgerald, involved with the deal. (Trump’s sons have said that they had no role in shaping the details of the deal. A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald told the Times that the company’s executives were not involved in discussions of government funding.) But this is only one example: Trump’s children are also negotiating private business deals in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, where local leaders have a clear interest in impressing their father. According to The Washington Post, Trump’s sons have also invested in numerous defense-tech companies that have received Pentagon contracts or other federal funding. “There are no conflicts of interest,” a White House spokesperson told the Post when asked about the report.

 

According to the Times, Trump himself earned an unprecedented $2.2 billion in the first year of his second term, much of it from cryptocurrency projects. But he also enjoys exercising power over other people, and uses the tools of government to do that. His tariffs give him financial and personal leverage over foreign leaders. His invasion of Venezuela gave him an apparent victory over an old enemy, but also opaque control of Venezuela’s oil, which he has bragged about repeatedly. His use of unconventional envoys helps him manage these various interests, many of which would have in the past been considered immoral or possibly illegal. Fiona Hill, a civil servant on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, told me that even then, the president was surrounded by people who were “quasi-thinking that they were representing American interests, but they were also representing their own.” He still is.

 

***

 

Sometimes, the goals of the civilizational warriors, the oligarchs, and Trump directly align. Consider their joint war against the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which regulates how social-media companies, search engines, and other online organizations protect users’ rights, handle illegal content, and generally look after the public interest. The State Department ideologues describe this law as “censorship” that is damaging not only to Europeans but to Americans. At an event in Washington this past spring, Sarah Rogers spoke of a “censorship class” that had allegedly been active under the Biden administration before it “scuttled to Europe” after the 2024 election.

 

Although several lawsuits have sought to prove otherwise, there is no evidence that the Biden administration silenced anybody. Nevertheless, the State Department takes this “threat” so seriously that it has imposed visa restrictions on Thierry Breton, a former EU commissioner who is now a private citizen, for his role in creating the Digital Services Act, as well as four other Europeans who campaigned for the law, paradoxically curbing their freedom of speech. A German official told me that Americans regularly bring up their objections to the act during bilateral negotiations, even though the law—passed by the European Union, not Germany—has been in effect since 2022.

 

The reality is that the Digital Services Act says nothing about censorship, especially not of Americans. The law requires digital platforms to protect minors, comply with European laws—laws that are made by democratically elected legislatures and that, in Germany and elsewhere, forbid Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial, as well as child pornography and incitement of terrorism—and provide transparency about their use of algorithms. Europeans don’t have the same speech laws as Americans, but they have the right to enact and enforce their own laws, just as they have a right to different food-safety or air-pollution laws. American companies operate all over the world in accordance with the local laws. But in Europe, U.S. tech companies and the U.S. administration are jointly seeking to change not just the laws, but the political and legal order that wrote them. Different faces of the revolution coincide conveniently here: The promotion of anti-European, far-right political parties serves both the profit-making interests of the tech companies and the ideological interests of the “free speech” defenders. Elon Musk, for example, openly uses his social-media platform, his political donations, and the clout that his companies give him inside the U.S. government to oppose many forms of digital regulation, to push racist conspiracy theories, and to promote the civilizational allies of the predator clan. He has made video appearances at a far-right “Unite the Kingdom” rally—“Violence is coming to you,” he told those gathered in London; “you either fight back or you die”—and at a rally of the AfD, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified as a right-wing extremist group. His platform has also been used to promote fear and misinformation, even to fuel violence that could destabilize sitting governments. After a stabbing in Southport, England, in 2024, viral posts falsely claiming that the suspect was a Muslim and an undocumented migrant spread rapidly to millions via X and other platforms, inflaming the riots that ensued.

 

The promotion of foreign political parties for commercial gain is not new. In 2018, Steve Bannon sent a message to Jeffrey Epstein, preserved in the Justice Department’s cache of Epstein files, suggesting that the success of extremist European political parties would make life easier for the cryptocurrency industry. In the message, Bannon described himself as an adviser to Italian, German, and Swiss far-right political parties, among others, as well as to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Britain’s Nigel Farage. Anticipating a victory in the upcoming European parliamentary elections, he told Epstein that “we can go from 92! seats to 200” and then “shut down any crypto legislation or anything else we want.” “Roger that,” Epstein responded.

 

Bannon, who by then had left the Trump administration, was not publicly claiming to speak for America or its interests. But people with views similar to Bannon’s are now speaking for America, and their impact on the international system is as dramatic as the Bolsheviks’ once was. I don’t mean that they will destroy the United Nations or the system of international law that Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of policy, disdainfully calls the “cloud-castle abstraction of the rules-based international order”; those things are already so weak that they have ceased to matter.

 

Rather, the change is inside the democratic world that came into being after 1945, a world based not exclusively on law, but on a set of mostly self-imposed restraints. Inside this sphere, American power was largely derived from alliances that it refrained from exploiting. Long-term relationships were held to be valuable, because you never knew when you might need your allies. U.S. politicians did not execute American foreign policy, or indeed domestic policy, in order to make money for themselves or their children while they were still in office. These alliances achieved enormous success: Although American policy in the Middle East has always been controversial and the results of American military interventions around the world mixed at best, America helped build eight decades of peace, prosperity, and eventually democracy in Europe and much of Asia, creating markets for U.S. companies and unprecedented support for U.S. power.

 

This world is fast disappearing. Instead, following the president’s lead, different people inside and outside the administration are seizing the revolutionary moment in order to win zero-sum victories. Countries that hang back from this free-for-all know they will suffer. “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at Davos earlier this year. He was right.

 

***

 

In May, the governor of Louisiana landed in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, declaring that he had come to “make a bunch of friends.” Jeff Landry is Trump’s “special envoy” to Greenland, a title that comes with no salary and no recognition from Denmark, of which Greenland is a semiautonomous territory. Landry had nevertheless told Trump, on X, that “it’s an honor to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.”

 

Upon his arrival, Landry changed into camouflage pants, as if he were preparing for combat. He attended a business conference to which he had not been invited. He tried to hand out MAGA hats, without much success. Although Louisiana is near the bottom of all U.S. health-care rankings, and although Greenland has full access to a state-funded national health service, Landry brought a doctor who seemed to be there to discuss Greenlandic health care. On the day after Landry’s departure, Greenlanders staged a large protest outside the new U.S. consulate, which they had dubbed “Trump Tower.” After returning home, Landry nevertheless told Fox News that the people he had met “want more U.S. involvement in Greenland.”

 

The visit was farcical, but no one in Denmark was laughing. Ever since the surreal, shocking days in January 2026 when the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, the government in Copenhagen has been watching the Americans who visit Nuuk, some for business, some for politics, some for a strange mix of both. In August, for example, an American oil company called Greenland Energy began bringing equipment to drill for oil in a remote part of the island, although it had not received formal permission to do so. Greenland Energy’s investors include Ken Griffin, a major donor to the Republican Party. Dr. Phil, the former talk-show host and prominent Trump supporter, has been commissioned to make a documentary series about the project, designed to “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters.” The company offered locals huge salaries—$185,000 annually, well above the national average—and talked up the potential size of the oil deposit. (Greenland Energy has said that it hasn’t officially started recruiting employees, and that high salaries are standard for specialized security guards.) A local leader told me that this talk of big money seemed ominous to Greenlanders, and in several towns, people staged protests against the drilling project. In mid-August, officials in Greenland formally postponed the drilling.

 

Larry Swets, the company’s executive chair, told Fortune that the project is not related to American annexation. But two days after the Greenlandic government warned that it had not given the company permission to deliver equipment, Trump posted an AI-generated photograph of himself glowering over a Greenlandic village beneath the headline “Hello, Greenland!” So is Greenland Energy there for politics, for business, or both?

 

Equally hard to assess are the motives of Dryden Brown, a co-founder of Praxis, which Brown has described as a “crypto-native country” that has financial backing from, among others, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Balaji Srinivasan, the author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country, along with entities associated with Peter Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Brown visited Greenland just before the 2024 U.S. presidential election to “try to buy it,” as he wrote on X. Praxis seeks to build a “digital nation”—anyone can apply to join—and he wants, at some point, to build a city in Greenland to house it. Maybe this was Brown’s own initiative. Maybe it was Thiel’s. Or maybe the idea came from Ken Howery, now the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, who co-founded PayPal with Thiel. Officially, Howery represents the U.S. government, but he equally represents the tech oligarchy, whose influence in this new world far exceeds that of mere government officials.

 

Lately, a more frequent visitor is Drew Horn, who describes himself as an entrepreneur “focusing on critical minerals and resource development.” With a Greenlandic business partner, a former politician who once starred in a Danish TV series, Horn is planning to build a data center in western Greenland, a daunting project that would require new port facilities, the construction of an undersea cable, housing for imported workers, and some bespoke engineering to prevent the center from sinking into the permafrost. But Horn is also a former Trump national-security official, according to The New Yorker, with links to at least one covert operation: In 2020, a participant in a failed coup attempt in Venezuela named Horn as one of his contacts, though Horn has denied all wrongdoing. He also denies playing any such role in Greenland, writing an article for Britain’s The Spectator magazine in May titled “No, I’m Not a CIA Spy in Greenland.” Still, he told Reuters in April that he maintains a “dialogue” with White House officials. Does he still represent Trump? American oligarchs? Both?

 

Horn has also met several times with the leader of Naleraq, Greenland’s populist pro-independence political party. At the time of Landry’s visit in May, Julie Rademacher, a Danish Greenlandic politician whom I’d met in Copenhagen, called me from Nuuk to describe the situation. Rademacher said that ever since American business and political operators from the Trump orbit had gotten involved in Greenland, Naleraq had become more aggressive, initiating votes of no confidence in a Parliament that is historically more decorous. Greenland does have long-standing grievances against Denmark. As recently as 2022, the Danish and Greenlandic governments launched an investigation into the Danish promotion of birth control in Greenland in the 1960s and ’70s, which included inserting IUDs into women without consent, a practice that former Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte B. Egede has said constituted “genocide.” Are Americans seeking to exploit that legacy?

 

Regardless of their opinion about Denmark, Greenlanders are becoming aware of, and are unnerved by, this semi-covert, sometimes glaringly obvious American pressure. The night after Landry’s visit, Rademacher said, she had gone to a bar in Nuuk where people were openly carrying guns, something she’d never seen before. The atmosphere on the island was becoming unsettled, strange: Greenlanders knew that envoys from a predatory foreign power were circulating among them, seeking minerals, money, attention, regime change. “They are destroying the trust and the respect in society, in institutions, but also in people,” she said. “They fuck with people’s brains. It will be a fight for Greenlanders to keep their sanity.”

 

***

 

Like the assault on Greenland—and like so many other MAGA trolling projects—the American assault on Canada began with what seemed like a joke: Canada as the 51st state. But it was not a joke. Even before his second inauguration, Trump declared on Truth Social that “many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State” and that “if Canada merged with the U.S. there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them.”

 

Never mind that U.S.-Canadian trade has been functioning perfectly well for decades. Never mind that there are no Russian and Chinese ships “constantly surrounding” Canada, just as there aren’t any surrounding Greenland. Once he took office, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods and a 10 percent tariff on Canadian energy products, as punishment, he claimed, for the failure to stop drugs and undocumented migrants from entering the U.S. This, too, was unfair—hardly any drugs enter the U.S. over the northern border—but Trump says many things that nobody is really expected to believe.

 

In practice, these tariffs had another purpose: They were, in the view of the Canadian government, the beginning of a campaign to weaken the Canadian economy. Trump, Prime Minister Carney said, is “trying to break us so the U.S. can own us.” As part of the negotiations to alleviate the tariffs, Canada was forced to abandon the idea of taxing U.S. tech companies. The tariffs did what they were supposed to do: In June, when Canada’s economy began to slow down, Trump once again suggested that Canada would do better as the “51st State!” In late July he tightened the screws again, announcing a new round of 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, from “wine to hockey sticks to cement,” as an administration official put it. Ostensibly this was in response to “discriminatory” Canadian trade practices—but those were introduced only in response to Trump’s earlier round of tariffs.

 

As in Greenland, the economic campaign has been accompanied by an unofficial influence campaign. Canadians listen to many of the same podcasts and watch many of the same video clips as Americans, and during the coronavirus pandemic, some American far-right podcasters sought to reach new audiences by amplifying a Canadian truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates. Some probably did this because they agreed with the sentiment; others may have done it for money, knowing that the internet rewards outrage. Since 2022, the truckers’ protest has morphed into a full-scale separatist movement for the province of Alberta, and the podcasters have now picked up that cause too. Marcus Kolga, who runs the Toronto-based foreign-disinformation-monitoring group DisinfoWatch, says he has also identified Russian accounts pushing “a sustained pattern of Alberta-focused content across the Pravda News Network,” as well as on Russian-affiliated websites and social-media accounts.

 

Unlike American states, Canadian provinces are allowed to hold referenda on their relationship to the union; Quebec has done so twice, both times choosing the status quo. Alberta will hold a referendum on October 19, asking citizens whether the province should remain in Canada or begin the legal process to hold a second referendum on separation. The road to secession is complicated, and as of this summer those favoring a new relationship with Ottawa did not seem to have anything close to a majority. But the movement has momentum—for the first time, Alberta has a provincial government willing to allow a referendum on secession.

 

Americans did not create Alberta separatism, any more than they created Bolsonarism in Brazil. Resentment of federal intervention in the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta is old and deep. On a visit to Calgary back in 2019, I encountered pro-oil, anti-environmentalist protesters carrying a banner: We ❤ all 🍁 Pipelines. But American involvement is not trivial, either. Taylor Owen, a Canadian scholar who tracks nearly 600 U.S.-politics podcasts, told me that in the past, Canada was mentioned only sporadically—someone would say something controversial, 24 hours of debate would follow, and that would be it. That has changed, Owen said. Discussions of Alberta are now continuous and repetitive, with podcasters “either coordinating or just following each other.”

 

The net effect is that American podcasts are now generating a significant volume of content about Alberta separatism. An episode of Glenn Beck’s podcast featured Keith Wilson, an Alberta separatist who said that the province has “far more shared values” with “the United States and Americans than we do with these leftists in Ottawa.” Steve Bannon has described “undefended northern territories of Canada” as susceptible to Russian and Chinese invasion. Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, formerly of Tenet Media—an organization that allegedly received significant funding from Russia in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election—have also joined the fray.

 

This is not solely a media project. On at least three occasions, State Department officials have welcomed representatives of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a separatist group. The names of the American officials present have not been published—Jeff Rath, one of the Alberta group’s leaders, has said its American contacts “don’t want to be wasting their time answering questions from the press.” The group reportedly requested a $500 billion loan for a future independent Albertan government. (Rath has denied this, but a co-founder of the group confirmed it to NBC News.) A State Department spokesperson has said that its officials meet frequently with “civil society types” and has not promised anything specific.

 

This behind-the-scenes conversation took on heavier significance in January, when Scott Bessent appeared on a far-right podcast run by the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and made a series of statements seeming to endorse the separatist cause. Alberta, the Treasury secretary told Posobiec, is a “natural partner for the U.S.” The province “is a wealth of natural resources,” but the Canadian government “won’t let them build a pipeline to the Pacific.”

 

Bessent didn’t mention specific U.S. oil-and-gas interests, although there are many: ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil, for instance, have major interests in the Alberta oil sands. U.S. investors also have big stakes in the Canadian companies that operate in Alberta. Bessent noted coyly that he had heard a “rumor that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not,” but he stopped just short of endorsing the effort.

 

At least one other official representative of the U.S. government has gone beyond mere hints. Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, this year invited Tamara Lich, a leader of the 2022 trucker protests, to his Fourth of July party. Lich, who was tried and convicted in connection with the protests and is still under house arrest, has shifted her energies to Alberta separatism. She said that she attended the party after obtaining permission from her probation officer, posted photographs of herself with the ambassador, and thanked Hoekstra, Trump, and the “American people” for their support.

 

Alberta is in the middle of Canada. If the province were to detach itself, eastern Canada could be physically cut off from western Canada, the country would lose a substantial portion of its oil and natural-gas production, and the province’s important contributions to the national budget would vanish. Canada might cease to be a viable country, especially if other provinces started to question the union. That may be the point: In 1990, Pat Buchanan, the intellectual grandfather of the MAGA movement, declared that if Quebec ever broke off from Canada, America should “pick up the pieces.” This now seems to be, if not the publicly stated U.S. policy toward Canada, then at least the predator clan’s policy: pressure the economy, break up the federation, pick up the pieces. And no, it is not a joke.

 

The idea that a dedicated group of Americans has a plan to dismantle Canada, or that businessmen with opaque links to the U.S. government might want to create political conditions for a U.S. takeover of Greenland, may surprise Americans. It shouldn’t. Every single tactic used against Brazil, Canada, or Denmark has also been deployed elsewhere—not to support democracy, not to build American prosperity, but to spread the illiberal revolution and make money for the predators who support it. Here is a partial list.

 

Direct financial support for revolutionary allies. About two weeks before a midterm election in Argentina, in October 2025, the Trump administration announced a $20 billion bailout to rescue the Argentine economy from a financial crisis. This was a straight-up bribe: If the country did not vote for the party of Javier Milei, civilizational ally of the MAGA movement, Trump would withdraw this support. Milei’s party won. Since then, the Argentine president has backed the complete deregulation of AI. A few months after the election, Peter Thiel temporarily moved his entire family to Buenos Aires.

 

Political support for revolutionary allies and illiberal parties. In Germany in February 2025, Vice President Vance went out of his way to meet Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the AfD. On a visit to Hungary in 2026, a few days before a national election, Vance endorsed Viktor Orbán for reelection as prime minister; at a public event in Budapest, Vance called Trump to confirm his endorsement too. Vance did not meet or mention the opposition leader, Péter Magyar, who then won the election in a landslide. During the Polish presidential-election campaign last year, Trump invited the far-right nationalist candidate, Karol Nawrocki, to the White House, but not his centrist opponent. Since then, Trump has repeatedly bragged about how he “won” the election for Nawrocki.

 

On a trip to Washington earlier this year, a group of German legislators, from various political parties, had scheduled meetings at the Pentagon and State Department. According to a member of the German Parliament, they were told that only representatives from the AfD and the center-right Christian Democratic party could enter the buildings; members of the Green Party and the Social Democratic Party were not allowed in.

 

Propaganda for revolutionary allies. The far-right videosphere regularly makes itself available for foreigners who want to burnish their revolutionary credentials at home. As a part of his 2025 presidential-election campaign in Romania, George Simion, the leader of the Romanian far right who is frequently aligned with Russia and whose 2022 wedding ceremony was modeled after that of a notorious interwar fascist, appeared on podcasts with Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon, telling the latter, “We totally bashed the globalists here in Romania.” Nayib Bukele, the autocratic leader of El Salvador, went on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend his own program of mass arrests and packed prisons. He spoke English, but a version also appeared with Spanish subtitles for Salvadoran consumption. Orbán, before losing his election, appeared with Carlson and invited him to a public event in Hungary, to demonstrate to Hungarians that he had American support.

 

Rallies for revolutionary allies. Meetings of CPAC, once a mainstream forum for U.S. conservatives, have now become a kind of traveling road show that appears wherever sponsors can pay, offering visibility and quasi-official American endorsements to the local far right. A rotating team of international guests shows up: Bolsonaro, Simion, Bukele, Orbán, Milei, and Weidel, as well as Geert Wilders of the Dutch far right and Santiago Abascal of the Spanish far right. They join Americans such as Kristi Noem, Senator Ted Cruz, and Trump’s consigliere Richard Grenell.

 

Repurposing humanitarian agencies to benefit revolutionary allies. Discarding decades of human-rights standards and refugee law, the Trump administration removed refugee-processing officials from postings around the world and sent them to South Africa, where they are helping allegedly repressed Afrikaners (who do not by any international standard qualify as refugees). The officials did their job: From October 2025 through June 2026, the U.S. accepted 7,727 “refugees” from South Africa—and three from the rest of the world. An additional 10,000 white South Africans are on track to be accepted soon. A government estimate puts the cost of processing them at $100 million.

 

Following the destruction of USAID, Food for Peace—a program that has fed more than 4 billion people over 70 years—was moved to the Department of Agriculture, where its primary purpose will be not fighting hunger around the world but subsidizing U.S. farmers. This year, it will distribute food to countries that, for obscure reasons, don’t include those on the edge of famine, notably Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia—but will include El Salvador, whose leader is a friend of the revolution.

 

Congressional networking with revolutionary allies. In March, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson headlined an Alliance of Sovereign Nations conference, hosted by Turning Point Action, bringing members of Congress and the global far right together beneath the banner of the organization created by the late Charlie Kirk. Among the attendees were Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD leader with unusually close ties to Russia; leaders from Georgia and Azerbaijan, repressive states with close ties to Russia; and Anna Paulina Luna, the conference organizer, a Florida congresswoman with close ties to Russia. George Simion was also there, having appeared earlier in the year as a guest at a party at the Kennedy Center, where he cut a slice from a red-white-and-blue cake shaped like Greenland.

 

Ending democracy promotion. All of the U.S. government institutions created over decades to promote democratic ideas and practices have now been weakened, dismantled, or rewired to promote the revolution. USAID is gone; foreign broadcasters such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have barely survived; the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, once considered a nonpartisan source of information on human rights, now suggests that Germany is more oppressive than El Salvador. Slowly, the money the U.S. spends on educational and cultural programs, scholarships, and exchange-student programs—a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and soft power since the early 1960s—is being repurposed. One example: 11 out of 12 members of the Fulbright exchange-student program’s board resigned last year after the State Department canceled nearly 200 Fulbright scholarships for American academics approved by the board and put other awards under review. One of the former board members told PBS that the board feared that the department was trying to block politically incorrect projects. This marked—“for the first time in 80 years,” he said—the “interjection of politics into the selection process,” a “gross distortion” of the program.

 

Asked at an event about the Trump administration’s policy toward cultural and academic grants more generally, Sarah Rogers, who runs America’s public diplomacy, explained that “we would choose a winning applicant for most of these grants based on how credibly we thought that person or organization could advance American priorities.” But what are “American priorities” if the American government is run by people who use its instruments not on behalf of its citizens, but on behalf of themselves?

 

***

 

Revolutions inspire other revolutions—and counterrevolutions. America is producing both. Slowly, politics around the world are shifting as leaders copy Trump’s tactics, switch sides to curry favor, develop a sudden interest in crypto—or else try hard to hedge against the predatory American regime.

 

Although European nationalist parties have historically favored a heavy role for the state—Viktor Orbán’s Hungary was an excellent example—many have now adopted a libertarian message, aligning themselves both with Trump and with American and international companies that seek havens from government regulation. Nigel Farage, the leader of the British far-right Reform party, campaigned for Trump in 2024. Now his income streams look similar to Trump’s. In 2024, he accepted a $6.7 million personal donation from a Thailand-based crypto mogul, Christopher Harborne, allegedly for Farage’s “security.” And George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster, also appears to have funded both Farage and, via donations made by Cottrell’s mother, Reform (even as a Polymarket account in Cottrell’s name was receiving some $9 million in cryptocurrency from unidentified sources). Previously better-known for promoting Brexit, Farage began to lobby hard on crypto issues—for example, he opposed a Bank of England cryptocurrency project that, as it happens, would damage Harborne’s business.

 

The revolution has also arrived in Poland, where the previously domestic-facing nationalist right has developed links to both the cryptocurrency industry and the Trump administration. A currency exchange called Zondacrypto, now under investigation for allegedly swindling customers, sponsored the CPAC event in Poland where Kristi Noem endorsed Karol Nawrocki and reportedly made contributions to foundations created by right-wing politicians. After Nawrocki won, he vetoed—three times—the centrist Polish government’s attempts to enshrine consumer cryptocurrency protections into Polish law. Echoing the language used in Trump’s Washington, Nawrocki’s justification for vetoing referenced “freedom” and “innovation.” (Disclosure: My husband, Radek Sikorski, is the foreign minister of Poland’s centrist government.)

 

In Latin America, hard-right politicians, some openly imitating Trump’s language and style, and some with links to crypto or the world of anonymous shell companies, are beginning to gain traction. Bukele, the autocratic leader of El Salvador, anticipated the revolution. He declared bitcoin legal tender in 2021, recruited an array of crypto-evangelists into his administration, and built a parallel diplomatic corps that set up Salvadoran bitcoin “embassies” in Texas and Switzerland. He also constructed a maximum-security prison for alleged gang members, designed with performative cruelty. The Trump administration sent alleged criminals there early in 2025. (Later investigations would find that most had no criminal records.)

 

Other Latin American leaders are also drawing from the Trump-Bukele playbook. Trump endorsed the new president of Colombia, Abelardo de la Espriella, a businessman who once told Agence France-Presse that “people who have created wealth during their lives should run the country”—a sentiment that sounds familiar—and who wants to build “mega-prisons” too. Hours after his inauguration, the U.S. offered him a $1 billion “security package,” even as his predecessor, taking another page out of the American playbook, was making accusations of a rigged election. Trump also backed José Antonio Kast, the new president of Chile, who ran a campaign calling for tighter border controls and mass deportations. During his first week in office, Kast negotiated a joint statement with the U.S. on mining rare earth minerals that seems intended to benefit private American mining interests.

 

Outside the democratic world, where kleptocracy has long been the norm, no special changes are necessary to accommodate the new American regime. Pragmatism reigns: If American-government decisions are now for sale, then many will eagerly buy them. The Qataris did not give Trump a $400 million jumbo jet merely out of friendship. The Saudi public-investment fund did not commit $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s private-equity fund simply as a gesture of goodwill. And Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama did not offer Kushner and Ivanka Trump a piece of the country’s environmentally protected coastline to build a luxury resort because he admires their design sense.

 

Sometimes, these kinds of contributions appear aimed at achieving very specific results. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Emirati royal family, purchased a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, for $500 million. A few months later, the Trump administration agreed to let the UAE buy high-tech chips whose export the Biden administration had restricted.

 

Most governments in the old democratic world cannot compete in this race. Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and others can’t pay off the American president by investing in his children’s companies, because that would be illegal. Nor are they finding it easy to adjust to the new world of quasi-official, quasi-private diplomacy.

 

Instead they are beginning to look elsewhere for contacts, for technology, for trade. No one previously imagined that Canada would find it necessary to sign a defense pact with the EU, let alone to conduct defense-tech negotiations with Australia; it has now done both. The EU has just arranged a free-trade agreement with India, something that few people were interested in completing a few years ago, and another with Australia. In the first half of 2026, no fewer than 26 world leaders visited China, including the British, Spanish, German, and Canadian prime ministers. The French government is slowly removing Windows, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom from its computers, replacing them with open-source software or French-made alternatives. Some German regional governments, as well as the Danish and Dutch governments, are on a similar mission, as are some European banks and universities. These changes are meant to be permanent. After all, even if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, the companies empowered by federal money and the ideologues who have taken over institutions will continue to influence Congress and voters. Now that Trump has shown that it can be done, future presidents might also benefit from kleptocratic practices. “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years,” France’s Europe minister has said.

 

These shifts have been mocked and attacked by some, including the Pentagon’s Elbridge Colby, who has argued that American allies can’t replace the U.S. That may be true, in the short term. But if Colby or anyone else believes that America’s old friends will not stop looking for other options, then he has misunderstood the depth and profundity of the shift in perceptions of America, not just in a few capital cities but in the heads and hearts of people around the globe.

 

A trivial but revealing incident from this summer hints at the extent of the change. Remember Trump’s phone call to Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, the body that runs the World Cup? Folarin Balogun, America’s star striker, had been given a red card, making him ineligible for the team’s next game, against Belgium. Trump asked Infantino to review the ban. FIFA lifted it. “I’m a person that loves sports and was a good athlete,” Trump told reporters, “and I understand sports really well. Really well.” But Trump did not understand sports, or sports fans. The outrage was immediate, visceral, and international, not because of anything the U.S. team had done but because the U.S. president had assumed he was allowed to break the rules, and because so many Americans seemed to approve.

 

Few may care about the ins and outs of Brazilian politics or understand the business dealings of World Liberty Financial. But many can recognize cheating. The head of the Norwegian football association filed an ethics complaint because “when you bend a rule like this, you’re on a slippery slope that will put the whole game at risk.” The British journalist Hugo Rifkind wrote that he was “startled and troubled to find myself heavily invested in Belgium winning a football game.” I heard former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta tell a large European audience that “Italians, French, and, yes, even the Dutch” had all rooted for Belgium too. I spent a couple of hours looking at commentary; hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of fans from all over the world left angry comments on X, YouTube, Facebook. The story resonated, not because this one World Cup match mattered, but because the presumptuous disdain that America showed for everyone else was so familiar.

 

Maybe it resonated with the team too. When the U.S. lost to Belgium—and lost badly—some wondered if Trump’s move had unsettled the players. They surely knew that the world was rooting against them, and seemed to have lost belief in themselves as a result. Other Americans may soon come to the same conclusion. For decades, we have told ourselves that our country represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies, like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when we realize that we no longer do?